You're very welcome, Shifra. I hope we can all stay attuned and share our experiences as we move through this transition together. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.
Pondering all of this and thinking about how whiteness kills off its own. The ones who resist. They are exiled from community. This is a measure of the danger that challenge poses. The rigidity of a construct that feels life-giving but must kill to sustain that belief.
There is no community in whiteness. Even the KKK must mask themselves from one another. It’s the inverse of the veil—not modesty before the other, but concealment from one’s own. In white supremacy, even in private, recognition is unbearable. The mask protects not from outsiders, but from the gaze of their own kind.
This piece was so moving, I almost cried as I finished it. So intellectually sophisticated, so emotionally piercing and so deftly written. Thank you 🙏🏾
I want to dwell on gratitude a little. If we collapse the ideologues of the world into two broad categories (dangerous I know!), there’s the logic of domination and there’s the logic of relationality. Neither is visible from the other’s perspective. I have been thinking about this since I left my abusive interracial relationship.
Domination/subjugation is about hierarchy, control, maximum extraction of resources at lowest cost, ROI, bang-for-buck, competition. It’s about endless suspicion, one-upmanship, distance and denial of dependency.
From its perspective, any actions someone does for you are to be considered with suspicion - “what does she want from me? What will I have to do to “pay back”? Will she want my pound of flesh?”” Any request for reciprocity or acknowledgment is immediately taken as a demand (“stop telling me what to do!”), an imposition, a lack of acceptance of the self (“let me be me! Accept me as I am!)”). Gratitude makes no sense in this logic because gift makes no sense…because love makes no sense. Everything is framed financially — “debt”, “cashing in on an investment” — and as tit-for-tat, obligatory, contractual, “payment.” It’s instrumentalism - everything is either out to use you or out there for you to use it. Everything is an object. Or a force that might objectify you, instrumentalise you.
Under the logic of relationality, hierarchy doesn’t even cross the mind. It’s about trust, given the other the benefit of the doubt, anticipating needs and meeting them, the “natural joy of giving,” the incredible web of relationships and dependence and gift that keeps life going. It’s about intimacy, closeness, and reciprocity. It’s about trust built on genuinely seeing and knowing the other and accountability when we fail to do so. The sort of reciprocity inherent here cannot really be measured or counted. It’s not really a payment in a debt that can be quantified in exact terms, but the joy of giving to someone who gives to you, knowing it goes around and around.
Under the logic of relationality, the suspicion and competition of the domination model makes no sense. The thinking goes, “we are all interdependent so of course we would be meeting one another’s needs.” The Domination model folk don’t feel gratitude when they are given something - they feel guilt. Perhaps because they know ultimately they’re trying to minimise costs and maximise benefits so they’ll be trying to part with as little as possible in return…And to the Relational model folk, the guilt makes no sense…but does engender our empathy. So empathise, we coddle, we console, we ask questions, we get curious, we listen, we are supportive, we are generous, we wonder: “what is it like to be you?” We take their inability to feel gratitude and to reciprocate not as a sign of domination/power at play, but of vulnerability and helplessness and insecurity (“accept me as I am”). We turn towards this with kindness, with acceptance, with overwhelming tenderness. We let them off the hook. We forego our need for care. For accountability. For reciprocity. We ask ourselves, “Am I being kind enough? Generous enough? Caring enough?” Rather than, “why isn’t he nurturing back?”
My ex embodied this white patriarchal notion of hyper-independence and associated suspicion, distrust, and viewed everything as a power play rather than a call for intimacy. He especially loved the New Age Fritz Perls pop psychology notions of “you meet your needs, I meet my needs” (see Gestalt Prayer), and “we are all responsible for meeting our own needs” otherwise you’re being demanding (Marshall Rosenberg). He backed this up with “separation-individuation” ideas from developmental psychology, with ideas of interdependence being dismissed as “symbiosis,” “merging,” “fusing,” and being caught up in an “undifferentiated infantile state.” He wanted to become a therapist but he hated listening to anyone’s feelings. Dependence was a dirty word. Need was seen as selfishness, narcissism, regressive, desperate, childish and pathological.
This was of course a convenient power move. Acting out of the Relational mindset, I met his needs automatically; I listened; I cared; I did repair and accountability promptly without question. And when I asked the same of him:
- He responded with how “pressured” he felt, and how much he needed to be “accepted as he was”
- He simultaneously dismissed my needs in pseudoscientific language of separation-individuation
- While actually fearing my asks of him were “demands” to “dominate” (acting out if Domination mentality)
- While also getting me to meet his needs for acceptance while getting me to be ok with him not meeting my needs for reciprocity
This is the mind-fuckery of Domination models colliding with Relational models and nowhere is this more evident than in heterosexual relationships also marked by power differences along other lines of race, class, age etc.
