The Weight of Whiteness: A Conversation between Alexis Shotwell and Alison Bailey

Alexis Shotwell: Thanks so much for talking with me about your wonderful book (The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance, Lexington Books, 2021)! Let’s start where you end, exploring ways that a particular kind of genealogical practice can either reinforce or resist the inheritances of whiteness. Can you start by talking a bit about that chapter and that kind of work? 

Alison Bailey: Endings offer fine beginnings. My final chapter treats whiteness as an inherited weight and extends what I call a ‘weighty invitation’ to people with white ancestries–especially those of us with settler-colonial pedigrees– to remain still long enough to hold space with the discomfort and pain of the historical weight we inherit from our ancestors. This takes patience and courage. About eight years ago, at my father’s request, I began researching his maternal family line. I wanted to make sense of the boxes of family papers and artifacts I inherited.

Genealogy is a social practice. Yet white peoples’ desire to be perceived as good and innocent has a strong gravitational pull on how we narrate the stories we inherit. Our family histories are shaped as much by what is remembered as by what has been erased or forgotten. My family history had already been pruned carefully to reflect colonial master narratives about the Dutch colonization of lower Manhattan and east New Jersey. My ancestors got in on the ground floor of the emerging colonial economy. They were soldiers, patriots, congressmen, mayors, planters, and entrepreneurs. They owned large plantations in Monmouth County.

Colonization requires amnesia and numbing. This means that white genealogical habits are likely to produce anesthetized pedigrees; that is, family histories aimed at protecting descendants from feeling those parts of our ancestral past we are unwilling to feel. The violence of colonization was not audible in the stories I inherited. Most people don’t think of New Jersey as a slave state, so it never occurred to me that my ancestors’ fortunes depended on the labor of enslaved Africans who worked in their potteries and tended their fields. In 1818, my Morgan and Van Wickle ancestors engineered a plan to sell over 137 free, bonded, and enslaved people of African descent into permanent slavery in the south.

Medicinal genealogies offer an antidote to the anesthetized pedigree. I’m inspired by Aurora Levin Morales’s (2019) account of history’s healing power. Her insights can be extended to genealogical work.  Practicing genealogy without anesthesia is an act of historical and psychological recovery because genealogy makes the historical personal. Consider how frequently the guests on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s popular Finding Your Roots television series comment on how knowing their family history has transformed their sense of self. The medicinal value of genealogy lies in the courage to hold the family weight that reaches up to claim you. My own pedigree is heavy. Holding its weight has been painful, humbling, and yet strangely settling. Viewing my family’s ancestral worlds through the lens of medicinal genealogy has broken me, but that’s the point. Telling the truth about my ancestry breaks what Sara Ahmed (2017) calls ‘the happiness seal.’ Anesthesia holds that seal in place. When the seal breaks the pain rushes to the surface. The trick is to make that pain sacred, so your life can be transformed by it, and our collective healing may begin. Untransformed pain is transmitted pain. Our failure to engage it ensures that we will continue to blow our historical trauma through one another’s bodies.

AS: I was struck in your book by the ways that teaching is central to this work. I love your conceptions of shadow texts, and how you bring a transformative pedagogical approach to what you call “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback.” Can you talk about some of this?

AB: I’m fond of describing classrooms as unlevel knowing fields, as contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are simultaneously produced and circulate with equal vigor. Those of us who teach courses with strong feminist and anti-racist content are familiar with student resistance in these spaces. Consider how easy it is to forecast most non-Black people’s responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. The words barely leave our lips before the chorus of “I think all lives matter!” or “Blue lives matter too” fill the room. These responses circulate publicly, but I focus on how they perform in philosophy classrooms because this is where I have these conversations.  Students tend to view these responses as critical thinking or healthy skepticism. They are not. There is a difference between objecting to a claim because it’s false and objecting to it because it challenges your worldview, and you feel threatened. There is a difference between a lack of agreement and a strategic refusal to listen and understand.

