8/11 It’s a great day to learn about innocence as a tool of white supremacy
This is the image description from Vulpinic’s Instagram post on 8/11/2020
It is a repost from the @itsagreatdaytolearnabout Instagram page, and all words belong to them. This is simply to create accessibility for those who cannot see the images posted to Vulpinic’s Instagram
[Image description: 9 slides with a golden background and white and black text]
Slide 1:
It’s a great day to learn about
Innocence as a tool of white supremacy
A summary and analysis based on “Against Innocence” by Jackie Wang
Slide 2:
Innocence is a tool of white supremacy
You might be thinking – How can saying someone is innocent help maintain white supremacy?
This idea, at first, may seem like a stretch but taking a closer look. We see that innocence discourse includes and excludes. It grants us permission to selectively humanize victims of racial terror, and emphasizing innocence obscures our focus and contributes to a misunderstanding of the problem of racism.
As Jackie Wang argues, “innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of anti-racist political campaigns.” And where innocence cannot be established, empathy and social change cannot follow. This maintains the more invisible, covert systems of racism, where there is no identifiable racist actor, or where there is a non-innocent victim.
In other words, relying on innocence misses the ways in which white supremacy itself is what informs and produces our understandings of innocence and guilt.
Slide 3:
Innocence politics misunderstands racism as an individual act, and obscures the need for radical systemic change
Wang argues that the #justicefor___ model of anti-racist politics “tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature” of racism.
As Wang argues, focusing on the individual case i.e. the specific inhumanity of those cops, or the unquestionable innocence of that victim “feed the fallacy that racism is an individual intention, feeling, or personal prejudice” and obscures the need for radical systemic change.
Indeed, these campaigns, which often center on “prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for the overt and locatable acts of racist violence” actually position the state and criminal justice system as allies of the movement #justicefor__ campaigns unintentionally align us with the state, which we confuse as the means for justice, rather than the root of injustice. By mis-locating the source of racism, innocence helps to confuse the end goal: dismantling the system.
In other words, innocence focuses us on temporary or micro-injustice via the state’s punishment of the racist murderous cop(s) instead of meaningful justice via abolishing the state’s racist murderous system.
The point here is that they could arrest, prosecute, and even jail the three racist and violent cops that killed Breonna Taylor without meaningfully disrupting the system of policing, which is not only responsible for Breonna’s death, but also the legitimizing source of racism and violence in the racist and violent cops.
Slide 4:
Innocence is a racially coded appeal to the white imagination
Campaigning for justice on the premise of innocence requires white folx be able to see themselves in the victim. As Jackie Wang argues, innocence is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society.”
Empathy and recognition are thus only extended when a person meets the “standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity.”
But this guilt-innocence framework fails to grapple with the ways in which blackness itself is associated (or more accurately, synonymous) with guilt, and how difficult it is for black folx to achieve “victimhood” because of the ways in which racism produces black folx as inherently non-innocent.
What we need to declare is “I don’t need to be innocent to not get shot. I don’t need to be compliant to not get shot.”
This matters because we know that cops still shoot innocent and compliant black folx. We need to set the bar higher by announcing “I don’t need to work with shelter cats, or be an award-winning EMT, or have rehabilitated my community for my life to have worth. My life is inherently worthy.”
Slide 5:
Emphasizing innocence actually erases most victims of racism
The emphasis on innocence results “in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as ‘criminals.’”
Take for example, the systemic imprisonment of black americans in the “war on drugs.” At the same time that the state targets and disproportionately imprisons black folx, it produces those imprisoned as non-innocents – “you are in prison because you are guilty and you are guilty because you are in prison.”
The “criminal justice system” tells us that there are no (or very few) “innocents” in prison – only criminals are in prison, and criminals are people that were proven non-innocent.
This means that even though we may collectively identify the war on drugs as a form of systemic racism, the absence of an “innocent” victim means we are unlikely to “arouse public sympathy.” If those in prison are understood as non-innocent, they are also understood as not “real victims” of racial and systemic violence. And how can I feel bad if I do not believe you are a victim?
In this way, innocence has become the exclusive legitimizer of victimhood and non-innocent people are not considered legitimate victims of state violence. Consider this in terms of police arrests: compliance has been conflated with tolerance of abuse to the extent that black folx who physically resist brutality during arrest are not understood as legitimate victims of that violence. They resisted, thus they are not innocent, thus they are not a victim. They should have complied.
Slide 6:
Innocence makes white advocacy dependent upon visceral Black suffering
When we build our politics around the “standards of legitimate victimhood,” Wang warns, we build “a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point.”
This is a dehumanizing way to pursue justice: it requires black folx to first be and then, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are innocent in order for white folx to care.
This appears most often in what I’d call allyship-bargaining: when non-black folx engage in “tell me more,” “let me hear more trauma,” “convince me” before I decide whether t I too will care/join this movement.
The idea that black folx must suffer, then prove they suffered by proving they were innocent to prove to you that you should care is asking black folx to submit to near perpetual re-traumatication.
Slide 7:
Innocence politics requires us to whitewash all radical action
Movements built on innocence tend to privilege the voices of those who are able to intellectualize the pain of oppression – those, for example, who are able to make rioting and looting digestible for white folx.
Wang argues that this constant translation into “morally palatable” terms is also an appeal to innocence: rioters and looters are “not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors.” So we try to legitimize disruptors by proving they are firstly legitimate victims.
Think about how black folx you might be looking to now for leadership: how often do you see those people spending time and emotional labor trying to explain, legitimize, and make comprehensible the oppression of black folx? The outrage of black folx?
Think about how many times you saw a tweet that justified rioting as the “language of the oppressed.” Fireworks, and rioting, and looting don’t need to be justified to white folx to count as legitimate political actions. If black folx are setting off fireworks in white neighborhoods, why is there an inpulse to legitimize them via a lecture on gentrification?
The black community does not need to (articulately) prove its pain before being allowed to feel and show it.
Slide 8:
We often use innocence strategically but relying on a politics of innocence has consequences
Invoking guilt, empathy, and outrage are all strategic ways to coalition-build. And there is not necessarily anything wrong with appealing to emotions to garner allyship.
However, when the entire movement is built on a politics of innocence, it means that we can only be sure our allies are committed to fighting the visible, tangible, obvious and easy-to-understand forms of racism.
The question then becomes: how do we arouse empathy for the more invisible, systemic forms of racism which (even for “allies”) are much easier to deny exist? How do we make people feel as outraged over victims of the prison industrial complex as they feel over the murder of Elijah McClain? And if we accept that we can’t, how do we sustain innocence-based allies and begin to move them towards a broader, less conditional allyship?
Slide 9:
Are you saying I should stop feeling empathy, posting about individual victims of police brutality, or advocating for justice?
Lol no.
But it’s important for us to understand how, even in the fight for justice, we are often unable to escape or outsmart white supremacy.
Here are some questions you might sit with (I will too):
-How many times have I posted about individual victims of police brutality vs about abolishing, defunding, or divesting from the institution of police?
-How does only or mostly posting about individual victims reinforce the idea that there are a certain amount of bad apples which, if removed, would solve the problem? Have I started to believe this myself?
-How many times, in describing riots to white folx/conservatives, did I attempt to make them palatable, or politically “sound?” Why did I do that?
-Do I follow BIPOC whose ways of speaking do not align with mine? Who are more “radical” or “less polished” in their advocacy? Do I see them as equally legitimate leaders?
-Do I advocate for justice for victims that I don’t have an emotional reaction to? Do I advocate for justice for less visible forms of racism? As Loudly?