“Can you meet me where we are instead of where you want to be?”
A correspondence between CeCe & Niall written by Foluke Taylor and Robert Downes
Cece and Niall are characters we came up with for a chapter that we wrote for a therapeutic text book. We were initially approached to write a chapter about whiteness. We failed to write that and at the deadline CeCe and Niall emerged to tell their story of a re-imagined therapeutic training in a chapter called:
Re-imagining the Space and Context for a Therapeutic Curriculum: a sketch.1
Cece and Niall remained as companions and below you will find an email exchange between CeCe and Niall whilst they reflect on white supremacy and Blackness in a correspondence that is rich with references to their studies and explorations from their differing locations as racialised embodiments - a Black woman and a white man who seek to know themselves beyond the capture of race as they attempt to make some kind of meeting place.
This piece serves as a form of inquiry, a reckoning, a dialectic and study2 that was created for a conference on creative writing as therapeutic practice which can also be thought of as liberatory practice and talking about things that some of us are not practiced in talking about in the state of becoming ‘unsutured3’.
“I think about writing as a technology for staying in and as a therapeutic method for re/seeing, re/inhabiting and re/imagining the world. Writing as a practical technology for loss that is accessible to the lost and does not require them to be found; as a tool for those of us for whom getting lost might be a practice of freedom; as the possibility of making the world, and ourselves anew”.
Foluke Taylor Unruly Therapeutics
From: CeCe@innababylon.com4
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and three
Date: World Ending Times
To: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Dear Niall,
I’ve been wondering how long I can put off writing to you about white supremacy. Apparently it is a conversation we agreed to have. Apparently there is a good intention somewhere, or a hope of something that might be possible if we talk about it. I need reminding about what that hope is, and why this is necessary, and importantly, why it is a good use of my time as a Black woman. I think perhaps that speaking back to white supremacy is one of the ways to survive it. So that’s a small hope I guess. You got any hope on your end? Any sense of the point of these letters?
Cece
Sent from my iMad
From: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com5
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and three
Date: World Ending Times
To: CeCe@innababylon.com
Dear Cece
It’s Sunday
Today I am devastated and “speaking back to white supremacy” isn’t in me right now as I sit within what you know Christina Sharpe calls The Wake6. This is one of the devastation study days, I began to watch Exterminate All The Brutes7, a history of colonialism by Raoul Peck who made the documentary I am not Your Negro8 about James Baldwin. Maybe today’s point is devastation recognition.
I also watched Gabor Mate’s film, The Wisdom of Trauma9 and his conversation with somatic abolitionist Resmaa Menakem10 exploring whiteness and embodied racialised trauma. I trust that something more will come to me at some point after being with these offerings - for now this is what I have alongside a tweet that I read today:
"What are you pretending not to know today?"
- Toni Cade Bambarra
For now, recognition of the realities of white supremacy is the point since me and my fellow white folk are usually treading water make it look otherwise in a normalised state of what is a daily manifestation of white psychosis11. Whilst the truth is brutal, I prefer it to the lies and harms of whiteness.
Whilst sat within this recognition I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s question "what is your work?”12 and Layla Saad’s invitations to reflect on “what kind of ancestor do you want to be"?13
Bye for now
Niall
Sent from my iCouch
From: CeCe@innababylon.com
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and three and a half
Date: World Ending Times
To: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Dear Niall,
I just read a very short quote from Sylvia Wynter
“White utopia was Black inferno”
It gives me some sense of why you might not want to hear/speak about white supremacy. You don’t want shares in the inferno. But it’s getting hot in here.
For all of us.
Start sweating
CeCe
Sent from my iBurn
From: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and three
Date: World Ending Times
To: CeCe@innababylon.com
Dear CeCe
I am coming, I am here - sweat and all.
I am here finding words. I need the words and ideas that speak to this Black inferno, words that describe the lie of this white utopia that James Baldwin14 and Toni Morrison15 pierce in their arrangements of thought that unpack whiteness as construction, as lie whilst I prefer the truth despite the discomfort - I wonder why is that?
White utopia is an ugly grasping for its continuance. I am full of sorrows for the days and years of Black inferno. I am full of "how in the hell can’t you see that this white utopia is a centuries old destructive mess”. Then I remember and consider the centuries old systems and institutions that make delusions of white supremacy seem normal and real - and how the wilful ignorance that Charles Mills16 describes maintains it.
