While anti-colonialism had focused on the expulsion of the colonial powers and the creation of new political nations, the postcolonial project was to decolonise the mind, to dismantle the racial hierarchies which were one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism and, as Bob Marley put it, to ‘free ourselves from mental slavery’. The damage that had been done by colonialism was not only political and economic, it was also cultural, shaping minds and subjectivities. Marley’s powerful and evocative lyrics were intended for his own people, the oppressed and the exploited, whose sense of self had been damaged and deformed by colonial power. … But it was not only the colonised who needed to dismantle their minds, it was also the colonisers, those who had assumed power and superiority over subordinated subjects, whose culture was built on the disavowal of violence and conquest, whose ‘imperial dispositions’ were embedded in everyday practices

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper & Keith McLelland (2015, 1 link).

Introduction

You might recognise the title of this week’s session as a lyric from Bob Marley’s (1980) ‘Redemption Song’ (listen). It draws upon a 1937 speech made my Guyanese pan-Africanist writer Walter Rodney who said “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind” (in Davis 2010 np link). So far this term, we have been looking into the multiple legacies of empire in the lives of colonised people, their colonisers, and their descendents. This week, we are going to get more introspective by examining arguments made about the legacies of empire on people’s senses of self, ways in which these selves can be ‘decolonised’, and the role of this process in wider decolonial politics which require some sense of shared purpose, ‘allyship’ and activism. Along the way, we will introduce a set of concepts that are used in the critique of ‘whiteness’. But, before we do this, there’s a wider context to explain.

The concept of ‘mental slavery’ and ‘freeing our minds’ is much more than a catchy lyric in an iconic reggae song. It resurfaces parts of the discussion we were having in Week 4 about the languages of slavery and the concept of creole cultures. Search online for literature on ‘decolonising the mind’ and you will find reference to a 1986 book of that title by Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Here, he talks about being obliged, as an African person, to speak and write in a coloniser’s language full of European ways of noticing, thinking and making sense. As Reiko Shindo explains:

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ reflects on his own relations to languages: he speaks Gikuyu (Gĩkũyũ) as his ‘mother tongue’ … and English as an imposed language of the British Empire. Ngũgĩ laments that, in Kenya, English is exclusively identified as the ‘language of conceptualisation, of thinking, of formal education, of mental development’ …, whereas African languages only function as ‘the language of daily interaction in the home and in the community’ … and are thus rendered irrelevant culturally and politically. What ensues is the lack of ‘people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environments, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’ … . Therefore, for Ngũgĩ, selecting Gikuyu language for his writing is a political statement to reclaim the silenced voice of the colonised. He considers that writing in a native tongue of the colonised is ‘part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples’ … By producing his works in Gikuyu, he aims to regain the cultural and political relevance of Gikuyu and enact Gikuyu speakers as political subjects in postcolonial Kenya

Reiko Shindo (2022, 653).

Colonised people and their descendents are not the only people damaged by the linguistic aspects of colonialism and empire, however. Catherine Hall et al (2015 above) echo the words of Trinidadian writer CLR James who, Priyamvada Gopal (2022, 879) says, “trenchantly argued in relation to the British empire [that] the ‘virulent poison’ of imperial mythmaking harmed British people as much as it did colonial subjects. Even as they were ready in the post-independence era to develop new and human relations with former colonial subjects, Britons remained ‘choked and stifled by the emanations from the myth’”.

This week we interrogate the concept of ‘whiteness’ – and related concepts – and then interrogate that interrogation by looking at what it means, not just for the ‘allyship’ which we might expect to come next, but also for what Aouragh (2019, 21) calls “a fraternity of radical kinship” that’s needed for this form of decolonial praxis to be more than just an empty gesture.

Before the class

This week’s 5 tasks involve a combination of quite quick playlist-watching tasks, a series of detailed bits of self-questioning from a popular anti-racist workbook, and a final key reading that contains the twist that will take us into next week’s session on apologies and reparations. Alltogether, these tasks should take you no more than three and a bit hours to complete.

Task 1 asks you to watch an epic TED talk on ‘the danger of a single story’ by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Task 2 asks you to watch a series of videos questioning and ridiculing the question often strangely asked of people of colour in white majority societies – ‘Where are you from?’ – and links this to the concept of ‘racial micro-aggression’. Task 3 asks you to delve into the concept of ‘whiteness’ as a powerful legacy of empire, asks who might notice it most and how it is experienced by those who notice it, and then introduces you to a workbook to help you identify and reflect upon its component parts. This task also introduces a couple of concepts that have been used to make sense of responses to the questioning of whiteness, and how these can help to dampen and distract decolonial politics. Task 4 contains this week’s key academic reading, which moves these arguments on a step to include understandings of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ in a more intersectional way of thinking and acting together.

