Bird watching in Central Park is the latest thing not to do while being Black. NYC Audubon Society board member Christian Cooper asked his namesake Amy Cooper to leash her dog, as required to protect the wildlife. Instead she saw him, not as a person, but as a type, “African American,” as if it was her observing wildlife. Her racialized seeing transformed his spoken request into a violent assault. As used by John Joseph Audubon, for example.
For there are many layers to racialized seeing. Some racist theory can lie beneath familiar categories, like popular culture or advertising for decades, only to suddenly (re)activate, like the racist association of masks with muzzles used for the enslaved. But natural history is always there, with its concept of a hierarchy of the human. And, yes, even birds.
If there was a long historical irony behind the Audubon Society anti-racist statement defending Christian Cooper, there is also a belated recognition that such basic precepts have to be asserted, by people identified and identifying as white, even and especially from such “neutral” spaces as ornithology, until they are, finally, absorbed. The Audubon Society website glosses over their figurehead’s involvement with slavery. Let’s correct that.
American ornithology can’t be understood without Audubon’s Birds of America, a multi-volume assemblage of enormous color plates and a text mingling natural history with autobiography and travel narrative. Audubon’s is an all-American story of debt, reinvention, violence and white supremacy. Born the illegitimate son of a Jewish servant to a planter on Haiti before the revolution, he became a bankrupt slaver, haunted by the double loss of slave-generated wealth. As his last two enslaved persons paddled him down the Mississippi River to New Orleans so that he could sell them, Audubon was “inspired” to become a bird artist and taxonomist. Like many 19th century amateur naturalists, he invented many more species than are now accepted. Including the fugitive from slavery.
Scenes of Enslavement
Audubon, Snowy Heron 1835
In 1831, Audubon observed what he called the Snowy Heron near Charleston in South Carolina. He saw them in flocks of hundreds of birds. As he observed, they reach as far north as Long Island, where I still see them, only now in twos and threes.
Rice Hope Plantation from the background of Snowy Heron
In the background, Audubon painted a plantation and himself, out shooting birds as usual. The plantation was Rice Hope, in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, where the enslaved cultivated rice. None are to be seen here. Instead, Audubon, oddly masked in modern style, is out hunting. The bird metonymically represents all this: settler colonialism, the Second Amendment, white supremacy, and the invisibility of African American labor. You can buy originals and reproductions all over the internet, teaching racialized vision, one print at a time.
Audubon casually shows how practices of enslavement affected even common songbirds. The blue jay was a prolific species with a habit of eating crops, so that in Louisiana
the planters are in the habit of occasionally soaking some corn in a solution of arsenic, and scattering the seeds over the ground, in consequence of which many Jays are found dead about the fields and gardens.
Audubon did not need to mention that Louisiana planters were slave owners but followed this account with a fantasy entitled “The Runaway,” also set in Louisiana. Audubon imagined that as he crossed the bayous, he was challenged by a maroon, a fugitive from slavery. But from “long habit of submission,” the fugitive at once calls him “master.” They travel to the fugitive’s hideout in a canebrake, a thicket of grasses reaching over 20 feet. Here Audubon hears the story of how the fugitive was sold, following his “owner’s” bankruptcy, as were his wife and children to different purchasers. Determined to reunite, the fugitives escaped but now they lacked food. Audubon’s reverie ended with him leading the fugitives back to slavery, where they were repurchased by a friend.
As so often, Audubon was repurposing his own history. He was the slaveowner who had become bankrupt and sold his people in New Orleans. Perhaps, too, he was remembering vaguely that at the end of the 1811 German Coast Insurrection of the enslaved in Louisiana, the final revolutionaries had been hunted down in the swamps. For him, the restoration of benevolent slavery, as visible in Snowy Heron, was a happy ending. There was no illustration to The Runaway.
Racism and racialized seeing
I don’t suppose Amy Cooper was thinking about Audubon. Any more than she considered that the Ramble–the “woodland retreat” where she let her dog run–was adjacent to Seneca Village, an African American community that was demolished to make the Park.
Seneca Village c. 1850
Seneca Village, though, faces the American Museum of Natural History, which all Park-adjacent New Yorkers have visited. This museum tells a story of racial hierarchy from the Roosevelt statue at the door to the racist “Pygmy” (Mbuti or Twi) diorama on the second floor. I bet you Amy Cooper went there.
As Fanon taught us long ago in reflecting on his own incident of being seen as a “Negro” on a French train around 1950, by the time the person is visually identified and named as a “type,” now updated to “African American,” nothing can stop what will happen. Amy Cooper probably believes she is not a racist. But her way of seeing is and when it took over because she panicked, so was she.
Fascism thrives on chaos, inserting itself into emerging fissures and faults. Not unlike a virus. There are plenty of people doing fascism right now in visual media. And during the pandemic, the social is media. What are the antifascist tactics to disrupt the online fascist wave? No reposting. Whiting out white supremacy. Undermining its claims. And imagining the future.
There’s no way to engage with fascism that has no risk. These are tactics. If they don’t work, then let’s drop them and find better ones. If they do, make them more effective. I’m just not happy seeing swastikas and racist imagery all over my social media.
Fascism is using public space to display its double accusation that stay-at-home policies are Nazism, whose implementation is communism. These small-scale actions have made for a chaos of meaning that has enabled the mass online circulation of everything from Confederate flags to armed takeovers of legislatures and Nazi imagery.
