Now You See It, Now You Don't: Magic Tricks of White Supremacy in the United States
From the book: Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, published by Lexington Books 2012
Is it more or less likely that Trayvon Martin would be dead had he been white? Is it more or less likely that George Zimmerman would have gone free that night had he been African-American? If Trayvon Martin had been white? If George Zimmerman had been African American and Trayvon Martin had been white? Is it more or less likely, had Trayvon Martin been carrying a gun and shot George Zimmerman as George Zimmerman came after him, that Trayvon Martin would have been immediately arrested? (1)
We are writing in the midst of the protests over the failure to arrest George Zimmerman after fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, and George Zimmerman's subsequent arrest and arraignment. Observations and judgments fly about us as public pressure is brought to bear on the Attorney General, whose investigation brings pressure on the sheriff's department in Sanford, Florida, and throws light on "Stand Your Ground" laws and neighborhood watch groups.
By the time this chapter is published, legal proceedings may or may not be completed, George Zimmerman may or may not have been tried, he may or may not have been found guilty, some "Stand Your Ground" laws may or may not have been modified or overturned and Trayvon Martin's family may or may not have received justice.
But one thing is certain: the relationality between whites and African Americans in this country will have rebalanced itself to remain the same, to maintain the body white, to maintain white supremacy.
Among most whites, slavery and segregation are over, in the past, and it is time to move on. But the relationality between whites and African Americans has remained stable. Thus as yet another racialized "incident" emerges disturbing the body politic, various mainstream discourses develop for denying racism—individual or institutional—against African Americans. Reactions to reports of racism will continue to function to reaffirm and re-stabilize the relationship of white supremacy. Now you see examples of racism and, presto chango, now you don't, as discourses form to enable the majority of Americans to keep their worldview unscathed each time another "incident" occurs. Watch the sleight of hand, the conjuring tricks, that normalize white supremacy in the arena of public consciousness, in the discourse that rational and unbiased people engage in.
We use this occasion of the murder (2) of Trayvon Martin to highlight strategies and techniques utilized: conjuring tricks, focused distractions which focus by highlighting and enlarging, to the point of decontextualizing, as a matter of riveting, repeating, and recycling, thus distracting us from connecting the dots.
For example, the corporate news media, turning an "incident" that won't go away into a spectacle, focuses public attention anywhere but on racism: focusing on Bill Cosby saying it is not about race but guns, or Piers Morgan saying it is not about race but justice, or Geraldo Rivera initially saying that it was the hoodie. This received press attention, while protests were ongoing to at least get the sheriff's department to do its job, as the public began thinking about the assault on Trayvon Martin. And implicit in this focused distraction is the "agreement" (3) that Trayvon Martin appeared dangerous.
What did George Zimmerman see? He says he saw a suspicious man. Why did he see a suspicious man?
Why did the cops who shot Amadou Diallo see a gun where there was a wallet?
Why did the jury accept that the police were so scared of Rodney King that they had to repeatedly beat him while he was incapacitated? Conjuring trick, a reversal: The video of the police beating Rodney King became proof not of police brutality but of how dangerous African American men are: those cops were that scared.
In the United States, a white supremacist nation, these acts are not racist because there are no racists.
Focused distraction: turning attention to so-called "black on black" crime. Conjuring trick: trotting out Shelby Steel, as the media frames a defective aberrant black culture, a trope for maintaining white supremacy as normalcy and in need of no correction. Meanwhile what is disappeared and ignored is that the vast majority of crime is white on white; what is ignored or erased is that the vast majority of violent crimes in the United States are committed by whites—financial crime, of course, but also aggravated assaults, rapes, larceny-theft, murder, terrorism. And regardless of the heinous acts done by white men, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey, Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Dahmer, and so forth, nothing attaches to white men.
Instead there is the association of drugs and gangs with African Americans and Latinos while the largest gangs are white; there is John McNeil serving life in prison, an African American man in a Stand Your Ground state, who stood his ground in his own house against a white intruder; there is the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug offenses that is 13 times that of whites, while the rate of drug use is equal. What is ignored is that when an African American man commits a crime, it reflects on African Americans, but no matter how many white serial killers, terrorists, murders of various sorts there are, this never leaves the public thinking that white men are dangerous, monsters to be feared. Thus African Americans are rendered invisible as the stereotype of black men as dangerous fertilizes the white imaginary.
