I'm Not Racist, My Best Square is Black!

climbingrock climbingracismraceoutdoor sports
Written By Rob Moore
Climbing "Communities" Near Police Murders
Community is a practice, not an idea.

When Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang started #theshowmustbepaused it was “in observance of the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard.” What it became was something else entirely.

In this episode, we talk about Black Out Tuesday (AKA Black Square) & Allyship Fatigue with Dom Davis. We’re asking questions: 

  • Just how tiring are good performances? 

  • Is it woke if it’s just about money?

  • ...what? ...they said….what?

Allyship fatigue and the black square have a lot in common. They draw focus. They invite unwelcome comparisons. They equate the unlike. And they do it, ostensibly, for Black lives. Allyship fatigue and black square both need two things to work. They need privilege and an audience. The thirst for a virtue signal cannot be denied - the history of whiteness is a virtue signal - something virtue-adjacent that sounds good, but exists entirely in theory. See also: All men are created equal.

What’s so specifically weird about allyship fatigue is how quickly it was invented and circulated. Black people have been abused, tortured, murdered, discriminated against, and subjected to a never-ending stream of violence and oppression since there have been Black people in America. It took white America 8 months and a few books for it all to be too much. Reading Audre Lourde in 1981 “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” reminds us that not much has changed, allies and enemies are often hard to distinguish, and that there is no topic that whiteness can’t co-opt to benefit whiteness. 

The Black Square was interesting because it engaged something different entirely, but ended with identical results. Instead of borrowing Black pain then returning it because it’s overwhelming (as allyship fatigue does) the black square pretends to help. It’s digital, ephemeral, and unaccountable. It’s an ironic badge that actively drowned out the voices of black people while loudly protesting the silencing of Black people. 

What links the two is the element of performance. Allyship fatigue is not surprising, it is inevitable that paying any serious attention to blackness in America - hell, otherness in America - would lead to a marked reduction in perceived white wellbeing. What’s distressing about allyship fatigue is the separation of the two words to create a special condition. To be an ally is to be fatigued, it is an invitation to participate in your own pedagogical annihilation. It’s not a cruise, it’s a crucible. You’re going to fuck it up. It’s not supposed to be fun. You aren’t sharing the load, you’re taking on far too little, far too late. 

To proclaim your “fatigue” is to recenter yourself and your whiteness in the conversation. The need to proclaim a heightened sensitivity to the horror, the inability to cope with how bad it all is? It’s a not-very convincing portrayal of an ally.

Rendering a convincing portrait is what the black square was all about. It was easy. It was viral. It was completely stolen from black women, remade in whiteness, and then used as a cudgel against black voices, drowning them out in a frenzy to proclaim - “I’m not racist!” Brands, individuals, concepts - the mass self-forgiveness campaign on behalf of capitalist, neoliberal white brands has only begun. Businesses have donated 250m of the 50bn that they pledged a year ago. Has anyone been holding their climbing brands accountable? Or is it back to “community” and playing pretend?

This is the crux of this matter. It is about the deep-seated miseducation, misunderstanding, and misalignment of what it is to be racist. Racism is endemic to society, and you participate in and benefit from society, but you yourself are not racist? That’s what we at ACP call: “Internet Racism” which largely centers on denying the problem. You aren’t burning a cross, therefore, you are not racist. You have a Black friend, or donated to a Black cause, or have a Black spouse, and therefore, you are not racist. Therefore, therefore, therefore. 

There is no evasion too complex, no Black friend too obscure, no distance too great that whiteness will not go to prevent itself from being called “racist.” Running from the accusation of racism has turned into a professional sport, with medals for “heroic antiracism” doled periodically from social media. The medals are made by white content creators, given to white allies, and the cycle repeats. Brands are canceled, then miraculously, they survive. 

Why? 

“It’s hard to keep holding them accountable - I just want to climb.”

The outdoors can’t be racist, right?

Just keep sending and you’re in the clear.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Black lives are still fighting to matter.

-Rob

Listen

From the News

Commentary

Scholarship

  • Fitts Ward, Mako. (2020) The Power of the Intersectional Protest Image JSTOR Daily.

  • Holdo, Markus (2019) Cooptation and non-cooptation: elite strategies in response to social protest, Social Movement Studies, 18:4, 444-462.

  • Husband, Miracle (2016) "Racial Battle Fatigue and the Black Student Affairs Professional in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter," The Vermont Connection: Vol. 37, Article 10.

  • Soto, Dawson-Andoh, BeLue. (2011) The relationship between perceived discrimination and Generalized Anxiety Disorder among African Americans, Afro Caribbeans, and non-Hispanic Whites. Journal of Anxiety Disorders; 25 (2): 258

  • Mundt, Ross, & Burnett. (2018). Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter. Social Media + Society.

  • Olson, Lester. (2011) Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association.
    Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 97

  • Kwate & Goodman. (2014) An empirical analysis of White privilege, Social Position and Health. Social Science & Medicine, 116, 150–160.

NYT52221.jpg

Support for Black
Lives Matter Surged Last
Year. Did It Last?

By Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson

The New York Times

 

Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" (1981)

Selected Excerpts

Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.  Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; Anger of exclusion, of  unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.

•    I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?

•    The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?”  I ask. The most vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.”  As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem.

•    After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in Rage,”  a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.”  I ask, “How do you use your rage?”  And then I have to turn away from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own annihilation. I do not exist to feel her anger for her.

But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.

It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.

When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are “creating a mood of hopelessness,” “preventing white women from getting past guilt,” or “standing in the way of trusting communication and action.”

For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.

We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.

BlackPast, B. (2012, August 12). (1981) Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”. BlackPast.org.

 

Science Daily: Constant race-based discrimination can lead to 'racial battle fatigue' for African-Americans.

“Just as the constant pressure soldiers face on the battlefield can follow them home in the form of debilitating stress, African Americans who face chronic exposure to racial discrimination may have an increased likelihood of suffering a race-based battle fatigue, according to Penn State researchers.

African Americans who reported in a survey that they experienced more instances of racial discrimination had significantly higher odds of suffering generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) some time during their lives, according to Jose Soto, assistant professor, psychology.

Generalized anxiety disorder has both psychological and physical symptoms that are so severe that they can significantly affect everyday tasks and job performance. People with the disorder may have chronic worrying, intrusive thoughts and difficulty concentrating. Physically, the disorder may manifest such symptoms as tension headaches, extreme fatigue and ulcers. Some of these symptoms are associated with "racial battle fatigue," a term coined by William A. Smith, associate professor, University of Utah.

"The results of our study suggest that the notion of racial battle fatigue could be a very real phenomenon that might explain how individuals can go from the experience of racism to the experience of a serious mental health disorder," said Soto. "While the term is certainly not trying to say that the conditions are exactly what soldiers face on a battlefield, it borrows from the idea that stress is created in chronically unsafe or hostile environments..."

Soto said the connection between racism and severe anxiety underscores the negative impact that discrimination has on society.

"This is just one instance of how powerful social stressors can impact healthy functioning," Soto said. "And I would suspect, if we could wave a wand and eliminate racism from our past and our present, we would also eliminate a lot of health disparities."

Penn State. (2011, March 4). Constant race-based discrimination can lead to 'racial battle fatigue' for African-Americans. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110303111802.htm

Rob Moore
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