Helen Ngo

The Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo first draws on the resources of Merleau-Ponty to argue that the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the more subtle but fundamental workings of racism; to catch its insidious, gestural expressions, as well as its habitual modes of racialized perception. Racism, on this account, is equally expressed through bodily habits, and this in turn raises important ethical questions regarding the responsibility for one's racist habits.
Ngo considers what the lived experience of racism and racialization teaches about the nature of the embodied and socially-situated being, arguing that racialized embodiment problematizes and extends existing accounts of general embodied experience, which calls into question dominant paradigms of the “self” in philosophy, as coherent, fluid, and synchronous. Drawing on thinkers such as Fanon, she argues that the racialized body is “in front of itself” and “uncanny” (in the Heideggerian senses of “strange” and “not-at-home”), while exploring the phenomenological and existential implications of this disorientation and displacement.
Finally, she returns to the visual register to take up the question of “objectification” in racism and racialization. While she critically examines the subject-object ontology presupposed by Sartre's account of “the gaze” (le regard), recalling that all embodied being is always already relational and co-constituting, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's concept of the intertwining, she argues that racialized embodiment reveals to us the ontological violence of racism—not a merely violation of one's subjectivity as commonly claimed, but also a violation of one's intersubjectivity.

This article takes up the idea of language as a home and dwelling, and reconsiders what this might mean in the context of diasporic bilingualism-where as a 'heritage speaker' of a minority language, the 'mother tongue' may be experienced as both deeply familiar yet also alien or alienating. Drawing on a range of philosophical and literary accounts, this article explores how the so-called 'mother tongue' is experienced by heritage speakers in an Englishdominant world. From navigating one's being in-between language-worlds, to the experience of language loss and efforts of reconnection, I argue that bilingual dwelling involves many complex layers often overlooked by philosophical accounts of language that do not attend to the lived world of the migrant and racialised outsider. By turning to the example of bilingual parenting, I then examine how such an undertaking, while labour-intensive, offers opportunities to refresh and co-create language-worlds anew.

Critical phenomenology is a rapidly flourishing field of research within philosophical phenomenology. This article undertakes a genealogy of the critical philosophical enterprise, drawing out its key commitments, motivations, tensions, and productive potential. In the second half of this article, I explore the promise of critical phenomenology, by examining how a critical phenomenological approach to questions of racism and racialised embodiment can help extend our understanding of white supremacy, opening up new possibilities for thinking its banality and ubiquity in contemporary social and political life.

In the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes: “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time” (Fanon, 1967, pp. 12–13). This chapter offers an exploration of racialized and colonized temporalities, drawing inspiration from Fanon’s account of racialized “lateness,” as elaborated by Alia Al-Saji (2013). Together, their analyses offer a springboard from which I consider how racialized and white bodies are differentially temporalized, with the racialized body predetermined by, and tethered to, the past. Such temporalization serves not only to anachronize the racialized body, but also to close off its projective possibilities for being or becoming otherwise. Drawing on Charles Mills’ (2007; 2014) accounts of “white ignorance” and “white time,” I then examine how racialization relies on a forgetting or a disavowal and leaving behind of its own process. The result, I argue, is to render whiteness and white bodies as temporally present and even futural in their orientation, free from the vestiges of racism’s history and free to adopt any number of stances on its continuing legacy. It is against this setting that I argue exhortations to “get over it” – whenever charges of racism are leveled in the public domain by racialized subjects – are not only dangerous in their denial of racism, but also disingenuous in the way they purport to move beyond a racially divided world, when in fact this very gesture serves to reinscribe differential racialized temporalities. Further, looking to typical responses in the contestations over public commemorations of events and figures within “white time” (for example, calls to tear down the monuments of colonialism and slavery), I examine how these responses cast the deep attachments and temporal “untetheredness” of whiteness in a different light.

This article engages in a philosophical analysis of three terms ('white privilege, white priority, and white supremacy'), prompted by current conversations around racism and the Black/Blak Lives Matter movement. I argue that while certain aspects of the white privilege discourse are useful, it is also limited in important ways - and that we need to understand the widespread racism in society not as an expression of white privilege, but white supremacy.

In this paper I examine the temporal dimensions of racialised and colonised embodiment. I draw on the work of Alia Al-Saji, whose phenomenological reading of Frantz Fanon examines the multiple ways in which racism and colonialism affix the racialised and colonised body to that of the past; a temporalisation that serves not only to anachronise these bodies, but also to close off their projective possibilities for being or becoming otherwise. Such a move reflects the nature of racialisation itself, which following Charles Mills, does not just exteriorise or ‘other’ racialised bodies, but relies equally on a forgetting, or a disavowal and leaving behind of this very process. The result, I argue, is to render whiteness and white bodies as temporally present and even futural in their orientation, free from the vestiges of racism's history and free to adopt any number of stances on its continuing legacy. It is against this that I argue that the familiar exhortation to ‘get over’ racism whenever the charge is levelled, is not only dangerous in its denial of racism, but also disingenuous in purporting to move beyond a racially divided world, when in fact this very gesture serves to reinscribe differential racialised temporalities.

This paper considers a certain genre of anti-racist solidarity — what I call simulations of lived experience – in order to critically examine the premises and pitfalls of such efforts. Two primary examples are examined: (1) a 2014 smartphone app called Everyday Racism, where users are invited to ‘play’ a racialised character for a week in order to ‘better understand’ the experience of racism; and (2) various iterations of ‘Hijab Day’, where non-Muslim women are invited to wear a hijab for a day. I argue that both examples, while well-intentioned, offer only a ‘thin’ version of the lived experience of veiled Muslim women and people of colour, failing to reckon with the epistemological and phenomenological complexity entailed in this embodied experience. Moreover, I argue that both proceed on the misguided idea that first-hand experience, rather than empathic listening, is generative of anti-racist solidarity, and in doing so, these efforts risk reproducing the very structures and habits of white privilege they set out to challenge.

This article examines how the phenomenological concept of habit can be productively deployed in the analysis of racism, in order to propose a reframing of the problem. Racism does not unfold primarily in the register of conscious thought or action, I argue, but more intimately and insidiously in the register of bodily habit. This claim, however, relies on a reading of habit as bodily orientation – or habituation – as developed by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. Drawing on his account, I turn to two salient dimensions of racist praxis which I argue are better understood through the frame of habit: bodily gesture or response, and racialized perception. Building on the analyses of contemporary critical race thinkers, I argue that racism is habitual insofar as it is embedded in bodily modes of responding to the presentation of racialized ‘others’ and in ‘sedimented’ modes of racialized seeing. However, this is not to suggest that the acquisition of racist habits is passive, or that such habits foreclose the possibility of change. In the final section, I revisit the concept of habit and its usual characterization as ‘sedimentation’ or ‘calcification’. I argue that while such a reading gives voice to the anchoring weight of the temporal past in habit, a more prospective rendering of the concept is available to us through a rereading of sedimentation as active passivity; habits are not only acquired, they are also held. This in turn will allow us to recast the question of responsibility in relation to one’s racist habits.

This special section brings together scholars working in Critical Philosophy of Race to explore questions of racism, coloniality, and migration, and in doing so, offers a glimpse into some of the scholarship currently being undertaken in this emerging field. The section has its origins in a one-day workshop, On Anti-Racism: A Critical Philosophy of Race Symposium, which took place in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia in October 2017. The symposium participants, Amir Jaima, Helen Ngo, and Bryan Mukandi, are here joined by Lori Gallegos and Chelsea Bond, in an effort to continue and extend some of the conversations initiated at that event.