Don’t repost to show how horrified you are.
At a typical “protest” at Commack NY (in Suffolk County with over 40,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 1700 deaths), a small group of reopeners insulted and harassed a local TV news reporter Kevin Vessey. He posted a video to Twitter. Trump then reposted it–twice–with each post getting over 100,000 retweets. If you don’t think that matters, ask Hillary Clinton how she’s enjoyed the last four years.
Beyond the tactical, these images do harm by themselves. During the 2014-16 moment of Black Lives Matter, African American activists reached a point where they no longer wanted pictures of violence distributed. I’ve reached that point with the fascist protests in the US today. It’s just not necessary to see every swastika. It doesn’t help with analysis or resistance and it maintains the sense of chaos that the far-right want to engender.
2. White Out
I’m not advocating just ignoring the violent image. I want to disrupt the chaotic effect they’re intended to cause. Take that appalling image of a white woman standing outside a courthouse in Humboldt County CA, holding a sign that depicted an enslaved African wearing a metal muzzle across the mouth, and an iron collar with a spike. The text was just as bad: “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.”
I don’t want to post that picture unchanged. As a teacher, I’ve long realized that simply showing a racist image does immediate harm. Under the currently existing conditions of white supremacy, the image is downloaded and absorbed at once. To say nothing of the pain it causes. Setting an alternative context, teaching the history, making it look otherwise–that takes time and care.
My simple tactic is to “white out” that image. Whiting out white supremacy. It’s affiliated with other such tactics, like the practice of redaction advocated so beautifully by Christina Sharpe. I’m also thinking of the erasure of lynched African Americans from the photographs in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, as did Ken Gonzales-Day and Mary Coffey.
The last show I saw before everything shut down was the outstanding recent series of photographs by Nona Faustine entitled “My Country,” which feature a bar across American monuments. I am not equal to these distinguished sources, I am aware. This is simply a step to think through how a challenge to visual images claiming white supremacy might be made visually by a person identified as white
I also used all the photograph posted by Kym Kemp (May 16, 2020). You can see that the different protestors made different choices. To the left, a woman chose to use her own sign, not the printed ones handed out. To the right, the drama teacher who features in all the cropped images has folded up her sign and taken the home-made but printed sign. She now claims she was just holding it after somebody else gave it to her but falsely asserts: “I had no sign of my own.” Yes, you did, you just folded it up. It’s almost impossible to notice that when confronted with the violent image.
The point is to be able to create a context in which to see what’s happening and then, if others agree, introduce the context and show the content. But there’s no point in worrying about how the fascists will respond: we know how they will respond.
Should the text be whited out too? Then you get this:
Whiting out white supremacy
It’s a little more surreal. It invites a caption. The original text reveals that white supremacy continues to believe that the enslaved were not human beings, any more than dogs. It rests on the polygenist “theory” that there are multiple species of humans with different capacities. Such ideas circulated widely in the 1850s and ’60s as a defense of slavery. Without the startling image, this nonsense can literally be seen for what it is.
In a classroom, I would work back from the fully whited-out sign to the text and then take a vote as to whether the image should be shown. Then the picture could be introduced as an illustration to the Memoirs of a Blind Man by Jacques Arago (1839), written when the author was in fact blind so could not check the image for accuracy. Then the history of Escrava Anastasia, the woman depicted, who was resistance leader among the Brazilian enslaved, could be shared. Only then would I show the engraving.
3. Undermining
One thing fascists hate is to be made to look ridiculous or to have their claims to power undermined. Montage works wonders at ridiculing the pompous. Most of us can’t be John Heartfield. But deploying memory and simple tools, you can make mash-ups that mock the would-be saviors.
In my example, Mike Pence is visiting the Mayo Clinic. As it’s a medical facility, everyone is wearing masks but not Pence. He’s too powerful to get infected, too masculine for a girly mask, and too divine to need its protection. Photographer Jim Mone depicted him in a gesture of apparent benediction or healing. Most of Mone’s shoot was generic but this photo evoked to me a painting from an older epidemic.
Gros, Napoleon in the Plague House. With VP Pence at Mayo Clinic (Jim Mone/AP).
Baron Gros’ immense oil painting showed Napoleon in a plague house in Jaffa, Palestine. While his officer covers his face to ward off infection, Napoleon reaches out to touch an infected man. The gesture echoed that of the French kings, who would use their touch to heal scrofula, a form of tuberculosis.
It’s good to be a king, in the administration’s mind. But they’re not supposed to make it so clear in what remains nominally a republic. Bonapartism is notorious for appearing first as tragedy, the second time as farce. Pence is a farce and the montage makes that apparent even if you don’t know what the painting is.
Too complicated? Try this. In Texas, some businesses are reopened but not bars. A bar in Odessa TX reopened with some gun-carrying men claiming to “protect” it. When the New York Times ran the story, it led with a photo of a wanna-be tough guy with a tattoo, a bandanna and an AR-15. All the usual “we’re willing to die” rhetoric. This is what actually happened.
Not so “willing to die” in fact. Photo: Eli Hartman, Odessa Advertiser/AP
The original story in the Odessa Advertiser made it clear that this was all an effort to profit and get publicity. No one, in deep Texas, was trying to take their guns. But for all bluster, these liberators were all hat and no cattle.
