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Pursuing a Liberated (Non-)Whiteness in a Pale Body an Abolitionist Approach to the Problem of the Concerned White Person

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Pursuing a Liberated (Non-)Whiteness in a Pale Body an Abolitionist Approach to the Problem of the Concerned White Person Pursuing a Liberated (non-)Whiteness in a Pale Body An Abolitionist Approach to the Problem of the Concerned White Person Caleb Conner April 27, 2020 Haverford College Political Science Department Senior Thesis Advisor: Craig Borowiak Acknowledgements This thesis comes at the end of an extraordinarily tumultuous year and a transformative 4 years in college. I am very grateful for the people I’ve met over the course of 4 years here, and this thesis would not have been possible without the tremendous amount that I’ve learned from my friends and acquaintances over my time here at Haverford. It seems to me that I have certainly learned more from my relationships than from my classes, particularly in ways that have helped me to grow as a human, learning how to live in this pale-skinned body. I have learned a great deal about myself through this thesis process and the thoughts and experiences that motivated it and that have been motivated by it. Thank you to my family and my friends. Thank you Huey, among many others, for helping radicalize me. There are some that I would like to thank but feel I should leave unnamed, you know who you are. Thank you to the D.C. community for twice hosting formative political experiences of mine. Thank you Ingrid for being a rock and a light for me in the music department. Thank you Steve for making me feel like a good political scientist. Thank you Clara for teaching me to sing and offering encouragement as needed. Thank you Joshua for teaching for the revolution. Thank you Chanelle for introducing me to the world of education and for believing in me. (I know no one will see this but it feels good to say thank you!) Finally, thank you Craig for being a wonderfully patient, encouraging, and challenging thesis advisor. If only I had been a better advisee! Preface This thesis, of course, comes in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is further exposing many of the horrifying realities of racial capitalism. Although I don’t anticipate many people will read this thesis, I hope that I and others might be successful enough at spreading these ideas (which are certainly not mine alone) as to accelerate revolution. Having the spring semester drastically impacted by the pandemic stunted the growth of this thesis, which is reflected in its brevity and incompleteness. In particular, the end of the first chapter is extremely rough, as is much of that chapter’s contents and really everything in this thesis. I still think the ideas are worth sharing. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... 2 Preface............................................................................................................................................. 2 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1: Whiteness and White Supremacy .................................................................................. 8 The Production of Whiteness ...................................................................................................... 9 The Nature of Whiteness .......................................................................................................... 13 The Reproduction of Whiteness................................................................................................ 21 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 28 Chapter 2: Pursuing a Liberated non-Whiteness in a Pale Body .................................................. 30 White Allyship .......................................................................................................................... 32 Ideas for A Liberatory Framework of Solidarity ...................................................................... 38 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 43 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 44 3 Introduction What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital? Joel Olson (1967-2012)1 With the widespread influence of the Black Lives Matter movement and Indigenous resistance in the aftermath of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Standing Rock, as well as the rise of Donald Trump and resurgent white nationalism weighing heavily on the United States’ national consciousness, white people have recently been forced into confronting something they/we would rather not talk about: their/our own Whiteness. While many white people have chosen to ignore the realities of white supremacy and/or doubled down on reactionary racial politics such as those exemplified by Trump, a great number of white people have at least expressed a willingness to engage with the persistence of racism in the United States. While this group of white people range in ideology from moderates and conservatives to liberal Democrats to progressives and anarchists, for the purposes of this thesis I have chosen to unify them/us2 under a shared identifier— “Concerned White People.” I chose this term because it emphasizes what all of these people share (concern about racism) without giving them/us credit for being anything other than concerned until proven otherwise. Further, since almost all of these people’s politics are aimed at preservation of the status quo with a few (in some cases many) social reforms, grouping all of them/us together emphasizes the fundamental similarity of their politics with respect to the abolition of Whiteness, white supremacy, and racial capitalism, which cannot be eradicated in isolation from one another. On a more positive note (I promise I am not writing this simply to tear down white people who might be convinced to fight racism), this term emphasizes 1 Joel Olson. Joel Olson Archive, February 13, 2019. https://joelolson.net/about/. 2 I am one of these people, perhaps obviously. 4 that these people are all unified by their concern about racism, which I believe has the possibility to be mobilized into action. The Problem of the Concerned White Person Historically, the Concerned White Person (CWP) has had a limited role in organizing against white supremacy. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself famously wrote that he thought the “white moderate” (a term that certainly includes a decent swatch of CWPs) might be a graver danger to the civil rights movement than the Ku Klux Klan.3 There have been notable exceptions, including the limited number of white Freedom Riders, the Young Patriots of the original Rainbow Coalition with the Black Panthers and Young Lords, and the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, among others. Nonetheless, a great many concerned white people have been caught up in the age-old question of “what is the white person to do to contribute to the struggle against racism?” and settled for a role on the sidelines, theoretically supportive but practically ineffective. What am I going to do in this Thesis? This thesis is my attempt to address the problem of the concerned white person. In order to address this problem, I will first discuss Whiteness itself, drawing out the relationship between Whiteness and white supremacy. This is the subject of my first chapter, which aims to illustrate the necessity of a political orientation aimed at the abolition of Whiteness as a means/end of abolishing white supremacy. I will then discuss and critique the popular ideology of white allyship, finally outlining what I’m calling a “liberatory framework of solidarity” that I hope 3 King, Martin Luther. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” African Studies Center. University of Pennsylvania. Accessed April 28, 2020. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. 5 might be instructive for the CWP. It will be incomplete, and there will be holes in my evidence, but I hope that my arguments nonetheless carry weight (they certainly do for me). A Note on White Supremacy/Racial Capitalism/Settler Colonialism/Imperialism in the U.S./Turtle Island Context4,5 In her article “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” Andrea Smith articulates the nature of white supremacy as constituted by three distinct yet interrelated logics: Slavery/Capitalism, Genocide/Colonialism, and Orientalism/War. Slavery/Capitalism is a logic that “renders Black people as inherently slaveable—as nothing more than property.”6 As Smith argues, the forms of slavery have changed over time, but the logic remains consistent. The logic of Genocide/Colonialism holds that indigenous peoples “must always be disappearing, in order to allow non-indigenous peoples rightful claim over this land.”7 This pillar “serves as the anchor for [settler-]colonialism,” allowing those who are not native (especially white people) to feel they “can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land.”8 The final logic (although Smith is open to the possibility of other logics), that of Orientalism/War, “marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of empire,” thus placing the United States in a constant state of war both at home (against non-white immigrants) and abroad.9 As will become clearer in the next chapter, Whiteness plays an inseparable
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