The Essence of Whiteness

Daniel Boscaljon

V. Intersectionality

Whether orienting toward a past to uncover those who had power, so as to appropriately assign blame or facing toward future promises that require the initiating sacrifice of freedom out of a love of fate, the external focus toward distant relations always ends with a person feeling disempowered. As the world has begun to move more quickly, with the identified points of power (Political Leaders, Environmental shifts, Economic Markets) expressing their invulnerable and fragile nature, the prospect of finding a way toward freedom can feel daunting. The palliatives offered as merchandise to offset the effects of whiteness—to either allow distraction or to accept defeat—are options still framed by whiteness itself. This is also true of forms of rebellion that would attempt to extract whiteness from the spaces of power that it has come to define and thus occupy—especially inasmuch as its dialectically informed ability to hold both sadistic and masochistic influences within itself, as well as its ability to deflect truth claims in terms of the necessary vicissitudes of fate, allow it to sublate multiple forms of attack without being changed.

Rather than looking outward, the only satisfying cure for the extraction of whiteness comes through focusing on care and the relationships that anchor us in the spaces where we are. This is recognized in its absence by the male writers I’ve engaged in conversation during the bulk of this essay. Ahab, chasing the current of fate and carrying an ocean of revenge, is unable to care for the men in his care—much less the whales he kills. The lawyer’s “Christian” care allows him to pay a tithe to his conscience (one suspects his “generosity” to Bartleby was a small price to pay for his brief experience with pity, or desire to resume his normal life) but never allows him to engage with the singular Bartleby as more than a curiosity. Delano showed great care for his brother captain, but never thought that the slaves were worthy of equal regard. The seed-man narrating the “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids” stayed at a remove throughout the story, which seemed fitting for the first story but grotesque in the second. Each of these characters engages in a relationship of extraction in an economy of desire, not open to the prospect of relating with proximity.

Mbembe notes this also, but also in the negative. In Necropolitics, he finds that “Within societies that continue to multiply the measures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care toward the Other has been replaced by a relation without desire. Explaining and understanding, knowledge and recognition, are no longer essential. Never have hospitality and hostility been so directly opposed.” Explaining, understanding, knowledge, and recognition only becomes important in a context with a living other nearby. Although the absence of desire is perhaps better than the cruelty of a desire that consumes, this sort of suspended state of numbing remains another factor related to the extractive quality of whiteness. It does not allow for the direct desire that flows from within a context, one that allows me to see my life as benefitting as I work to benefit the lives of others.

Fromm’s work notes the negative—he argues that Calvin and Luther broke “man’s spiritual backbone, his feeling of dignity and pride, by teaching him that activity had no further aims outside of himself” (110). But beyond this, Fromm also speaks of love as something grounded and participating in a sense of relation and interconnection that cannot be extracted:

Love is not primarily “caused” by a specific object, but a lingering quality which is only actualized by a certain “object” … love is a passionate affirmation of an “object”: it is not an “affect” but an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object (115).

He continues to expand on this sense of love as the experience of interconnectedness on the next page, and argues against the notion that we love by understanding its abstract “essence” which we then apply to others. On the contrary, he writes that instead of an “enlargement of the experience with a specific ‘object,’; it is its premise, although, genetically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals.” His most full statement follows: “The affirmation of my own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in the presence of the basic readiness of and ability for such an affirmation. If an individual has this readiness, he has it also toward himself; if he can only “love” others, he cannot love at all (115). This kind of love, then, is one that integrates the lover toward an open, hospitable, and unknowable future. This love is obtained genetically and happenstantially with the others with whom we come into contact, unlike the circuits of “desire” which allow us to experience passion in our own time. This is the essence of humanity—the harmony within the heart that comprises the essential chord within us. Rather than offering thoughts and prayers, or the sigh of “Ah humanity!” following an avoidable tragedy, this is the love whose relationality and care prompt us to action.

            Despite the two decades leading up to it, characterized by the maintenance of systems of oppression with only occasional nods toward change, 2020 has been a year that has allowed for an increased visibility of the need to safeguard others—even strangers—through an awakened sense of intersectional relations. First, the threat caused by COVID-19 created massive changes in the ways humans engage with each other. Throughout the world, including most of America (at least for a short period of time), humans maintained an ethic of social distancing. The particular parameters of this disease, given a long latency period promoting asymptomatic transmission, meant that the promise of social distancing was less to protect one’s own life than to safeguard the lives of others. It also helped to support the infrastructure of health care, as allowing fewer cases would maintain a supply of human and medical resources that would not be outstripped or exhausted. Although a lack of political will (and care) meant that America did not have much leadership in this direction and despite the well-publicized accounts of individuals wishing to claim rights to a haircut or cheeseburger, the combined efforts of millions of Americans to promote a safe space to breathe, mattered.

            Secondly, the Black Lives Matter movement spurred by another Black man whose life was ended through an inability to breathe—George Floyd, whose neck was knelt upon in an act of racially motivated murder—showed another widespread commitment to care. Following other murders of Black persons—Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor within the month preceding Floyd’s death—millions of people across America and the world began massive protests against police brutality, and the systems of extraction that this form of policing promoted. Across America, large cities (including Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered) began working to defund and even abolish their police forces, which preserved the power of the system of whiteness and defended the accumulation of property.

It is not coincidence—or fate—that the Black Lives Matter movement began with the efforts of three black feminists: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. They collaborated to provide a context in which the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality could become cites of care rather than occasions for competition. Patricia Hill Collins’ Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory provides a compelling and clarifying set of essays that explore what living justly and lovingly mean. Exploring questions of relationality, embodiment, and freedom, Collins shows how a “framework of relational difference,” not threatened by difference, and neither requiring nor desiring extraction, “might underpin the idea of flexible solidarity” (219) by moving away from “frameworks of oppositional difference” that “stress comparing entities as being either same or different” (218). This shifts the ground from which questions ask in ways that promote care:

Comparing race and gender within assumptions of oppositional difference would ask, How are racism and sexism alike and unlike one another? In contrast, comparing race and gender within assumptions of relational difference would ask, What does the relationship between racism and sexism reveal about these entities as separate systems of power as well as how they shape one another? (218)

This latter question refuses to extract systems of power into an abstract conversation divorced from life and instead allows each person to reflect on how racism and sexism differently influence different people’s lives. The emphasis is always on what is relational, relevant, and embodied. These questions then get to how we can proactively begin to interact and create a future beyond the imagination of the fate of whiteness. Collins frames such a conversation in terms of freedom and praxis in her discussion of Pauli Murray and Simone de Beauvoir. She writes: “Existential freedom is meaningless without critical praxis, yet critical praxis needs theoretical ideas such as existential freedom. …This view incorporates experience as important in shaping knowledge. But more importantly, it also points to the significance of intentional social action. Similarly, critical praxis without a community and a goal is aimless and ineffective” (220).

            Rather than working up to use control, violence, and antipathy as ways to bolster an insecure self, the path of relationality and care asks that we embrace a larger conception of the self. This “self” is not an “individual” who works toward profit or in fear of less. Instead, this finds in the essence of our humanness a love that relates itself to that which is near, reaching forward in proactive responsibility. Understanding this truth of being human is essential for our future together.