4. Reclaim The Future
The swastika, MAGA crowd are all about the past. Going back has become code for “go back to militarized white supremacy.” Last time this crowd showed themselves openly at Charlottesville, they were comprehensively defeated but it came at a heavy price: the murder of Heather Heyer. That’s why there are Confederate flags at all the Astroturf protests. They know it’s the second round. They’ll lose again but the cost of human life may be much greater.
That’s why it’s also important to reclaim the future. Mutual aid has been a key part of getting through this first wave, as Rebecca Solnit has chronicled. Since the emergence of the Zapatistas in 1994, an alternative agenda has been clear, including respect for the Indigenous; direct democracy; sustainable economies for human and other-than-human life; health care and other forms of care as the key around which to organize society; production for need not profit; and an end to violence.
The pandemic highlights in bold why we need all this as matters of life and death. Who are we? Pan demos. All the people. The future is pandemocracy. All colonial thought and practice imagines democracy–opposed to the republic–as pandemonium, literally the presence of all demons, and figuratively as a cacophony in which no sense can be made. For the pandemocracy, learning to speak, to connect the visible and the sayable, articulating “that-which-must-be-made-sense-of” (Pasolini) is the work that is collectively at hand.
Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
The corona virus was supposed to be the great equalizer, a leveler of the divides of race, class and gender. Instead, the invisible pathogen has not only made existing inequalities palpably visible, it has weaponized them. The far-right, last seen at Charlottesville, is back with a new claim: the right (for you) to die. The old settler-colonial slogan “Liberty or Death” has been revamped: “my (white) Liberty in exchange for your Death.” In one week in April, the virus has become racialized.
The far-right activism has followed from a perverse and reverse act of self-recognition. Those white people inclined to an overt declaration of white supremacy became aware that Black, brown and Indigenous people were being disproportionately affected. Hearing this, they concluded that they are immune.
Or more exactly, when “protestors” were asked if they thought the epidemic was real, they agreed that it was but claimed that they were protected by a “higher power.” This phrase comes from the rhetorics of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups rather than Christianity. It was used to carry a double meaning in the familiar dog-whistle locutions of US white supremacy: the higher power is God, manifested as whiteness.
Learning to see in reverse
Let’s track how the “invisible enemy” constantly evoked by Trump became visibly non-white people. In a ten day span, the virus became racialized domestically, congruent with the ongoing xenophobia attached to the disease as being “Chinese.”
It had been predicted in March that minorities would suffer economically. But it was not until early April that media began to report on the disproportionate rates of death and infection in these communities. A wave of reports began in national media around April 7, 2020. By April 17, the Center for Disease Control was reporting that of those cases where racial and ethnic identity was known, 30% of COVID-19 patients were African American and 18% were “Hispanic/Latino.”
A week after this media wave broke, the first “protest” against stay-at-home measures happened in Michigan on April 15. Organized by Trump front groups like the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), the event was quickly co-opted by the far-right. The MCC called for people to stay in their cars. Instead, rifle-carrying men in combat gear posed on the steps of the Capitol. While police might have intervened–imagine this with protestors from the Nation of Islam–this unpermitted, armed action was allowed to continue and garner wall-to-wall media coverage.
Lansing, MI, April 15, 2020.
It was right after a Fox News segment on April 17 covered the event that Trump sent out his “LIBERATE” tweets. As at Charlottesville, the far-right received presidential endorsement, even as the MCC now urges its followers not to attend follow-up Operation Gridlock events later this month. But the Betsy Devos-funded Michigan Freedom Fund, a co-organizer of the event, is still all in, calling the stay at home order “arbitrary and capricious.” The president and a leading cabinet member are conspiring against their own policies in other words.
If Michigan saw assault rifles, two days later on April 17, Denver saw a white woman in a top-end Dodge RAM 1500 tell a medical worker to “go back to China.” Not because he was Chinese, but because social distancing is communism, and the virus “is” Chinese. So it makes “sense.”
Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran
You just know this woman has 5,000 rolls of toilet paper in her McMansion alongside a freezer or two full of food. While she feels herself to be a brave anti-Communist, she did not in fact dare to walk the streets. The next day in Kentucky the all-white “protestors” chanted “Facts Not Fear,” a Fox News slogan, even as cases peaked in the state.
There is, then, a range of class and political positions among the white activists. What they share is a fear that whiteness is being dissolved in the emergency created by the pandemic. When they say–as they all do–that they would rather work than receive a government handout, it expresses the long-standing belief that welfare is only for people of color and so-called “white trash.” Being required to stay home and receive government funds provokes a furious–if small in number–backlash at being reframed as a dependent person, understood by them to mean a person of color, rather than a “free” person, meaning white. Slavery is never far away in the US.
It has all had an effect. On April 9, 81% of Americans supported stay at home policies, including 68% of Republicans (Quinnipiac). A week later (April 16), Pew Research found 66% concerned that the country would reopen too quickly. By April 19, that support had dropped to 58%, with less than 40% of Republicans in support (NBC News/WSJ). Other polls are close to that number with some as high as 64%. Polls are fickle, and biased, yes. But let’s not presume that a handful of activists can’t change minds, just because we intensely disagree with them.
