Peer Review: A Note from Kirsten Hemmy

PEER REVIEW.

Shades of Noir has been pleased to invite Kirsten Hemmy and Annabel Crowley to peer review this Terms of Reference.

Kirsten Hemmy. Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies, Philosophy, and Religion at Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, North Carolina; Member of the Southern Humanities Council executive board and the director of the Mosaic Literary Center of Charlotte (a nonprofit organization dedicated to the discovery, cultivation, and preservation of contemporary literature and the arts in underserved communities). As a Fulbright Scholar in 2003, she studied politics and poetry in Senegal. Hemmy has also studied in Ghana and is currently completing a book on Emma Brown, an Ibibio freedom fighter and political activist in Nigeria. She was the 2008 recipient of the Linda Flowers Literary Award for Poetry, has received the Academy of American Poets Award, and has published interviews with poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Ralph Angel

Annabel Crowley. Annabel is a long-time education enthusiast and advocate. She has worked in the Further and Higher Education sectors for more than a decade. She is also the co-chair of UAL’s Group for the Equality of Minority Staff (GEMS), UAL’s largest and longest-standing staff network that represents employees and workers of colour. Annabel’s main role is to develop strategic Equality, Diversity and Inclusion/ Organisational Development interventions that promote access and inclusion for UAL staff. As a Visiting Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, she has taught critical theory on the BA Textile Design course. Before joining UAL, she led self-advocacy projects for disabled people-led organisations in London. Annabel’s research interests are in social justice pedagogy and inclusive learning and teaching practices. She is currently studying for her MA at Central Saint Martins.

A NOTE FROM KIRSTEN HEMMY.

I am a woman of color.

I have lived my life passing in and out of situations, flitting in and out of spaces, believing I belonged everywhere.

Whiteness.

Admission: my best friend and I used to box together. After one evening’s class, I posted on social media that I was getting my aggressions out with her. She asked me to delete it. Come on, she said. You know I can’t refer to myself as aggressive. I’m a Black woman. I was ashamed that after a 10-year friendship, it hadn’t occurred to me.

Admission: I received tenure at an Historically Black Universities and Colleges (HBCU). While I was eager and earnest to become a respectful, loving member of this institution, it literally never dawned on me that I might not be welcomed into this space. When reflecting on this years later with a Black friend, they said they never assumed they were welcome in any space.

Admission: I feel welcome in every space, sure I can win people over.

Admission: When I lived in Senegal, I forgot how much I didn’t fit in visually. I learned Wolof and Diola, I felt comfortable. My mother asked me once what it was like to feel so visible everywhere I went. White privilege meant I’d never considered it.

Admission: at 27, when I moved from Hawai’i to the Midwest US for graduate school, I felt so different, so apart, so far away from fitting in. I had the selfish, unreflective, white audacity to detail my sadness to my mentor, a queer Black scholar who’d spent her formative years in the racist, homophobic bastion of Milwaukee. Finally, one day she told me, wow, that must be very hard for you, and it was only at that moment that I understood how idiotic, selfish, and white I was being. It took me many years to apologize to her.

Internally, I rail against the treatment I endure as someone visibly Muslim, and I know that it’s because a) the rest of my life has been absorbed in the comfort of white privilege, and b) I am aware that I have given up access to my whiteness and even my Americanness (which seems to count less because I am Muslim).

I am aware that if need be, I can take out those cards, that they are ultimately always available to me. This is whiteness, having at one’s disposal the ability to wield power, authority, and presence.

Whiteness is also the sense of security I feel.

A white South African yells at me at the pool, a white British woman scoffs as I put on my hijab after ladies’ yoga, a white French couple runs their cart into me at the grocery store, discussing how I’m a rude imbecile, I become impregnated by flames that slowly reach into my throat. But I’m also aware of the number of cards I’m secretly holding. And they’re there, a comfort, like a platinum credit card, like a concealed carry.

This same confidence is what has led to what L. Lamar Wilson calls the Beckyfication of America (and I argue it’s global in scope), white women who police Black presence in what these women deem white spaces. Thankfully, we have social media to police these white women, but their actions belie a continued contempt for Black men and women and children, and a conscious or unconscious desire to cause trouble, violence or even death to the people they harass, ala the Jim Crow era.

