Like a Tsurezuregusa for a philosophy grad student.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Authenticity as Affect
Typically when we engage in conversations about authenticity, identity, or any of the discourse that falls under the umbrella of authenticity or identity politics, the critique of an individual as inauthentic is located in the kinds of actions that the individual performs. Rooted in an essentialist notion of an authentic identity, these discourses take the inauthentic individual as the one who fails certain criteria of action, which demonstrates their lack of authenticity and, through it, their lack of connection to the group that they are seeking membership in. Cornel West’s attack on Barack Obama as “deracinated,” as an example, is rooted in West’s perception of Obama’s actions while in office as not aligning with the criterion of action that West has set for authentic connection to the wider Black community.
Rather than dealing with the concept of identity politics head on, as has been the case for both proponents and antagonists of the concept, I want to look at how thinking about authenticity not in terms of action, but in terms of affect, or the feeling generated by the actions, can restructure the conversation. First off, I need to explain what “action” means in the context of this conversation. Action is not merely the movement of the particular individual through space, but how that individual moves through spaces, and the responses of that space to the individual. Action, on this reading, can be everything from how that individual dresses, to their mode of speech, to the way in which they engage in social relations with the wider world. To this end, any body in a social space (which is pretty much everything) is engaged in action all the time through the act of being.
Now, actions are not performed in a vacuum: they are performed in a meaning rich environment and always in a particular context. For example, the meaning of lifting my hand vertically in the air changes depending upon the contextual situation: in a classroom, I could be signalling for a teacher’s attention; at the curb side, I could be hailing a cab; if my fist was clenched, I could be engaging in a racially coded act of resistance. It is the meaning and the situation that changes how a particular action, no matter how minor, is perceived and understood, and we carry different understandings of these meanings based on our interactions with the social and historical horizons of our situation. Put simply, our backgrounds matter in how we interpret these actions, and what they mean to us in the situations that we encounter them.
This is what leads us to the question of affect, or the qualitative unity of the action. Every action, as an engagement with the environment, has a dramatic structure: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the way in which the action completes this dramatic structure is the source of its affective quality. An action that is disjointed, out of synch, is unintelligible to us: we do not understand how the action “hangs together” and, as a result, we cannot understand the qualitative unity of the action. Pushing further, qualitative unities are what make each action (as an engagement with the environment) different from one another: as each consummation of an action (which really should be interaction) is different because both the individual and the environment are different, the quality that pervades the whole action will be different.
So, what does all of this have to do with authenticity? Remember how authenticity politics was predicated on the actions taken by the individual as a marker of their authenticity? If we are to import the notion that actions have a qualitative unity to them, then the action that is “inauthentic” is an action whose qualitative unity cannot be identified with the qualitative unity of the actions of the community. In so far as a community is a collection of individuals whose engagement with their environment is the product of a particular social history, which generates a particular qualitative unity, then it is possible for the actions of an individual to possess a quality about them that is perceived as “other” in the eyes of the community. This is where things become sticky.
As actions have meanings within contexts, and a community is its own social contexts, the meaning of engaging in an action that produces a qualitative feeling that is at odds with the community’s own quality is one of a problem. So let’s be real here: when a Black person argues that they feel as though their community has marginalized them for acting white, or inauthentically Black, it may not be the result of any actions on the part of the community, but the awareness of the fact that the qualitative feeling generated by their actions does not align with the expected quality that their community expects from them. On this view, there might not be any actions that the individual can point to (though this is usually not the case), rather, there might be a feeling of unwelcome as the qualitative feeling of their activity does not align with the feeling circulated by all the other individuals in the community.
This is where we get to affectivity. If we take affectivity as identical with qualitative feeling, then these feelings are circulated through the community by the actions of the community and the ideological orientations privileged by the community. The circulation of affect is what causes some feelings to “stick” or “collect” around some bodies and not around others. In US/American society, the organization of the culture around white-supremacy means that various negative feelings collect around people of color in different ways. The actions that proceed from this organization perpetuate the circulation of these feelings around the community, allowing them to “stick” to some bodies and not others. As affect sticks to the body, it calls attention to that body, which prevents the body from “trailing behind” its action, or going unnoticed in the execution of the action. For example, to speak of a scientist, the image that emerges is of a white man in a lab coat; to think otherwise requires a reorientation or a specification to mark the scientist as other than the presumed default.
