Having trouble figuring out your role in criticism and in discussion of race, gender, sexuality? This piece of evidence outlines a strategy - what do you think about it?
WHAT CAN WHITE PEOPLE DO—Their approach should not be an attempt to seek a world beyond of racism before fully confront the structural issue. The impossible position of a critical whiteness studies is to inhabit a critique without attempting to resolve it—wielding a critique that ceaselessly implicates the critic. That is, to occupy the structural position of privilege while preventing privileges reification or a turn back toward whiteness—the critical whiteness theorist( the judge) must come to terms this impossible position.
Ahmed, Sara 2006, declarations of whiteness http://www.borderlands.net.au/
You might not be surprised to hear that a white response to this paper has asked the question, ‘but what are white people to do’. That question is not necessarily misguided, although it does re-center on white agency, as a hope premised on lack rather than presence. It is a question asked persistently in response to hearing about racism and colonialism:I always remember being in an audience to a paper on the stolen generation and the first question asked was: ‘but what can we do’. The impulse towards action is understandable and complicated; it can be both a defense against the ‘shock’ of hearing about racism (and the shock of the complicity revealed by the very ‘shock’ that ‘this’ was a ‘shock’);it can be an impulse to reconciliation as a ‘re-covering’ of the past (the desire to feel better); it can be about making public one’s judgment (‘what happened was wrong’); or it can be an expression of solidarity (‘I am with you’); or it can simply an orientation towards the openness of the future (rephrased as: ‘what can be done?’).But the question, in all of these modes of utterance, can work to block hearing;in moving on from the present towards the future, it can also move away from the object of critique, or place the white subject ‘outside’ that critique in the present of the hearing. In other words, the desire to act, to move, or even to move on, can stop the message ‘getting through’.
To hear the work of exposure requires that white subjects inhabit the critique,with its lengthy duration, and to recognise the world that is re-described by the critique as one in which they live.The desire to act in a non-racist or anti-racist way when one hears about racism, in my view, can function as a defense against hearing how that racism implicates which subjects, in the sense that it shapes the spaces inhabited by white subjects in the unfinished present. Such a question can even allow the white subject to re-emerge as an agent in the face of the exposure of racism, by saying ‘I am not that’ (the racists of whom you speak), as an expression of ‘good faith’. The desire for action, or even the desire to be seen as the good white anti-racist subject, is not always a form of bad faith, that is, it does not necessarily involve the concealment of racism.But such a question rushes too quickly past the exposure of racism and hence ‘risks’ such concealment in the very ‘return’ of its address.
58. I am of course riskingbeing seen asproducing a ‘useless’ critique by not prescribing what an anti-racist whiteness studies would be, or by not offering some suggestions about ‘what white people can do’. I am happy to take that risk. At the same time, I think it is quite clear that my critique of ‘anti-racist whiteness’ is prescriptive. After all, I am arguing that whiteness studies, even in its critical form, should not be about re- describing the white subject as anti-racist, or constitute itself as a form of anti-racism, or even as providing the conditions for anti-racism. Whiteness studies should instead be about attending to forms of white racism and white privilege that are not undone, and may even be repeated and intensified, through declarations of whiteness, or through the recognition of privilege as privilege.
59. In making this prescription, it is important that I do not rush to ‘inhabit’ a ‘beyond’ to the work of exposing racism, as that which structures the present that we differently inhabit.At the same time, it is always tempting to end one’s work with an expression of political hope. Such hope is what makes the work of critique possible, in the sense that without hope, the future would be decided, and there would be nothing left to do. Perhaps its time to ‘return’ to the ‘turn’ of whiteness studies, by asking where else we might turn. If ‘whiteness studies’ turns towards white privilege, as that which enables and endures declarations of whiteness, then this does not simply involve turning towards the white subject, which would amount to the narcissism of a perpetual return. Rather, whiteness studies should involve at least a double turn: to turn towards whiteness is to turn towards and away from those bodies who have been afforded agency and
mobility by such privilege. In other words, the task for white subjects would be to stay implicated in what they critique, but in turning towards their role and responsibility in these histories of racism, as histories of this present, to turn away from themselves, and towards others.This ‘double turn’ is not sufficient, but it clears some ground, upon which the work of exposing racism might provide the conditions for another kind of work. We don’t know, as yet, what such conditions might be, or whether we are even up to the task of recognizing them.
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