Task 1: The danger of a single story

The first task this week is to watch an 20 minute 2009 TED talk by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is an excellent place to begin to think critically about “cultural decolonisation – what some call the decolonisation of the mind” (Jo Sharp in Martin & Griffiths 2014, 941 link). Please watch it with the prompts below in mind.

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• Growing up in Nigeria, what kinds of books did Adichie read as a child? What shaped her imagination of the West?
• How and where did she experience other people fitting her – and her writing – into a ‘single story’ about Africa?
• What effects do she say these ‘single stories’ have on different people’s senses of self and identity?
• How did her discovery of African writers change this? What kind of multiple stories is she arguing for and why?

[Study time: approx. 30 minutes]

Task 2: Where are you from?

The next short task tries to bring this concept of the ‘single story’ closer to home, into the ‘student experience’. Asking someone you have just met – particularly in Week 1 at university – where they are from can seem like the most normal thing in the world. But, when we’re turning our critical gaze on the so-called ‘normal’, ‘mainstream’, ‘home’, ‘core’ culture in the UK, this is the kind of ‘innocent’ question that can make people feel excluded, out of place, unwelcome, different, second best. When this exclusion, etc. is felt, this kind of question is known as a ‘racial microaggression’. This is the first of our concepts this week, and here’s a short definition.

Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group . … These exchanges are so pervasive and automatic in daily conversations and interactions that they are often dismissed and glossed over as being innocent and innocuous

Derald Sue in Shangrila Joshi, Priscilla McCutcheon & Elizabeth Sweet (2015, 304-5).

To better understand this concept, we want you to watch a 3-video 6-minute playlist which documents / satirises the asking and answering of a simple question – ‘Where are you from?’ One is a serious journalism piece, and two are comedy sketches. As you watch these videos, please use the prompts below to organise your notes.

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• Who seems to be asking this question of whom? What happens when the tables are turned? What’s it like to watch?
• What assumptions do the people asking this question seem to make? What does this seem to say about them?
• What kinds of answers are they looking for? What effects can this have on the person being asked?
• How do the two comedy sketches bring the problems with this ‘innocent’ question to light?
• How do you think this ‘where are you from?’ question connects the Adichie’s argument about ‘the danger of a single story’?

[Study time: approx. 20 minutes]

Task 3: Questioning Whiteness

Looking, with such passion and single-mindedness, at non-dominant groups has … the effect of reproducing the sense of the oddness, differentness, exceptionality of these groups, the feeling that they are departures from the norm. Meanwhile the [white] norm has carried on as if it is the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human … Trying to think about the representation of whiteness as an ethnic category … is difficult, partly because white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular, but also because, when whiteness qua whiteness does come into focus, it is often revealed as emptiness, absence, denial or even a kind of death

Richard Dyer (1998, 44).

In this task, we develop the argument that ends the third video above. In this comedy sketch, a Korean-heritage American woman turns the tables, to ask and ask again where the ‘normal’ white American man is from? It’s funny because his answers are so ridiculous, but it could be argued that they are no more ridiculous than the answers he was looking for her to provide. What she seems to be questioning – for our purposes this week – is the concept of ‘whiteness’ (and ‘white supremacy’). This is one of the most powerful and enduring remnants of empire that all of us, somehow, live with today.

There are a number of connected concepts that we will try to make sense of this in this task. These fit together in quite a neat package. We discussed the concept of ‘white privilege’ in Week 2, but what is ‘whiteness’? In the 1990s, British film theorist Richard Dyer – above – argued that it is, for many, an unquestioned norm from which ‘others’ deviate but which, itself, goes unnoticed and unquestioned by those who benefit from it. Writing from a Black American feminist perspective, however, bell hooks took Dyer’s argument and argued that this doesn’t work for everyone:

Socialized to believe in the fantasy, that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and nonthreatening, many white people assume that this is the way black people conceptualise whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt is black life, most often as terrorising imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness

bell hooks (1997, 169).

Interrogating this terror, she argues, would allow us to “both name racism’s impact and help to break its hold” (ibid. 178) and this, in turn, would help us to “decolonise our minds and our imaginations” (ibid.).

So how can we go about this task? We are going to ask you to try. There are 3 parts to this task. And a list of questions to prompt your note-taking at the end.

a) a video warm-up

To begin with, we would like you to watch a 2-video 10-minute playlist. The first video comes from a 2020 Channel 4 documentary series called the ‘School that tried to end racism’ in which a group of children learn how white privilege affects all of them. In the second video author Layla Saad introduces her (2018) workbook ‘Me and white supremacy’.