In this post-racial white supremacist culture, there is the conjuring trick of using coded language, racialized without naming it racial: for example crack cocaine laws, illegal alien policies (applied to Mexicans but not white Europeans), and there are tropes such as welfare queens and street gangs. (4) That is, a particular population may have been rendered invisible by hegemonic discourse in key ways, while also being rendered highly visible as a trope justifying marginalizing policies and informing everyday perceptions and reactions in the body politic. For African American men, the visible/invisible trick is performed through the trope of suspicious/dangerous. The perception that African American men are suspicious/dangerous is a cultural perception.
The conjuring trick: what has been rendered invisible through this trope is the situation African Americans face. African Americans are no longer the population that endured and survived 200 years of multigenerational chattel slavery through which white supremacy was built, followed by the expansion and development of white supremacy through the violence of white planters forcing Black Codes and the Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling which basically established that African Americans had no rights that whites were bound to respect. There is the erasure of the debate between Republicans and Whigs, over whether blacks were human that grounded Segregation. There is the erasure of 236 years of affirmative action for white men combined with the free labor of slaves and the appropriation of their intellectual products. There are lists of stolen patents. There is the big lie that the only constructive, imaginative contributions were made by white men. There are the absurd scientific studies doctored to justify the colonial construction of race, whose authors, such as Samuel Morton, are still honored. There are the economic policies maintaining the gap between African Americans and whites. And so forth.
Hence the conjuring trick of colorblind racism: racism disappears because there is no acknowledgement that skin color is relevant to the overall relationship between whites and African Americans; the conjuring trick of denying racial patterns when progressives challenge poverty and police action, but which come into play when officials determine funding for hospitals, schools, public transportation, disaster relief. . . .
There is the continuing myth that African Americans haven't done anything for African Americans, and the repeated bootstrap admonitions. There is erasure of the fact that when African Americans create thriving and profitable communities such as Black Wall Street and Rosewood, whites, both individual and official, will destroy them, bomb them, burn them.
Because whites don't know anything that blacks have done other than "black on black" or "black on white" crimes, the trope becomes the definition of African Americans.
Then there is the successful undermining of Brown v. Board of Education through its translation into busing, creating chaos with schools and resulting today in schools being far more segregated (including schools with both white and African American students). More recently, Arizona legislators are targeting and criminalizing Mexican American and ethnic studies, and Texans in charge of schoolbooks are falsifying American history (e.g. removing the word slave from The Triangle Slave Trade), finding new ways to render African Americans, Native Americans and Mexican Americans invisible.
All conjuring tricks, all disappearing acts when addressing "incidents" so the white imaginary is released from connecting the dots from slavery through segregation to contemporary institutions.
All of this serves to convince concerned, good and well-intentioned people, not only whites, that something is being done; that there is an interest in fixing things; all of this serves to make disappear that what seems a fix, for example busing or affirmative action, isn't fixing anything, but instead, once institutionalized within the U.S. system, creates something far more chaotic; all of this serves to make disappear the fact that attempts to redress wrongs, once filtered through the white imaginary, are just games.
The fix of Affirmative Action, while fought for by many, was quickly conjured into so-called "reverse" discrimination while policies reserving places at universities, benefiting children of benefactors to rural farm boys, continue to shape the student population. Meanwhile underprivileged African Americans continue to be blamed for any performance that does not meet white standards, while those in charge simultaneously fail to recognize the standards by which African Americans excel and whites fail. The point of Affirmative Action was that white men remain incompetent at judging anyone but their own kind.
Conjuring trick: the ease with which the current discourse on race has been refocused by both white and African American intellectuals such that the emphasis has shifted from national accountability for the stubborn negative demographics of African Americans to individual personal responsibility. Hence the current absurdity of racism without racists.
There is the conjuring trick of the disappearing elephant in the room, the gap that was created with the formation of the United States and is still widening: an unemployment rate at two times the national average since 1954, a $10,000 median income gap since 1886 that's never been closed; indeed today African Americans are experiencing greater poverty. Schools serving African Americans are left to flounder, and African American kids still score badly. The doors to experience are basically closed to African Americans—individual, educational, entrepreneurial.
The fact that there are more African Americans under correctional control today than there were slaves in 1850 … all of this disrupts and undermines communities. If there were in prison the percentage of white men today that there are of African American men, if the reality were that most white men would be imprisoned at least once before the age of 25, as is true of most African American men, the public discourse would shift to addressing widespread institutional failure. Conjuring trick: no such public discourse exists about widespread institutional failure in relation to African Americans in the white imaginary.