Returning to the question of authenticity, actions considered “at home” in the space of a community are usually those actions that do not call attention to the bodies executing them. Modes of speech, dress, conduct, and embodiment of cultural and social history are all actions that are “at home” and thus do not call attention to the bodies executing them in the space of the community. Further, these actions circulate particular kinds of affect, demand particular kinds of qualitative unities, within the community. We can think of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” in different communities of color, for example. The modes of embodying masculinity for a Black man in the Black community are different than the modes for a Latin@ or Asian man within their respective communities, and these modes of embodiment result in the circulation of particular affects attached to these bodies. To be authentic, therefore, is to engage in actions that result in the circulation of particular affects, culturally coded, that do not call attention to the body within the community.
This, then, allows us to turn to the inauthentic, or the body whose actions halts the circulation of affect. To be inauthentic, on this view, is to engage in actions that halt the circulation of affect, or that cause affects associated with the “other” to accrue around the body in the community. To act white, for example, would be to engage in modes of action that cause the affective feeling of whiteness (and we can call to mind what that is) to accrue around an individual, regardless of their intention. If the affect of whiteness is one that halts the circulation of the affect that the individual is “supposed” to be circulating, then that individual’s body will not trail behind their actions in a way to allow them to go unnoticed. Worse, still, this body’s actions will be associated with the intentional generation of an affect to be like the other, and distant from the community. In doing so, the meaning of the actions may become one of betrayal or the community, or the appeasement of the oppressors, regardless of the intention of the individual engaging in the action.
As responses to qualitative unities do not have to be intentional or active, the body in question might not be subject to social reprisal in the mode of active persecution. Rather, they may be constantly made aware of the way in which they are “other” within their community through the way that affect is extended towards or away from them in smaller actions. That is, there may not be a concerted effort to drive the “inauthentic” individual out of the community, but the affect that sticks to them prevents their total acceptance within the community proper: if the community is such that there are no borderlands, in the sense that Andalzua speaks of, then the meaning of being unable to be unnoticed within the community may be perceived by the individual as one of rejection or alienation from the community.
This is, I believe, a situation that bell hooks sought to resolve in her essay, Postmodern Blackness, wherein she hovered at the edge of speaking of authenticity in terms of affect, or the way that actions generate feeling. For hooks, the solution lies not in reinforcing the rigid structures that demand Black bodies engage in certain actions to circulate particular affects, but looking at how all actions might be expressions of different affects, all of which share in Blackness as articulated by the total actions of those people who call themselves Black. If we recognize authenticity as emerging from the affect produced and circulated by particular actions, then we must come to recognize that no two bodies will generate the same affect, since no two bodies engage in actions in the same way.
There is a tendency, in western culture, to separate emotion from reason. A good argument is a rational one, a purely intellectual one. To display emotion always weakens your case, no matter how deep the feelings you feel are, no matter how intertwined with your argument they may be. Western philosophy has attempted to strip impertinent emotion away from rationality, and it remains popular to insist that emotion should play no role in our public lives.
Ahmed shows this vision of politics to be laughably incorrect — we are awash in emotion, emotion which pushes and pulls us towards each other and away from each other, emotion which alters the way we perceive the world, emotions which construct our very nature as individuals, or as members of a group. She painstakingly examines the phenomena of love, pain, shame, disgust, and fear to demonstrate how each of these emotions works on a social being, and she offers a firm challenge to the reigning emotion/reason binary which marginalizes women, racial minorities, and subaltern cultures.
For Ahmed, emotions are not to be located in certain objects; there is no sign or symbol that itself is inherently tied to emotion. Emotion is what is produced at the end of a interaction, or event, or phenomena. Emotion is the end result of a process — it is the water that moves us to and from others.
Emotion is not an unadulterated good, for Ahmed — it is a phenomenon. It works to reinforce the worst kind of hatred, but it can also excite an sense of wonder and hopefulness, a feeling that progress is possible and achievable. Emotion can and often does work to reinforce power relations. Emotion can work to preserve certain objects and institutions as normative ideals, which then serve to divide a population along the line of conformity to that ideal. Strong emotion moves you to ally yourself with those who conform to your ideal, those who will work to preserve the status quo.
