She who stumbles

This week’s class was on W.E.B. Du Bois, and brought up the notion of double consciousness.

At that point, I had to pause and reflect. For a moment my mind tumbled and I took in the class not as a site of intellectual engagement with critical race theory, but as a site where race relations are produced and reproduced. Taking in the white supremacy of academia, the racist history of education, the socio-economic privilege it draws from and confers, I paused. The thought ended as quickly as it began, and I couldn’t think deeply about any of those things. But I did take in the racial composition of the class, the teacher, and the tenor of the conversation.

The class is mostly white. There are two people of colour in the class, myself and another South Asian woman. The class is small, so everyone is expected to contribute, and anyone who didn’t would stand out and lose marks. So the conversation is monopolised by white people. This is a space where white people try to figure out how people of colour feel about race.

It started to seem a bit ridiculous at that point, but I need to keep going, and fuck if I’m gonna abandon a space where I get to say my piece and be taken seriously.

In many ways, I have an unfair advantage over the other students: having begun my Honours thesis project halfway through the past academic year, I’ve been studying these very issues for six months now. I’ve been devouring critical race theory, radical women of color theory, and critical whiteness studies with a passion that surpasses my academic commitment to the field. I am a woman of colour, this is about people like me and our social experience, and it reads off that social experience to make a powerful critique of the global order. This is the place in which I found myself, the place I feel at home. So I find strength in it, it strengthens me.

But I was the one who kept silent while one of the white women nutted out the basics of the concept of double consciousness with the teacher (another white woman). The same student had brought in an article about twins of different races to ‘prove’ that Du Bois’ focus on his blackness was unfair, because he had a mixed-race ancestry, and we should all celebrate our human mixedness.

Did it ever occur to her that double consciousness, that polite epithet, was the reason I kept my mouth shut while she worked it out with the teacher?

I doubt it.

It sounds so neat. Too neat to describe the psychological violence it does to people of colour. Too neat to take on board the passions and conflicts evoked in engagement about racial issues. Too neat to describe the confusion, pain, conflict, and self-loathing it invokes in people of colour. And finally, too neatly subjective to identify its role in reinstating a white supremacist status quo.

In the past week, my fellow women of colour bloggers have been duking it out with white feminist bloggers over various issues, all centring around how much WoC should get on board with the issues prioritised by white feminists. This is a fight that’s been going on for a long time, on many fronts. White feminists’ insistence on the centrality of the issues they prioritise has been taken apart and debunked for the way it merely centralises whiteness, fixes femininity and womanhood within a white locus, and asserts the hegemony of white feminists within women’s movements.

It’s not a new issue, but it’s one that plays off certain psychological dispositions created by racism. The dispositions are durable, so it continues to be an issue.

Racism alienates people of colour from ourselves. Especially when we are isolated from other people of colour, we lack the vocabulary to put together a view of the world that exposes the bases of the injustices inflicted upon us from a young age. We lack the knowledge to come up with a notion of our place in the world, how we got here and why, and therefore limits what we can do about it. We have no secular mythology that convinces us that we’re entitled to the entire earth and all the people on it, but we feel the lack of that self-affirmation and don’t know what to put in its place.

This is because white people have something we need and hold it over us. The ability to define ourselves according to who we are: self-constituting subjectivity.

They have this power because of various social, political, and cultural relations which put them in positions of power over us. Be that slavemaster, principal, employer, committee chair, member of parliament, or even spouse.

Before we can even conceive of our own needs, we’re taught to conceive of needs in general on white terms, in ways that re-instate the power that white people have over people of colour. Those white terms are, by various ideological tricks, cloaked in a language of fair play and universalism that disavows responsibility for the injustices inflicted upon various users of that language. This orthodoxy is so powerful that when people of colour assert our own priorities for justice, we are shut down for being unfair.

