enoughtohold: A central feature of white settler... -

Text - Jun 1, 2020

A central feature of white settler colonial subjectivity is forgetting; we live whiteness in part as active ignorance and forgetting. In situations where facts of the matter are routinely brought to our attention, forgetting must be an active and ongoing thing. In general, I believe that systemic oppression is, in fact, present enough in our world that the kinds of ignorance and lack of knowledge running alongside oppression deserve explanation. Consider that some people think that they “just don’t see race,” or that poverty doesn’t exist in their community, or that Indigenous people aren’t part of their national consciousness. One way to understand what is at play here is through imagining a kind of benign ignorance — people just haven’t been taught the facts of the situation, and so they can’t be held responsible for not understanding how race, poverty, indigeneity, and more, are present in their lives. If this were the problem, just giving people more and better information would correct their knowledge problem. But we don’t just have a knowledge problem — we have a habit-of-being problem; the problem of whiteness is a problem of what we expect, our ways of being, bodily-ness, and how we understand ourselves as “placed” in time. Whiteness is a problem of being shaped to think that other people are the problem. Another way to understand this dynamic is to realize the very complex entanglement of practices and habits of ignorance, repression, and active disavowal that constitute an active settler process of not telling, not seeing, and not understanding the truth of the matter, which is a truth of being shaped as the legacy of the harms of the past.
[…] We white people might, on some level, like living with annihilated social and historical memories — we might like to think that the present can be innocent of the past that produced it. We might like to think, though we’re ashamed to admit it, that we don’t need to tell or hear the painful stories of the actions that created the world we live in. That feeling, of wanting to be people unmoored from history, of endorsing the pretense that we have nothing to do with the past that constitutes our material conditions and our most intimate subjectivities, is a feeling that defines us. The social organization of forgetting means that our actual histories are lost, and it means that we have a feeling of acceptance and normalness about living with a lie instead of an unforgetting.

Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016), Ch. 1.

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