But emotion also fuels a revolutionary politics, emotion fuels the quest for justice and knowledge. Emotion fosters within us a sense of wonder, a love for our neighbor, an investment in ourselves and in our communities. Ahmed describes a framework for a revamped feminist and queer politics in the last two chapter; a fruitful yet incomplete account of how to incorporate emotionality into our revolutionary politics — how we can use our emotions to challenge existing power relations.
tldr: 4.5/5, will probably be digesting for a long time to come.
ninjaruski, thoughts?
awwwwnobro, heauxchinoise, since both of you asked me about this, I might as well tag you both.
Something that I think you overlooked is the import of the “stickiness” of emotions, and how emotions stick to some bodies and not others. Particular kinds of emotions tick to particular bodies through the interaction with those bodies: the more the emotion sticks to the body, the more the body seems to bear that particular affect. And this is one of the things that I think people who read Ahmed need to be cognizant of: emotion is a kind of affect, but is not the totality of affect.
In her later work, she speaks of “rightness” and “wrongness” in terms of affect: when something is right, when it coheres with the organization of the world, it has a feeling about it. Rightness, in this sense, is something that can be circulated through communities through the alignment of knowledge with preferred modes of knowledge production. A thing that “feels” right will emerge from a practice that is in line withe the cultural orientation of a group and produce knowledge that does not challenge that orientation. Rightness and wrongness, in this sense, are affects and Ahmed might speak of them in terms of emotion, but we do not often think of them as emotion. This is one of the most valuable points about Ahmed’s work.
Your understanding of Ahmed’s use of emotion as an orienting force is good, but I think you’re missing something. Culture orients people and directs how they should feel about something. This feeling about is part of how emotions come to stick to certain bodies as directed by the organization of culture: we emerge into a world already oriented, which is something that Ahmed recognizes, but how this world is oriented results in the direction of our emotions, which is what enables some emotion to stick to some bodies. If we think about the organization of American society around white-supremacy, it becomes clear that the orientation of society allows for the sticking of some emotions to some bodies and not to others. Fear, for example, sticks to Black bodies more than white bodies (unless you are Black) because the orientation of culture is such that the Black body is constructed as inherently threatening.
What Ahmed is unambiguous about is how some emotions stick varies within the culture: fear sticks to Black bodies in American culture given the white-supremacist organization of American culture; fear also sticks to white bodies for Black people because of the history of white-supremacist abuse of Black bodies. Further, to the white viewer, some emotions do not stick to Black bodies that embody and perform their blackness in particular ways; while that same performance causes different emotions to stick to those same Black bodies when subjected to the Black gaze. In this conversation, we can see the specter of authenticity and respectability politics when some individuals event to create institutions that demand certain performances to produce certain feelings of blackness from black bodies. This is something that becomes important in Ahmed’s later works, particularly the concept of the Feminist Killjoy and in Queer Phenomenology.
To sketch briefly, to be a killjoy (in whatever adjectival sense) is to engage in a performance that “blocks” the flow of particular emotions, and therefore causes others to “stick” to the killjoy. It is to unseat some bodies at the “table” through being present in a space in a way that disrupts the smooth cohesion of the space. Put another way, a killjoy’s presence prevents the smooth flowing of the affect that allows a space to cohere in particular ways. A Black body in a white space interrupts the smooth coherence of the space around whiteness in particular affective ways: when the Black body engages in performances that further disrupt the space, like speaking about racism, it actively interrupts the smooth flowing of affect. The space becomes uncomfortable because the affect does not flow in such a way as to be comfortable, which opens up the possibility for transformation.
The theme of circulation is one that moves through Ahmed’s work in different ways: in On Being Included, diversity is described as being circulated through institutions and picking up affect as it does so. Diversity fails to do the “work” that it needs to do when it is “blocked” or circulated differently so that it protects rather than disrupts the coherence of space. Thus, the affect attached to diversity results in a reinforcement of the institution as good because it is diverse, even if the representation of that diversity is through the positioning of bodies of color as representatives of diversity. Diversity sticks to these bodies, and then to the institution, which enables the institution to continue to cohere in ways that circulates whiteness.
