The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization, Edited by Daniel C. Blight (London, SPBH Editions & Art on the Underground, 2019)
Published last year and arising from a symposium two years earlier at the Royal College of Art in London, no one could have foreseen how current events would throw this book into urgent relevance. Actually, everyone could foresee it; we simply choose not to acknowledge its foreseeability. In large measure, that’s the point of the book. People like me—people with light skin—allow whiteness to afflict our eyes with a highly specific blindness. It is a blindness to the condition of whiteness that affects the way we engage—or refuse to engage—the world we occupy.
As a photographer, I pride myself in my powers of observation. This is the lifeblood of my craft. So I find it chastening to learn that I may be missing great swaths of human experience that pass through my visual field. The task before me—a task which Daniel Blight sets not only for photographers and artists, but for light-skinned people generally—is to decolonize my seeing.
Blight and the thinkers he interviews offer a number of considerations that it is important to carry with us if we are serious about engaging in this project:
1) White supremacy is on the rise
What is driving this to the point of crisis is the resurgence of white nationalism in the U.S., UK and Western European countries. Chief among the rationales of white nationalists is the perceived threat posed by shifting demographics. As a racial category, Caucasians or whites or whatever will become a minority by 2050 in the U.S. and by the end of the century in Europe and Australia. He doesn’t mention Canada. However, the city where I live (Toronto) watched that milestone come and go a decade ago and the Earth didn’t tremble. Maybe the Earth didn’t tremble because of Blight’s second observation.
2) Whiteness has nothing to do with the colour of your skin
It’s become a cliché to say that whiteness is a social construct. But even that cliché may offer too sophisticated an account of things. It may boil down to something more banal, like money. Whiteness is intimately tied to the emergence of unregulated neoliberal capitalism. The idea of a white race is only 400 years old and, not coincidentally, first made its appearance when western Europeans undertook a full scale slaughter of indigenous peoples in the Americas and filled those freshly emptied lands with slave labour transplanted from the west coast of Africa.
Whiteness is the cultural practices used to justify the benefits accruing from those historic arrangements. Because these practices have had 400 years to develop, they’ve gotten quite clever at hiding their grounding in violence, even at hiding their very existence. As a result, people like me, born into these practices, internalize them and come to accept them as simply “the way things are”. The hegemonic power of whiteness is the source of the blindness I mentioned above.
3) The (white) response
The (white) response to Blight’s challenge is utterly predictable. The first is White Denial which refuses to accept that whiteness is a thing. Locally, we recently witnessed this when Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, found it necessary to speak to the protests which have erupted in the U.S. in response to the murder of George Floyd.
They have their issues, there’s no doubt they have their issues in the U.S. And they have to fix their issues, but it’s like night and day comparing Canada and the U.S. … Good luck to them and hopefully they can straighten out their problems, and thank God that we’re different than the United States … We don’t have the systemic deep-roots they have had for years.
This just days after a young Black woman in Toronto fell 24 floors to her death. Her last words were a cry for help to her mother. The only eyewitnesses were the police officers who were with her when she went over the railing.
The second predictable response is Relative White Silence, a refusal to speak either positively or negatively on matters of racism in order to maintain a moderate position. However, the silence isn’t real. Somehow or other, we feel compelled to weigh in while preserving the appearance of moderation. We blacken our avatar on Instagram or post a woke meme or, who knows, post something on our blog about a helpful book we’ve read. Once the news cycle has flipped over, we move on to something else.
4) Lifelong work
The work this demands does not result in a one-off epiphany that leaves us forever after not-racist; it is a lifelong project of entering into just relations. As Blight writes:
This is not a simple opportunity to become an “enlightened white person”, simply to give up our whiteness in a single pronouncement of colour blindness and go join a woke revolution. We are not allowed to let ourselves off the hook that easily.
And again:
[W]hite people must work to accept that they are sutured to whiteness and that removing those stitches is a lifelong pursuit rather than a single, narcissistic point of arrival. This requires perpetual vigilance or, as George Yancy has written, a “continuous effort on the part of whites to forge new ways of seeing, knowing, and being”.
5) The death of whiteness
This project demands that I engage in a kind of suicide. To the extent that I have constructed my personal identity around whiteness, I kill my self as I dismantle that whiteness. Because it necessarily engages me in loss, I my well grieve. One approach to coping with this loss is to recognize the relational nature of personal identity. If I identify as white, it is because I adhere to a notion of whiteness which is founded upon the violent oppression of Black bodies. It is an identity whose chief feature is a violent (self) hatred. In this context, Blight’s notional suicide is an act of (self) love because the renewed identity is rooted in a striving after just relations.
Because Blight presents his project/challenge in the context of photographic practice and primarily addresses white photographers, we are left with the question: how do we engage photography to disrupt and expose whiteness and white seeing? More challenging still: how do we sustain this? How do we make it part of our daily regimen? And how do we interrogate it in the work of our peers?
6) We work alone
It is clear that I must do this work on my own. I can’t be looking to BIPOC people for feedback, or a report card on my progress, or a pat on the back. In their own way, these requests are expressions that re-enact the power relations that characterize whiteness in the first instance.
A final note about context
Conversations about race will necessarily be influenced by context. Daniel C. Blight writes from London. What is missing (for me) from that context is the inclusion of First Nations peoples and the role they have played in the emergence of whiteness in the Americas and Australia. Living in downtown Toronto, I have only to step onto the sidewalk outside my home and am immediately reminded that colonialism and genocide are not matters relegated to a murky past. The suffering they have produced lives on in the bodies of people I encounter every day.