The Deathly Sociality of Whiteness

This dissertation maps and theorizes what it means to permanently embody two binds that I argue are inherent to living in a white and class-privileged body while being committed to radical leftist politics in the contemporary so-called US and Canada: I want to abolish white supremacy, yet I live in a body marked as white, that benefits daily from this whiteness, and that inherits individual and collective histories of perpetrating “gendered racial terror” (Haley 2016). And I want to engage in repair for the ongoing violences of settler colonialism and I want to abolish racial capitalism, yet I have lived a class-privileged life as a documented person on stolen land. In dialogue primarily with abolition feminism, Black feminism, and other Black radical thought, I discuss what it means to live with these inescapable complicities and work towards radical healing and repair for their violences.In chapter one, I make the grounding argument of this entire project: that white people living in Canada and the US, regardless of their adopted politics, are deathly social. Deathly sociality describes the structural position white subjects in the US and Canada inherit and inhabit due to the historical production of white power and freedom through ongoing processes of white supremacy, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, empire, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, fatphobia, and other interconnected axes of oppression. If white supremacy produces “social death” (Sexton 2011) for Black people—and conditions of intense violence and oppression for Indigenous people and other people of color—then, I argue, whiteness itself is deathly social. Here, following Sara Ahmed’s call (2004), I seek to define whiteness first and foremost through its deathly effects on others (the social at large) as opposed to defining whiteness as an essentialized or non-relational racial formation unto itself. Thus, to be a radical leftist white person is, I argue, in part to be positioned antagonistically towards one’s own body as it materially moves and signifies within white supremacy and racial capitalism. Radical white leftists, thus, must ask themselves: How does one live in a body that one knows is violent? In chapter two, I draw on Hortense Spillers’s use of the term grammar in her seminal article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) to argue that framing and naming whiteness as deathly social might be helpful tool in conceptualizing and practicing radical leftist organizing. Whereas what I call liberal grammars of anti-racism offer white subjects the promise of finding a sense of goodness, innocence, and escape if they engage in “adequate” amounts of anti-racist training and acts, I argue that centering the ineluctable deathly sociality of white subjects is a fundamental, necessary prerequisite to engaging in more radical grammars of anti-racist organizing. It is only by fully reckoning with the inherent violence of whiteness as a structural position of advantage, I contend, that we can move from liberal models and theories of change like diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives toward more radical grammars of liberation that seek to abolish the systems that birth and maintain social death in the first place, including white supremacy, racial capitalism, and liberal democracy. In chapter three, I think about an example of what it can look like for white people to confront the deathly sociality of whiteness in aesthetic politics by analyzing a sculptural installation by the Montreal-based artist Sheena Hoszko, Laval Immigration Holding Centre (Total Perimeter: 572 feet) (2014). Drawing on the work of abolitionists Angela Davis (2003), Jackie Wang (2018), and others—who argue that despite the omnipresence of racialized and settler-colonial carceral violence in everyday US and Canadian life, the prison- and migrant- industrial complex often remains distanced or abstracted from dominant white subjects—I contend that Hoszko’s artwork strategically uses the aesthetic vocabulary of abstraction to represent this material abstraction of prisons from dominant white subjects back to the dominant white viewers of her artwork. In chapter four, I turn to Sara Ahmed’s article “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism” (2004) to think about the politics and poetics of writing and speaking about gendered racial terror from the position of the perpetrator. What questions and quandaries arise when white people attempt to publicly speak out against whiteness? What are the theoretical, political, and methodological possibilities when it comes to white people like myself constructing entire projects around whiteness? I think about how core tenets of white anti-racist speech signify differently depending on if they are being deployed in liberal or radical anti-racist grammars. I consider the shortcomings of privileged people confessing their privileges and argue for the necessity of developing more expansive grammars for radical leftists to publicly confront their privilege, build relationships and trust across difference, and work towards repair. Finally, I consider how white people need to learn how to respond to the radical vulnerability BIPOC artists and activists engage in when they are producing knowledge around white supremacy.

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