So, my thoughts on this for you, and anyone else who might be reading Ahmed’s work, is to keep in mind the themes of circulation and affect. For Ahmed, affect encompasses emotion and how things feel to us; affect is circulated through institutions and comes to stick to objects in particular ways, which is what enables them to become signs of a particular feeling. Here, your analysis of there being no inherence of emotion in particular objects is correct, but I don’t think Ahmed is saying that there are no signs of emotion: if emotion sticks enough to a particular object through the direction of affect by culture, certain objects become the sign of a particular affect.
I’d say read Queer Phenomenology, On Being Included, and the essay Phenomenology of Whiteness. Her blog is pretty good too.
iscrystalmethvegan-deactivated2:
how does their experience differ from a white ally who distances themselves from whiteness? are they more likely to suffer racism as a result?
because like, we’d still say that a white ally who did everything they could to reject whiteness is still white, they don’t ever personally suffer from racism
so why would a person who looks white suffer a racist response? it’s not like a white racist would reclassify them as a person of color if they think they’re white?
This was way too long to answer in the ask or the comment thing, so I rebagled it.
A white ally, whatever their starting point, has privilege: given the organization of American society around whiteness, all white people have a measure of privilege that works without their consent and without their agency. White people’s abilities to exercise intentional control over their whiteness and its attendant privileges depends upon other intersections of identity (class, sexuality, gender identity, embodiment) and the way in which those intersections have their own structures of privilege. As a side note, this is why intersectional analysis of whiteness is necessary to understand how white privilege functions.
If we take this as a starting point, white people do not generally try to distance themselves from whiteness: they distance themselves from the actions that follow from white-supremacy which is what enables the functioning of white-privilege. White ally narrative is always structured upon the recognition of the way in which white-supremacy has enacted oppressive force against bodies of culture, which is what enables them to say “I am white, I have privilege, but I stand against the structures that grant me privilege.” The only way that a white ally could distance themselves from whiteness itself is by claiming non-white heritage, and thereby claiming a place in the history of resistance against white-supremacy by virtue of their shared history with people of color.
No white ally, unless they are presenting the fraction argument for their heritage, never tries to deny their whiteness: denying their whiteness would invalidate their position as an ally which is contingent upon being the recipient of white-privilege. If a white ally manages to fully extinguish their whiteness (how they could do this, I don’t know), they would no longer be a “white ally,” they would simply be another body of color within the struggle. Thus, I’d say you should be immediately suspect of any white person who tries to deny their whiteness, as opposed to articulating resistance to a white-supremacist structure that enables their white privilege.
If by “distance themselves from whiteness,” you mean a white ally who pushes back against white culture, or the culture of white-supremacy, these people cannot experience racism because they still carry their white privilege. Any abuse they might suffer emerges from the perception of those inculcated in white-supremacist structures that they are betraying the collective of whiteness, repudiating what amounts to a “divine right” and should be punished for their treason. This is a fundamentally different experience than racist abuse because the treasonous white person can recant their treason and be welcomed back into the fold.
People who can pass as white do so as long as they do not call attention to markers of their non-white heritage. A multi-racial individual could pass as white so long as they do not engage in the performance of their cultural heritages, or if the performance of their cultural heritage increases their “value” in the eyes of whiteness. A white/Japanese woman, for example, who performs the cultural traditions of her Japanese heritage is viewed as not-white, however, her Japanese heritage allows for the exotification of her whiteness. Thus, she does not lose her white privilege because the admixture of her Japanese heritage positions her as an object of desire, and therefore more valuable to whiteness. She is just white enough to be included in the fold of whiteness, but she possesses just enough “exotic” elements to make her more interesting.
I want to make clear that the above example is a REALLY FUCKING BAD THING and is presented to demonstrate the nuance of the operation of white privilege at the intersections of race. A more direct example would be if the multi-racial individual’s cultural heritage was one that was taken to be inherently inferior by whiteness. A black and white individual, who can pass as white, but engages in the performance of blackness becomes subject to white-supremacist abuse because they are recognized as Black. It is the performance of their blackness which enables white-supremacy to position them as not-white, closer to blackness, and thus subject to particular forms of white-supremacist violence.