I finally made sense of it reading pieces like Nora Samaran’s “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture,” Carmen Spagnola’s “Portrait of a Marriage, Yes: It’s Mine,” Dan Wile’s books on Collaborative Couple Therapy (which is all about becoming more effectively dependent rather than eschewing dependence), Sue Johnson’s EFT books and academic research, attachment theory from an intersectional perspective.
And one text that really helped me wade through this mess was Val Plumwood’s “Feminism and the Mastery of Nature” which uses the stellar phrase “denial of dependency” as a hallmark of the master’s ideology.
Extract from Plumwood’s book:
“Homogenisation supports both instrumentalism, incorporation (relational definition) and radical exclusion. It produces binarism, a division of the world into two orders. As Hartsock (1990) points out, homogenisation is a feature of the master’s perspective. To the master, residing at what he takes to be the centre, differences among those of lesser status at the periphery are of little interest or importance, and might undermine comfortable stereotypes of superiority. To the master, all the rest are just that: ‘the rest’, the Others, the background to his achievements and the resources for his needs. Diversity and multiplicity which are surplus to his desires need not be acknowledged. The other is not seen as a unique individual bound to the self by specific ties. It is related to as a universal rather than a particular, as a member of a class of interchangeable items which can be used as resources to satisfy the master’s needs. Elimination of reliance on any particular individual of the relevant kind also facilitates denial of dependency and backgrounding. Instrumentalisation and commodification normally produce relations of this kind."
"A hyperseparated account of self also emerges in Cartesian solipsism, an extreme denial of dependency which doubts the other’s mindful existence and treats the other as alien to the self, excluding the possibility of mutual recognition or exchange (Flax 1985:28–9). For Benjamin, such a hyperdifferentiation of self and other is associated with the inability to grasp the aliveness of the other; it reflects the dualisation of the self/other boundary and its construal as a relationship of opposition and power (Benjamin 1988:193). In the Cartesian dream of power, the subject is set over against the object it knows, in a relation of alleged neutrality in practice modelled as power and control."
This denial of dependency thing is truly the bane of my existence and I see it both in left and right wing circles! Right wing is about individualism, bootstraps, meritocracy, capitalism, separation (unless it’s the church community of course). Left wing denial of dependency comes out through New Age free love hippie ideals that no one really needs anyone else and we are all interchangeable in the marketplace of sexed commodities and “love yourself before anyone can love you” and self-care and self-responsibility (so don’t ask anyone to meet your needs as that’s being needy) and Buddhist inspired enlightened sounding “non-attachment” nonsense. And yes I am going to critique patriarchal independence-oriented spirituality like Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism that has emerged out of my own country!
When someone owes you $12,000 and asks you to be oh-so-enlightened and “just let it go”, and “think positive thoughts” and “you deserve what you attract,” and “everything is a lesson,” that’s power masquerading as spiritual enlightenment and non-attachment.
Lastly I also wanted to mention ambivalent racism, which is what I think you are talking about here. I learnt about it through ambivalent sexism, which drew from it. Ambivalent racism helps make sense of the subjectively negative and subjectively positive attitudes people hold towards BIPOC (bearing in mind racism is not about individual attitudes but a system of social, economic and political resource control, and that difference can’t be collapsed into the BIPOC label). “Benevolent racism” is the carrot, looking favourably on the “kind” brown person, the one who confirms to white supremacist ideals of subservience and communality; it’s benevolent and paternalistic and “we know best” and the kind of performative gratitude you describe here. Hostile racism is the stick - it punishes people of colour who step out of line, who are too much, too demanding, too aggressive, have too much agency. It’s outright foreclosure and disavowal. Both function to maintain the status quo.
Your 'comment' also brought tears to my eyes. Tears of exhaustion. Tears of overwhelm. Thank you for the wealth of reflection, knowledge, and new connections to map out. But I also want to take a moment to grieve. How maddening are the effects of white supremacy? To have people like yourself, to become so intelligible, so researched, so well informed, so articulate. What oppression, what pressures, what levels of gaslighting does it take to mould a person to reach this point?
I've personally had to learn the reasons for my own intellectualization and neurotic obsessionality as a reflection of the maddening world in which we are born.