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This idea that white supremacy applies to the so-called ‘bad ones’ is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people. White supremacy is far from fringe. In white-centred societies and communities, it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created

Layla Saad (2018, 13).

b) reflecting on whiteness and white supremacy

The second part of this task follows on from Layla Saad’s video and asks you to spend some time doing the activities she outlines in her (2018) workbook ‘Me and white supremacy’. This contains 28 activities that can help to reveal elements of a deeply engrained and unnoticed ‘culture of whiteness’ and ‘white supremacy’. This may be an uncomfortable experience for many of you. Its intro chapters guide readers slowly towards the tasks. It’s not a good idea to skip straight to them, for reasons she explains. We’re asking you to read the book from the start. Get into some activities. Spend no more than an hour on this. See where you end up. Whatever you get to read, please consider the questions below and bring notes to class.

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White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include an outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviours such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviours, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium

Robin DiAngelo (2011, 54 link).

c) defensive emotions and responses

This next part of this task is to read the text we’ve written below. As Leila Saad (2018) and others argue, and the school video above suggests, whiteness and white supremacy are powerfully ingrained concepts, and they’re hard to make visible and to dislodge. Mentioning them, not to mention interrogating them, may produce – in even the most willingly self-decolonising person – some uncomfortable, painful responses. What’s left is to introduce you to the ways in which these responses have been conceptualised and their significance to decolonial politics.

Responses to observations and critiques of everyday whiteness and white supremacy, this argument goes, can bring to the surface another feature of whiteness and white supremacy – ‘white fragility’ – a concept developed by Robin DiAngelo. See the quote above. Why, though? As Priyamvada Gopal has recently suggested, “when faced with the challenge to decolonise, it is as though the postcolonial imaginary in the geopolitical West can envision nothing less than revenge exacted against itself in the same coin” (2022, 875 added emphasis).

So what happens when decolonial education focuses on consciousness-raising? Is that decolonial enough. No, is usually the answer. Let’s briefly look at an account published earlier this year by UCL geographers Tariq Jazeel, Anson Mackay and others about their annual first year ‘decolonial engagement’ – i.e. one day field trip – to the Royal Geographical Society at its headquarters in London. The aim of this trip is to make UCL Geography students “both aware of geography’s problematic colonial histories, and party to the ways the discipline is changing and critically engaging with its past” (Jazeel et al. 2022, 516 link).

Towards the end of their account, however, they express a worry. Maybe this trip “flirts with the risk of what Tuck and Yang … refer to as ‘settler moves to innocence'” (ibid, 518). By this, they mean that, perhaps, it “encourages students to be aware of, and reflect on, the colonial histories of whiteness and exclusion in geographical knowledge production, but does little to ensure any real challenge or change to the colonial continuities in those conditions of knowledge production” (ibid.). While we haven’t been examining ‘settler colonialism’ directly (1. below) it’s worth thinking about what ‘settler moves to innocence’ could mean for us too. Here’s a taste of Tuck & Yang’s argument:

There is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples making moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization. The too-easy adoption of decolonizing discourse (making decolonization a metaphor) is just one part of that history and it taps into pre-existing tropes that get in the way of more meaningful potential alliances. We think of the enactment of these tropes as a series of moves to innocence …, which problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. … Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler. … In describing settler moves to innocence, our goal is to provide a framework of excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization

Eve Tuck & K Wayne Yang (2012, 3 & 10 link).

Both ‘white fragility’ and ‘settler moves to innocence’ invite us to critically reflect on our emotional responses to efforts to decolonise our education, our selves and everything else. These emotions, so the argument goes, are part and parcel of the ideas and processes we’re trying to work through in the module.

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• When Dyer, hooks, Saad, DiAngelo & Tuck & Yang talk about ‘whiteness’, ‘white privilege’, ‘white supremacy’, and ‘settler moves to innocence’, are they talking only to and about ‘white’ people?
• How would you describe your emotional responses to the tasks so far this week? What might the effects of these responses be? How and where do you think the emotions of decolonisation can be channelled? (see 2, below)

[Study time: approx. 1 hour and 20 minutes]

1. After looking so closely at all of these arguments in the context of plantation societies, it’s easy to think that ‘settler colonialism’ might be quite different and that this concept could be irrelevant to us in this module. The decendents of enslaved African people are not ‘indigenous’ to the Caribbean. Its indigenous population were murdered and displaced. However, when it comes to who owns the land and who doesn’t, historically and in the present, the concept seems to be transferable. As Erna Brodber (2009, 72-3 link) explains: “The 311,070 persons of African ancestry emancipated in Jamaica in 1834 and fully so in 1838, owned no land and were outside of the political system – they had no vote. Few had family power – mates, children; few owned livestock. They owned no space. They had no army, no ships, no compass, no respected organised grouping. All they had was their individual minds and souls with which to create a viable space for themselves and their progeny in Jamaica and eventually to weld themselves in a nation or a respected part of a nation. … [A] conceptual framework, frame of reference, portrait of self had to be constructed”.