My personal sorrows are of little significance within centuries of old practices of anti-blackness and not leaving Black people alone. Whiteness’s use of its reductive version of Blackness as useful bodies seems to be never ending. Black culture for whiteness is often just another cotton field to take from, and still you rise and make life otherwise, whilst in the surrounds of the inescapable realities of white supremacy, a whiteness that can’t be alone, it needs something to shore itself up against - how can we be good whites if there isn’t bad Black or Black in need of our ‘good whiteness’? Whilst we have whiteness we will never leave you alone it seems - I wish we would.
So here we are writing and reading and sharing in the service of being good ancestors and evoking moments and spaces where the truth of how things are can breathe.
I have been living in a book my friend left on my kitchen table. In Black Pentecostal Breath, The Aesthetics of Possibility17 - Ashon T Crawley writes:
"Whiteness is a way to think the world: it has its theological and philosophical resonances and employments; it has its theological and philosophical emplotments”.
I want to work alongside other white people and talk and write about how we have been taught an un-listening as an automatic where we deny, alter and gaslight the realities of racism via various ‘emplotments’ to remain good whites, right whites, innocent whites in a good white world that generates Black and Brown death on the daily.
I want to evoke the journey of yielding to the reality that there is no good white, no right white - that we need to wrestle with the reality that whiteness was constructed to do bad for profit, that it was and is central to the on going project of racial capitalism18 and the lie of whiteness that can be ultimately be unthought and disidentified with as a singular truth.
Can we (white people) get curious? Really curious about the lie and unravel from the lies to find out who we are beyond the constructions and limitations of whiteness? Can we unravel ultimately to do less harm, to leave possibilities of living otherwise for all future generations.
I return to Crawley’s words and Yancy’s descriptions of whiteness. I am grateful for them because they describe something of the realties of whiteness. I am sorry that Black life gets spent having to formulate such things out of what Christina Sharpe calls the monstrous intimacies19 of racism. I am also relieved that such containers of thought and care are made that make living and thinking possible whilst in the inferno.
Crawley continues: ”It is a violent encounter, an encounter and way of life that is fundamentally about the interdiction, the desired theft, of the capacity to breathe”…….I pause after that sentence. I take it in, I wonder about myself and other white people taking in that sentence with a breath, to feel the edge of the potential of that being the last breath taken as we hear this next sentence: “Eric Garner is but one example of this. As a way to think the world and one’s relation to it, whiteness is about the acceptance of violence and violation as a way of life, as quotidian, as axiomatic”.
I am an implicated subject20, living in a world that accepts the daily body count of white supremacy. I am materially comfortable in this hell for some, disentangling from this violent lie that has people burn and labour for a version of the good life with brutal horizons.
Niall
Sent from my iDissent
From: CeCe@innababylon.com
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and three and forty
Date: World Ending Times
To: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Dear Niall,
I have been reading. I wish we would all read more instead of thinking we know — instead of being full of knowing and opinion. I’ve lost count of the times that people have shared their opinions on race — on what is racism and what isn’t; on what is terrible and what isn’t; on how actually they are a diverse organisation and have a very diverse group of friends with people from….people from…
…all kinds of people.
I hear the hesitation. I hear the absence of the word Black. I see what Reni-Eddo Lodge21 calls ‘acrobatics' going on behind the eyes — the question of which words to use, what to say, and ultimately, the moment when the person thinks, oh gods, what am I saying?
Recently a white colleague asked me if I had travelled anywhere in the summer holidays. She had been to Spain she said. When I mentioned that two of my children had also been in Spain she was enthusiastic,
“Did they have a good time?” she asked, and I kicked myself for not being more vigilant in the conversation because now I had to decide whether to lie and say yes, or admit that they had been racially abused, physically assaulted and been forced to move accommodation. Both of them - and they were not even on the same holiday in the same place. So, trying to keep it real — you know how I roll — I said “well they experienced a lot of racism actually” and she looked horrified and shook her head and said
“Oh! You would never think it would you? You would never think it still happens.” And then she told me about her house where they never think it and how she and her children have such a very diverse group of friends…people who come from…from…
…all kinds of people.”
So I was pissed — you know how I roll — but my racism poker face and shock absorbing body were on point and I was able to say something. So the first thing I said was
“hmm, well yes, I do think it. I guess I’m used to thinking it.”
And the second thing I said was;
“and I am tired of you being able to never think it while I always have to think it because it still happens and has always happened and I will not know a life outside of this happening so in fact I have to think, and feel, and act ALWAYS in ways that incorporate this reality. Like bitch will you get out of never land and wake the fuck up and share the load of this white supremacist world - even just for a minute? Can you meet me where we are instead of where you want to be?”
