White innocence

In the United States today, much interpersonal racism is driven by corrupt forms of self-preservation. Drawing from Jean- Jacques Rousseau, I refer to this as self-love racism. The byproduct of socially-induced racial anxieties and perceived threats to one’s physical or social wellbeing, self-love racism is the protective attachment to the racialized dimensions of one’s social status, wealth, privilege, and/or identity. Examples include police officer related shootings of unarmed Black Americans, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the resurgence of unabashed white supremacy. This form of racism is defined less by the introduction of racism into the world and more on the perpetuation of racially unjust socioeconomic and political structures. My theory, therefore, works at the intersection of the interpersonal and structural by offering an account of moral complacency in racist social structures. My goal is to reorient the directionality of philosophical work on racism by questioning the sense of innocence at the core of white ways-of-being.

Discourses that supported de jure segregated
schools often invoked White innocence in the form
of altruistic motivations. These same invocations
are found in more contemporary school policy discourses.
The authors of this article argue, based
on the concept of intertextuality of discourse, the
existence of contemporary schooling policies as
vestiges of segregation.

In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz’s Open Casket in conversation with Teresa Margolles’ Vaporization. In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions involved in the desire of whiteness
to transcend its own matrix of race-power and aestheticization of black suffering. That is, instead of anti-racist and transformative, Schutz’s piece, in our view, remains caught within a Manichean subject/object relationship constituted by a curative relation of mastery and servitude that is inextricably contained with and by the ontology of whiteness. We argue that this dynamic of ‘pornotroping’ mobilizes an aesthetics of hailing and identification that reaffirms white innocence. Margolles’
Vaporization, on the other hand, compels us to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh outside of the subject/object divide, while confronting us with multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions.

This think-piece addresses the issue of intersectionality as a core value of our movement, raised in the meeting of May 23th 2018. It does not represent a settled HR standpoint: it is an invitation to debate the issue further. We take it to be work in progress.

We acknowledge that at present we have no clear concepts/ideas/theory how to make our movement more ‘intersectional/diverse’ – let alone how to make it a core value - and consequently no clear practical alternatives. The only present alternative seems to be “shared responsibility” (we take this to mean that each person should individually be aware of racism, sexism, classism etc.). Still, “shared responsibility is a horror” (notulen 23-5). More importantly, this is again dodging the issue.

James Baldwin’s writing, his persona, as well as his public speeches, interviews, and discussions are undergoing a renewed reception in the arts, in queer and critical race studies, and in queer of color movements. Directed by Raoul Peck, the film I Am Not Your Negro decisively contributed to the rekindled circulation of Baldwin across the Atlantic. Since 2017, screenings and commentaries on the highly acclaimed film have prompted discussions about the persistent yet variously racialized temporospatial formations of Europe and the U.S. Stemming from a roundtable that followed a screening in Zurich in February 2018, this collective essay wanders between the audio-visual and textual matter of the film and Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” which was also adapted into a film-essay directed by Pierre Koralnik, staging Baldwin in the Swiss village of Leukerbad. Privileging Black feminist, postcolonial, and queer of color perspectives, we identify three sites of Baldwin’s transatl...