And white women legitimately wonder why women of color often do not believe in, or desire, white allies.

Whiteness frequently disbelieves narratives that counter its own dominant, domineering narrative.

Whiteness accepts the narrative point of view of the institutions and structures and storytellers that maintain and build its own will to power.

Whiteness tells people of color to stop playing the race card.

Whiteness is an ornate system that is its own race card, the most powerful card there is. It is played before any transaction is begun. It is always already on the table.

My students, all Omani, are a diverse group descended from Oman, East Africa, India, Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere in the region. We recently read “Talk,” an Ashanti folktale, the premise of the story being a farmer who sets off to tell people about his talking yam. Along the way, he meets others and tries to convince them. Finally, the men reach the king, who doubts the veracity of their story, saying to himself, what an unbelievable story! And his stool answers, agreeing with him that the notion of a talking yam is crazy. As my students see it, this story is meant to teach, in part, the futility of talking to people about things they haven’t experienced or seen. People don’t believe that which they haven’t seen for themselves, as one student put it. The conversation shifted over into whether this is good advice in today’s world. Is it true?

Yes, they all said. Eventually, the conversation moved to prejudice, and to the experiences of Black and brown people. The problem, said a student, is that white people don’t believe the experiences of people of color, because they can’t experience it themselves. A student brought up contemporary whiteness, how it polices Blackness in order to maintain its place at the top of the hierarchy. How it does this everywhere—media, arts, institutionally. And it does this because it can and because it feels it must. And it must also continue to view Blackness through the lenses it has created, those racist, reductive perspectives that dehumanize. This folktale, they say, it’s a cautionary tale. It’s precolonial and postcolonial. It’s the always-already of what whiteness does to the body politic – the not-seeing, the not-believing. Tell a white person they are hurting you. Tell whiteness it hurts your black and brownness. It will react by turning its back. There is no stool to speak to it, and if there is, it won’t listen until it must.

There’s much to admire in this issue. If we accept that whiteness cannot hear—I am not advocating that we accept this—then this issue is exactly the space that’s needed. People of color are being heard. Here is a space that asks us to believe. And we do. Rachel Isabel Mukendi reminds us that whiteness waits patiently to dismantle the house that equity, that POC are building, and notes that the media—a creation and outlet of white supremacy— waited 14 years, until Serena Williams was the greatest of all time to ask if she was intimidated by Sharipova’s “supermodel looks.” Renee Matich calls for us to transcend the terminology of whiteness, the semantic and scientific institutions that require blackness to measure itself against mere whiteness: we surely recognize that every ounce of blackness lives in contrast to the dominant aesthetic. But we ought to see this as precious, transcendent, that “every single golden grain of blackness that takes up space in the white landscape is a diamond.”

The question, this issue asks, is how to move the archive back into the body in order to humanize it, and whether such a move can lead to the elimination of violence and exploitation. Some answers from this issue: The creation of landscapes that glorify the beauty of Blackness by eliminating whiteness. Visual artist Sola Olulode creates spaces where her Blackness can thrive. “The Black Flaneur” by Madinah Farhannah Thompson, urges people of color to resist invisibility, to hold on to that archive of wealth within, as “holding onto yourself whilst being wished away is an act of resistance.” Omnipresent reparation, Kader Attia’s phrase, is a way to insist on reconsiderations of whiteness.

Jawara Alleyne’s gorgeous work asks readers to consider whether the self exists outside of the collective. The self—the way we have learned about the self, in our institutions that teach whiteness as discourse, as religion and law—is a construct of that same whiteness, designed to support white supremacy and bell curves and social Darwinism and most importantly

in our 2018, that foolish notion of individualism, of conquest by the individual. We know this not to be true. We know the self is the self because of so many people who have come before us, because of those who lift us, who feed us, who hear us. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. If we are free, we free others. If we have some power, we empower others. This is our job and our calling (Toni Morrison). The body politic, then, is to keep building communities and carving spaces that make room those who have been asked to leave spaces that privilege whiteness. To support the creation of images and words and ideas and stories that showcase the diamonds that are people of color. These pages—this exquisite work of art—is a body politi—that sustains, encourages, and changes. Diamonds spill from these pages. These pages are diamonds, as are all the people who have collaborated to create them.