Stefano Harney on whiteness

http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/

It’s also good timing that you wrote to me about this comment I made to you in an earlier conversation because I just finished a terrific book called Dixie Be Damned by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford. They write about insurrections in the South from the dismal swamp in the 18^th century to a 1975 uprising in a North Carolina women’s prison. It’s stirring stuff and then in a really sound, clear-hearted concluding chapter they surprised me. They said our enemies have been saved not by fascism but by democracy. It should not have surprised me, given that we were just speaking about Du Bois and democratic despotism, but it did. They are right. And I think it is in this sense that a better university would be worse for us, has been worse for us, in a paradoxical way. Some ask, ‘Is another university possible?’ Well, that implies this one is possible but more than that it suggests another university would be better for us. I don’t know about that. This is not to say I do not find work like that of Marc Bousquet and Chris Newfield indispensable. I do. But there is something at stake in Shirley and Stafford’s book and I want to talk with you about it because I think it connects to your question about how the Undercommons book has been read and used.

The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say:

‘Those who would risk extending solidarity across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence.”  (Italics in the original.)

Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well, I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship, accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community.