I will take the time to digest and research your additions, and I'm grateful, and I'm sorry for all that you've had to endure.
Thank you, it’s good to be seen. And it’s great to be alive! Everyday I wake up going, yay I’m still alive.
And yes the intensity of pain was a total fog that took a long time to clamber out of and make sense of, so there have been many tears shed over what now appear as intellectual insights. That said, there are things I experienced that wouldn’t wish on anyone 🙏🏾
I read this twice and listened also. This piece is at once essential, and a true gift. It absolutely stopped me in my tracks. I recognized myself in my own radicalization process, and the ways that each defense operates both independently and interchangibly depending on the context and type of confrontation it meets. The ways that whiteness abhors grief and self interrogation. The ways that whiteness stays alienating us from relationship and connection to the web of life and humanity. It also made me think about whiteness as hegemonic via reproduction by capitalism and imperialism.
How yes of course it lives in those of us with lighter skin tones, socialized in European and USian and other white dominion settler colonial and imperialist contexts- but also how these defenses become present and prevalent in those seeking proximity, power and protection under systems of white supremacy. That is the part I often find myself perplexed on how to proceed. Seeing the same defenses white supremacy employs, the same ones that I need to interrogate and investigate in myself and other white people, manifesting in spaces of all backgrounds (liberalism, neoliberalism?) but reduced down only to class interests. In social settings I am clear that this is not my place to interrogate internalized white supremacy in oppressed and colonized peoples and communities. In the clinic though, how do we navigate this terrain? When we can see whiteness defending itself in someone who is also oppressed and targeted by whiteness? Is the intervention the same, the triage? Whiteness falsely promises its adherants safety, security, impunity..
I know this is not a consultation group, and I will continue to interrogate my own perceptions on this, but I thought raising the question might be helpful as this is what I was left wondering after reading.
that's a difficult and necessary question Dana. and to name the protean quality of whiteness as a defensive structure, not phenotype or identity position. it shifts across race, class, context, pressurized through capitalism, imperialism and liberalism.
clinically, the question might not be whether to intervene, but how. it requires more attunement, more precision and a refusal to collapse structure into identity. might we ask, what wound is this defense defending? what bargain has been struck for legibility, for saftey, for belonging? how can we track the defensiveness of whiteness, through the patient, rather than against them?
so the triage might be beyond accusation but about decoding. how has the subject been interpellated by whiteness? what form of life becomes possible when that grip loosens?
similar to the kkk, the exposure is the disarmament, and also the cost.
I love this piece, though I struggle to locate myself in it. I feel as though I began in the repressive mode and have been moved/treated to something less reactive and more open, but I struggle to know if I can even identify that within myself. Can I, as the subject of the treatment, locate where I am in the path to treatment. Am I healing, or performing healing, and how can I tell the difference? I have experienced ruptures. I have experienced grief. I have experienced gratitude, felt deeply and expressed. I am not seeking accolades, merely a metric by which I can measure myself so I know how much harder I have to work, how much further I have to go. My power within the systems is limited, my primary strength is in crafting propaganda and challenging expectations. And I seek to build a world where tension, discomfort, is celebrated as the way forward. And I feel that tension right now. Between my conception of my self as someone doing the work of deconstructing my whiteness, while recognizing the structural reality of how it places me in a position of power, and the possibility that I may be the disavowing type. In short, this has given me a lot to think about.
your question already signals the movement of the subject. the one who reflects on their position is not fully known to themselves. this is not a flaw, but the condition of subjectivity under analysis.
when naming the struggle, it is in fact an indication that something real is occuring. not knowing where you are is different from being numb. the act of locating, is different from being having located. the desire for a metric, the understandable, is part of the inherited logic of mastery: the fantasy that if we just knew where we stood, we could know what to do. but in analysis, there are no maps. it's a working with drives, repetition, ruptures.
rather than accept or rejecting the possibility of being a 'disavowing type', what does that designation allow you to displace? what does it defend against? disavowal is not denial. it's knowing AND not knowing at once. the structure of whiteness is precisely this way: "I know i benefit, but i also feel marginal. i want to undo systems, but i fear implicating myself too fully." your uncertainty is not a problem to be solved, but a site to be listened to.
perhaps the strength to 'crafting propoganda and challenging expectations' is also a defense. what happens when you're not crafting? what's left when you're not producing counter-narratives? it's not to diminish the power of that work. but to invite inquiry inot what conditions it. what it wards off? what contradictions, ambivalence, even the unflattering or uninformed?
and to end with desire, to build a world where discomfort is accepted. you're seeking a truth procedure that doesn't promise ease. and in that, you're already outside the logic of moralistic self assesment. let the symptom speak.