Facts really don’t have much to do with this. Whiteness connects by emotional cathexis. White supremacy contains a volatile mix of anger, resentment and fear of failure, which is then combined with violence, especially against women. “Lock Her Up,” a slogan again in use at the Michigan protest, remains its watchword. Guns are its iconographic form. Its vocabulary is selectively drawn from the 1776 settler-colonial uprising in defense of slavery, also known as the American Revolution
Breaking the frame of whiteness
What’s at stake now is whether the far-right variant of white supremacy becomes hegemonic over the new conjuncture. Or if something entirely new can be imagined, as thinkers from Gramsci to Grace Lee Boggs, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have long exhorted us to do. It will take what Hall called “a profound cultural transformation” to undehumanize the settler-colony and imagine something different.
Whiteness “works” as an ideology because it provides a frame to sustain contradiction, or as Hall put it:
it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference
Hall, “Gramsci and Us”
Its goal is to make xenophobic white supremacy the ‘common sense’ (which is not to say ‘good sense’) not of politics as a whole but of the right. And, as Hall put it, they have ‘totally dominated that idiom, while the Left forlornly tries to drag the conversation round to “our policies.”‘
To break the frame offered by white supremacy will have create what Arundhati Roy calls “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” It will be both digital and material. A portal is not quite a frame. It that may have edges but not borders. It creates a sense of relation not of exclusion. The intensity of white reaction responds to their sense that that gateway is, paradoxically, now more visible than it has been for some time. How this plays out depends on how the several waves of Covid-19 infection are imagined and configured. I really don’t know what will happen.
Mira Schor, "Untitled (part of an ongoing series of corrective interventions into The New York Times shared on social media since 2017)" 2019.
My body has just become a battleground for the rise of the nationalist right. The Anglo-American governing strategy is to consolidate nationalists and split the left around the figure of the “Jew.” I’m of Jewish descent and I have family in Israel. According to the Trump administration that now means being Jewish is my national origin “on the basis of actual or perceived ancestry or ethnic characteristics.” Really? Which ancestry? The Bukharans who became Jews to get into Russia in the 1860s? Or the unknown Eastern Europeans or Russians who fetched up in London’s East End in the 1890s? Which ethnic characteristics? My nose? My tendency to be sarcastic?
It’s easy to make fun but this is serious business. The Brexit-Trump wave of 2016 has doubled down on white nationalism. This nationalism has updated the neoliberal tactic of attacking your opponent’s strength. It now accuses its opponents of being racist. Not the old racism that it so gleefully parades but a newly invented tradition: anti-Israel racism.
To cover the newness, they call it “antisemitism.” In this worldview, Brexit-Trump nationalists are not racists, they defend the Jewish nation against antisemitism. Meanwhile critics of Israel are racists, so Brexit-Trump nationalists are antiracist. They could care less about actual Jews. They want to split any possible antiracist coalition to govern by executive orders and majorities won with 42% of the vote.
Mira Schor, “Untitled (part of an ongoing series of corrective interventions into The New York Times shared on social media since 2017)” 2019.
Can you be racist against a country? One you don’t even live in? Brexit-Trump nationalism gets around such objections by drawing up a list of rules, not legislation as such, but a “quasi-law.” So to win acceptance, call them by an imposing name. And then claim that everyone already agrees to these rules.
Enter the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its definition of antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” This is so vague that it can only be specified by examples. Example number one: “targeting the state of Israel.”
IRHA say you can, in theory, criticize Israel in terms “similar to that leveled against any other country.” Only in practice the new antisemitism police always find any criticism of Israel to be exceptional. Above all, don’t mention the occupation.
The IHRA definition was a key source of controversy in the Labour Party, where it was seen as preventing criticism of Israel. And now it’s been introduced as a benchmark by Trump’s executive order.
A marginal issue? Not if this quasi-law is being used to reconfigure “race” as “nation,” a position very congenial to the right. And not when the UK election will turn on 150,000 votes in marginal constituencies–it’s all margin. The 2016 US presidential election was decided by 100,000 votes across three states, a rounding error.
The small number of Jews that may change votes based on “antisemitism,” actual or invented, is almost irrelevant. Far more significant are those liberals who can be made comfortable with not voting or even voting conservative as an expression of their anti-antisemitism. To say nothing of those whites who can find this supposed antiracist nationalism to be a moral force.
First came the furore in the UK. Boris Johnson, author of casually racist and antisemitic fiction and journalism turned prime minister in the UK has been “shocked, shocked” to find purported antisemitism in the Labour Party. He has hardly had to make the point. A toxic alliance of print and broadcast media with anti-Corbyn Labour MPS has done it for him (see appendix below).
Yes, there are instances of antisemitism in Labour but not because Labour is an antisemitic party. Rather, Britain–especially England–is an antisemitic country.
Now comes Trump’s order to amend the Civil Rights Act with regard to antisemitism. Many Brexit-Trump mouthpieces call now criticism of Israel “anti-Jewish racism.” In this view, they are nationalists, not racists. The Left are racists. This has the further advantage of subdividing the racial category “semite” that includes Arabs and Jews to just focus on Jews. Brexit-Trump nationalism is all about Islamophobia, that’s “priced in,” as they say.
Many assume the goal of Trump’s order is to make support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel illegal. While it certainly does, that’s just a benchmark. The long-term goal is to consolidate an explicitly hierarchical white nationalism, hinging around the pivot of the “Jew,” and frame the “left” as anti-Jewish racists.
Here “Jew” means Israel, where Israel is both a totem for the religious right and the exemplary “racial settler colony” (Ronit Lentin). The goal is to pivot from the long-standing collective position that (to adapt Foucault) “Israel must be defended” to its updated form: “racial purity must be defended.” In both cases, what’s at stake is the racialized nation-state. Today Jared Kushner uses the liberal New York Times as his platform to declare “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” (his capitals) under the headline “Trump’s Order Protects Jews.” As if this invented tradition were accepted fact.
