Chronicle EditorWHEN Chairman Mao Zedong said “there is great disorder under the heavens, the situation is excellent”, he was not celebrating disorder. Mao was too great a revolutionary in his own take, perhaps, to celebrate disorder. He meant that even times of dystopia and disorder can be an excellent opportunity for thought and political activism. Two scholars, Shona Hunter and Christi van der Westhuizen seem to have taken the dystopia of the Covid-19 moment to engage in the excellent work of confronting the monstrosity of whiteness/racism and the colonialities that it has constructed and produced in the world system. They did this by assembling a platoon of 33 scholars that contributed to a book volume: Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2022). The scholars treat whiteness as an organising idea and also an artefact of the modern colonial world system that has white supremacy, racism and violation of others as its darker side.
The book volume is a work of power and beauty. The power is in the observations, argumentative stamina, and critical conclusions the various authors make concerning the world-systemic problem of whiteness. The beauty is in the art of writing and rendition. Where power and beauty meet what is born is a classic such as the book in question. As such the book is a rich good read that is a proper handbook in that all of us that take social justice seriously should hold in hand. The first striking feature of the book, in my view, is its multiple multiplicities. It is multinational by virtue of the diverse nationalities of the contributors that hail from the Global North and the Global South, from different countries therein. The multivocality of the book comes from the way different voices of the different scholars are collapsed in between the two covers. The multidiciplinarity of the book is to the point of being undisciplinary, the writers are from all the imaginable intellectual and academic disciplines of the global academy. As such, the book is also multi-perspectival. All sorts of different geographies and biographies are collapsed, critically, into the book volume that makes for a pulsating read.
A book in dark times
The dystopia of the present world and its political and economic system is dramatised in the Covid-19 pandemic and the increasing threat of nuclear war. Both Covid-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine have seen people dying in alarming numbers. The global ecological crisis that is symptomatised by rapid climate change, extreme heat and extreme cold, massive flooding and earth movement, and polluted air and water are all adding to the precarity of human, animal and plant life on earth. Some scientists have already started talking about dead water and dead air where the life-giving elements of nature are themselves dying of poisoning.
The life of the earth itself is in jeopardy. Refugees, stateless and nationless populations, are multiplying, poverty and violent social inequalities are expanding. The chapters in the book in question reflect this dystopia with a kind of tragic optimism. The contributors are clear about how bad things are under the sun, the disorder under the heavens, but they retain some critical hope that humanity will recover itself and the earth from dystopia and restore human, animal, and plant life to progress and peace. There is hope that the dying water and the dying air can be rescued from pollution and the toxins.
Viral colonialities
Innovatively, the writers in the volume compare whiteness and the colonialities that it comes with to a viral pandemic that has spread itself to the ends of the earth, much like Covid-19 itself. Whiteness, like the racism that it is built on, is an ontological and also an epistemological phenomenon in that it is tied to being and also to knowledge. The book does not only invite readers to learn and think about the problem of whiteness/racism, but it goes beyond to demand that readers unlearn and unthink coloniality as a way of negating and challenging it in daily life. Unlearning and unthinking whiteness/racism is even more vital for peoples of the Global South that have been victims of racism and coloniality. The victory of racism and coloniality has been in how the victims have normalised and naturalised their inferiorisation and accepted the dominance of whiteness as God-given when it is a colonial construct that should be deconstructed as the crime against humanity that it is. Coloniality is at its triumphant when its victims not only accept it as normal but also reproduce it as natural and permanent. Steve Biko said it that the greatest weapon in the hands of the conqueror is the mind of the conquered. Once the conqueror has control of the mind of the conqueror, conquest has achieved its zenith. That is why decolonising our minds which Ngugi wa Thiongo recommended should be our capital priority.
Vita activa and vita contemplativa
It is Hannah Arendt who gifted the philosophical world with the powerful concepts of vita Contemplativa and vita activa. She meant that the life of a philosopher should not only be isolated to contemplation but should also be extended to activism. Philosophers should, otherwise, not only contemplate on and describe injustice but should also get into the streets of activism, protest and struggle to challenge domination and conquest.
The book under discussion is an intellectual weapon as well as it is a potent tool of activism and stubborn anti-racism. Shona Hunter and Christi van der Westhuizen unmask the form and content of whiteness that thrives on being invisible, ignorant of its crimes, and pretending to be innocent when the evidence of its evil in the world system is abound. White skinned human beings are encouraged to lead the struggle against racism, to come clean on their unearned privilege, and to refuse the continuation of white supremacy in their name. The decolonial potency of the book, in my view, is in how white skinned thinkers lead the way in challenging racial injustice and demanding the moral equality of human beings that is as natural as it is a human entitlement. The decoloniality of the book is in overturning the propaganda that decoloniality is a philosophy and an activism against all white people when it is a philosophy and activism against racists and racism. In that way, white skinned people that stand up against whiteness and coloniality shame the devil of coloniality and give decoloniality its place as a philosophy of human liberation.
Decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation, therefore, demands that both black and white people challenge whiteness as a way of achieving their rehumanisation and liberation. The true fall of man in the world, otherwise, has been the classification of human beings according to the idea of race. Man can only rise to salvation, and even power and glory, by declassifying human beings and deracialising human relations at a world scale. This should not be done in colour blind non-racialism that ignores racial injustice, but it should be done through rigorous anti-racism that acknowledges racial inequalities and racial injustice and actively seeks to undo them as crimes against humanity. There is a human family, made out of black and white skinned people, over and above the world of racism and white supremacy that pretends to be normal and natural.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa. This article is a simplified and shortened version of a presentation in a book launch organised by the departments of Philosophy and Anthropology at Wits, on 18 August 2022. Contacts: [email protected] .
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