Shannon Sullivan on “whiteness” – questions asked by George Yancy. Part of an excellent series in the Stone:

“S.S.:Yes, definitely. Class and poverty are real factors here, but they don’t erase the effects of race and racism, at least not in the United States and not in a lot of other countries with histories (and presents) of white domination. The challenge philosophically and personally is to keep all the relevant factors in play in thinking about these issues. In that complex tangle, you hit the nail on the head when you said that black life continues to be valued as less. Poor white people’s lives aren’t valued for much either, but at least in their case it seems that something went wrong, that there was something of potential value that was lost.
Let’s put it even more bluntly: America is fundamentally shaped by white domination, and as such it does not care about the lives of black people, period. It never has, it doesn’t now, and it makes me wonder about whether it ever will.”

(..)

“I think that white people have a small but important role to play in combating white domination. Small, because the idea isn’t that white people are going to lead that work; they need to be following the work and leadership of people of color. But important because, given de facto racial segregation, there still are many pockets of whiteness — in neighborhoods, businesses, classrooms, philosophy departments – where you need white people who are going to challenge racism when it pops up. Which it often does.
But I think I have to add that this role is absurd. I mean absurd in the technical existentialist sense that, for example, Kierkegaard and Camus gave it. I don’t have a lot of hope that our white-saturated society is ever going to change, and at the same time it is crucial that one struggles for that change. Those two things don’t rationally fit together, I realize. It’s absurd to struggle for something that you don’t think can happen, and yet we (people of all races) should.
It’s like Camus’ main character in “The Plague,” the doctor who realizes that the plague will never completely go away. It — death, the atrocities of Nazi Germany — always wins in the end, even if one achieves some minor victories against it. We could add white supremacy to Camus’ list. It’s crucial to fight it even if total victory is impossible, to care for those who suffer because of it. And we all suffer because of it. The plague spares no one even as it hits different groups and individuals in different ways.”

(…)

“I’m not saying that white people should never feel guilty or ashamed because of their race, and I don’t think that not feeling guilty or ashamed is a way to let white people off the hook. But guilt and shame are toxic just as hatred and greed are, and we sure don’t need to increase the toxicity of white people.”

Read the article here.

Shannon Sullivan has obviously important things to say, but I’d like to focus one two aspects of her observations.

If the fight against white domination is absurd in the sense as Camus used it for example in “The Myth of Sisyphus” then we must acknowlegde that the outcome of this struggle is not the reason why we need to engage in it. Because there is no positive outcome thinkable, something Shannon Sullivan appears to acknowlegde by explictly referring to “The Plague” by Camus. At best, we cane save or better the lives of a few individuals.

I’m not sure if I agree with this analysis. Yes, the plague will never go away, (the form of the plague can change) but we can structurally lessen the effects of the plague.

Secondly I’m wondering why shame has a toxic effect on people. I’m not in favor of governments promoting the notion of collective guilt, although the results in postwar Germany have been encouraging. (The first decades after the war the German attitude towards its history was not the same as it is now. And it was not only various German governments that changed their attitude vis-à-vis the Third Reich, it were for example also the students in the sixties in Germany who protested that too much of the “Bundesrepublik” was a continuation of Nazi-Germany.)
But on an individual level shame often has a humanizing and beneficial effect on the person who is ashamed. First of all shame is the notion that another is watching you or if you wish, that the superego is judging you. Shame forces you to valuate your actions, perhaps also your body, with a certain distance, with less subjectivity.
In theory we can engage in murder because we feel ashamed that we don’t do as the murderers around us (also called: peer pressure) but in general I would say that the effects of shame are positive. If this sounds too utilitaristic I say that shame is simply the consequnce of consciousness. You are aware of your existence and of the existence of others, so you feel ashamed. That there are very often no good reasons for these feelings of shame (my ears are too big, my nose is dripping, my erection is too visible, I don’t know any German) and that shame can lead to an inferiority complex or worsen it doesn’t mean that we should not praise shame at least once a day. Because without shame man would be nothing but an unbearable bundle of hubris.