UCCS invited a professor of philosophy who specializes in studying racism to speak about whiteness and anti-Black racism at their JEDI Speaker Series.
The UCCS Division of Inclusive Culture and Belonging partnered with the Department of Philosophy to host Dr. George Yancy as the speaker for the Dec. 10 event.
Yancy is a Samuel Chandler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University. He has authored over 250 scholarly works, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race” and “Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice and the Future.”
Yancy opened his talk by sharing the reactions he received to a letter he wrote for the New York Times in 2015 titled “Dear White America.” The letter calls on white Americans to reflect on the role their whiteness plays in perpetuating anti-Blackness in everyday life.
Yancy said he asked his white readers to practice confronting their internalized racist behaviors. He then read a series of hateful responding comments aloud, which were riddled with racial slurs and derogatory phrases.
“This is not something out of the white temper of the 1930s or 1960s, but sent to me in 21st century white U.S.A.,” Yancy said.
Yancy explained that the response to his letter, which he intended to be a gift to white America, is indicative of ongoing systems of white racist hegemony.
“The backlash was brutally racist, but it is this kind of brutality that we must be willing to face if we are to interrogate aspects of whiteness and trace its explicit anti-Blackness,” he said.
Yancy argued that “fearless or courageous speech is indispensable when discussing issues regarding the question of race and trauma, and the trauma of anti-Black racism … but especially in the context of embodied whiteness, or so-called white innocence.”
Yancy defined white innocence as the tendency to avoid critical reflections and deconstructions of whiteness. The exercise of white innocence involves the denial of any blame in perpetuating racist systems. White innocence is a practice of self-soothing, even for the most earnest advocates of antiracism.
As a philosopher, Yancy explained that it was his duty to engage in this kind of speech. “Part of courageous speech in philosophy is to be a troublemaker, a contemporary gadfly. Being a troublemaker involves risk,” Yancy said.
Yancy asked the audience to be open and willing to confront the difficult truths of whiteness and racism. “If we are to get white people to address the problem that is whiteness, then along with fearless speech, we need fearless or courageous listening … which I see as an embodied openness to have one’s white assumptions shattered, one’s white self fissured,” Yancy said.
According to Yancy, one force that continues to perpetuate anti-Black racism in America is the inability or refusal of white people to open themselves up for a confrontation of their racist attitudes.
Yancy shared an anecdote about the clicking of car locks. In Yancy’s scenario, white people lock their car doors and pull their purses away as he passes. He says the clicking represents an action that solidifies the white perception of reality and the assumption of Black people as being dangerous.
The clicks that Yancy described are part of a larger process of “inscription and description” of Black bodies. “What the white person knows, I am. And how I am is what the white person knows,” Yancy said.
The clicks project the false white “knowledge” of Blackness onto Black people. What the white person assumes alters how Blackness is perceived and reforms reality around a racist narrative.
Yancy asked his audience to challenge the assumptions that whiteness projects onto Black people. “Do battle with forms of historical creation that have gotten us to this place, a place where so many of us refuse or fail to be undone. Fail to lose themselves to an address that comes from outside of themselves, from outside of our problematic assumptions,” he said.
Yancy reiterated the importance of listening and of nurturing the “disposition to un-suture, a disposition to re-crack and crack again the calcified operations of the white gaze.”
Yancy concluded the talk by sharing a quote from James Baldwin: “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”
Around 35 people, including instructors from the UCCS philosophy department and UCCS students, were in attendance.
Dr. George Yancy speaks as part of the JEDI speaker series on Dec. 10. Photo by Josiah Dolan.