This was the first article of yours that came across my feed, before I understood how Substack worked. I didn't know I could leave comments that authors could see.
So I'm back now to say Thank you for this amazing piece, Ayoto. There's some writing that reaches inside you and lifts out all the feelings you couldn't coalesce on your own, and this is one of them. Reading it felt like oxygen reaching deep places that I didn't realize had been starved.
Is this a dissertation on critical race theory. I’m Caucasian. And I don’t hate myself. I’m sure something in your wordy dissertation is worth value, but I am curious where you were educated. No disrespect.
None taken. Though I am curious also, when someone identifies as ‘Caucasian’ and asserts they don’t hate themselves, is that a statement, a deflection, or an imposition? And does asking where I was educated serve curiosity, or the need to situate critique as foreign?
These words unwrap and reveal so much of the elusive codes of conduct and ways of being, codes and ways that, just as they are revealed, shrink slyly away. Thank you for the generosity of your sharing. I am thinking of how rupture and traumatophilia play out in mythologies and are necessary in so many stories: currently thinking of Virabhadra and Sati at King Daksha's party (a Shiva story of great carnage and death resulting in King Daksha becoming a devotee of Shiva).
What got cleared up for me in this article is that you're talking about that thing which I call the ego. I define it as "a thought system based on the concept of separation". Why you've renamed it "whiteness" I do not understand, or rather, I do have a pretty good understanding of it but I'm sad to see that you don't understand it.
The thing that is both funny and tragic about this, for me, is that while we're all sorting this out, a guy who could best be described as orange in skin tone is benefitting the most from our discourse. We could all be forming alliances to push back against his extremely ego-centered worldview but we're too busy creating more divisiveness and polarity which works to his advantage, always.
I'd say read it again... Its not about ego as such but about when being white becomes part of the ego. If you are white and cannot see it that is because you are within it.
I'm not sure what century your reification of whiteness comes from, but you should put it back where you found it. You're keeping "race" alive just to play with it. Let it die.
if naming whiteness keeps it alive, maybe saying erection keeps you hard. just don’t look in the mirror. you might see race staring back at you with your name.
You're not just naming whiteness, you ascribe it agency. It acts on the world, on a higher level than the individual. This is an exercise of imagination, not analysis. I don't think you'd be able to pull off the same trick with, say, "yellowness." Is yellowness what you see when you look in the mirror? Of course not. You see Ayoto in the mirror. What is so special about so-called white people that their racial identity takes on a life of its own? While the white person sleeps, whiteness is on the rampage? Fuck that noise.
I puked in the bed, I didn't piss in the bed, thank you very much 😋
If you want to talk about structure, bell hooks' term "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" is a lot more useful a term than the ghostly "whiteness."
I thank you for being the first person to respond to my posts, some of what you say sticks. (I am the object, I am the witness; white privilege sticks to me no matter how much I disavow it) I do find it remarkable that "whiteness" can be discerned in a poem about drinking too much wine and making messes, and in my delusions about Bruce Lee and John Lennon. I can easily imagine my posts being written by someone with a different skin tone, without having to change anything. For this reason I have to locate whiteness in your gaze, and not in my words.
you’re the kind of haunted house that charges admission. You leak guilt theatrically, then ask for tips. aren’t we a little old for the ‘I know I am but what are you’ game? it’s not self-awareness if you’re still directing the spotlight.
My goodness 🙏
This is so helpful
Thanks a million times for your graciousness sharing this generous gift with us 💝
You're very welcome, Shifra. I hope we can all stay attuned and share our experiences as we move through this transition together. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.
I deeply appreciate everything you share. It feels like freshwater 💦 in a desert 🏜️ to me. Solace to hear words for what lives inside
and articulate so clearly
and make sense of it
gives so much comfort
which helps me offer space for others as well to give them opportunity to be able to express all which is heavy on their heart.
The ripple effect is greater than we can imagine.
It gives me hope
Pondering all of this and thinking about how whiteness kills off its own. The ones who resist. They are exiled from community. This is a measure of the danger that challenge poses. The rigidity of a construct that feels life-giving but must kill to sustain that belief.
There is no community in whiteness. Even the KKK must mask themselves from one another. It’s the inverse of the veil—not modesty before the other, but concealment from one’s own. In white supremacy, even in private, recognition is unbearable. The mask protects not from outsiders, but from the gaze of their own kind.