This shift has been happening for some time. The attack on the Democratic Representatives known as the Squad was the start. Ron Dermer Israel’s ambassador to the US already went so far as to cite Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a cause of the Pittsburgh massacre. In this way, the use of imputed antisemitism against those critiquing settler colonialism produces actual antisemitic violence. The push-back against Bernie Sanders by association with the Squad has already started in the Jewish press.
From here, expect that BDS and declarations of loyalty to all that Israel does will become wedge issues first in the Democratic primary and then in the general election. Learn from the UK–facts don’t matter in this debate, endless repetition creates moral panic: over 5400 media articles about alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party. It doesn’t have to win the argument. It just has to split votes enough to let the nationalists win.
Let’s look at how this is already playing out. The Middle East Studies Association Board of Directors issued a statement at the start of its 2019 annual meeting condemning
“the conflation of criticism of Israeli actions and policies, and of Zionism as a political ideology, with anti-Semitism.”
On the same day, yet more children were buried in Gaza after the latest Israeli bombing. The usual statement “Israel has a right to defend itself” came from Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as if to speak for the triangulating tendency of neoliberalism. But, as part of the new nationalism, Israel has stopped playing by triangulation rules. A few days after Buttigieg and Biden defended the Gaza bombing, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz revealed the whole incident was a sham:
The target had not been re-examined for at least one year prior to the strike, the individual who was supposedly its target never existed and the intelligence was based on rumors.
No one in the “Israel must be defended” lobby, inside or outside Israel, cared. But they know enough to want to prevent others from talking about it.
So is it now “antisemitic,” under the terms of Trump’s order, for me to discuss what has been reported in Israel on my university campus? Can I ask how the right of nations to self-defense has been distorted to justify attacks on occupied territory in conditions of mass incarceration?
When NYU’s spokesperson claims it is “highly supportive [and] deeply concerned about its Jewish community,” does that mean me and others of Jewish descent who are appalled by what is being done in our name? What’s a Jew to do?
This is just beginning.
Appendix: Why the Labour Party Is Not Antisemitic
So many pay credence to these allegations that it’s worth re-enumerating why the idea that Labour is an antisemitic party is wrong and how it was formed:
The number of members alleged to have been antisemitic and subject to a Labour Party investigation represented about 0.1% of the membership.
Between June 2015 and March 2019, eight national newspapers carried a total of 5497 stories about Labour and antisemitism. It’s what Stuart Hall called a “moral panic.”
The great majority of people reported for antisemitic remarks or behavior were not Labour Party members.
For example, of the 200 cases cited by Labour MP Margaret Hodge in May 2019, only 20 related to Labour Party members. This discrepancy was not acknowledged by Hodge, who has continued to give interviews referring to ‘countless’ or ‘thousands’ of cases.
What does white nationalism look like today? It looks like Etihad Man. A 41 year old ex-soldier in Northern Ireland turned civil engineering manager, whose idea of entertainment is physical and verbal racialized violence at the Etihad football (soccer) stadium in Manchester. He embodies how Thatcherism’s Great Moving Right Show turned into Brexit.
Man. Utd’s Fred being hit by one of several lighters thrown from the crowd at Etihad Stadium. Photo: Tom Jenkins/Guardian
On Saturday, as you can see above, Etihad Man was among a reassuringly similar group of (mostly) middle-aged (almost entirely) white Manchester City fans, hurling objects like lighters and water bottles at Manchester United’s Brazilian midfielder Fred, while chanting racist abuse. His team were losing.
Etihad Man outlined at right, 41 year old Anthony Burke
Anthony Burke, outlined above, happened to be photographed and video-ed while making so-called ‘monkey’ chants and gestures at Fred. No one chants by themselves, Burke was simply the most visible of the racist collective. As the video plays, you can lip read him chanting ‘You Black B*st*rd,’ together with the sweet white-haired older woman to his right (our left) and everyone else in shot.
Etihad Man was born in 1978, the year that Stuart Hall first diagnosed Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Great Moving Right Show.’ That movement has brought us to Brexit-Trumpism and doesn’t appear to be finished yet. It is embodied in Etihad Man. He lives in the suburbs. You know he voted for Brexit. He’s separated from his wife. He even has Black relatives. He wrote on Facebook: ‘Listen, I’m only racist c*** because I had a screen shot that made me look it.’ Never mind the video, then.
His well-paid job offers physical comforts. He must have paid at least £50 for his ticket–far more if it was being resold. He’s got a down vest and a nice jumper in case he gets cold. But jumping up and down like a ‘monkey’ will keep you warm too.
That’s actually his defense–he named himself and gave interviews. According to him, he was putting his hands in his pockets. Will it get him off? It might well–he’s out on bail already. But none of the others that share in his psychic rage at the sight of Blackness will be inconvenienced in any way.
For this segment of Middle England, the £50 race riot is the participatory equivalent of being at a Trump rally. Football crowds are self-directed with chants originating from the fans, not prompted by the club. And like the Trump audience, they’re enjoying themselves–only they get to direct their resentments and hatreds at an actual person, right there.
