White Persistency
- By Emma Bigé
- and Léna Dormeau
Pages 126 to 131
Cite this article
- BIGÉ, Emma
- and DORMEAU, Léna,
- Bigé, Emma.
- et al.
- Bigé, E.
- and Dormeau, L.
https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.101.0126
Cite this article
- Bigé, E.
- and Dormeau, L.
- Bigé, Emma.
- et al.
- BIGÉ, Emma
- and DORMEAU, Léna,
https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.101.0126
This article investigates whiteness as white’s commitment to its own perpetuation through purification, eradication, occupation and propagation. The authors examine how whiteness persists even in antiracist contexts through what Sara Ahmed calls the “non-performativity of antiracism”—antiracist declarations that protect rather than challenge white hegemony. Addressing three common objections to critical whiteness studies (that they supposedly: 1/ induce guilt, 2/ minimize other racisms, or 3/ are themselves racist), they propose transforming white guilt into white debt (Audre Lorde, Eula Biss), building coalitions that recognize the specificity of white supremacism within racial capitalism, and understanding that studying whiteness critically means making it matter differently—making it stutter and stumble, and finally, to abolish it.