The following is a foreword to Najib Warsame’s Whitetology (2022)
A few years ago, I was at a work function and a white woman approached me, calling me by another name, and engaged me in a confusing conversation that was only cleared up when I told her she must have mistaken me for someone else. I spent a lot of time reassuring her that it was okay, people make mistakes, you’re not racist. The last part was unspoken, but I could tell she needed me to know that she wasn’t racist. At the time I hadn’t met Najib yet, but years later I would tell him this story. It’s a common story, but notable in that I ended up getting to know the person I was mistaken for. This wasn’t the only time I was mistaken for someone else, or even the only time I was mistaken for Najib. I don’t know why this happens, but I know why this happens. It’s one of those things.
Whitetology describes specific, particular situations that make you turn around and say, wait, the exact thing happened to me as well! It also serves the purpose of necessary documentation, intended primarily for those caught up in the situations it describes. Reading Whitetology, it’s impossible to ignore how troubling the behaviours it describes are: what kind of society is this, when so many of us live and work in unsafe environments? As with much radical literature, this text is one that I hope becomes a relic in a future where we are free and empowered in our bodies and our labour and our communities. This irony is, in its way, an essential part of liberation politics, as our project is one that eventually seeks the conditions of its own demise. Decolonisation, after all, is both an end-goal and, for now, an ongoing process.
When Najib and I eventually met, we both realised we’ve spent our careers working with the same people, stuck in the same kinds of interactions, over and over. In Whitetology, this depleting loop that we are caught in is given name, identified and recognised. In the epigraph there is a quote from Malcolm X which speaks to the power of language, reminding us that we live in a world where our names are our power, words are our reality, and literature the seed of our liberation—to paraphrase bell hooks, it is the origin point of our critical consciousness. In the introduction, Najib writes:
“Language can either affirm or deny someone’s experience. In the continued fight for race equity, this glossary is a tool to encourage readers to critically examine how power manifests within a dominant race and the ways power and privilege can work concerning race and racism.”
We understand race as a necessary fiction of capitalism, as its antecedent, and its enabling norm; though it must be reinforced and re-animated continuously (a quality of capitalism’s seemingly endless capacity to reproduce itself in its destruction and injury). Similar fictions abound in our society: private property; norms and relations between identity groups; the competence and soundness of our justice system; and the supposed necessity of borders, policing and incarceration. When Stuart Hall remarked that “race is the modality in which class is lived,” he correctly identified the way these constructions are experienced at the level of the individual. We treat these fictions as social realities because we must, we have no choice, but at the same time we work towards their complete obliteration.
The situations and scenarios described in Whitetology will be familiar to many racialised people, particularly in the community services and arts industries. These are predominantly white spaces. In my own experience in the community arts sector, most of my colleagues have been white, middle-class, and university educated, which is very removed from the actual make-up of the communities we purportedly served. While I believe that all human interactions have inherent potential as sites of radical and substantive liberation, it is a general truism that people are either predisposed to working in their class interests or, at the very least, not working against their class interests. In many cases, this leads to our individual experiences of situations that, at their root, are bound up in unjust dynamics of oppression, control, and dehumanisation. These same situations have also, occasionally, been transformed through active listening and real commitment to change to produce moments of true grace, care, and safety.
It is a critical fact that we work against a state of affairs presented to us as eternal, one where human dignity isn’t prioritised, where small and unimaginative politicians launder daily horror to our faces, where we are oppressed in our social, sexual, or racial identities, where these very identities themselves are constrained by ontological frameworks built on extractive and dehumanising logics that are harmful to the planet and to ourselves, towards a world where we are all allies in a global struggle against the ruinous forces of capital and its catastrophic future. The image of our liberation is often an inscrutable one, but we can sometimes form a negative image, one which allows us to visibly see and name that which harms us, so that we may clear a path to dismantling it. It is in this context, I think, that Whitetology is read.
- Khalid Warsame