You know I didn’t really say the second thing though don’t you? Cos otherwise I’d be out of a job and tapping you for a loan. Anyway, all of that is simply to say that I was reading Kathryn Yusoff’s Billion Black Anthropocenes or None22 and this quote seemed relevant:
“The move toward a more expansive notion of humanity must be made with care. It cannot be based on the pre-supposition that emancipation is possible once the racial others and their voices are included…but must be based on the recognition that these “Others” are already unscripted in the foundation formulation of the universal as a space of privileged subjectification.” (p50/51)
In other words, my colleague’s idea that progress looks like ‘all kinds of people’ being included misses the fact that all kinds of people are included. All kinds of people — classified and categorised — have always been included. Without our inclusion as categorical “Others” white supremacy would have no foundation on which to give birth to itself.
Anyway, what you been reading?
CeCe
Sent from my iPokerface
From: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and 5
Date: World Ending Times
To: CeCe@innababylon.com
Dear CeCe
I have been reading too, right now I am reading a lake.
I am sat beside Lough Leane in county Kerry, Ireland.
In English, the language of the long time ago coloniser who never really left, it means lake of learning. In a culture of ‘drive-by’ feedback, y(our) writing serves as an island of learning, as place of study and revelation - as lake, as the vastness where everything comes from.
I note that the attempt at deeper discourse about the existing arrangements are clearly disrupting something otherwise there wouldn’t be such a violent backlash. The lake of learning remains vast despite the thrashings around of white supremacy and the identifications with the compelling lie of whiteness.
I read the lake
Maybe it reads me too, as student, as witness, as wanderer
I am the lake
For nearly a 1000 years monks lived in an abbey on one of the lake’s islands until they were evicted by Elizabeth I’s occupying colonial forces. The monks were collating and writing The Annals of Innisfallen, a history of Ireland that had primarily been shared as an oral tradition. This history of Ireland is now residing in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. I say that with some tone in my voice - a Wolf Tone, colonial thefts hurt.
The Annals do not belong there, but colonial extractive arrogance as you know knows no bounds. According to Oliver Dowden the Benin Bronzes were not stolen from Benin, whilst their theft was bloody and violent. Whiteness proclaiming itself innocent and superior again as it hoards value to distract itself from the emptiness of the shell of whiteness23.
For this I feel a fury of the heart as I contemplate the stolen lands, bodies, artefacts, resources, languages and culture that British colonial projects around the world enacted via the lie and tool of white supremacy, the legacy of which was painfully showing up in those moments with your children on their holidays in Spain, and then again in your giving an account of what happened to your colleague who couldn’t meet you where you are - right up and near the fire this time.24 I think of how my work as a white man requires that I get closer to the fire as a way of disidentifying with whiteness whilst registering that we are never outside of the problem and what is required is a double consciousness.
I think about the things your colleague could have said that would be a step in the direction of the fire to meet you in the vicinity of the flames, to get a little burnt too.
“Whites are, after all, still accorded the privileges of being white even as they ideologically renounce their whiteness, often with the best intentions”. 25
- Peter McLaren
My people are yet to meet peak realisation that there is no such thing as innocent whiteness and that we could surrender our white acrobatics for the truth, for justice and for being better company and doing way less harm. These diversity and inclusion distractions won’t do it as you point out, deep study is required that imagines us into living otherwise.
For me George Yancy has offered the rigour that has helped me reckon with whiteness, a grappling and reckoning with embodied white supremacy that is necessary if we are to do less harm and practice the care you refer to. He writes:
"White self-interrogation, however, is a form of striving, etymologically, “to quarrel [streiten]” which means that one is committed to a life of danger and contestation, one which refuses to make peace with taken for granted “legitimating” white norms and practices that actually perpetuate racial injustice”.26
I am interested in the kind of study and practice that has white people really grapple with the reality that to be anti-racist isn’t a comfort practice, that it is an everyday quarrel, a practice of disruption and bearing discomfort to know ourselves beyond the confines and lenses and practices of whiteness.
In that moment with your colleague I contemplate the internal navigations you and Black people generally have to practice in the face of a whiteness that doesn’t register the everyday realities of racism. I wish us to be more ready to receive what you didn't get to say out loud.