Dominant groups are accustomed to having an “epistemic home-turf advantage” in these conversations. We might be willing to talk about race, but only in ways that foreground our goodness, perceived innocence, and comfort. Broadly speaking then, privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a form of worldview protection: a willful resistance to new knowledge that occurs predictably in discussions that threaten a social group’s epistemic home terrain. Predictability, however, does not translate into visibility. These protective responses associated with privilege-preserving epistemic pushback are unmarked, nuanced, and are difficult to spot in philosophy classes because often masquerade as acceptable philosophical engagements. Philosophers like to argue. To make these visible I invite students to focus on how these responses function during our conversations. They perform a silencing function.

I think that good teaching should track simultaneously the social production of knowledge and ignorance. I use the term shadow texts to direct student’s attention to the ways epistemic resistance and silencing circulate during classroom discussions and to encourage them to attend to the written and spoken cognitive-affective content of this discursive resistance. Shadow texts do deep epistemic work. Shadows are by definition the product of obstacles. They are dark areas or shapes produced by bodies (obstacles) that come between a light source and a surface. “White lives matter too!” is a shadow text. It pulls attention away from the work the phrase Black Lives Matter does to focus attention on how Black lives and communities have historically been unvalued. They have not mattered. Just as shadows are regions of opacity, so shadow texts are regions of epistemic opacity. Such conversational detours and distractions tell listeners “I’m not going there. You need to convince me.” Naming these as shadow texts focus students’ attention on this double meaning. The point is to encourage them to attend to something deeper and more complicated in their learning spaces. There is genuine world-protecting resistance running alongside our class readings and discussions.

AS: Can you say something about the ways the work you do in the book is specifically feminist work?

AB: Feminist epistemologists have long noted the connections between the social location of knowers and a particular social group’s understandings of the world. The book draws on this literature to critique and advance the nuanced connections between white ignorance, the anesthesia of privilege, and the humanity-distorting weight of the histories we inherit. The work of Sarah Ahmed, Marilyn Frye, María Lugones, Aurora Levins Morales, and Mab Segrest deeply inspires my thinking in these chapters. The book is, in many ways, a product of conversations I’ve had over the years at the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) and Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST).

AS: Let’s talk more about the “privilege” part of that pushback. You open the book with an extensive genealogy on understanding privilege as “unearned power conferred systematically.”  Your turn toward assessing how we understand privilege is really generative. Can you say how you came to focus on privilege, and what you’re thinking about it in the book?

AB: There is extensive philosophical literature on whiteness and privilege, but Peggy McIntosh’s invisible and weightless knapsack metaphor remains most readers’ first introduction to the topic. It offers a clear path to perceiving what white supremacy works repeatedly to conceal. I still teach it. At some point, I noticed that white students treated her unpacking exercise as a one-and-done task. Some leveraged it as evidence of their goodness and others wallowed in shame, guilt, and fragility. When we focus exclusively on making privileges visible, we do the work of the head, not the heart. My students’ desire for comfort was more powerful than their desire to heal the wound at the heart of whiteness. Most white people are more comfortable discussing what white privilege does for us than we are considering what it does to us.

Liberation requires a more nuanced weighty understanding of privilege, one that attends to how white peoples’ damaged psyches are what allow the violence to continue. People of color feel the weight of whiteness every day. It presses down on them when they shop, wait for their friends in coffee shops, or study in empty classrooms in the evening. It is their bodies that absorb the weight of white people’s hypervigilance, entitlement, discomfort in nonwhite spaces, whitewashed curriculum, and impulse to hoard opportunities and resources. It is their communities that absorb white people’s tendency to perceive the world wrongly and to make bad moral judgments based on our misperceptions. Weights are measured in kilos and pounds. Following James Baldwin, I measure the weight of whiteness in the costs and losses to our humanity. It’s a heaviness that breaks human connection. Broken connections feel heavy in our bodies. Consider the heaviness of a broken heart, the death of a family member, or a friendship that has gone sour. That’s the quality of the weight I want white people to feel.

