9. June Digest/Digress
Blackness is a critique of property—from individual self possession to always already racial capitalism
- Che Gossett
Well it’s the end of the month of June and if I had a boss for this over-thinking newsletter they might look at me and say, hey, you seem scattered and in no state to articulate anything - take the month off, Hannah. But that’s not how most bosses operate. I’m plowing on because I am the boss and I am mean. That’s the thing: amongst the necessary reckoning and unraveling of the past month/pandemic/lifetime under capitalism I have still to dethrone the boss-like/cop-like figure in my head that flagellates, perfects, ‘achieves’, feels flat, feels self-contempt, despairs, flagellates, perfects, ‘achieves’, feels flat. The thing is, though, that for me this voice didn’t come from a boss or from a cop, it came from teachers. And that has huge implications for my work and for the network of teachers to which I belong. Abolishing the police and redirecting funds to teaching or social work or therapy won’t work if we don’t also abolish the principles of policing that are still inherent in those public projects (though the therapy one gets me sometimes, the way counselling strategies like CBT often privatise public problems, we just need to change your thinking). I loved Jeffrey Moro’s blog post from the start of the year “against cop shit”, speaking out against the ways that many educators prefer to assume adversarial relationships to their students rather than treat them as equal participants in the project of learning. But it’s more than student-teacher relationships and solidarities, it is also about exiting the achievement paradigm.
That cyclical gamut of trying, perfecting, failing, flagellating is also a problem for coalition and movement-building. Being so urgent about achievement is violent - on the personal level of the learner, and on the level of the collective. Being urgent about achievement means that when we don’t immediately see systemic change we flagellate ourselves or others, or feel contempt or despair. It means that when when we don’t immediately see change we stop posting and agitating and instead submit ourselves to what seems currently possible. In the rush we abandon our imaginations and the currently unknowable. The rush to fix and change and optimise is the light to nihilism’s dark - they are both part of the same white supremacist day. All in a day’s work: a boom then a bust. All of this is not to say that we do not have urgent problems: the killing of Black and Indigenous lives through police and carceral violence or through the violences of food and housing insecurity and precarious (un)employment or through the violence of what educator Bettina Love calls spirit murdering - all of these have been urgent for a long time. Violence is urgent, but urgency can also be violent. A pretty tautology, perhaps, but a reminder to myself to refuse to let my urgency flip into flagellation and failure.
June has been a funny (not funny) old month in England. In June 2020 death means [belatedly] more (BLM, a sharpness, an unflinching focus) and less (sheets of numbers of coronavirus losses, government-induced numbness, the scale-tipping economy over life bound up in re-openings). June 9th gave us a brilliant panel talk guided by Audre Lorde’s idea that revolution is not a one-time event (not an urgent flash-in-the-pan). Chaired by Akwugo Emejulu with guests Amrit Wilson, Lola Olufemi, Ru Kaur, and Che Gossett, the full transcript is available here at the White Review. June 14th saw the third anniversary of the preventable Grenfell Tower disaster - a preventable one since everyone, even/especially government ministers, knew the residents were at risk after a ‘beatification’ project used cheap and flammable cladding materials. Beautification, of course, is part of gentrification and property development/profiteering. London landlords have had the audacity to demand the same (or, according to this report in The Guardian, HIGHER) profit margins during the pandemic. But, then again, what is a fair ‘return on investment’ for these types of actors? I read this piece from Rowland Atkinson in The Independent on how London was bought and sold by the Super-Rich, and what it means for the rest of us, “the rich need the city like an astronaut needs a spacesuit”. When housing is treated as a commodity rather than held as a public good it means that landlording as a for-profit business is allowed to exist. This existence is unfathomable. How is it that housing can be a privatised, for-profit commodity and at the same time be both a basic human right (shelter!) and also our main public health strategy during a pandemic. If keeping people in houses has literally been the best public strategy for tackling covid-19 then why can’t housing be a public good?
June 19th was my birthday and, like most birthdays, it was an emotionally-heightened day. With even more existential voids to contend with than previous years, I spent part of the morning lying on the grass in the local park staring at the sky, tears leaking from the corners of my indulgently cat-eyed eyes. Things picked up in the evening with a very silly birthday party in a Google Sheet. June 25th was Race Today: Marginality, Inequality, Creativity and Belonging in Britain. Paul Gilroy contradicted Joy White’s celebration of chaos by saying that “for me chaos is not appealing. Turn off social media. Google is not your friend [when it comes to research/learning]. Prioritise the face to face. Real time is the priority”. I’ve been so buoyed by the social media activity of the movement: resources, shares, e-d-u-c-a-t-i-o-n. But of late my take has turned, now feeling almost creeped out by some of the pastel-hued, Y2K-word-art-designed, well-intentioned anti-racist tips and tricks designed for and shared by white people. ‘How to’ guides abound: how to be an ally, how to design an anti-racist curriculum, how to challenge racist stereotypes. Gilroy made me wonder (yet again) about my use of social media. How to’s are a neat teleology but neatness asks us to give up our imaginations. I’ve seen a lot of ally-washing language on Instagram, which has led to an almost consumerist ally culture of ‘shopping’ for Black or POC friends, shopping for Black shows and films and books and podcasts. Shopping is not it. At the Race Today event Lola Olufemi said that the “politics of allyship are facile. The idea of an ally implies benevolence, a favour”. Instead Olufemi advocates for being committed to a world where it’s never a case of you being able to live because others die. There is no list of steps, there is only being in service of movements.
On that note I might leave you here tonight. I share a land-locked-in-London dream of swimming in a winking blue sea with all the swimming, bobbing bodies around me free from all conditions of domination. I remembering hearing Gail Lewis talk in an interview about imagining a future where she can be unintelligible in terms of the normativity by which she is currently understood. Live that future, make it possible; don’t abandon the currently unknowable.
Until next month, thinkers
Hannah xx