Excerpt from “Reassuring Sounds”: The Impossibility of White Public Apology” by Michel Büch
After yesterday’s drop, Time is not a Finite Resource, It is a Space to Rectify Past Wrongs, and as the collective calls for public recognition, JFM is sharing an excerpt from Reassuring Sounds”: The Impossibility of White Public Apology as a tool for unlearning as well as taking action to make those who were harmed by the BHA’s current leadership feel whole. Click here to read Büch’s full article. The excerpt begins below:
This article discusses instances of racism and the debates they caused. Black readers who decide to read on, and, more importantly, follow the links, may find reading the racist words that led to the apology and that had to be repeated here for the purposes of my argument upsetting. Due to the subject matter and my perspective as a white man, this article mostly addresses a white audience. The “we” and “I” are consciously white.
Forced public apologies by white people perform a paradox: the apologizer expresses shock at their own actions and distance themselves from them. The moral impetus for the apology provides a handy cop-out for the offender, who no longer needs to own the words or deeds that put them in a position to apologize in the first place. (This gesture of distancing and disowning is embedded in the etymology of the apology: the Greek prefix apo means “away from” and logos means “speech.”) The apology not only separates the racist act from the person responsible for it; it also ostensibly removes the act from its temporal, spatial, psychological, and affective environment.
But the moral surplus value that a public apology generates for whites comes at an existential cost for whites too: if the offender is now (morally) distant, i.e. absent, from the event they originally embodied (!), where has the event gone? Impossibly, it is undone. And where has the offender gone, part of whose past has never happened? They are still there. What a privilege to exist and not exist in this way! In reality, of course, the event still exists in the bodies and minds of all who ever engaged with it. As self-assurance for some (existing without having happened), as violence for others. If whites recognized the existential illogic in which we live and which is revealed in situations like these, our sense of self would become highly fragile.
“Doing anti-racist work, we need to find a way of dealing with the paradoxical aim of eroding the ground on which we stand.”
White people are created by, through, and for whiteness. Inevitably, we are formed and informed by it, we perpetuate it, we think and feel in it – whether we like it or not. Whiteness cannot be overcome or pushed aside at will. If we could do that, we would be more than human. If we really set out to attack whiteness, we must be prepared for this to become an existential issue that challenges the basis of our existence. If whiteness goes, what will be left of us? Doing anti-racist work, we need to find a way of dealing with this contradiction, with the paradoxical aim of eroding the ground on which we stand, in a way that does not exhaust itself in excessive and aimless breast-beating.
Facing the helplessness that comes with this contradiction, some people turn to hands-on advice. Surely, such advice will help some people and prevent future racist utterances. Yet I warn against relying only on such manuals, or at least doing so thinking that following them will position you on the side of righteousness. The problem is that such anti-racist manuals give the impression that whites can behave in an unassailable way – which is, again, a self-aggrandizing assumption. Rather than striving to find an ideal way to apologize, we should sit with the fact that the “solution” to racism is not within reach and that white people’s work urgently needs to go beyond expressions of remorse.
Recognizing the limitations of whiteness does not have to be stifling. It enables us to enter conversations on racism more genuinely – not by empowering but by disempowering ourselves. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around that, and the work of anti-racism does not end with recognizing its necessity. And surely it doesn’t end (or begin) with the sort of exculpation that the apologies discussed here aim at. In my experience, anti-racist work does not feel great, and it involves shame. Yet this shame does not lie in the fact of being white. It lies in the active, conscious ignorance of what it means to be white, and of the fact that this whiteness is limiting the breadth of our views on and experience of the world.
It is our responsibility to get our defense mechanisms out of the way. For those who suffer from racism directly, the conversation is strenuous, exhausting, and painful enough as it is. Too often, white people make it worse by hypermoralizing and thus actively sustaining our affective, emotional, and intellectual ignorance of the obvious plights caused by racism. It is a contradictory gesture: we need to turn to ourselves to make the conversation not about us. This article represents this very paradox.
End excerpt. Click here to continue to educate yourself and unlearn by reading and sharing the complete article. JFM highly recommends reading the full article and also conducting your own research on authentic apologies for racial discrimination and harm.
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