Armor
This piece was so moving, I almost cried as I finished it. So intellectually sophisticated, so emotionally piercing and so deftly written. Thank you 🙏🏾
I want to dwell on gratitude a little. If we collapse the ideologues of the world into two broad categories (dangerous I know!), there’s the logic of domination and there’s the logic of relationality. Neither is visible from the other’s perspective. I have been thinking about this since I left my abusive interracial relationship.
Domination/subjugation is about hierarchy, control, maximum extraction of resources at lowest cost, ROI, bang-for-buck, competition. It’s about endless suspicion, one-upmanship, distance and denial of dependency.
From its perspective, any actions someone does for you are to be considered with suspicion - “what does she want from me? What will I have to do to “pay back”? Will she want my pound of flesh?”” Any request for reciprocity or acknowledgment is immediately taken as a demand (“stop telling me what to do!”), an imposition, a lack of acceptance of the self (“let me be me! Accept me as I am!)”). Gratitude makes no sense in this logic because gift makes no sense…because love makes no sense. Everything is framed financially — “debt”, “cashing in on an investment” — and as tit-for-tat, obligatory, contractual, “payment.” It’s instrumentalism - everything is either out to use you or out there for you to use it. Everything is an object. Or a force that might objectify you, instrumentalise you.
Under the logic of relationality, hierarchy doesn’t even cross the mind. It’s about trust, given the other the benefit of the doubt, anticipating needs and meeting them, the “natural joy of giving,” the incredible web of relationships and dependence and gift that keeps life going. It’s about intimacy, closeness, and reciprocity. It’s about trust built on genuinely seeing and knowing the other and accountability when we fail to do so. The sort of reciprocity inherent here cannot really be measured or counted. It’s not really a payment in a debt that can be quantified in exact terms, but the joy of giving to someone who gives to you, knowing it goes around and around.
Under the logic of relationality, the suspicion and competition of the domination model makes no sense. The thinking goes, “we are all interdependent so of course we would be meeting one another’s needs.” The Domination model folk don’t feel gratitude when they are given something - they feel guilt. Perhaps because they know ultimately they’re trying to minimise costs and maximise benefits so they’ll be trying to part with as little as possible in return…And to the Relational model folk, the guilt makes no sense…but does engender our empathy. So empathise, we coddle, we console, we ask questions, we get curious, we listen, we are supportive, we are generous, we wonder: “what is it like to be you?” We take their inability to feel gratitude and to reciprocate not as a sign of domination/power at play, but of vulnerability and helplessness and insecurity (“accept me as I am”). We turn towards this with kindness, with acceptance, with overwhelming tenderness. We let them off the hook. We forego our need for care. For accountability. For reciprocity. We ask ourselves, “Am I being kind enough? Generous enough? Caring enough?” Rather than, “why isn’t he nurturing back?”
My ex embodied this white patriarchal notion of hyper-independence and associated suspicion, distrust, and viewed everything as a power play rather than a call for intimacy. He especially loved the New Age Fritz Perls pop psychology notions of “you meet your needs, I meet my needs” (see Gestalt Prayer), and “we are all responsible for meeting our own needs” otherwise you’re being demanding (Marshall Rosenberg). He backed this up with “separation-individuation” ideas from developmental psychology, with ideas of interdependence being dismissed as “symbiosis,” “merging,” “fusing,” and being caught up in an “undifferentiated infantile state.” He wanted to become a therapist but he hated listening to anyone’s feelings. Dependence was a dirty word. Need was seen as selfishness, narcissism, regressive, desperate, childish and pathological.
This was of course a convenient power move. Acting out of the Relational mindset, I met his needs automatically; I listened; I cared; I did repair and accountability promptly without question. And when I asked the same of him:
- He responded with how “pressured” he felt, and how much he needed to be “accepted as he was”
- He simultaneously dismissed my needs in pseudoscientific language of separation-individuation
- While actually fearing my asks of him were “demands” to “dominate” (acting out if Domination mentality)
- While also getting me to meet his needs for acceptance while getting me to be ok with him not meeting my needs for reciprocity
This is the mind-fuckery of Domination models colliding with Relational models and nowhere is this more evident than in heterosexual relationships also marked by power differences along other lines of race, class, age etc.
I finally made sense of it reading pieces like Nora Samaran’s “The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture,” Carmen Spagnola’s “Portrait of a Marriage, Yes: It’s Mine,” Dan Wile’s books on Collaborative Couple Therapy (which is all about becoming more effectively dependent rather than eschewing dependence), Sue Johnson’s EFT books and academic research, attachment theory from an intersectional perspective.