A Black and white person who speaks out against racism may be met with, “why are you concerned about this, you’re not like them;” or, “you don’t seem Black to me;” or any number of microaggressions that remind them of the denigration of their cultural heritage. Further, if the individual has managed to pass for the majority of their interactions with whiteness, and then suddenly reveals their mixed heritage, this may be perceived as a betrayal, as though the individual had deceived their acquaintances as to their true nature. In my observation of this phenomena, whiteness begins to ascribe all manner of negative connotations to the activities of that individual: every mistake, every error, every misstep is attributed to their Black heritage; every success, every victory, every achievement is attributed to their white heritage.
Part of the difficulty of this conversation is that passing is more than “looking” white: it requires a complicated way of embodying whiteness that creates a perception of whiteness. A light-skinned African-American, in some cases, can “look” more white and not be able to pass due to their performance, their embodiment of their Blackness in particular ways. Accordingly, a Black person can “look” less Black due to their performance and embodiment of blackness. This is the theoretical structures that underlies the capacity for white people to say to Black people “I don’t see you as black,” or “I don’t see race when I talk to you.” What is actually being said is “I don’t see the problematic Blackness that white-supremacy has trained me to see, so therefore I don’t see you as Black in the problematic way.” This is a form of white-supremacist violence that we tend not to think of as violence.
To answer your question, in some ways the white-supremacist reclassifies them as not-white, and in others they do not. There is the possibility of the feeling of betrayal, as though a person were hiding their true nature from the white-supremacist, that can be made manifest in racialized violence. A lot of that, I think, comes from the inability of the person inculcated in a white-supremacist system to integrate the contradiction of the person in front of them with the image of blackness that white-supremacy has constructed. To be more theoretical about it, Merleau-Ponty calls this “psychological rigidity,” the inability for an individual to integrate contradictions within their world view which results in denial of the contradiction in a myriad of ways.
Thanks!
You can find some of my work on my academia.edu page which is kind of spartan right now.
As for other thinkers doing work in phenomenology of racial embodiment, I would suggest that you begin with the following:
Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self
Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality
Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, Race
In addition to these, I would suggest that you also read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, The Primacy of Perception, and The Visible and the Invisible.
Lee’s work, linked above, is still forthcoming, but she does have some very interesting articles bringing Merleau-Ponty into contemporary conversations about race and the lived experienced of being raced.
There is something that I should note: most of the authors linked above are not Black. While Africana Existentialism has produced some valuable resources for the conversation about the situation (and here I mean situation in the existential sense) of being Black in America, the existential situation that is under investigation is done so from a particular way of experiencing the world as Black. This limits the applicability of the theoretical frameworks that emerge from these schools of thought to a particular kind of experience of being Black.
This is where perspectives on the embodiment of race from outside the Black community are valuable: the theoretical frameworks developed to talk about the way whiteness must deal differently with an Asian body or a Latin@ body can be used to develop fuller notions of how racism functions differently upon different Black bodies. Alcoff, in particular, is extremely valuable for discussing the experience of bi-raciality as a lived experience of race and racism that is no less racist, but differently racist than the experience of, and I hate this term, mono-racial individuals.
Phenomenology of race that emerges out of the Black Academy tends to be organized around a particular experience of being Black in the world, a particular experience of racism, and seeks to universalize that experience to the whole of African-American subjects, or those subjects who can be identified as Black. In doing so, the theoretical framework that emerges to explain this particular experience tends to leave out experience of the Black middle-class, bi-raciality, or Black bodies that occupy ethnic spaces marked as different from the dominant discourse, or Black immigrants all of whose experiences would not align with the dominant discourse.
For example, a phenomenology of Blackness that articulates how racism must function differently on a bi-racial body, or a middle-class Black body, or a Jewish Black body, an immigrant Black body, would be able to offer a more complete description of the lived experience of racism as contingent upon the social and cultural situatedness of the particular Black body. It would also act as a bulwark against using privilege discourse within spaces organized around Black bodies to silence those voices whose experiences do not align with the dominant experiential discourse.
One of the things that you should consider when discussing the phenomenology of racial embodiment is that embodiment is central to your work. Keeping this in mind, no one has the same body, and thus no one has the same embodied experiences. There may be general structures of experience that we can speak of, but your account of these general structures must recognize that the situatedness of embodied subjects and the way that the existential situation of the subjects in question changes the way that these general structures of experience function.