Yancy writes of the multiplicity that occurs in such moments and the kind of nuanced study that is required if white people are to mentalise whilst white, to be what Yancy calls ‘un-sutured’27:
“These embodied spaces of social transaction are filled with rituals, spoken words, silences, grimaces, reactions, signs and symbols, body gestures, gazes, projections, denials, myths, and complex emotions. As I write, I attempt to dwell within the multifaceted landscape, as it were, of racial incidents, which are often so subtle that one might think there is nothing there of racial significance or consequence”.28
Currently the establishment and its army of the white right are obsessed with their attacks on historical knowledge and critical race theory. Since socially just study and activism have impelled this backlash, I too wish for fewer unconsidered opinions and for more study; reading that grounds thought and action in critical, reflective analysis; drawing from the bounty that resides within so much of Black feminist thought, reflection and analysis. No wonder they diminish being ‘woke’.
I have been reading whiteness through the eyes of many, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, George Yancy, Claudia Rankine, Kehinde Andrews to name a few. The curriculum is there, generously offered and not so eagerly taken up although there was a flurry of activity following the murder of George Floyd and that flurry seems to have settled, the urgency tempered yet Black life remains precarious.
I am sat before a beautiful waterfall watching the water wear a groove that is invisible to me through the rocks and I ponder the work of eroding structures of whiteness.
As I read of your children and their encounters with the violence of whiteness on their holiday, amongst my sorrow and fury at what is everyday - Claudia Rankine came to mind and an article she wrote: ‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’29 - where she states:
"Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black”.
I feel sorrow, I wanted your kids to have a good time yet there is no holiday from white supremacy and its everyday corrosive violence. Black parents bear this reality daily and for that I feel sorrow and ponder actions. What is your colleague’s email address - I feel to send her some George Yancy?
I recognised the normality of these violences in your use of the word ‘anyway’ at the end of your email.
What are you reading today?
Niall
Sent from my iLake
From: CeCe@innababylon.com
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and three and forty
Date: World Ending Times
To: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Dear Niall,
Today I am reading my own work, which is of course never really my own work but a collaboration with many thinkers and teachers; a riffing off of the imaginaries and creations of others; my moving with and as part of the flow of collective utterance. And what I really mean is practices of freedom in unfreedom. Sure, there is always a fight to be fought — against racism, against white supremacy, against premature Black death — but/and there is so much more. We are so much more.
Much more like when Christina Sharpe describes our inhabitation of the wake - the still unfolding afterlives of slavery - and reminds us that we are more than our subjection; That we insist on existing, that "we insist Black being into the wake30”
Much more like bell hooks saying that
“If we only view the margin as a sign marking the condition of our pain and deprivation, then hopelessness and despair penetrate the very ground of our being.”(hooks, 1989,21)31
…and that in that space of collective despair both our creativity and imagination is at risk. If there are black, brown of colour folk reading these letters — especially those working with critically creative writing — I want them to hear this. I want us to keep rethinking and remaking this margin.
Much more like Adrienne Maree Brown saying:
“We are living in the ancestral imagination of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn't include us, or included us as enemy, fright, other.”32
And reminding us about the generativity of our imaginations and how imagination is a tool for activism, and how as we imagine the world in which we are free from white supremacy, we call it into existence.
We have been imagined as brutes, and in this brutal imagination our possibilities — our capacity to breathe — is squeezed. A black feminist politics of refusal is about making room to breathe. As Marquis Bey33 says, it is blackness as Nah! Not in it. Not playing that game. Not going to try and make myself into the shape of your ‘civilised', not going to adopt your 'work ethic', nah to respectability where respectability means colluding with and striving to prove myself human within the racialised hierarchy that whiteness invented to keep itself safe and, as Du Bois said, to take ownership of the earth forever and ever. Naaaah. Not this one here. Not us. We are not about sacrificing our imaginations.
Or, to put it another way, to draw on Kevin Quashie's Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being, while we see, and feel how in this world of white supremacy ‘what is expected from black people is [only] blackness’ (Quashie, Kevin, 2021:10)34 we also live, and by living bring into being, another world where “what we expect and get from black people is beingness”
And there is a lot to be said for beingness. And Black being. And Niall, there are so many things that Blackness is — aside from an identity, aside from an embodied performance — and we don’t have time to go into all of them but check these two;
1. Blackness is the theory of white capture
2. Blackness is fierce departures from and disruption to the geographies of white hegemony or, “Black geography is a method of living outside geographic norms” (McKittrick (2021) p170)35
And honestly Niall I don’t know if you’re getting all of this, and I’m not about waiting for you to get it because I’m not going to use up all my being on proving to white people that whiteness is trouble and in need of attention. It doesn’t mean that I don’t hope that you get it…or that you will get it.
