Abolish Whiteness
Jason Okundaye
Two photographs have come to define Saturday’s demonstrations in London: one of a Black man, Patrick Hutchinson, rescuing a white far-right protester, apparently from death; the other of a far-right protester, Andrew Banks, caught with his pants down, urinating next to the memorial for PC Keith Palmer, who was stabbed to death in the Westminster terror attack of 2017.
Both photographs, and the ways they have been framed by politicians and the media, invite a moral (and nominally apolitical) judgment, asking us to draw conclusions about the two men’s contrasting characters. Hutchinson’s actions – and his impressive strength and stature – are an expression of a heroic, cool and noble masculinity. Banks, on the other hand, is at once an anti-patriot and an ugly embodiment of Little England: boorish, vulgar and, in the words of Keir Starmer, ‘beneath contempt’.
Let’s be clear: what makes Banks ‘beneath contempt’, on this view, is not his attending a far-right protest, but his violation of public standards of propriety in urinating next to a memorial. It’s true that his actions neatly expose the contradiction in sacralising the bronze sculptures of Westminster while desecrating the memorial of a man who died defending Westminster from an Islamist terrorist. But it is also true that loutishness appears a greater sin than racism. Despite footage circulating of far-right protesters singing ‘burn the black cunt’ before setting effigies alight, and a war veteran calling for the execution of Sadiq Khan, I have seen no evidence of efforts to trace or investigate these people for hate crimes.
In an interview with ITV News on Sunday, Hutchinson said: ‘It definitely gives me a positive feeling that … together we can change the way things are at the moment. And what we did just embodies that, just to show other people that … it’s not black or white, we’re a human race.’ Admirable sentiments. But the appropriation of them by the right-wing media is a disgrace. The front page of the Sun yesterday featured the famous photograph of Hutchinson, with the headline: ‘It’s not black versus white, it’s everyone versus racists.’
The words are not only a sentimental bromide intended to delegitimise and deradicalise the current movements of Black Lives Matter activism. They are also a cynical attempt to dissociate the Sun and related media from the violent cycle of racism and anti-blackness. In 2016, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, in unequivocal terms, correlated the reporting of the Sun and the Daily Mail with escalating racist violence and hate speech in the UK. If it’s ‘everyone versus racists’, the Sun cannot claim to be on the side of ‘everyone’.
It is just as urgent to reject the idea that ‘it’s not black versus white’. As abolitionism surfaces as the central organising principle of the second wave of Black Lives Matter activism, we need to recognise that one of the things that needs to be abolished is the category of ‘whiteness’ itself. The existence of whiteness is dependent on the subjugation of a racialised other. As such there is no way to extract or preserve whiteness from white supremacy. Without the subjugation of Blacks through a project of racial essentialism, whiteness as a category ceases to exist. Whiteness is not a biological reality, but a description of social relations defined by class, ownership and property rights. Hutchinson’s aim to redeem white individuals of racism is fine, but we cannot redeem whiteness itself.
The Guardian’s interview yesterday with Hutchinson and the four men who helped him is further fuel for this depoliticisation. ‘Maybe it will change the view of racists,’ one of them, Lee Russell, said. ‘I hope it shows that whatever they think of us, we’re cool, we’re good – we just saved your life.’ I wonder where that leaves Black people, or other people of colour, who have no interest in – or capacity or opportunity for – similar acts of heroism; who are not ‘cool’ and ‘good’, but feel righteous hostility towards whiteness and are not interested in diplomacy. Interpersonal acts of sacrifice, forgiveness or kindness cannot be the panacea for racism. And Black activists cannot be required to follow an established code of behavioural and moral conduct. The promotion of respectable Blackness is a gift to white supremacy: it obscures the social relations that define white power by identifying racial aggression as the preserve of a non-respectable, insurgent minority, apparently unrepresentative of a more gentle and tolerant majority of Blacks. I would urge everyone who centres kindness and diplomacy to consider this carefully.
While Hutchinson enjoys a media circus, Banks has been sentenced to 14 days in prison for the crime of ‘outraging public decency’. His actions are an embarrassment for the far right, and evidence that Saturday’s events had less to do with a sense of patriotic duty than with treating racist chauvinism as an opportunity for a brawl and piss up. But leftists shouldn’t rush to celebrate Banks’s sentence. Urinating in public usually carries a fine (if it’s punished at all). What Banks did is repugnant, but does it really merit two weeks in jail? We shouldn’t be too eager to embrace the carceral logic of the state, or accept ‘public revulsion’ (in the words of the sentencing magistrate) as grounds for punishment. British standards of ‘public decency’ could easily work against us, particularly in light of the home secretary’s plans for a 24-hour arrest-to-jail pipeline for those who vandalise statues.
Far-right protesters should be condemned not for individual acts of outraging public decency, but en masse as an expression of the apparatus of white supremacy. And we should resist, too, any narrative that tries to defuse Black Lives Matter activism as non-threatening and essentially about ‘equality’ rather than liberation and abolition.
Comments
The chap Banks seems something of a twerp and I presume drink was involved.
No generalised conclusions to be drawn from these two incidents.