Hopefully this was helpful.
Another snipped from “the need for a phenomenology of blackness.”
Phenomenologically, the primary consequence of the imposition of the historico racial schema and the epidermal racial schema is the closing off of the possibility for the creative uptaking of the past for the black subject. As Fanon states, “The Negro, however sincere, is the slave of the past.” However, this is not the personal horizon of history, nor the inherited past that Merleau-Ponty articulates: it is the mythological past constructed by white racism that is forced upon the black subject. Thus, the freedom that Merleau-Ponty articulates as a consequence of the formation of our corporeal schema is subsequently denied to the black subject. Not only is the black subject un-free with regards to his social situation, he is also un-free with regards to the denial of his ability to even engage in the project of the constitution of a corporeal schema. Freedom, in a world organized around whiteness, is essentially impossible.
It is at this point that we can discern the value of Fanon’s re-articulation of Merleau-Ponty for philosophers interested in the construction of a phenomenology of race: Fanon provides a concrete phenomenological description of the interruption of the formation of the corporeal schema of the black subject as a result of the encounter with the white world. The encounter with the white world has subsequently become the site of expansion by thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Gail Weiss who take the position that the historico racial and epidermal racial schemas are already operative, rather than become operative, as a result of the organization of the world by colonialism.
Historically, colonialism has been a force that sought to remake the world in a particular image, the white image. To that end, the world is thus prepared for the arrival of white bodies: the formation of the corporeal schema of the white body in a world made in the image of whiteness can be understood as “coming home.” In so far as the white body is “at home” within the space of the world organized around the white image, whiteness becomes the background against which all other bodies appear. It becomes the “horizon” of race from which bodies emerge. As the background, the white body subsequently fails to draw attention to itself as is reaches for objects within the world because the habits of the white body cohere with the background of whiteness.
Re-framed in this way, the encounter of the black body with the white world is not merely a singular event that throws the bodily schema into disarray: it is a fundamental existential condition of the embodiment of the black subject. To be black in a world oriented around whiteness is to constantly encounter a world where the habits adopted by the body never fade into the background. The black body is subsequently always noticed in its enactment of its action, it is always subject to the imposition of the historico racial schema and the epidermal racial schema made manifest in a thousand different encounters both large and small.
“Driving while black,” the stopping of a black person for driving a vehicle viewed as outside of their means serves as an apt example of the way in which the historico racial and epidermal racial schema are applied upon the black body. Because the black skin is the metonymic sign of the mythology of blackness as poor and listless, economically immobile, and ultimately associated with criminality, the assumption by the white officer is that the black person must have stolen the vehicle because they are black. To this end, the officer has a reasonable suspicion to stop the black driver and search for the “signs” of the mythological history imposed upon the black body by whiteness. The degree to which the black body confirms the mythology and the historico racial schema effectively legitimizes further actions by the white officer.
On the politics of authenticity: a short bit from “The Need for a Phenomenology of Blackness.”
The concept of politics of authenticity relies almost exclusively upon the abstraction of blackness as a quality out of the lived experience of black bodies. By saying an individual can be more or less back, politics of authenticity begins to treat blackness as though it were an abstract property to be gained or lost through the influence of whiteness and not a result of how a black body engages with the world.
In order to posit the existence of blackness as a property which can be lost, the material reality of the black body must be ignored in favor of the things that the body does. What is lost in this process of abstraction is the fact of the black body’s existence in a world organized by whiteness itself. It is by virtue of the orientation of the world around whiteness (whiteness as an orienting force) that the black body will continue to experience racism regardless of the black subject’s purported authenticity. To whiteness, the black body is still a black body and subject to racism.
Understanding politics of authenticity as involving the abstraction of blackness away from lived experience enables us to speak more concretely about the lived experience of racism across the totality of the black community. An individual who is read as more white should not be taken as not experiencing racism, or experiencing less racism, but experiencing racism differently. We may take Chris Rock’s sketch about Colin Powell as evidence of this distinction in how racism must act on a body read as less black.