In class-ridden British stereotypes, ex-Army middle managers don’t throw objects and make racist chants. But they do. So while the response has concentrated on excluding one white person, the issue is all these white people in general. Or, more exactly, how does a city go from singing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ together in 2017 after the bombing at Ariana Grande’s Manchester Arena concert, two miles away, to singing that?
It’s not all of Manchester, I know. But it is less than a week before a general election that has seen the Conservatives’ embrace of white nationalism return them to polling at the 43% level that elected Mrs. Thatcher on three occasions. According the right-wing ‘think tank’ Onward, this election was going to be determined by ‘Workington Man’:
‘an older, white, non-graduate man from the North of England, with strong rugby league traditions and a tendency to vote Labour.’
Almost immediately dismissed, Workington Man faded quickly and the alleged report is not to be found online anymore. But Etihad Man is all too real. Burke works for the Kier Group, a construction conglomerate who made £124 million declared profit on £4.5 billion revenues in financial year 2018-19.
Their webpage entitled “Quality, Diversity, Inclusion” features a group photograph of all white men in hard hats and hi-vis vests, cheering at the camera, as if a goal has been scored:
This idea of inclusion brings together the white nationalism of the football crowd with the Brexit-y uniform of the Yellow Vest. That’s right, the anti-Europeans have appropriated a European symbol of anti-austerity to indicate their support for the UK’s Brexit party of austerity.
Kier do quietly admit:
“We know things aren’t perfect yet – for example, we would like to see a greater number of women and people from ethnically diverse backgrounds fully represented in our organisation.”
One would be a start.
Etihad Man takes his whites-only football culture from work to football and back again. It doesn’t trouble him that his stadium is named after the airline of the United Arab Emirates, whose money has turned Manchester City from an also-ran into one of the top clubs in Europe. I wouldn’t turn up at the Etihad in a keffiyeh though, let alone a hijab.
The response from organized football has been to call for Burke to be banned and for ‘education.’ But Kick It Out, the official anti-racism group, make the limitations of this approach visible on their home page.
While there are three visibly Black British men in this banner, they are all cropped by the frame. Only the young Black woman at bottom left can be fully seen. Meanwhile five white people, including England captain Harry Kane, can be fully seen with two more cropped. It’s a step up from the Kier Group but not very far.
For Etihad Man loves Harry Kane, the white English center forward, wearing the Cross of St George beloved of white nationalists. Etihad Man might be part of England Away, the notorious England traveling fans who routinely vandalize European cities while drunk on cheap beer. He was definitely part of the Army in Northern Ireland, where he served with the Cheshire Regiment.
Etihad Man is already old news. Today’s headline in the Manchester Evening News is a ‘black alert’–it means that a local hospital can no longer guarantee patient safety because it’s so overcrowded. Did no one think for a minute about that name? More work for Kier Group, perhaps–they are in the top three health construction firms. All the people depicted on their Health webpage are visibly white.
“All hitherto existing visuality becomes aesthetic by being misogynist.”
This is the necessary update to my earlier claim that “the right to look ….is very much a feminist project.” Visuality is “masculine” or heroic because it is misogynist. It is that misogyny that enables its claim to legitimacy, that is, to make and embody law. The permanent and constituent crisis that visuality visualizes is that which claims to require patriarchy as its solution, a rear-view mirror engagement with the present. Case in point: Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the classic Blade Runner (1982), on which every visual culture scholar has opined.
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Before beginning this rewrite, let’s take a moment to say that I’m aware that this is not just any modulation of an analysis. It’s an admission of past failing that has been made glaring by present conditions. It’s up to you, the reader, to decide what to make of that. This is me beginning to try to do better by working it through.
In The Right to Look, the patriarchal authority to visualize is set against collective, democratic forms of countervisuality, yes. But I’m a little bit surprised looking back at it now to see that the feminist/gender/sexuality analysis is not well worked out. Why? I’m male identified, so that probably doesn’t help. There was a foregrounding of a masculine seriousness about war in the period I was writing (2003-10). I think, too, that I wrongly assumed the gender dimension of the ridiculous hyper-masculinity of the Heroic tradition to be both well established in visual culture analysis and so obviously reactionary that it did not need as much focus. And I was wildly wrong. Let’s start again.
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misogynist visuality
“Visuality” is the specific technology of coloniality formed on the plantation by the overseer, generalized as a technology of colonial war, and later named in English by Thomas Carlyle (1840). All such misogynist visuality is the property of the Great Man or the Hero. To understand what this means, it is only necessary to know that present-day alt-right considers Trump to be such a Hero.
Colonial visuality operates in complexes, which classify (free from slave, for example) and then separates the classified orders. That order holds because it produces an aesthetic, that which Fanon called the “aesthetic of respect for the established [patriarchal] order.” This aesthetic is always nostalgic, always bound to what Carlyle called “Tradition,” always haunted by the fear of its imminent disappearance. Which is to say, it is always violent.
In the era of neo-colonial war in Iraq and Afghanistan, enabled by the drone, there was a return to overt ideology of “commander’s visualization,” to quote the US Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual. It also seemed as if that visualizing was not hegemonic. The “aesthetic” of permanent war (in movies like The Hurt Locker) felt unfinished and thereby contestable because there was no way to make it feel necessary and right.