Because you must.
Really you must.
Because as Fred Moten says, “it’s killing you too36”.
Am I going too deep? Let’s bring it home with Katherine McKittrick, because you know how much I love her work. When she talks about taking the groove as theoretical insight - and about valuing what we know and where we know from, she gives me life. When she says that Black music and cultural production are psychic and physiological experiences and that the song helps us ‘think consciousness without being distracted by the demand for clarity’, it is a knowing that I recognise at the core of my being. So I am about to duck out of here - letter writing is great and it has its limits, and white supremacy needs attention and I have my limits. I’m looking elsewhere for my theoretical insight, into a different groove, other places to know from. I’m thinking our next collaboration might be an exchange of playlists?
CeCe
Sent from my iRad
From: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and 10 and 5 and 2
Date: World Ending Times
To: CeCe@innababylon.com
Dear CeCe
I am minded of what your brother Marquis Bey had to say in his book:
“Black radical feminism is the only kind of god to which I feel the need to pray, as the incantatory tremors of its abolishing the shitty regimes of white, male, cis, straight, etc. etc. etc. violence strike me as the only means by which the world’s ills can be purged. Black feminism posits a radical future in which we might, hopefully, someday, live. The Black feminism to which I bow with my pen, feet, mind, and body operates on what grammarians would call “future real conditional” tense, or that which will have had to happen for the future to be realized, a future that hasn’t yet happened but must—a Black feminist grammar. This is the alternative grammar for our bodies and lives to which we must turn. It is the idea of living the radical future now”.
I am grateful and made anew by the knowledges that I meet in you, through you, via our studies together and apart, amongst the texts we gather, within our dialogues and practices. This unravelling and becoming undone.
I ponder a landscape, a geography free of white supremacy, this alternative landscape that is not of ownership, not of ‘mine’ not of such violence. It is hard to see it, to imagine it; it has been so for so long and we won’t know this place whilst you are making a black geography within a white hegemony whilst I hope for another geography whilst making moments in this life time through the revelation of truth telling and seeking.
As I read your last mail I was touched by the fierce creative love that the multitude of Blackness (beyond white definitions) IS, despite the great shenanigans of whiteness. Whilst you are insisting Black being into the wake, into the quietude, into the music, into Black joy and existence as spirit, I appreciate and enjoy the view of this vast Black geography whilst doing my work over here.
We can continue adding to our playlist.
Niall
Sent from my iDJ
From: CeCe@innababylon.com
Subject: Re: White supremacy day four hundred and fifty ‘leven and three and forty
Date: World Ending Times
To: niall@InaHedgeSchool.com
Dear Niall,
Watch this… ☞ Dingaling by Greentea Peng
TUNE!
CeCe
Sent from my iRadio
Ed: Divine Charura & Colin Lago - Black Identities + White Therapies: Race, Respect + Diversity PCCS Books. You can access a pdf of the chapter: ☞ here
Christina Sharpe In The Wake - On Blackness and Being
Dir: Raoul Peck Exterminate all the Brutes
Dir: Raoul Peck - I Am Not Your Negro
Gabor Mate - The Wisdom of Trauma
James Baldwin On Being White and Other Lies
Ashon T Crawley - Black Pentecostal Breath, The Aesthetics of Possibility
Christina Sharpe - Monstrous Intimacies Black Pentecostal Breath, The Aesthetics of Possibility - Ashon T Crawley
Reni Eddo Lodge - Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
George Yancy in the Introduction (XII) to White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does it Feel to be a White Problem? (Philosophy of Race)
George Yancy explains: ‘Unsutured’
George Yancy in the Introduction (XI) to White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does it Feel to be a White Problem? (Philosophy of Race)
Claudia Rankine - The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning
Christina Sharpe - In The Wake - On Blackness and Being
bell hooks – Marginality as a Site of Resistance, 1989
Adrienne Maree Brown - Emergent Strategy - Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Kevin Quashie - The Sovereignty of Quiet - Beyond Resistance in Black Culture
Fred Moten & Stefano Harney - the undercommons fugitive planning & black study
 | A guest post by
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I guess ‘meeting where we are’ is a revealing proposition. I am interested in how we might make room (inside and out) to ‘thINK’ about where we are instead of simply reacting? What needs to be borne?
Nauseating racist filth.