Colin Powell, in Rock’s articulation, was subject to racist remarks like “you speak so well.” On the surface, this appears to be a compliment, but the background of the compliment must be attended to: the unspoken “for a black man.” This unspoken background can be appended to the end of most “complimentary” statements offered to upper-middle class and lighter skinned black individuals, or individuals who are read as “more white.” Racism of this form is not something that is commonly viewed as racist: it is only when we attend to the how of the compliment, that the racist character appears as racist. The statement as such is not treated as a racist act.
Let us return to politics of authenticity as abstracting blackness away from the lived experience. Through phenomenology, we can articulate blackness as emerging from the how of a black body’s engagement in the world. The how of a black body engaging in the activity of, say, dungeons and dragons will necessarily be different than the how of a white or Asian or Latin@ body engaging n that activity, not only because of the sedimented history of that body, or because of whiteness, but because of the materiality of that black body: the how of that black body’s engagement will be where the blackness of the activity emerges.
To this end, doing an activity will not result in the loss of one’s blackness: activities become black by virtue of the bodies that engage in them. Activities become white by virtue of the bodies engaged in them. In treating blackness as an abstract property that can be lost through engaging in certain activities, politics of authenticity serves to deny the possibility for certain activities to become black. Further, this abstraction narrows the perception of racism to overt acts which can be pointed to and called “racist,” as opposed to recognizing that racism is in the how of the relations of bodies.
Sites of Resistance
There is something that is often left unconsidered when we speak of resistance: the way in which an ideology of resistance cultivates the selves of the individuals who participate in this ideology. I do not know if the framework that I am speaking of will apply to individuals outside of the Black community, but It is my hope that it is possible that some wisdom can be gained from this thought.
This discussion will be based upon two premises. First, social constructions, in so far as they have real effects, are based upon the material conditions of a particular social group. Second, what we call a “self” in western ontology, is the end result of the conditions from which we emerge in society and the interplay of social relations upon this “self”. From there, we can see how an ideology of resistance, as a product of culture, and produce certain undesirable effects/
With regards to the first premises, “material conditions,” refers not only to the materiality of a particular group, but the historical constitution of that group, its situation within a given society. In essence, by material conditions I intend the activity of a specific group within a society and the world at large. Taking that to be the case, social constructions, while unstable, rest upon certain conditions that make them socially real and phenomenologically real categories. Sara Ahmed’s work in demonstrating whiteness as real and material, in a phenomenological sense, demonstrates the ways in which a particular social construction, that of whiteness, can have socially real effects upon the world and a given population.
As for the second premise, we may borrow from Buddhist ontology to provide a perspective framework for a self. What we call a self, our enduring presence within the world, is really the product of a network of conditions that give our “selves” an illusion of permanence. When the conditions that allow for the arising of a particular self change, that self changes in response. Called dependent-origination, conditioned co-arising, or pratityasamutpada, it forms the basis of the buddhist argument for non attachment.
The task here is not to demonstrate that we are all metaphysically conditioned, but to argue that which we call our identity, our selves, in the western notion, is derived in a similar way. From the moment we are born our materiality (our bodies) conditions the way in which society responds to us, and we to society. Genderization, racialization, sexualization as social constructions all have a determinate effect on the way that we perceive ourselves and the way we are perceived. Phenomenologically, these are all components of the way in which we are embodied, and this embodiment allows for recognition by the world at large.
However, the ways in which we are embodied are often socially determined, or determined by the relations which we enter into or desire to enter into. We perform sexuality, race, and gender in specific ways as determined by our cultural conditions. To take a Mencian perspective, we may have certain innate dispositions, but it is the activity of ritual (understood as social activity) that cultivates these dispositions into the expressions that they take. Thus, the social construction of a particular manifestation of a desire cultivates the way in which we express our desire.
Now, what does the above have to do with “Sites of Resistance”? Almost everything. Again, drawing upon Sara Ahmed, In a world organized by whiteness, a world in which the white body and white activity go unnoticed, bodies of color arrest the attention, and often in a harmful way. Bodies of color, since they cannot trail behind their activity (go unnoticed) are “stopped” during the performance of their action, and are thus created as a site of social stress. Examples of this stopping can range from “innocent” questions about a body of color in a particular social space, to sexualized assumptions about that body, to the way in which the law itself acts upon that body.