What the trope of African American men as suspicious/dangerous makes disappear is that these circumstances exist not because African Americans are bad or incompetent (although some are), but exist as a direct result of the effects of white supremacy on African American communities. The trope becomes that everything associated with African Americans is dangerous. This is the way that African Americans have been rendered invisible. African American presence has disappeared, and the presence that emerges from the trope that is a focused distraction is a degraded presence for which this country is in no sense accountable. This conjuring trick becomes the expression of white supremacy. (5)
Frame the event as a discourse about individuals. (6) Focused distraction—zoom in on individuals so the conjuring trick of the frame appears natural, common sense: Examine Trayvon Martin for gang connections, test his body for the presence of drugs and alcohol (but do not test George Zimmerman). At the moment you discover Trayvon Martin to be squeaky clean, examine George Zimmerman's history with the Sanford sheriff's department then quickly cut to George Zimmerman's bruises. This involves individualizing without really individualizing as nobody exists context free. Overall, the move is to decontextualize any situation and regard everything that happens that might be called racist on individual terms, portray it as the individual actions of two people not complexly related, unrelated in or by U.S. racial and immigration history in this post-racial age. Then each "incident" can be understood as an anomaly and hence is not relevant to the body politic. So the body white remains unscathed. And what Descartes has taught us kicks in: if it doesn't make sense in the privacy of our own ideas, one can doubt it, making it incumbent on those speaking outside "common sense" to fit into the dominant paradigm: there is no obligation on the part of the knower to extend themselves. If it is not clear and distinct to you, you can dismiss it.
White supremacy in the United States is a foundation, like an axis, held in place by all that surrounds it. (7) What if one were to acknowledge the functioning paradigm of white supremacy? To actually see the individuals in situation involves acknowledging the different institutional, historical, economic and social patterns that different individuals negotiate to survive, how the institutional, historical, economic and social patterns play out in each individual's life.
Then there is the conjuring trick of blaming the victim: treating as reasonable the question of why Trayvon Martin was where he was (in this post-democracy age). Victimize the perpetrator: focus on the fact that George Zimmerman was physically hurt and ignore the likelihood that Trayvon Martin tried to defend himself against a threatening man chasing him. A law of white supremacy: don't ever let an African American man fight back. There is no defense against being black, that is a crime in the white imaginary.
There is the conjuring trick of the disappearing of George Zimmerman's accountability for his careless imagination upon encountering an African American male.
There is the conjuring trick of focusing on the motivations and stated intentions of individuals in this post-political correctness age. That way, if they say they didn't intend anything racist we can rest assured, unless someone amasses compelling evidence to prove they were lying about their intentions. Presume transparency in this Post-Freudian age. Rest easy knowing that the assertion of intention, or lack there-of, on the part of privilege trumps any articulation of patterns that map onto the behavior of citizens. (8)
White supremacy is not about individual incidents. A single incident is a matter of racism, and racism is understood in the white imaginary, at this point in time, to be something bad. Thus when something bad happens, many scramble to deny it was racist, and the only challenge to that is to argue that the person is lying. Thus many find ways of deflecting attention and the racism disappears—there was a good reason for George Zimmerman to shoot his gun, he was scared. (9)
White supremacy does not characterize acts, it characterizes a relationship, one constructing complex interrelationships among individuals in the United States, one that is affirmed by public response to attacks on African Americans, individual and institutional. So racism disappears while white domination remains unscathed and the white worldview of superiority remains intact.
White supremacy so infiltrates this country from its very genesis that it is like water to a fish. For us, it is the air we breathe. Racist acts and utterances become indefinable as racist because, as Derrick Bell made clear, racism is in the very structure of the nation and no passing of laws is going to change that. It is just normal. And that's the magic of white supremacy: there are no racists and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the body politic. This is the absence that is always already present.
But . . .
While white supremacy is the necessary air for the body white to live, it is foul air for actual bodies. If the system weren't challenged and its stability threatened by everyday actions and connections and friendships never meant to exist that render white supremacy, not false but nonsense, (10) if the system didn't continuously need maintenance and repair, there would be no need for focused distractions or conjuring tricks.
About the authors:
Jackie Anderson is an African-American dyke philosopher and activist who has been holding court in Chicago for more years than she cares to count.
Sarah Lucia Hoagland is a white dyke philosopher who has been causing trouble and creating communities with other lesbians in Chicago since 1977. She recently retired from Northeastern Illinois University.
