White Lethality/White Legibility

Two protestors stand side by side—one black, the other white. The black figure holds a sign that reads “I Can't Breathe”; the white figure holds a sign that reads “I Can't See.”1

I am the youngest daughter of Jack (an orphan) and Rose Fine, who was the youngest of eighteen children, both Jewish refugees from Poland. My mother arrived in 1921 at the moment that Karen Brodkin Saks calls “when the Jews became white.” My mother held the loss of immigration and struggle in her migraines, depression, and staying in bed, as my father burst out the front door to sell plumbing supplies and grab hold of the American dream. As their youngest, chubby baby girl, I watched with envy as my father left in the morning for America and with sweet loyalty as my mother remained in bed. I knew then that loss and progress, pain and optimism, sleep in the same bed.

With duality in mind, I want to think through how whiteness is enacted in the current political moment. I want us to think about two dimensions: lethality, from supremacist to banal, and legibility, from paranoid knowing to elaborate denial.

In this context, for a moment, let us consider white violence to be a public health epidemic enacted in two registers. There are the outbursts of white supremacy, which includes nationalists and Nazis, as well as white officers killing black men, women, and children. There are white women and men calling police on black children at swimming pools, shopping centers, and barbecues. And then there is the banality of whiteness — to contest Hannah Arendt — enacted through media, government, universities, and perhaps analytic institutes, normalized, where we are all complicit in domesticating and softening the spiked edges of whiteness. There is an odd splitting: we easily critique white men who bomb and carry torches on the streets and into churches, mosques, schools, malls, movie theatres, and synagogues. It seems we have a clumsy inability to talk through whiteness. When ask