And one text that really helped me wade through this mess was Val Plumwood’s “Feminism and the Mastery of Nature” which uses the stellar phrase “denial of dependency” as a hallmark of the master’s ideology.
Extract from Plumwood’s book:
“Homogenisation supports both instrumentalism, incorporation (relational definition) and radical exclusion. It produces binarism, a division of the world into two orders. As Hartsock (1990) points out, homogenisation is a feature of the master’s perspective. To the master, residing at what he takes to be the centre, differences among those of lesser status at the periphery are of little interest or importance, and might undermine comfortable stereotypes of superiority. To the master, all the rest are just that: ‘the rest’, the Others, the background to his achievements and the resources for his needs. Diversity and multiplicity which are surplus to his desires need not be acknowledged. The other is not seen as a unique individual bound to the self by specific ties. It is related to as a universal rather than a particular, as a member of a class of interchangeable items which can be used as resources to satisfy the master’s needs. Elimination of reliance on any particular individual of the relevant kind also facilitates denial of dependency and backgrounding. Instrumentalisation and commodification normally produce relations of this kind."
"A hyperseparated account of self also emerges in Cartesian solipsism, an extreme denial of dependency which doubts the other’s mindful existence and treats the other as alien to the self, excluding the possibility of mutual recognition or exchange (Flax 1985:28–9). For Benjamin, such a hyperdifferentiation of self and other is associated with the inability to grasp the aliveness of the other; it reflects the dualisation of the self/other boundary and its construal as a relationship of opposition and power (Benjamin 1988:193). In the Cartesian dream of power, the subject is set over against the object it knows, in a relation of alleged neutrality in practice modelled as power and control."
Do a CTRL F on all the places Plumwood mentions “denial of dependency” in her book: https://takku.net/mediagallery/mediaobjects/orig/f/f_val-plumwood-feminism-and-the-mastery-of-nature-pdf.pdf
This denial of dependency thing is truly the bane of my existence and I see it both in left and right wing circles! Right wing is about individualism, bootstraps, meritocracy, capitalism, separation (unless it’s the church community of course). Left wing denial of dependency comes out through New Age free love hippie ideals that no one really needs anyone else and we are all interchangeable in the marketplace of sexed commodities and “love yourself before anyone can love you” and self-care and self-responsibility (so don’t ask anyone to meet your needs as that’s being needy) and Buddhist inspired enlightened sounding “non-attachment” nonsense. And yes I am going to critique patriarchal independence-oriented spirituality like Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism that has emerged out of my own country!
When someone owes you $12,000 and asks you to be oh-so-enlightened and “just let it go”, and “think positive thoughts” and “you deserve what you attract,” and “everything is a lesson,” that’s power masquerading as spiritual enlightenment and non-attachment.
Lastly I also wanted to mention ambivalent racism, which is what I think you are talking about here. I learnt about it through ambivalent sexism, which drew from it. Ambivalent racism helps make sense of the subjectively negative and subjectively positive attitudes people hold towards BIPOC (bearing in mind racism is not about individual attitudes but a system of social, economic and political resource control, and that difference can’t be collapsed into the BIPOC label). “Benevolent racism” is the carrot, looking favourably on the “kind” brown person, the one who confirms to white supremacist ideals of subservience and communality; it’s benevolent and paternalistic and “we know best” and the kind of performative gratitude you describe here. Hostile racism is the stick - it punishes people of colour who step out of line, who are too much, too demanding, too aggressive, have too much agency. It’s outright foreclosure and disavowal. Both function to maintain the status quo.
Your 'comment' also brought tears to my eyes. Tears of exhaustion. Tears of overwhelm. Thank you for the wealth of reflection, knowledge, and new connections to map out. But I also want to take a moment to grieve. How maddening are the effects of white supremacy? To have people like yourself, to become so intelligible, so researched, so well informed, so articulate. What oppression, what pressures, what levels of gaslighting does it take to mould a person to reach this point?
I've personally had to learn the reasons for my own intellectualization and neurotic obsessionality as a reflection of the maddening world in which we are born.
I will take the time to digest and research your additions, and I'm grateful, and I'm sorry for all that you've had to endure.
Thank you, it’s good to be seen. And it’s great to be alive! Everyday I wake up going, yay I’m still alive.