Yet, when I explain this I often hear, “But, I can’t feel the weight? If it’s so heavy, then why can’t I feel it? The knapsack is not weightless then because it is empty– it is filled with wildcards. It just feels weightless because white supremacy structures the world so that white people have, generation after generation, been anesthetized to privilege’s contorting weight. Anesthesia is part of the master’s tool kit. It numbs us to the weight.  Privilege is the anesthesia that keeps us from feeling whiteness’s costs and losses. White supremacy does not want white people to feel the weight because if we realized its true costs to our humanity; that is, if the price of whiteness were tangibly felt, if we were presented with an actual bill, then it would dawn on us that the racial contract that Charles Mills describes, is really a suicide pact.

AS: Okay, last question, though we could go on forever. I think there is some tension in philosophy on whiteness about the practice of, roughly, relating to white people – whether we focus on abolishing whiteness or healing white people as part of antiracist work. This is perhaps a false binary, so please push back on me around it, but it came up for me in your discussion about whiteness and racialized trauma. If we frame whiteness as a trauma response, I guess I worry that the theory of change we’re positing is that healing white people will solve racial oppression.

AB: I appreciate you raising this concern. I was haunted by two worries as I wrote the book: A fear that readers would think I was recentering white distress, and a fear that pondering the correspondences between the habits of whiteness and trauma response would upstage traumas of slavery and indigenous genocide. Colonization is traumatizing and indigenous and enslaved peoples were the main targets of European greed. But think about it this way. What kind of a person do you have to become in order to burn villages, traffic human beings, torture and work them to death, separate families on auction blocks, etc. what does that do to you?

My ancestors committed these atrocities, and I’m curious about how I inherit that weight. I’m still thinking about this. Resmaa Menakem’s approach had a huge impact on my understanding of intergenerational trauma. He clearly explains the texture of white Americans’ intergenerational trauma. He is also adamant that white Americans do not get to make our intergenerational trauma the center of racial healing projects. We do, however, have to acknowledge the past, face it, and heal. White people don’t have a right to comfort here, because our comfort is tied to others’ suffering. We have a choice about whether to feel the pain of our personal, ancestral, and national histories in ways that either promote healing and wholeness, or in ways that promote numbness and comfort.

The white ally who refuses to consider how her whitely habits (hypervigilance, perceiving the world wrongly) have real material implications for people of color refuses to feel how centuries of white entitlement distort her humanity. She avoids the conversation because she fears re-centering. She drops the weight. Her caution does not make her a good ally. It makes her an anesthetized missionary, eager and willing to help, but unwilling to feel.  Think about it this way. It would be like if you were doing couples therapy and your partner said, “I’ll go to appointments with you and support your work to make our relationship better, but don’t ask me to work on my own stuff. That makes me too uncomfortable. My old habits work for me.” Indeed, at a recent APA meeting, Gaile Pohlhaus suggested to me that inviting white people to hold space with the weight of our defensiveness, hypervigilance, hoarding, or historical amnesia may serve as a form of harm reduction.

The moral of the story here is that white people’s fear of the inherited weight signals our ongoing failure to heal. White people’s massive defensiveness and our failure to hold space with how our collective intergenerational traumas are intertwined across racial lines make it difficult to stand in genuine solidarity with people of color.

AS: Alison, thank you so much!

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.

Alexis Shotwell

Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project, and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.

Alison Bailey

Alison Bailey is a Professor of Philosophy at Illinois State University where she directs the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her scholarship engages issues at the intersections of feminist theories, philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and social epistemology (especially epistemic injustice and ignorance). Her recent work has addressed issues of anger and epistemic injustice. Her book, The Weight of Whiteness: Feminist Engagements with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance (Lexington Books, 2021) is framed as a series of invitations to wade slowly and mindfully into the inherited weight of whiteness and to hold space with the ways that white supremacy works to anesthetize white people from the damage it does to our collective humanity.