That analysis underestimated the necessity of unfinish to the neo-imperial masculine aesthetic, the need it has to feel threatened and on the verge of being overwhelmed, to sustain and reproduce itself. “Chaos” is visuality’s always feminized other in Carlyle and in all subsequent claims to Heroism. The opposition to Heroism was, according to Carlyle, “the female Insurrectionary force,” always already racialized as “black.” Carlyle did not even bother to consider the possibility of a female Hero, which would (in his view) produce monstrous forms like Amazons and Maenads. “Female force” is Heroism’s internal challenge to be overcome, as a constitutive, embodied part of itself. This ideology is phantasmatic, even ridiculous, to be sure, but it has had very real effects.
Indeed, coloniality has now created a new form of heroic masculinity for the aftermath of the conquest of (M)other nature. Surviving in the midst of climate disaster is the new heroism visualized in Blade Runner 2049, in ways that bear little resemblance to lived experience. Today’s self-proclaimed Heroes embrace the earth system crisis as their chance to wage permanent misogynist war. Real men eat GMO, use pesticide, burn coal and master the resultant chaos because mastering (female) chaos is what (male) Heroes do. What follows is the spectacle of Trump minions advocating for coal at the climate conference, while only 8% of college-educated Republicans “believe” in climate change, as if it is a branch of theology. In this view, faith rests in the Hero, who welcomes climate chaos as a test of his strength.
2049 is now
Blade Runner 2049
Misogynist coloniality has created a nostalgic aesthetic, such as that deployed in the self-consciously “epic,” which is to say, “heroic” film Blade Runner 2049. It failed at the box office but so did Trump. For my generation of visual culture studies, the first Blade Runner was canonical, taught over and again. So its return was nostalgic for me too. Like Bertolt Brecht siding with the cowboys during Westerns–as he admitted he did–I can’t deny enjoying watching it, both for its intense cinematic experience of sound and image and for the postmodern Proustian resonance of rediscovering past media time.
But this film not only visualizes the white supremacist masculinity that is making the world toxic, it takes active pleasure in the toxicity of the world. It is now the visible analogy of the hidden-in-plain-sight violent, abusive, misogynist Hollywood system evoked by the name “Weinstein.” Everywhere you look in this extended exploration of white masculinity there are available, conventionally attractive, young, white female bodies, floating on the side of buildings; or activated as software when the Man returns home to his miserable apartment; or standing on the street waiting for sex work. In this future, a (male) wish fulfillment if there ever was one, no one is trans or queer, and hardly anyone isn’t white.
In Blade Runner 2049, the new white male hero, known only as K, is literally a machine. K (Ryan Gosling) embodies the Heroic interface of the corporation and the police, which Gramsci called Caesarism. K marches through the orange desert in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas in search of the lost original Blade Runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford). It’s radioactive but he doesn’t care because he’s a machine. If such orange effects usually result from desert winds, recently seen in the U.K., the hyper-smog today enveloping Delhi and Lahore is a suffocating grey that locals are actively comparing to Blade Runner. Without the “conquest of nature” anaesthetic to make it palatable. Unlike Blade Runner, helicopters can’t even fly in the dense, gritty air mass.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog
K’s wandering through radioactive Vegas is a digital upgrade of the industrial-era Romantic fantasy of the conquest of nature. In Caspar David Friedrich’s much-reproduced painting, the wanderer, known only through his bourgeois suit, is colonial master of all he surveys, like Keats’ Cortés, “silent on a peak in Darien.” What lies beneath him is said to be fog but most such precipitation in the period was coal-induced smog. It’s not so far from the Wanderer to K, except that the “human” (which is to say “white” masculine) gaze is now automated.
the machine gaze
Opening shot Bladerunner 2049
How does the machine visualize? The first shot of BR 2049 fills the screen for a second: an all-seeing blue eye, with blond eyelashes. It is that of a replicant, an artificial person. Nowhere else in BR 2049 does this combination of blue-eyed blonde appear, so it is not the eye of a character. It is the ideal of machine vision, the machine as Hero. In the next instant, blink and you miss it, we zoom into the eye, into swirls of blue, and emerge in a giant solar panel array, converting the tomb-like sky into power.
The Solar Eye
All puns are intended by director Denis Villeneuve: the replicant’s eye is replaced by the solar “eye,” where neither is an “I.” Power is all, electric and social. If “we,” the spectators, are, as it were, in the eye of the machine, in their mind, then where are we? And who are “we,” when people are not always human?
The primary work of visualizing is classification, creating here an imagined distinction between the “human” and the machine, or replicant. Any such classification is a reenactment of the colonial hierarchy of the human, in which most people do not achieve the fully human status that is reserved for “whiteness.”
In Blade Runner 2049, all the major characters are machines. The only human that plays a role is the police officer Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), desperate to keep “order,” meaning the separation between human and machine. It’s already too late. She’s killed by a replicant. The fully human “humans” are elsewhere in the place the film calls “off-world,” the new interstellar colony.
Luv’s Eye
The replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), who kills Joshi, achieves perfect machine visualization, sublimely reflected in her sunglasses that act as her remote screen vision. A machine-Medusa, Luv directs a lethal missile attack to protect K in his hunt for the natural-born replicant, a mechanical messiah. In the animation of her cyber-eye, Luv embodies all the current dreams of power, like that of the wide-angle drone apparatus named The Gorgon Stare. What Luv cannot do, the film suggests, is love. She is all war, the female counter-insurrectionary force machine, the necessary counterpart to the heroic drive of corporate leader Wallace (Jared Leto).
wish fulfillment
The sardonic displacement of “love” into Luv acknowledges the misogynist violence at the center of the story. Blade Runner 2049 centers around the pursuit of a child born to the replicants Rachael (Sean Young) and Deckard (Harrison Ford). In the first Blade Runner film (1982), Deckard falls for Rachael. When he tries to kiss her, she pulls away. He slams the door, pushes back into the blinds and makes her say “I want you.” Then she acts out the kiss. Did she love him? Or Luv him, as directed by her software? Deckard doesn’t care.