And yes the intensity of pain was a total fog that took a long time to clamber out of and make sense of, so there have been many tears shed over what now appear as intellectual insights. That said, there are things I experienced that wouldn’t wish on anyone 🙏🏾
Spoken like a true master. I’m grateful to be in connection with you
Sublime! 💥
I read this twice and listened also. This piece is at once essential, and a true gift. It absolutely stopped me in my tracks. I recognized myself in my own radicalization process, and the ways that each defense operates both independently and interchangibly depending on the context and type of confrontation it meets. The ways that whiteness abhors grief and self interrogation. The ways that whiteness stays alienating us from relationship and connection to the web of life and humanity. It also made me think about whiteness as hegemonic via reproduction by capitalism and imperialism.
How yes of course it lives in those of us with lighter skin tones, socialized in European and USian and other white dominion settler colonial and imperialist contexts- but also how these defenses become present and prevalent in those seeking proximity, power and protection under systems of white supremacy. That is the part I often find myself perplexed on how to proceed. Seeing the same defenses white supremacy employs, the same ones that I need to interrogate and investigate in myself and other white people, manifesting in spaces of all backgrounds (liberalism, neoliberalism?) but reduced down only to class interests. In social settings I am clear that this is not my place to interrogate internalized white supremacy in oppressed and colonized peoples and communities. In the clinic though, how do we navigate this terrain? When we can see whiteness defending itself in someone who is also oppressed and targeted by whiteness? Is the intervention the same, the triage? Whiteness falsely promises its adherants safety, security, impunity..
I know this is not a consultation group, and I will continue to interrogate my own perceptions on this, but I thought raising the question might be helpful as this is what I was left wondering after reading.
that's a difficult and necessary question Dana. and to name the protean quality of whiteness as a defensive structure, not phenotype or identity position. it shifts across race, class, context, pressurized through capitalism, imperialism and liberalism.
clinically, the question might not be whether to intervene, but how. it requires more attunement, more precision and a refusal to collapse structure into identity. might we ask, what wound is this defense defending? what bargain has been struck for legibility, for saftey, for belonging? how can we track the defensiveness of whiteness, through the patient, rather than against them?
so the triage might be beyond accusation but about decoding. how has the subject been interpellated by whiteness? what form of life becomes possible when that grip loosens?
similar to the kkk, the exposure is the disarmament, and also the cost.
I love this piece, though I struggle to locate myself in it. I feel as though I began in the repressive mode and have been moved/treated to something less reactive and more open, but I struggle to know if I can even identify that within myself. Can I, as the subject of the treatment, locate where I am in the path to treatment. Am I healing, or performing healing, and how can I tell the difference? I have experienced ruptures. I have experienced grief. I have experienced gratitude, felt deeply and expressed. I am not seeking accolades, merely a metric by which I can measure myself so I know how much harder I have to work, how much further I have to go. My power within the systems is limited, my primary strength is in crafting propaganda and challenging expectations. And I seek to build a world where tension, discomfort, is celebrated as the way forward. And I feel that tension right now. Between my conception of my self as someone doing the work of deconstructing my whiteness, while recognizing the structural reality of how it places me in a position of power, and the possibility that I may be the disavowing type. In short, this has given me a lot to think about.
your question already signals the movement of the subject. the one who reflects on their position is not fully known to themselves. this is not a flaw, but the condition of subjectivity under analysis.
when naming the struggle, it is in fact an indication that something real is occuring. not knowing where you are is different from being numb. the act of locating, is different from being having located. the desire for a metric, the understandable, is part of the inherited logic of mastery: the fantasy that if we just knew where we stood, we could know what to do. but in analysis, there are no maps. it's a working with drives, repetition, ruptures.
rather than accept or rejecting the possibility of being a 'disavowing type', what does that designation allow you to displace? what does it defend against? disavowal is not denial. it's knowing AND not knowing at once. the structure of whiteness is precisely this way: "I know i benefit, but i also feel marginal. i want to undo systems, but i fear implicating myself too fully." your uncertainty is not a problem to be solved, but a site to be listened to.
perhaps the strength to 'crafting propoganda and challenging expectations' is also a defense. what happens when you're not crafting? what's left when you're not producing counter-narratives? it's not to diminish the power of that work. but to invite inquiry inot what conditions it. what it wards off? what contradictions, ambivalence, even the unflattering or uninformed?
and to end with desire, to build a world where discomfort is accepted. you're seeking a truth procedure that doesn't promise ease. and in that, you're already outside the logic of moralistic self assesment. let the symptom speak.
Brilliant!
This was the first article of yours that came across my feed, before I understood how Substack worked. I didn't know I could leave comments that authors could see.
