Red Skin, White Masks

Red Skin, White Masks

Fanon & Critical Indigenous Studies

“…[how to]motivate praxis that is attentive to the structural as well as the subjective features of colonial rule… [and] truly initiate the ‘cycle of freedom.’”

–Glen Coulthard, “The Plunge into the Chasm of the Past,” 144

i. recognition & racializing violence

examples from podcast episodes:

• “It is always an affront when someone tells you to sound ‘white’” (“The Problem with Sounding White,” The Stoop podcast)
• “With your future growth in mind, describe a potential classmate that you believe you could learn from, either within or outside a formal classroom environment” (“Essay B,” This American Life podcast)
• “Interaction with peers of colour is a resource some white students feel entitled to—or sometimes wrongly deprived of…. To many white students, minority students do not hold up their end of the diversity bargain when they join the Black Students Association or sit together in the cafeteria” (Natasha K. Warikoo, The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions and Meritocracy at Elite Universities, University of Chicago Press 2016, 104)

examples from this lesson’s assigned reading:

• “I am not so concerned with how we dismantle the master’s house, that is, which set of theories we use to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re)build our own house, or our own houses” (Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, 32, cited Coulthard 148).

ii. saying ‘no’ to the terms of recognition

“In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sign the past to any detriment of my present and my future.”

–Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Coulthard’s epigraph)

• Recognition as violence (being-for-others):
• “… as a theft, as objectification, and as such ‘the death of [one’s] possibilities,’… a form of enslavement, of being ‘fixed’ by ‘the look’ of another…. the only way out of this situation is for the objectified to make the other into the object of one’s own look, to ‘turn back’ the gaze, thereby reversing the process of objectification.”
• Except that some forms of objectification are so “over-determined” that there’s no way to gaze back effectively (citing Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, Coulthard 134).

What can be over-determining about recognition? (ie. when the situation or the inherited field in which a person must act, make choices and derive meaning leads directly to assimilation).

“I am not given a second chance. I am overdetermined from the outside. I am a slave not to the ‘idea’ that others have of me, but to my appearance” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 95).

Watch in class this 5-minute video: Claudia Rankine, reading from Citizen: An American Lyric (131-133)

• Can there be a revolutionary role for claiming recognition in the voice of the “we”? to establish broad bonds of social solidarity and collective struggle. To reinscribe value and worth to those identity-related differences as a subjective necessity (Coulthard 140).

• Three limitations of recognition as a strategy for “being-for-self” (on Coulthard’s reading of Fanon):
• Risking the inversion of colonial discourse, thereby remaining fixed around a value structure that is pre-determined by colonial society
• Risking an essentialist conception of one’s own subjectivity
• Risking elitist assumptions about exploitation and struggle, focusing too narrowly on revaluing the historical achievements of colonized cultures and societies (Coulthard 143).

iii. decolonial praxis & the very framing of the question

“There is a long practice of whiteness, framing questions about identity in ways that actually seek to replicate the brutalities of white imposition.”

–Rinaldo Walcott (The Henceforward)

• Rinaldo Walcott: “The kind of question I’m willing to tolerate and engage with from a non-white person is very different from that of a white person…. I’m often willing to suspend suspicion inter-racially as opposed to being so generous when engaging with whiteness…. There is a long practice of whiteness framing questions about especially identity in ways that actually seek to replicate the brutalities of white imposition.”
• Eve Tuck: “So many of us operate in different frames. When I get posed a question, I’m always having to intervene on the questions that are asked of me. I can’t even begin to answer a question… there’s always an intervention that has to happen with the framing of the question…. I would like to figure out how to be more generous with each other to anticipate the adjustments we might need to make in order to be in conversation with each other.”

Claudia Rankine:

“Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.

“For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.”

(Citizen: An American Lyric, 49)