The article is almost incomprehensible. There’s an academic-style jargon at work about anti-racism that is so post-modern that it’s impossible to penetrate unless you’re reading the latest and greatest books about your own privilege.
Like a lot of post-modernist rhetoric posing as scientific, these passages could benefit from saying what they mean. It’s unreadable otherwise:
tressiemcphd | These explicit white racial identities are kind of what we wanted to have happen. Only an explicit identity can be named and negotiated, ideally to better social outcomes. The confusion seems to be a latent belief that white racial identities are only progressive, that is that they get better as they are surfaced. Which, uh-oh. Nope. We are watching clashes of white racial identities, between explicit and implicit frames, worked out through implied loyalties of kinship and resource-sharing.
A poor woman on Twitter last night was crying in response to this similar story, from the Associated Press. It featured a series of gut-wrenching nut graphs like this one:
Democratic voter Rosanna Guadagno, 49, said her brother disowned her after she refused to support Trump four years ago. Last year her mother suffered a stroke, but her brother — who lived in the same California city as her mother — did not let her know when their mother died six months later. She was told the news after three days in an email from her sister-in-law.
I have been mildly surprised by their surprise, whether the shock is knowing that families are not infinitely resilient or that politics can matter more than kin, I’m not sure. I put together a string of thoughts on Twitter in response to one such story:
I have a 3/4 baked argument about what’s going on with these “a nation/family divided” stories. Maybe I should jot it down quickly.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) January 24, 2021
I want to focus a bit on the break-up with whiteness thing. I want to focus on that bit because I fear it has gotten lost in the recent racial awakening among white Americans. I am not being cute when I say that I do not know if the “how to be a better white person” genre of books, articles, reading groups, and self-help communities cover “the break-up”. I really do not know. I do not pay that genre a great deal of attention because I am not the audience. It is not, as I say, my ministry.
Despite not being my ministry, I do empathize with citizen-learners who are struggling with the course material. It is the pedagogue in me. If no one else has mentioned it (or, you missed that day in class), I want to be very clear: breaking up with whiteness is absolutely the end game of all anti-racist, humanist, post-racism work.
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