So much in the first chapter address the question of when is the right time to engage in a struggle for liberation and how, and I think Kaepernick's sitting represents an act toward bigger acts, a coalescing of communities and energies that seek alterity rather than continuing in oppressive stasis.
I am wondering a lot about Leonardo and Porter's (2012, I believe) hot and cold violence--have you read it? How does Fanon define violence? Must a society created on violence dismantle with violence? And, if so, must it be violence of the same sort?
...more to come.
Part II
The Intro/preface/chapter 1 also really had me thinking. There are so many applications to how the world is today. The connection that stuck with me the most is how the colonized live in a world of constantly moving standards and lost histories. Kaepernick's act and the response to it are great examples. People are reacting to his political act, not with logical retorts or questions about the limit of speech, but with emotional reactions, with visceral reactions. The accusations that the protest is UnAmerican highlights the ahistorical nature of colonization. Violence, as I am reading, interrupts that process and interrupts the vicious cycle of colonization. While violence isn't merely physical, I am wondering if violence, in this definition, can only be momentary, at least systemically. People can lives of constant interruptions, but does is that what is need to fend off and defeat colonialism? I am thinking that perhaps the answer to Spivak's question 'Can the Subaltern speak?' needs to come through daily acts of violence that invert and inverse the status of the Subaltern. Perhaps, for Fanon, the question isn't about speaking, but in listening. "can we listen to the Subaltern without getting in the way?" Can we stop privilege and live lives of violence that interrupt the forces of marginalization and subjugation?
What do you think?
I think a lot about the lost histories and ahistorical nature of our society and epistemologies. I have always seen it as attempts by the (white) power structure to maintain dominance. What do you do as a historian to connect to lost histories or bring them to the fore of your work?
Also, if Kaepernick's protest is unAmerican, then the acceptance and silence of rape and abuse by athletes seems to imply that rape and male supremacy with women is American... A serial rapist was just nominated for the Hall of Fame?! And, Trump...?! I feel like we are in the midst of an intense moment of attacks on women and people of color, so brutal and overt, yet completely excused by a massive segment of the population. Where do we need to go from here? What are the next steps, beyond calling out injustice?
What do you mean by momentary violence? Are you saying that violence exists episodically and must constantly emerge as interruption, or its meaning is lost? I haven't read Spivak, though I am somewhat familiar because it is constantly referenced (I just downloaded it), I do this that the work is daily to invert the status... A constant commitment to protests is important, such as Kaepernick continuing to kneel, but at some point--I think it is already happening--that kneeling becomes "accepted" (not really, but perhaps ignored). Then, the protests must shift or alter to continue the discomfort. I am not sure what that looks like, as far as next steps... I do think it is important for a constant, shifting dissonance to be cultivated. The natural reaction to dissonance is defensiveness, so I do wonder how to engage people in the listening and reflective process to reconsider in a way that doesn't center whiteness. Is it working one-on-one or in small, closer knit groups? Is it a line of questioning? I think about the way that the white identity development continuum works and white people's reluctance to admit fault: what if a model existed, instead, that took hegemonic thoughts and built history around those thoughts to disrupt specific (violent) lines of thinking?
The question of "stopping privilege" has always been an interesting one to me. I think that extending privileges--equity--to all people so that they aren't privileges is the idea, rather than giving up privileges, though I do think an interrogation of what is beneficial is necessary. Certain privileges--being trusted as doing the right thing in the store, on the street, etc--should be extended, whereas others--unqualified promotions because of connections--should be dismantled.
I am also thinking about the section in the preface that says, "This walking dead man has lost his wife and his sons; he has seen so much agony he prefers victory to survival; others will profit from the victory, not him; he is too weary. But this weariness of hear is the reason behind his incredible courage" (p. lvii). I feel like people get to moments of desperation, in a sense, where their exhaustion in a situation propels actions. Few people are in such a critical state, and when the exhaustion relents a bit, when a small victory is made, people often back off and take what they have been given, only for the gains to be relinquished over time (see Thompson Dorsey, D. N., & Venzant Chambers, T. T. (2014). Growing C-D-R (Cedar): Working the intersections of interest convergence and whiteness as property in the affirmative action legal debate. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 56-87. doi:10.1080/13613324.2013.812628). I wonder how to push past this settling, how to get people together to press for changes for long enough and in an intense enough way to make systemic change... And how to recognize systemic change when it occurs. Do you think reform or transformation or needed or some combination? What is the role of wealth redistribution, and how can working class white folks see their struggles as connected across racial lines, given the nature of racial socialization and Harris' whiteness as property? ["This colossal task, which consists of reintroducing man into the world, man in his totality, will be achieved with the crucial help of the European masses who would do well to confess that they have often rallied behind the position of our common masters on colonial issues. In order to do this, the European masses must first of all decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty" (p. 62).]
"Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different" (p. 7). What is the significance of the fact that multiple worlds exist in a culture that seeks one reality, one normality, and a positivistic truth? What are the implications for what we as academics research and how? How does knowledge production in academia reify normative structures of knowledge production? I am thinking about ways to disrupt linear rationality through the structure of my dissertation, and--I may have told you this--my advisor is an arts based researcher so that I can...
I love all those articles that you cited. I think about the whiteness as property by Harris a lot, especially if we are going to consider settler colonialism as well. I think we need to think about how does whiteness act as a colonizing force and how does it navigate through the different systems of the world. I am wondering how do we make reform until we talk about these systems at work in our society? If we are going to attempt reform, what does that reform look like and who's experiences does it center and privilege? I think the issues of doing the systems that create privilege and affirming non-conforming community's values needs to be in tandem and simultaneous. We cannot simple push at the structures that reinforce whiteness and white privilege and hope that others will be simple take up the vacated space. Part of this includes doing this work not only now, but in history as well. Working through and reclaiming history needs to be a task of the utmost importance as well as problematizing the present situations. A new history that questions and problematizes whiteness and white supremacy represents an interruption of the dominating myths that control our society. This would also allow us to question and problematize the different ways that whiteness and domination exists in our world. White Privilege is so tied up with systems of oppression and the discourse that create and perpetuate these systesms, it is hard for me to see a way of "reforming" the system without undoing these structures. I think about how Kaepernick has been critiqued for not protesting the right way, or how Trump gets to hide behind intelligence for not paying taxes and we are essentially glorifying white privilege by hiding behind colorblind politics or the rhetoric of meritocracy. How does reform look when it aims to change the basic fabric of our society and the systems at work?
