This is a post for white friends who, like me, are experiencing an increased awareness of our responsibility to educate ourselves about race, racism, and white supremacy, and to submit ourselves to be changed by – and to act on – what we learn. There's some great resources out there explicitly created to help us do this: Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Akala's Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire and Nikesh Shukla et al.'s The Good Immigrant are among those I've read myself and benefited from. And Ben Lindsay's We Need to Talk About Race: Understanding the Black Experience in White Majority Churches addresses some of the particular issues arising in a Christian context.
If all this learning feels like 'effort', it is effort that is due. Overdue. Let's keep on humbly at it, yes?
But everyone needs downtime ... and (to state what should be obvious) we don't need to pause becoming anti-racist when we rest. Whatever it is you do for fun – read novels, watch films,go to the stream theatre – think about WHOSE books, films and plays you choose. All artists inevitably bring something of their own personal context into the stories they tell us, the creatively-imagined realities they invite us to explore. So our entertainment / cultural experiences combine to map a portion of the world beyond ourselves. But that portion doesn't automatically resemble the whole; in fact, historic and current structural injustice mean it almost certainly won't without (or even with) a good deal of intentionality on our part.
I used to joke (unbearably smugly) that "I prefer to wait at least 50 years before I decide whether a book is worth reading..." There's only so much time in a life, I figured, and more literature of lasting consequence than I could hope to get through in that time, even without squandering it in the shallow "contemporary fiction" end of the library. And indeed, you name an Important Book and the chances are that at some point during the third decade of my life I found it on a List Of Important Books and read it.
Thing is, though, who had the education and the time and the independent means and the contacts and the leisured audience to make their masterpieces 50 ... 100 ... 200+ years ago, and to have those masterpieces published and affirmed and preserved by the gatekeepers of 'Western' culture? Certainly not ALL white males. But hardly anyone besides.
Now, "white male" has come to be used and/or heard as an accusation, a cheap dismissive shot. But it's important that we don't let that deflect from the information it provides as a description of particularity. You see, there's this myth we've collectively absorbed that the white male perspective (not that there is only one) is somehow objective and universal. The problem with "white male"-produced culture is not first and foremost that it is white, nor that it is male, but that we have forgotten that it has a context at all. It (with a few extra normative assumptions) is the neutral, unnamed default against which "black" art or "women's" art (or "queer" art, or "disabled" art or "world" art) are specified.
I really enjoyed my journey through what I would eventually recognise as the white male literary canon. I met some wonderful creations along the way – Ulysses, Catch-22, Don Quixote, The Brothers Karamazov, Tristram Shandy. But the discovery – at the prompting of friends, and feminist writers such as bell hooks – of vast realms of creativity beyond that narrow path was exciting as well as humbling. One thing I found, as I began to make a point of reading novels and memoirs by black women (highlights so far include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Nella Larsen, Octavia E. Butler, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Candice Carty-Williams, Bernadine Evaristo) and men (James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Colson Whitehead, Chinua Achebe) [1], and by other writers who share the experience of being racialised by white-centric European/US society, was how blinkered and skewed many of my old favourites began to appear by comparison. I was struck by these words of Angela Davis, quoted in Ben Lyndsay's book mentioned above:
In short, expanding my reading habits (and my theatre and cinema habits [2]) has been massively enriching and enjoyable for me personally. But let's be absolutely clear: BLACK CREATIVES DON'T NEED MY 'APPRECIATION'.
Or rather, maybe I should say I want to want to see it. Because being in the centre and oblivious is obviously 'nicer', and requires zero effort, zero loss. But not everybody has the luxury of choosing when to tune in to reality, and I cannot square embracing a convenient distortion with my faith in one who promises to bring all things to light. "You (plural) will know the truth, and the truth will set you (plural) free"...
[1] I don't get through novels as fast as I used to as there's theology reading to be doing (and yes, all of the above very very much applies there too, as I've started to venture into a little in 'Theology in Isolation'). So these lists are not as long or as globally-representative as I would like, but I'm enjoying working on it – recommendations welcome!
[2] There's something amiss about the fact that recent "mainstream"-recognised films by black directors and/or writers have been of disproportionately high quality (Black Panther, Get Out, Blindspotting, If Beale Street Could Talk, Sorry to Bother You, Moonlight and BlacKkKlansman are some that spring to mind for me). It seems to confirm the felt obligation (voiced by Michelle Obama among many others) to be "twice as good in order to go half as far". Why are only white filmmakers allowed to be mediocre?
[Thumbnail cc by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash].
If all this learning feels like 'effort', it is effort that is due. Overdue. Let's keep on humbly at it, yes?