On the bigger issue, I will say that the moment of Bryn Male’s rescue by Patrick Hutchinson and his friends felt to me like one of those moments when, in Alan Bennet’s phrase, history runs over the points. I dread to think where we’d be if Male had been killed, he would have become a martyr to the extreme right around the world, and people who had just begun to think that BLM might be on the right track would be repelled back to their delusions. Instead BLM has never been more attractive to those who used to dismiss it, and its opponents’ nature has never been more obviously revealed.
I’d also say to Jason Okundaye that while his anger and disgust at the right-wing media is entirely justified; neither organizations nor people change suddenly, and there’s no point killing an organization if something just as bad will take its place. Things change gradually, and the Sun and the Mail should be applauded for the way they covered Hutchinson (interesting that the Telegraph was the exception) while insisting that this in no way excuses their many transgressions. A lot of those newspapers’ readers would have reacted with fear if they’d seen Hutchinson walking down the street towards them (I have a black friend who had a t-shirt made with ‘You see …’ on the front and ‘… I didn’t mug you’ on the back), now those same people will be a bit less frightened - some of them might even start to question why they were frightened in the first place. That’s the way change happens, tiny bit by tiny bit; it’s unfair but it’s the world.
This is the country that wouldn't elect Corbyn and just voted to validate Brexit. If you think there's a majority in the country that favours abolishing whiteness, or that might support BLM activism that's 'threatening', you're reading the wrong tea leaves.
Racism is quantitatively and qualitatively different in the UK compared to the US. So like it or not, BLM will get nothing without the support of Sun and Heil readers. There's a certain amount of shaming and responsibility they can accept, and once you go beyond that you've lost them.
Topple Colston? Fine, who cares. Churchill was racist? Yeah, but he saved us from the Nazis, so you're missing the point. Nelson and Drake? Go whistle.
Wouldn't it be great if we subjected deaths in police custody to the same level of scrutiny as air crashes (Chris Rock's idea)? Wouldn't it be tragic if this didn't happen because BLM was perceived to be too threatening and too unfocused?
Learn from Labour's defeat: be focused on the small number of meaningful, tangible changes we want. Not a laundry list. Not semiotic rabbit-holes. And not distractions. What's BLM's equivalent of solidarity with the Palestinian cause? Write it down, then vow to never, ever talk about it.
But racism and xenophobia are not going to be overcome by one act of decency.
And pace Staberinde, not that many folk read the Sun these days. The Daily Evil has changed its tune on Brexit somewhat but to what effect? And did Churchill save the UK. Really? He and his government and British and Commonwealth forces played a part. But so did the English Channel (Britain's real saviour over centuries), the Russians who were attacking while British forces were at home (23 million dead), the Americans, and folk in those countries that were occupied. He spoke well but made some big errors, fortunately not big enough to lose the war. We won the Battle of Britain, but German fighters were at the disadvantage of having to carry more fuel etc. etc. Let's have some balance and not false gods.
Actually, I despair for the UK at the moment. Brexit has given xenophobia and racism a big boost. And whatever happens post-Brexit it will be the fault of the EU and those pesky foreigners. BAME folk are 'foreigners' who happen to stick out more than others, and are consequently subject to more abuse, discrimination and prejudice. Racism and xenophobia are probably too deeply engrained - all that can be done is to try to diminish the effect on those targeted.
How to judge historical figures is a difficult question. My admiration of Aristotle is not tarnished by the wrongness of slavery never occurring to him, because everyone in that society just seemed to treat it as an inevitable part of life. Gladstone (the son of a slave owner), on the other hand, is reprehensible because he resisted abolitionist measures as untimely while accepting that they were ‘a good idea in principle’. The context that a life is lived in is as important to judging it, as the sentences surrounding a word is to determining its meaning.
And, I’m more optimistic than you. There has been a repulsive spike in racism since Brexit, even in London, but I still believe we’re moving in the right direction - I see it in the young and all around me. ‘Black skin, white palm, same blood’ is the slogan plastered on the walls round here, I see the youth in this city of every class and colour embracing that message.
I hope you are right about racism and xenophobia. I just have the feeling we have been here before with hopes raised, and lots of meaningful discussion...
I can’t help thinking here of two other deeply religious Prime Ministers - Thatcher and Blair. The former’s religious beliefs meant she had no qualms about having tea and scones with a torturer and the latter seems very comfortable in the company of torturers and theives from some of the former soviet republics. Plus ca change...
I’m happy to judge Gladstone by what I take to be universal standards of morality, rather than some relativistic or post-modernist nonsense. I’m afraid he doesn’t come out very well, either as a politician or as an individual.
'And Black activists cannot be required to follow an established code of behavioural and moral conduct': I am wondering whether the problem goes even further than this, in implicitly expecting black people (after the last 400-500 years!) to act as the moral barometer or personification of idealised ethical purity for the whole human race.
White people have never needed the equivalent of an Anti-Defamation League; and any attempts at same (e.g., David Duke's "National Association for the Advancement of White People") have been and are simply vehicles for white-supremacist ideology, neither more nor less.
What we're actually seeing here is the emergence of some deeply troubled, openly racist individuals, being enabled by members of the very race they're setting out to demolish. It really is beneath contempt, and gives the equally repugnant Tommy Robinsons of this world all the ammunition they need to proclaim their very racial identity is under threat.
Yet, probably won't be buying LRB ever again after this. Truly abysmal.