Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.12
White Privilege
by Travis Hedge Coke
What are they doing about the end of the world in Guayana, in Ethiopia,
Why are so many men ethnically from east of Western Europe in The Invisibles, midwives to the universe? Or, in service to the white people who do things?
Is the centering of the saving/destroying of the universe focused on the United Kingdom and France, or the British colony, the United States of America, a genuine occurrence or a blind of operations?
Good grammar be damned. Gaza be spared.
How much around the Earth do you have to go to stop being east of Western Europe?
One of the troubles in addressing white privilege – and its cousin, light skin privilege – is that white is both a made up thing and one which can shift in qualifiers in an instant. White is always circumstantial. Always revocable.
White is a set of mutable privileges.
And, pretty much everyone is a midwife.
One of the first beats a white supremacist learns is how to play We Are the Majority simultaneous with The Horde a Them Is So Fucking Huge, mixed loops of a vile triphop demo you stumble on by bad algorithms clicking song to song across a vast website which should know better.
To be white in an anglophone nation or an anglophone context, is to be permitted, momentarily, to forget whiteness. To forget that whiteness is a thing and not the thing, that when a conversation turns to “soon, white people may not be the majority,” the conversation is almost inevitably adding up every people not white into a mass, regardless of culture, class, ethnicity, nationality, race, skin color, surname, lineage or linearity.
Why can’t we tell white people from white people?
Whiteness is provisional. I think racists know this and rather than let on, they attempt to anchor it with racism.
Whiteness is the molehill mountain. The prairie dog hole you can break your ankle in.
Around the age The Invisibles anchored itself to me, attending St Kate’s, we went to see Trainspotting at a multiplex. Four or five Native kids flouting the “no one under eighteen” sign, excited about Ewan McGregor’s penis, the Gregorian chants and Macarena fading into a little reverb of the Beatles resurgence via Anthology 1, 2, and 3, and an explosion of Bowie, MC5, and Iggy Pop vitalization our teenaged experience had not taught us to anticipate nor to question.
Trainspotting got us all to swear off, well, heroin at least, and briefly some other things, with people lapsing or not at their own pace.
Trainspotting was somehow the most Native movie, the most Indigenous film we had seen since 1989’s Powwow Highway. It felt supremely Native. “It’s shite being Scottish” was the rallying cry pricking every Indian kid’s ear.
We were naive and confused, frustrated, a world away from the locales of the movie or the book it was based on, and more than likely, no one ever intended this resonance, but we all knew it was true.
In a way, in the year, that movie did a lot of what The Invisibles would take its course to also do. In its way, the movie and novel are The Invisibles, by other authors, in other forms, with rougher dirty jokes and less “lost souls.” In a way, so too, were we, living our lives.
For many people over hundreds of years, life is being fucked by the English. The white supremacism, white colonialist violence, is so English, it may as well be, the English, and yet, for many colonialists in English colonies, for many white people in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, even the English might not be white (enough) or colonizing (enough) to their bootlicking standards.
Invisibles may be racist, may have supremacist notions even they do not understand are supremacist or racist. There is racism embedded in common and colloquial speech, in admonishing and admiration. This is emblematic of racism being endemic to so many of us, because of the world and cultures of the world in which we live, but also, that everyone is Invisible.
The little CIA man behind your awareness might be your personal dirty policeman. In these white-colonized territories, he is a white man. Phantom ghost haunter shoggoth shambles. Bogeyman. Boogerman.
Tonight, in my own life, white supremacists are hitting social media to say “God works in mysterious ways,” after a drag revue they threatened mysteriously had its power cut off when terrorists shot up multiple power stations around the county, blanketing thirty to forty thousand people in darkness.
By the time you read this, it will no longer be that tonight, but it is always that tonight. And, believe me, it is whiteness which hates drag. It is whiteness which hates any queerness, even the whiteness which buys into queerness and the queer who buy way into whiteness.
When Ally Henny said online that the song, Mary Did You Know, is mansplaining to Mary, mother of Jesus, her own life and child, the co-writer of the song, Mark Lowry, sought her out to say, “I wasn’t asking you.”
Is that a white man being white about it to a Black woman? An author and creator defending territory against very mild criticism? Just douchey?
A piece of dried nasal mucus on the electric wet of your brain.
It takes a John Waters to confront Maryland whiteness so thoroughly and decidedly, because John Waters rarely begins to talk without showing his own. And, because when someone nonwhite does it.
. and , point stab and point stab but your hand jerks. Pass and skewer passant skewback and. In an attempt to fix whiteness with grammar by transfixing punctuation.
Most white people will not do the work to confront systemic white supremacy. Their own whiteness? No. No no no.
So, what is it we midwife? Nonwhite and white alike? Or, separately?
I am tempted to say that it is a whiteness which speaks when some nonwhite persons rage or hate or snipe or snark, because it is definitely their colonization talking, but colonization does not make whiteness. There is no killing the Indian and saving the man.
The man is not that important. Dipesh Chakrabarty: “(I do not gloss ‘man’ for obvious reasons).”
The making Indian of India and Cherokee and Dine and so much, is the orienting of orientalization. It is the colonial.
White people are colonized, too. Too often, they have colonized themselves. Colonization reenacted, reiterated on strata, across levels, beveled and crimped into our hearts and daily thoughts, rituals and consciousness.
Whiteness, to be clarified in the sense of butter, has to be addressed by whiteness, but it cannot only be addressed by whiteness, though it inevitably seeks, even in good faith or earnestness, to erase, mute, remove, destroy, forget other voices.
Chakrabarty: “Not every modern nation in the history of the last two hundred and fifty or so years has felt obliged to mint replicas of the so-called European bourgeoisie, but none, one could argue, has been quite able to escape the ghosts o the categories and themes… the ghost… haunts us all in many different forms.”
Truer, is that white people are not, either, wholly, their whiteness. Whiteness is bourgeoisie ghost in many forms. Whiteness is not a culture, an ethnicity, a genetic deal or family tree. There are white supremacist nations, but there has been no long-standing or notable white nation.
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Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
2011. John Waters: Interviews. Edited by James Egan.
1998. Flight to Canada. Ishmael Reed.
1970. Black London Blues. Ram John Holder.