The YouTube post of Deckard’s assault on Rachael (labeled a “love scene’)
Deckard, we learn in BR 2049, was programmed to desire Rachael (meaning that he is himself a replicant, as everyone except Harrison Ford has worked out long ago). So the first film literally engenders the second with the birth of their child, which conveniently causes Rachael’s death. In BR 2049 we discover Deckard living out a bro-noir life of mourning and drinking in ruined Las Vegas hotels. Captured, he again causes the death of a newly re-replicated Rachael. Like Wallace’s casual murder of a newly-created replicant, this misogynist killing has no other function than to continue the wish fulfillment that violence is power.
For Deckard’s assault plays out the elemental pornographic fantasy that whatever a man wants, a woman does too. In the recent HBO series The Deuce, the sex worker turned porn film director Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaall) keeps reminding everyone that porn is “fantasy.” It’s as if she’s speaking out of character here in this sadly misogynist and racist series–beautifully staged and shot, just like BR 2049–as the present-day actor addressing the audience.
In the minds of assaulting men, anything can be a justification. Women’s words play no significant role in this justifying narrative. Yale students chanted “no means yes, yes means anal” in 2010, so this is (by the hierarchy’s own standards) a rot that spreads from the head. Maybe now Sean Young’s claims to have been abused by a studio head and Warren Beatty might be finally believed.
fetishism
In BR 2049, K doesn’t bother with complicated replicant Luv. He has an A.I. called Joi (Ana de Armas) instead, a software construct designed to meet his every need. Joi makes home dinners for him and then changes into vampy outfits, the digitized remake of the 1950s every MAGA man needs. The fetish she offers K is the siren call of whiteness: “You’re special.”
Joi “believes” this–or, more exactly, has been programmed to say it–so that K continues to do his work. In just the same way, the “wages of whiteness” like racist statues, the national anthem, and not being shot by police compensate for the not so perfect lived experience of actually being “white.”
Only K finds out that, despite his fantasy, he isn’t special, he’s not a naturally-born replicant, but just another shop-bought off-the-shelf model. Rather than give up his fetishism, he transposes it into the “noble death.” The rebel replicant leader suggests to him that such a death is the most human thing he can do, like Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities–whose 1935 movie ending was oddly watched in The Deuce as a form of sex work. K dies happily at the end, the first time he has smiled during the entire film.
But why would a machine that can see what humans have done to the world want to be human? There’s no reason that makes “sense” within the narrative, it’s just the old colonial fantasy that what “they” want above all is to be like “us.” And it’s the job of the Hero to stop them. Within the film narrative that doesn’t quite make sense but the real Hero is, in the cinematic fantasy, the male spectator, now aspiring to be a machine, a metaphor that also saturates sports fantasy.
condensation
K does achieve one notable visual first. Freud imagined Western male (hetero)sexuality to revolve around the (m)other/”whore” classification. These roles must then be separated to feel right and, goodness knows, a whole lot of “aesthetics” has followed from that separation. In a world where, according to the New Yorker of all places, incest is the top-rated theme in porn, such distinction seems more than a little quaint.
In BR 2049, K manages to have it both ways by inserting his eroticized (m)other Joi into the body of a replicant sex worker Mariette (Mackenzie Davis). The resulting not quite perfectly overlapping three-way was a tour-de-force of animation and white male peculiarity. What does the white (machine) man want? To fuck (with) his own software. Apparently.
white supremacy
What does machine visuality want? To sustain the separation between the human and the enslaved. In the first Blade Runner, the replicants are to be pitied as they are hunted down. Now the replicant capitalist Wallace demands the production of an enslaved machine labor force, creating a new hierarchy between the human machine and the enslaved machine.
The enslaved machine will be known to be enslaved in the same way that the United States knew its enslaved to be so: because they were their mother’s child. An enslaved person could be of many phenotypes and genealogies. But there was no gainsaying partus sequitur ventrem, literally “the offspring follows the womb.” Control of the womb is, as United States politics amply demonstrates, central to all coloniality. As Saidiya Hartman puts it, “the master dreams of future increase.” Androids may dream of electric sheep but the ones in charge dream of primitive accumulation.
In the imaginary of Blade Runner 2049, the ever-more perfect replicant can defeat the test as to whether it feels. But it cannot refute being its mother’s child, although that “kinship loses meaning,” as Hortense Spillers argues in the context of slavery, when “one is neither female or male.” Enslaved or machine, the meaningless of the non-human condition continues. The patriarchy wins on both sides of the film: the replicant natural-born child lives (win for Wallace’s slave patriarchy). Deckard lives, and like a latter day father of the Horatii, gets to claim the same woman as “his” child, free of both her mother and K, her potential love interest (win for replicant patriarchy).
the end of patriarchy. or the end of the world?
It turns out that it is not the end of capitalism that is impossible to imagine over that of the end of the world. It is that of patriarchy. Worse, for patriarchy to continue, it now imagines that its conquest of nature must continue, whether in the machine body, the transformed planet, or the racialized hierarchies of the human and the enslaved.