But everyone needs downtime ... and (to state what should be obvious) we don't need to pause becoming anti-racist when we rest. Whatever it is you do for fun – read novels, watch films,
I used to joke (unbearably smugly) that "I prefer to wait at least 50 years before I decide whether a book is worth reading..." There's only so much time in a life, I figured, and more literature of lasting consequence than I could hope to get through in that time, even without squandering it in the shallow "contemporary fiction" end of the library. And indeed, you name an Important Book and the chances are that at some point during the third decade of my life I found it on a List Of Important Books and read it.
Thing is, though, who had the education and the time and the independent means and the contacts and the leisured audience to make their masterpieces 50 ... 100 ... 200+ years ago, and to have those masterpieces published and affirmed and preserved by the gatekeepers of 'Western' culture? Certainly not ALL white males. But hardly anyone besides.
Now, "white male" has come to be used and/or heard as an accusation, a cheap dismissive shot. But it's important that we don't let that deflect from the information it provides as a description of particularity. You see, there's this myth we've collectively absorbed that the white male perspective (not that there is only one) is somehow objective and universal. The problem with "white male"-produced culture is not first and foremost that it is white, nor that it is male, but that we have forgotten that it has a context at all. It (with a few extra normative assumptions) is the neutral, unnamed default against which "black" art or "women's" art (or "queer" art, or "disabled" art or "world" art) are specified.
I really enjoyed my journey through what I would eventually recognise as the white male literary canon. I met some wonderful creations along the way – Ulysses, Catch-22, Don Quixote, The Brothers Karamazov, Tristram Shandy. But the discovery – at the prompting of friends, and feminist writers such as bell hooks – of vast realms of creativity beyond that narrow path was exciting as well as humbling. One thing I found, as I began to make a point of reading novels and memoirs by black women (highlights so far include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Nella Larsen, Octavia E. Butler, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Candice Carty-Williams, Bernadine Evaristo) and men (James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Colson Whitehead, Chinua Achebe) [1], and by other writers who share the experience of being racialised by white-centric European/US society, was how blinkered and skewed many of my old favourites began to appear by comparison. I was struck by these words of Angela Davis, quoted in Ben Lyndsay's book mentioned above:
“Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.” – Angela Davis.While no one constructed division of society can be expected or presumed to speak universally for all of us, there is a sense in which people who have experienced marginalisation have a clearer view on the whole than those who are so used to being 'in the centre' that they are barely aware of a reality beyond it. (All the more painfully ironic, then, that perspectives of this latter sort are the ones we are most likely to mistake as universal and objective).
In short, expanding my reading habits (and my theatre and cinema habits [2]) has been massively enriching and enjoyable for me personally. But let's be absolutely clear: BLACK CREATIVES DON'T NEED MY 'APPRECIATION'.
“I’m writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologise or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white people] – which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.” – Toni Morrison, interviewed in The Guardian, 2015.What is needed, as I understand it, is the dismantling of racist power structures that disproportionately obstruct the development and expression and fair payment of black talent, and that deny black audiences the opportunity to see themselves represented diversely, complexly, aspirationally, and everywhere. Perhaps, in a consumerist economy, showing that there is a "market" for the work of a given artist stimulates investment from industry decision-makers. But I don't make the choices I make because of some self-important delusion that I'm 'helping' (urgh!), I do it out of the same desire for quality cultural experiences that had me ticking my way through so-called Greatest Novels lists five years ago. And I do it because I want to see the world I live in as it is, and not some skewed white-centric reduction of it that blinkers me to its own absurdity and leaves me comfortably, complicitly content with a status quo that suits me just fine.
Or rather, maybe I should say I want to want to see it. Because being in the centre and oblivious is obviously 'nicer', and requires zero effort, zero loss. But not everybody has the luxury of choosing when to tune in to reality, and I cannot square embracing a convenient distortion with my faith in one who promises to bring all things to light. "You (plural) will know the truth, and the truth will set you (plural) free"...
[1] I don't get through novels as fast as I used to as there's theology reading to be doing (and yes, all of the above very very much applies there too, as I've started to venture into a little in 'Theology in Isolation'). So these lists are not as long or as globally-representative as I would like, but I'm enjoying working on it – recommendations welcome!
[2] There's something amiss about the fact that recent "mainstream"-recognised films by black directors and/or writers have been of disproportionately high quality (Black Panther, Get Out, Blindspotting, If Beale Street Could Talk, Sorry to Bother You, Moonlight and BlacKkKlansman are some that spring to mind for me). It seems to confirm the felt obligation (voiced by Michelle Obama among many others) to be "twice as good in order to go half as far". Why are only white filmmakers allowed to be mediocre?
[Thumbnail cc by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash].
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