“You aren’t white unless you act white”
— Fred Moten
A common mistake of thought reduces whiteness to a recognizable quality that a specific population “has”. There are ‘Black’ people, ‘Brown’ people, ‘People of the Global Majority’, and then there are ‘white people’. This latter category, the subject of contentious debates about race and colonization, congregates a curious group of humans and, in popular imagination, a villainous and privileged ‘class’, laden with the almost singular burden of being responsible for the world’s most noxious ills.
From the churning toxic spillages and oil dumps made possible by the extractivist machines of Euro-American multinationals in the Niger Delta, to the pilfering of the Benin Bronzes from the old kingdom of Benin; from the traumatic interiors of the Middle Passage to the heat-swept wastelands of our Anthropocene; from the asphyxiated necks of Black America to the clean utopian futures dreamt up in the corporate boardrooms of the Global North, the sprawl of whiteness feels as vast as its reputed inevitability.
If we began from the tautological premise that this whiteness – culpable to the degree that it defines the world-shaping, life-denying, life-flattening practices that are the source of our shared troubles today – is primarily what white people are (which in turn makes them do “white things” that in turn reinforce how “white” they are), then it is easier to recognize why there are powerful contemporary convergences around the prospects of becoming good white people, around “doing the work”, around learning the right things to say so that no one gets hurt, and around demonstrating to one’s white peers that one is morally superior (which lends itself to people policing each other).
In short, white virtue is all the rage. White virtue, a highly valuable commodity, is leaping off the shelves like indulgences in medieval times, soothing the guilt of whiteness!
But will it save us?
Will it help to have more good white people? Will it change the shape of whiteness if more white folk “did their research”?
In conversation, Bayo Akomolafe and Erin Manning propose that white virtue is a function of white settlement, and that this virtue will not assuage white guilt because it operates by justification, by lending itself as value within familiar moral boundaries. In their eyes, white virtue is a trap. Unravelling this trap means rethinking the ways we speak, write, and think about white identity, white privilege, white guilt, white fragility, and whiteness.
Bringing their lines of inquiry into resonance, they explore how “white virtue” is yet another strange machine of white coloniality that works by offering white-identified folks premium guarantees for placement within the shrinking settlements of the modern. In their re-examination of white settlement and its normopathic consistencies, Manning and Akomolafe suggest – quite critically – that whiteness has never been pure, and that it too is troubled by inconsistencies and minor gestures within its world-making projects, and that these streaming tendencies lurch towards a different kind of value that doesn’t settle. Indeed, one that cannot settle. One that unfastens settlement from within, opening the way toward another logic altogether.
On March 6, be a part of this critical exploration of white settlement and the shapes it proliferates to keep itself aloft.
This conversation, hosted and held with philosopher Alex Forrester as part of the continuation of Dr. Akomolafe’s W. E. B. Du Bois Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, is ultimately about blackness. Not the Blackness that settles, but the blackness that unravels the settled. Becoming unsettled is becoming black. It is not taking on a new colour; it is being rendered unrenderable by asystemic forces that sidle the logics of settlement; it is how we name the fugitive and apophatic forces that refuse the frightening valour and magisterial decree of Eden that all of creation be still, once and for all.
Join us at the tinkering edges of our shared unravelling.