To survive in a world that insists on stopping the activity of the body of color, it became a phenomenological necessity for those bodies to “resist” or struggle against their forced organization within the world. This resistance may be material in the form of marches and the physical occupation of spaces occupied by white bodies (I would include the entry of bodies of color into academia as a material form of resistance), to the usage of language that pushes against the domination of “word space” by hegemonic language (AAEV as a language pushing back against English), to dressing in such a way as to intentionally disrupt the domination of a space by whiteness.
All of these activities transform the body of color into a site of resistance that disrupts the organization of space by whiteness: it forces whiteness to confront its assumed dominion of space and the construction of the world in its image. Conscious (or unconscious) activities by people who enter into spaces of whiteness (read: the world) and choose not to allow themselves to be organized by whiteness can elevate certain objects to the status of a site of resistance.
Resistance, and becoming a site of resistance, can have its own risks: appropriation is a powerful tool whereby whiteness or oppression can rob a site of resistance of its power: when a cultural artifact that has been elevated to a site of resistance becomes adopted by the oppressing culture, that site is no longer disruptive to the oppressive culture and thus looses its capacity for resistance. Here, we find a tenuous ground: on the one hand, the site must remain disruptive in someway to the organizing force of society; on the other hand, the more powerful the site of resistance, the more likely it will be adopted by the dominant culture.
There is also a further risk: in choosing to enter a space dominated by whiteness or oppression, whether the person likes it or not, that body becomes a site of resistance. This is especially true of bodies that excel or are the pioneers or vanguards within that space. These exceptional bodies run the risk of being glorified, their very achievements co-opted by an ideology that they may not subscribe to. They also, like sites of resistance, run the risk of becoming representatives of ideologies that argue for an end of the visible manifestations of oppression. Here, we can further see the tensions that emerge when bodies become sites of resistance.
To conclude, I would like to point towards an unintended side-effect of becoming a site of resistance, or having a self founded upon and ideology of resistance: the modes of expression of the kind of self that is cultivated by ideologies of resistance are limited to resistance. That is, every social action carries with it an element of resistance to an oppressive ideology, which may not seem to be something that needs to be questioned were it not for the fact that these selves must enter into social relations with other bodies whose social activities may carry elements of the oppressor.
To be blunt, I am referring to what Ogbu and Majors articulate as an oppositional identity formation in black males in specific, though they implicate most of black culture. In my context, the selves cultivated by a culture whose very existence has (by necessity, some would argue) been a site of resistance to whiteness, tend to resist or push back against those things perceived of white. In this, we can speak of the ways in which black bodies that embody blackness react, sometimes with physical violence, against other black bodies that embody whiteness.
Phenomenologically, we can see the development of the insult “oreo” as an end result of a cultivation of resistance against whiteness run rampant. The linking of “talking white” to inauthenticity, and the very presence of politics of authenticity within the black community, could be said to be an end result of the cultivation of selves designed to resist the oppressive boot of whiteness.
I am not arguing for the elimination of the core of resistance against whiteness that has helped maintain the boundaries of black culture against centuries of oppression and violence, for that would be tantamount to cultural suicide. I am arguing for a shift in the way in which we cultivate the selves of black people that does not demand a specific form of embodiment, a specific way of being, in order to be accepted within the fold of the community.
I know not if this is a problem within other communities of color (and I might suspect it is), but we must take care not to let the very real need to resist oppression result in the ejection of those who would be allies from our community.
I really don’t want to say this but…
It strikes me as a possibility that the lack of PoC protagonists, well black protagonists specifically, in video games, has something to do with a phenomenological distraction.
Put another way, when we play a video game, first person shooter, RPG, anything but a rhythm or a puzzle game, that game becomes the agent of our embodiment. Our capacity to interact with that world is dependent not upon our own physical presence, but the collection of skills that allows us to manipulate that world.
A white person may have more trouble imagining themselves embodying a black body in a video game quite simply because it becomes a phenomenological distraction. They notice the body, the material that they must inhabit to navigate their chosen world. Thus, there would always be this distance between the player and the environment which might make the playing of the game, the virtual embodiment, more difficult for the player.
I make this argument because it is assumed that the default for a protagonist in a video game, or other work of fiction, unless other wise noted, is a white person.