Shattering Whiteness

The literature of critical whiteness studies (CWS) has shifted from its original focus on how the oppressed experience whiteness (Du Bois 1903/2007), Fanon (1952/2008), to how people racialised as white understand the advantages that whiteness grants them (McIntosh, 1995, Di Angelo, 2018). This trend suggests CWS is in danger of underplaying how whiteness embodies, enacts and maintains structures of white supremacy. Can CWS be used positively for racial justice and refrain from further reifying narcissistic whiteness? Activist work by white artists such as myself could be seen as peak performance allyship – a one-off display of engagement in the plight of others to boost social cachet, before returning to the “listless indifference”, as Gregory Sholette puts it, that neoliberalism requires (Sholette, 2017). How can my research, using porcelain as part of an activist art practice, avoid promoting ‘woke’ whiteness and instead work in the service of social justice and collective anti-racist action? Following Leonardo (2004, 2013) and Matias and Boucher (2021), I attempt to take a ‘black whiteness’ approach to the critical study of whiteness, which requires an amplification of black voices and black experiences of whiteness. This position forces people racialised as white to be active rather than passive in their racial awakening. Only then can whiteness start to be dismantled. Reflection on the injustices that whiteness upholds can create reflection, dialogue and change. As part of this paper, I will show the outcomes of my recent ‘research in action’ using porcelain as a tool to interrogate whiteness from an explicitly anti-racist position. This will consist of a short video documenting an art activism performance piece and sharing my collaborative intervention, White but working on it, which asks participants to consider structural whiteness and how it impacts on global-majority others.