So I'm back now to say Thank you for this amazing piece, Ayoto. There's some writing that reaches inside you and lifts out all the feelings you couldn't coalesce on your own, and this is one of them. Reading it felt like oxygen reaching deep places that I didn't realize had been starved.
Thank you again! ❤️
Is this a dissertation on critical race theory. I’m Caucasian. And I don’t hate myself. I’m sure something in your wordy dissertation is worth value, but I am curious where you were educated. No disrespect.
None taken. Though I am curious also, when someone identifies as ‘Caucasian’ and asserts they don’t hate themselves, is that a statement, a deflection, or an imposition? And does asking where I was educated serve curiosity, or the need to situate critique as foreign?
First answer, a statement. Second answer, a curiosity. Thank you for your reply. In respect.
These words unwrap and reveal so much of the elusive codes of conduct and ways of being, codes and ways that, just as they are revealed, shrink slyly away. Thank you for the generosity of your sharing. I am thinking of how rupture and traumatophilia play out in mythologies and are necessary in so many stories: currently thinking of Virabhadra and Sati at King Daksha's party (a Shiva story of great carnage and death resulting in King Daksha becoming a devotee of Shiva).
What got cleared up for me in this article is that you're talking about that thing which I call the ego. I define it as "a thought system based on the concept of separation". Why you've renamed it "whiteness" I do not understand, or rather, I do have a pretty good understanding of it but I'm sad to see that you don't understand it.
The thing that is both funny and tragic about this, for me, is that while we're all sorting this out, a guy who could best be described as orange in skin tone is benefitting the most from our discourse. We could all be forming alliances to push back against his extremely ego-centered worldview but we're too busy creating more divisiveness and polarity which works to his advantage, always.
I'd say read it again... Its not about ego as such but about when being white becomes part of the ego. If you are white and cannot see it that is because you are within it.
This reads like an 18th century treatise on the phlogiston, or some shit.
you’re right, it is a bit much for those still using 18th century concepts of the self. Don’t worry, you’ll catch up. or combust.
I'm not sure what century your reification of whiteness comes from, but you should put it back where you found it. You're keeping "race" alive just to play with it. Let it die.
if naming whiteness keeps it alive, maybe saying erection keeps you hard. just don’t look in the mirror. you might see race staring back at you with your name.
You're not just naming whiteness, you ascribe it agency. It acts on the world, on a higher level than the individual. This is an exercise of imagination, not analysis. I don't think you'd be able to pull off the same trick with, say, "yellowness." Is yellowness what you see when you look in the mirror? Of course not. You see Ayoto in the mirror. What is so special about so-called white people that their racial identity takes on a life of its own? While the white person sleeps, whiteness is on the rampage? Fuck that noise.
there is yellowness.
ask the emperor. ask the archivist. ask the man pissing in the mouth of a dying empire.
yellowness survives its name. it glows, leaks, stains, radiates.
whiteness can’t say its own. it needs gloves. a drone. a badge with no shadow.
that’s the price of purity: the non-space.
the klansman knew it. the state knows it.
so do you.
you’re not wrong to feel haunted.
you sleep. it moves.
that’s not a metaphor. that’s a structure.
and yes — whiteness acts.
but only when you’ve disavowed the act and rephrased it as style.
which is what you’ve been doing.
your poems are a loop — a scene of confession that never risks recognition.
you piss in the bed, then write the haiku.
you become the object, then demand to be read as witness.
you apologize, but only as performance. the violence is never metabolized. just repackaged.
you aestheticize collapse and wait to see who flinches.
not this time.
the god that left?
it wasn’t lennon. it wasn’t bruce.
it was you.
I puked in the bed, I didn't piss in the bed, thank you very much 😋
If you want to talk about structure, bell hooks' term "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" is a lot more useful a term than the ghostly "whiteness."
I thank you for being the first person to respond to my posts, some of what you say sticks. (I am the object, I am the witness; white privilege sticks to me no matter how much I disavow it) I do find it remarkable that "whiteness" can be discerned in a poem about drinking too much wine and making messes, and in my delusions about Bruce Lee and John Lennon. I can easily imagine my posts being written by someone with a different skin tone, without having to change anything. For this reason I have to locate whiteness in your gaze, and not in my words.
you’re the kind of haunted house that charges admission. You leak guilt theatrically, then ask for tips. aren’t we a little old for the ‘I know I am but what are you’ game? it’s not self-awareness if you’re still directing the spotlight.