So White So Toxic

@stragiertissus , the luxury historical Belgian fabric mill, haberdasher and store, has decided to grace our inboxes with a poem. For those that don't read French, it goes a little something like this...

* Born To Be White *

We like its freshness, its brightness, its purity.

Ageless, it is at once the symbol of innocence and the colouring of wisdom.

The colour of empty space, it opens the doors of liberty onto the realm of possibilities.

Determined and solid like marble

Cold and ephemeral like snow

Luminous and enigmatic like the moon

White is so simple and yet complex at the same time…

The July 30^th, 2019 newsletter, titled ”White Party” is peppered with "inspo" photos of white, cis, able-bodied female models of stick thin, heteropatriarchal, white supremacist proportions and all white decors. It highlights a handful of white fabrics described as an “overview of fabrics void of artifice; for the sake of the beauty and elegance of sobriety”. This is how ytness is hammered into all of us on the daily from the minute we are born to the one we expire, through seemingly discrete, innocuous and dismissible means like this one, positioning itself and reminding all of us through repetition, visual and otherwise, of its globalized reach, aspirational value, absolute virtue and domination. The white racial frame and its requisite world racial order is in constant operation.

Interestingly, Stragier's poets, in an idiotic play on the Steppenwolf song title “Born To Be Wild” (an homage to toxic yt male settler colonial violence) have used the English "white" in the title instead of the French "blanc". This “born to be white” is also an unabashed illustration of yt racial capital that includes not only economic, political and educational capital but also value assignation and symbolic capital. Joe Feagin explains:” This valuable capital is at best half-consciously recognized by most whites. Among other features, it encompasses the shared assumptions, understandings, and inclinations to interact in certain traditional ways that whites have mostly learned in families and other networks. Symbolic capital, including white skin privilege, is a central part of the dominant racial frame and operates to relate and link both white acquaintances and white strangers. Perceiving and accenting white skin privilege in daily interactions is one outcome of holding that dominant frame in one’s head. (…) Whites do not have to say explicitly to other whites that “I am white like you and need to use my racial capital to gain privileges” in order to get privileges and benefits. Symbolic capital enables whites to avoid many interactive problems (…) and it facilitates positive interactions among whites in many social settings (…). Messages of “I am white like you” are routinely sent out by the physical and cultural markers of whiteness. Living in a society where the dominant framing constantly maintains the prized white identity, and denigrates the identities of racialized “others,” a white person is typically taken as having positive symbolic capital and thus worthy of racial privileges. This symbolic capital makes it much easier for whites to interact in most societal arenas, and it often shapes how decisions are made and what their outcomes will be. The everyday use or operation of this symbolic capital is often subtle and hard for many whites even to see.” I am white like you. We were born white and we deserve the world on our white plates.

I have already briefly discussed (in IG posts on a recent exhibition, “Le modèle noir” at the musée d’Orsay in Paris) France's state prescribed and legal, cultural, social reinforcement of irrational, wish fulfillment colourblindness, zealous assimilationist republicanism, willful white supremacist denial, racial illiteracy and auto-congratulatory epistemologies of ignorance as seen through the unwillingness to name the race-making colours (of its own slaveholding and colonial doing) in its own language. This example is certainly illustrative of this (Belgium is a neighbouring francophone country and similarly, a former colonizing nation). Not naming racist realities in your own language and with your own words means that you are able to forget and forego confronting your racist realities through othering and exotifying in another language, with other words. Moreover, the use of the English "white" within a French text is in keeping with the English language's colonization, past and ongoing, of global linguistic and cultural spaces – a fitting partner and vehicle, then, for global white supremacy. “Blanc” is named only once at the end of the text, reminding us that ytness circumvents naming, it simply is, naturally, unquestionably, under the guise of cataphora with pronouns like “il” (it) and possessive adjectives like “sa” (its).

The use of “white” to designate Europeans and European descended colonists came into regular use during the seventeenth century. Feagin again: “In the English language of the colonists, prior to the development of African American enslavement, the word “white” had uses that were mostly positive, such as “gleaming brightly,” as for a candle, while the word “black” had mostly negative meanings like “sooted.” The word “black” had long been used by residents of England metaphorically, to describe evil and the devil. It was soon adopted by the early English colonists for the purpose of naming dark-skinned Africans. (…) Both “white” and”black” were not temporary or unattached words, for they were defined and delimited within the ever growing white racial frame. In its racial usage the word “white” was mainly conceptualized in contrast to the word “black” – initially and most powerfully by those who defined themselves as “white.” These English language developments were a clear indication of the thorough institutionalization of African American slavery [and arguably, chattel slavery the world over] and of its racialized rationalization. Increasingly, the word white defined who European Americans [and Europeans] were, and who they were not. Whiteness was indeed a “terrible invention” as W.E.B. Du Bois once put it, one that further solidified European thinking into an extensive either/or framework and that came to symbolize for whites civilization and the “ownership of the earth.”

This limp lyrical saunter stresses whiteness as a distinct entity and with it, a shared cultural heritage inscribed in a clear hierarchy where the refuse gets triaged out. What the poem implies, stopping short of saying it out loud is that coloured complexions are not fresh, bright and pure, are not wise and free of artifice, are not Liberty’s doors held wide open to the feast of possibility and taking and taking and taking, are not determined and solid and cold and rational and therefore judicious and valid, are not luminous and moonlike, are not elegant and sober and beautiful. 

If it's a market for pure white percale sheeting Stragier is looking for, the oldest running terrorist organization in the world is constantly renewing its wardrobe (cross burnings be messy). White is so predictable and yet so harmful at the same time…

You know what to do: info@stragier.com  @stragiertissus