This happens in so many ways: from the use of stereotypes in fiction, to calling out classmates for racist taunting, to telling off a partner for using racially derogatory sexual imagery, to calling out the disavowal of white feminists for their own white supremacy… we end up getting blamed for being too angry, too histrionic, too emotive to fit into their polite fictions that erase our being.

Having learned that the punishments will fall upon us from white authorities if we speak out against racist peers, we learn to shut ourselves down. Better to get what we can, and avoid the pitfalls, than to meditate on injustices and be miserable. The helplessness of children binds this troubled consciousness into the psyche.

The weight of authority places pressure on ourselves to identify with the terms that whiteness sets. Not doing so results in severe punishments. We still recognise authority as legitimate, regardless of how much faith we have in it, and so our dependence upon it for our needs — education, care, inclusion, etc. — leads us to take on board its terms and neglect our own.

This “double consciousness” isn’t just dualistic and peacefully co-existent, it’s an interrupted consciousness that stops us from recognising ourselves as people, from recognising our own needs and the way those needs fit into the global order. It leaves us worried, depressed, resentful, hurt, and confused.

Later, when we have a measure of independence, and we come into contact with white people, that double consciousness leads us to make compromises. We don’t want to alienate anyone or cause conflict. We put up with casual slights, meant in good humour, because white supremacy divides our loyalties.

White people are free to exploit any part of the racial hierarchy they want, with impunity. They have the power to enforce this entitlement, both through force and through social cues. They can make jokes at the expense of people of colour, and they’ll have hordes to back them up with “it’s only a joke”. We can either accept that it is, turning aside from the racism the joke reinforces, or we can declare ourselves outside the social sphere of whiteness, cast ourselves into the murky realm of irrational savagery, by standing up against the only thing that could be considered fair, true, acceptable.
It happens when PoC point out more substantial arenas of racial injustice, too, and white insistence on race not being an aspect of justice cancels us out.

When you have no theory, no community at your back, standing up to the only community you know is next to impossible.

This power to set the agenda, to divide the world according to their priorities, causes PoC of good faith to be confused, compromised, and to hate themselves for wanting anything else. Sometimes that loathing is projected on other PoC who do stand against white supremacy.

“How did I let myself become colonised?” asks my psyche.
“Through my humanity, through my good faith and credulity, through my neediness and weakness,” answers my insecurity, and I project that onto my brown skin and hate it for holding me back from love, acceptance, and success.

But it’s not our fault the world works this way, and when we come to realise that, we become angry. This is a righteous anger, which protects our new-found self-consciousness from the onslaughts of a white society that functions to elicit compromise and self-defeat from us. Our self-constituting work is fragile. We don’t have the resources, material or cultural, that white communities do. We need to protect ourselves.

This is the anger of feminists of colour doing work in communities of colour, when they are faced with the insistence by white feminists that they fall into line. We are protecting ourselves and our agendas from the insidiousness of whiteness, which turns alliance and friendship into mastery and slavery.

Maybe, after going through this process, I should have more sympathy for the white people in my class. They’re trying to work out the meaning of race and to decolonise their own minds. I’m not sure if my resources can stretch so far as to accommodate them; people whose agendas are different to mine, but want my support anyway.

I don’t have a community in my immediate reach, to turn to if I need it. This class is not a safe space for me, and for the moment, only this blog is.

I have white friends and allies to turn to, but I’m ambivalent about their loyalties. The PoC I know are scattered and disorganised. My project to start an anti-racism group is on the backburner this week, as I stress about studies, social life, blogging, and housework… I’m blogging anyway, because it’s better than hating myself and shutting up about it.

But I have a thesis to write.
This thesis is my baby and my parent. Choosing to write about race has been the best decision I ever made, because now I can decolonise my mind. Working on it enriches me in ways I couldn’t name for you. This is my magnum opus. It’s my proof to the world that I can work by its laws, and my proof to myself that I can be productive and worthwhile for my own self.
It’s the bastard child of my double consciousness, and I love it to death.

Seeyou in June, baby.