One More Time With Feeling
Literally. Just this last time. Then let's actually move forward, yeah?
Whiteness is not effortless.
This feels like it goes without saying to those of us who are at least moderately capable of critical thought. Nothing that’s been quietly enshrined does though. (Go without saying.)
I wrote the above in August, and then walked away. Because it’s so constantly relevant and so exhausting to take something that is observably true but insistently unconsidered and put it into words you don’t trust will make a difference. Yes, I get discouraged and think, I could just watch Bob’s Burgers. Like, I could either say something in a space where people pretend at communication while being gleefully disingenuous, making bad faith arguments not because they don’t know better but because they know the playbook and they know the way marginalized people have been socialized to entertain completely tangential logical fallacies—or I could watch a cartoon.
Let’s get this out of the way: Oppressors aren’t oppressors without knowing how to warp language. And they train their children. How to insidiously alter the conversation, create verbal distractions that people get tripped up trying to parse instead of recognizing them as intentional sabotage.
Everyone knows what woke means.
Everyone knows what Black Lives Matter means.
They are getting you to argue something off-topic on purpose. (And I do not want to frame Toni Morrison’s oft-recited quote as being an admonishment of Black people getting trapped in intentionally tautological discourse. It’s just a sad truth. Black people, you’ve done nothing wrong when you’ve had your time wasted.)
And see, none of that is what I wanted to talk about, it’s how I explain why I stop talking when I do sometimes stop talking. When I walk away. Leave folks where they are. It’s frustrating when the other person is the marginalized and I’m stopping because it feels like they’re falling into every trap.
Some Best Books of 2023 list came out today, apparently, and several of my favorite peers spoke on it. And almost every way it’s been discussed—the lily whiteness of the list, the thorough whiteness—is to ask people to do better. To “include” non-white authors. And I started to tweet and stopped and walked away and watched a television show (an ensemble procedural with a disappointingly rote script and character introduction, yarg) because of the way it comes across. The way innocence is presumed even in the critique. When we act like something was passively accomplished, when we act like a proper Best Of anything in any year could passively be populated entirely by white people, we’re composing our critique according to their entrenched supremacy. We’re forfeiting, pretending to ask for the hand-outs they characterize all affirmative action as. We’re making it sound like they’re not handing out accolades on the basis of whiteness, and as though we’re asking for a few on the basis of non-whiteness.
But whiteness is not effortless. Without barriers constructed for everyone else, you cannot close your eyes and accidentally populate a Best Of list with exclusively white authors. You cannot accidentally hand accolades and access and confidence and encouragement and resources exclusively to white people. In which case, I’m not asking for inclusion. I’m demanding an end to white supremacy. White supremacy is why when you went searching, you only looked where white authors would be found. It’s why when you read for the Best, your metric favored white authors.
Whiteness is not effortless.
So how did we all get convinced otherwise. When you invent race, and the purpose of that invention is to enable racism—some disadvantage that dehumanizes and segregates by something that seems inborn and straightforward until you realize that ethnicities need induction into the privileged ranks, regardless of skin color—you start by proudly proclaiming your whiteness and what it means for a few generations. You make signs that dictate who can touch what, can sit where, can drink or swim or eat. You make a great effort on the front end. You say things like “I’m free, white, and 21” in scores of films.
You loudly decry Blackness and tether it to a socioeconomic experience. And then you stop. You stop talking about it. You suddenly stop referring to yourself by race. No one else can. You see, their entire experience and safety is impacted by their racialization. And therein lies the game. Now the person who cannot avoid talking about it is the disrupter. Now the one who doesn’t have to mention it is carefree, but for that disrupter who refuses to stop. Now whiteness is effortless. When we don’t want to be bothered by the agreed upon burden of race, we must default to whiteness to escape it. Now no one wants you to say white but everything means white. Mainstream audiences. Non-issue books. Apolitical media.
Language matters. It shapes conversations, particularly what happens between the lines. It shapes national imaginations and community identities and morale. It changes society from the micro to the macro. It damns or saves lives.
I’m not asking anyone to include me. I’m demanding that they stop excluding me.
Speaking of Bob’s Burgers, there’s an episode where Louise and her friends excitedly participate in a unit on Ancient Greece. Excitedly because the teacher liberally gives out coins and prizes for correct answers to questions. For the unit, she rearranges their desks to make a socratic circle, which she claims is all about fairness and equality, ensuring everyone’s voice is equally heard. Which, of course, turns out not to be the case. The teacher is standing in the center of the circle and though she could give everyone equal attention, she doesn’t. She favors one side of the circle and doesn’t notice that she’s calling on the same few students over and over. Of course, these students wind up racking up the coins and prizes—and they deserve it, right? They got those answers correct. But so might everyone else, if they’d had access to the teacher. Long story short: Louise and friends descend into crime time and forgery. Which frankly I found to be an apt commentary, right up until the part where the moral seems to be, yes, the circle was unfair, but the children should’ve taken on the burden of educating their educator and correcting the system they’re subjected to. Which unfortunately was an even more precise commentary.
You get it.
Things I didn’t write about:
That this marks the end of Banned Books Week.
The ridiculous disk horse coming around again, but uglier, wherein white authors demand we give permission for them to write our stories. David broke it down brilliantly thus:
My fantabulous time gallivanting to Indianapolis in a sleeper car to celebrate Leah Johnson’s bookstore opening!!
@bethanycmorrowRomanticizing a romantic life. Celebrated the opening of #LoudmouthIndy by riding the rails with my beloved. Such a magical weekend seeing friends and family. Another #dayinthelife of an author/friend/cousin. #leahjohnson #bethanycmorrow #amtrak #sleepercar #indiebookstore #authorsoftiktok #authortok #authorlife #amtraktravel #indianapolis
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All better. <3