2. NB in coursework 2, there is always a self-reflective question asking you to consider what particular aspects of the module have meant for you personally.

Task 4: A Politics of Discomfort

It is uncomfortable to know that you benefit from a system premised on structurally disadvantaging others symbolically, discursively and materially. Discomfort proposes an important politics because it works to unseat people from a position of comfort and privilege so that a new order can be imagined. However, a politics of discomfort holds different demands depending on your place within the racial terrain – giving up the white privileges which you have inherited versus risking hard-fought privileges by refusing to be silent about the racist structures that continue to shape yours and others experiences even when you appear to be a beneficiary … An intersectional analysis may be recuperative by drawing connections between social experiences rather than divisions between them, and expanding our gaze so that we might ask a different question: who benefits from sharpening oppositions between differentially oppressed people within the British population? In order to be recuperative, there needs to be an understanding of ‘white’ as a racial category and how whiteness as a system operates through interlocking oppressions, where the white heterosexual able-bodied male functions as the norm; the seat of white privilege. This would provide greater understanding of how privilege and oppression operate in complex ways which defy us/them logics

Madelaine-Sophie Abbas (2020, 218 & 216).

There’s one more thing to do this week because, as Priyamvada Gopal (2022, 884) has put it, decolonisation “cannot take place just in the classroom” where students are challenged to decolonise themselves and/or their minds! This, she says, “runs the risk of standing in for decolonisation itself” (ibid.). Put more bluntly, she cites Tuck and Yang’s concerns that the “cultivation of critical consciousness [should not] stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing land” (ibid. 883). Or, as Miryam Aouragh (2019) puts it, critiques of ‘white prejudice’ can “reduce… racism to an attitude[,] de-centre… the importance of power relations and structural capitalist exploitation … [and] place… individual experience above the role of unity in struggle.” For this final task, we would like you to read the following review paper by Madeline-Sophie Abbas which discusses three books which have made important contributions to popular decolonising debates in the UK. It can help us to bring together what you have been looking in to this week, and to think more critically and carefully about the ‘what next?’ question.

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Here are some questions to guide your note-making for this reading:

• What is intersectional thinking and how can it foster alternatives to historically rooted ‘them’ and ‘us’ narratives?
• How can a critical attention to ‘whiteness’, ‘blackness’ and and anti-racism foster connections, shared concerns and actions?
• What does Abbas mean by a ‘politics of discomfort’ and why is it an important part of anti-racist & decolonial activism?

[Study time: approx. 1 hour]

Our timetabled class

We want you to bring your notes, questions and links from the tasks above to our timetabled class. Here, we will try to bring your responses into conversation with those of other students both through some small group discussions and via an all-class Padlet. We would like you to share ideas and to think things through together, and to come to some conclusions about this week’s topic. As usual, we will drop by each table for a chat.

We will ask you to work with the people nearest you and to add your thoughts, ideas and questions to the Padlet. This will appear on the big screen in class, we will watch it fill up, and we will respond to what you put there. We will try to get to everyone’s posts and discuss what they raise, and may add some comments after class if there are some leftover issues we ran out of time to cover.

Please note that each week’s Padlet will be opened for you to add to in class.

NB if you are unable to make this week’s class, or wish to revisit the discussion, a recording of the session will automatically be posted on the module’s ELE page.

Supplementary reading list

Each week we will add some supplementary academic readings which will allow you to dig into the details discussed above in more depth. This week, there are a number of readings mentioned above which have links to the original texts. These are interesting but not as important to follow up. Below, we list the ones which don’t have links, which are more important and will allow you to get at the more detailed and nuanced arguments behind this week’s tasks. These may be useful for coursework 2 and/or 3 that will be set at the end of term.

NB module assessments assess what has been set and learned in a module. We will expect you to use the key and supplementary readings from these blog posts as core readings in your assessments.

Comments and questions

If you have any questions or comments about this week’s tasks, if something needs further explanation, if there’s a link that’s not working, … please post it below.

NB we would like to keep ALL routine Q&As public on this website where everyone can see them. PLEASE DON’T EMAIL US about this kind of thing, unless what you have to say is particularly embarrassing or relates to an ILP (and if you do, don’t forget to say you have an ILP!).

However, there is one exception, if you are unable to make class this week, please email Ian (i.j.cook@exeter.ac.uk) to let us know.

Thanks

Ian & Nicola

NB this week’s header image comes from a 2019 Buzzfeed article in which ‘where are you from?’ is featured one of 21 ‘racial microagressions’ reported by the students who were interviewed.