Anne T. Leighton is a long-time white Chicago dyke thinker and activist.
About the book:
Jackie Anderson, Anne Leighton, and Sarah Hoagland wrote this paper for an anthology that George Yancy and Janine Jones edited: Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, published by Lexington Books 2012. Right now, it is still only available in hard cover or a Kindle edition at a high price, but it should be available in paperback at a lower price soon.
George Yancy and Janine Jones conceived of and edited this anthology, getting the authors to write our pieces and Lexington books to publish it in record time. We all wrote in May of 2012, and the book was out in November. The editors and authors, "cognizant of the historical significance of this tragic event and the deep racial divide surrounding it, were fueled by a collective sense of passion and urgency," as George and Janine write, to "capture the immediacy of this tragic situation and to provide critical and insightful discourse surrounding it." They say, "At the end of the day the book was conceived and created for purposes beyond our individual scholarship. The book was written on behalf of Trayvon Martin and all of those who have been (and will continue to be) victims of State violence and other forms of violence—micro and otherwise."
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Endnotes:
(1) (less, less, less, less, more)
(2) In using the term murder we're not expressing a legal opinion.
(3) We are thinking of Wittgenstein's notion of "agreement" in the sense of not disagreeing, of forms of life (PI 240-242).
(4) This paper is a partial analysis. We are not addressing the construction and maintenance of tropes as they play out in connection with women, women of color as well as white women, or in connection with black/brown relationality, or in connection with white woman/black man relationality, or as it plays out in the "confusing" of various peoples of color (Arabs, Indians, Latinos, Iranians, African Americans, Native Americans, Pakistanis, e.g.). In fact, the only population in this country who is not victimized by tropes is white men. As they understand themselves, they have become the new victims. But they are not victims, tropes don't hurt them in substantive ways: white guys don't not get hired because of some trope.
(5) Thus, if the President of the United States ponders how he would react if he had an African American son, he is portrayed as biased and stepping out of his place while many whites contemplate beefing up gated communities. Perhaps the clearest current symbol of white supremacy in this post-racial age is Donald Trump successfully coercing President Obama to produce his long form birth certificate while U.S. senators and congress people did nothing to intervene and stop the spectacle, and those who elected Obama did not rise up in outrage. This is the existential fear whites exhibit in being willing to listen to this while also being self-congratulating in allowing themselves to be presided over by an African American. That is, whites need African-Americans to affirm their own superiority, and then need African American men as dangerous to leave another contradiction out of view: that protectors are predators (including George Zimmerman). For white supremacy, for this sense of superiority, of being White, the white imaginary needs blacks.
(6) U.S. criminal law praxis fits the body white like a glove. The state is both victim and prosecutor; jurors are routinely required to practice collective amnesia, to unhear and unlearn; jurors practice isolation and denial, neither listening nor speaking about the elephant in the room until authorized to do so; pronouncements are either/or propositions, "guilty" or "not guilty;" judgments are solely placed on individuals. The media thrives on this frame, embracing individual stories of good and bad, innocent and guilty, victim and perpetrator. Focusing on details it selects and endlessly repeats, the media scrambles to flesh out the narrative of the good innocent victim and the bad guilty perpetrator. Breathing life into the artifice, it then examines it as real. New or previously discarded details are presented as "evidence" or "proof." Of what? Game, set, match. We are reacting to and debating the golems of the body white.
(7) We are thinking of Wittgenstein's notion of foundation not as building blocks but as an axis (OC -152).
(8) Offsetting the challenge to the white imaginary of Brown v. Board of Education, thus stabilizing white supremacy, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that racial disparities in law enforcement are constitutional as long as there is no discriminatory intent. See Scully referencing McClesky v. Kemp (1987) and U.S. v. Armstrong (1996), also Lawrence citing Washington v. Davis (1987), and Bell. On the other hand, in 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers who sue their employers for age discrimination need not prove that the discrimination was intentional. (N.Y. Times, March 31, 2005).
(9) All this is appropriate because there are no racists, except those who avidly avow racial hatred, and they are exceptions that prove the rule—the necessity of the KKK to show how white America is not racist. Even the targeting of self-avowed white supremacist groups sets other whites to distance themselves while still benefitting from their acts, allows the white imaginary of superiority to remain unscathed.
(10) We are thinking of Wittgenstein's distinction (following Einstein) in On Certainty between something being false and something being nonsense, note particularly OC &305.
