What so many commentators are getting wrong about the deaths of Alexi Pretti and Renée Good

And what it is imperative we understand about whiteness

The recent killings of Alexi Pretti and Renée Good are shocking, and frightening, yes, but they do not mark as dramatic a change as some commentators imagine. They are undeniably an acceleration of violence, but I would argue, are part of the identifiable trajectory I feared we were already on when writing What White People Can Do Next.

For the New York Review of Books Irish writer Fintin O Toole’s forthcoming piece describes the way “the regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied”

But hasn’t state violence been the case for Black Americans throughout most of the country’s history? The fact that state violence has been not only routine but embedded in the infrastructure of the US makes it all the easier to enact it more routinely now.

But while this has long been the experience of Black Americans it is also erroneous to imagine that it is the first time that certain classes of white people have been subject to this type of treatment either.

One of the visionary insights of Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago chapter of The Black Panthers was that he could see that the police brutality that poor white people were also subject to, was a powerful mechanism for building coalitions across artificially constructed racial divisions. It was with this in mind that he formed the exemplary Rainbow Coalition, a union including unlikely bedfellows The Young Patriots, working class white southerners so committed to their white southern identity that their emblem was the Confederate flag (which they later renounced themselves, not because they were ‘shamed’ into doing so but out of profound respect for Hampton and the Panthers after working together). It was Hampton’s ability to work alongside whites that contributed to his assignation at 21 years old.

Coalition remains the most threatening risk to authority. The idea of a white race and a black race was first codified into law to prevent such allegiances emerging between the indentured Europeans (often Irish) and kidnapped Africans who toiled side by side on the plantations in the early days of the English colonies of Barbados, Virgina and Maryland. The various uprisings that occurred when they came together scared the bejaysus out of the ruling class. The idea of race as an immutable difference between the two groups was one of the most powerful mechanisms in shutting those allegiances down and in doing so allowing the landowners and lawmaker of the 17^th unchallenged power to continue to consolidate their wealth.

Fast forward to today; the theorist, poet and philosopher Fred Moten describes coalition as emerging ‘out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us’.

Barbara Fields, a professor of history at Colombia University (and the first African American woman to get tenure at that institution), provides, along with co-author Adam Rothman, a poignant example, writing about the death of a young woman named Hannah Fizer (What White People Can Do Next 2021: 17)

“Hannah Fizer was driving to work at a convenience store late on a Saturday night in June [2020] when a police officer pulled her over for running a red light.

According to police reports, Fizer was ‘non-compliant’ and threatened to shoot the officer, so the officer shot and killed her. Hannah, whose co- worker describes her as ‘a beautiful person’, had no gun.

At this stage it’s a depressingly recognizable tale.

Here’s the part that might come as more of a surprise: Hannah was white.

Fields references a database of police shootings in the United States compiled since 2015, writing that: half of those shot dead by police – and four of every ten who were unarmed – have been white.

People in poor neighborhoods are a lot more likely to be killed by police than people in rich neighborhoods. Living for the most part in poor or working- class neighborhoods as well as subject to a racist double- standard, black people suffer disproportionately from police violence. But white skin does not provide immunity.

Fields goes on to insist that those seeking genuine democracy must fight like hell to convince white Americans that what is good for black people is also good for them. Reining in murderous police, investing in schools rather than prisons, providing universal healthcare (including drug treatment and rehabilitation for addicts in the rural heartlands), raising taxes on the rich, and ending foolish wars are policies that would benefit a solid majority of the American people. Such an agenda could be the basis for a successful political coalition rooted in the real conditions of American life, which were disastrous before the pandemic and are now catastrophic. ”

In 2020 I was fearful that we were headed in the direction we appear to be hurtling towards now. I felt that the dominant allyship model was not only inadequate but counterproductive to a liberatory future and that in many ways actually played into the hands of an authoritaran future: “Today’s allyship fails to build the necessary coalitions identified by Moten and Fields; it lacks the vision of Hampton. With its reliance on information rather than knowledge, its fetishizing of privilege without any clear means of transferral, as well as the ways in which it actively reinforces whiteness, allyship is not only not up to the task, it is in many ways counterproductive. If you, potential ally, are relying solely on that type of material and whatever allyship information you can cobble together from Google – because, never forget the foundational allyship principles: ‘Do not expect to be taught or shown’, and ‘Google is your friend’ – well, then I have little hope about the outcome of all this, no matter how noble your intentions (moreover we all know about noble intentions and the building materials that constitute the road to hell) (WWPCDN 2021: 18).

Rather than castigating white liberals about microaggressions (enraging as that shit might be), and demanding things like diverse casting for fast fashion commercials, what we needed was far better strategy and focus on outcomes. To repeat the words of Fields a commitment to seeking genuine democracy, by fighting like hell to convince white [Americans] that what is good for black people is also good for them.

White people are too easily persuaded to mistakenly believe in a fictive kinship with other white people, even when those other white people are oppressive power hungry billionaires, who see most whites as subordinates, dupes and pawns – valuable only in so much as their labour can be extracted or in our current period of late stage capitalism -where their labour power is largely obsolete- valuable only as a power bloc to vote for them. In order to facilitate this, Black people, brown people, immigrant groups, provide the perfect scapegoats to say, “Look. Those are the people responsible for stealing your jobs, houses, healthcare opportunities, culture.

Not us.

No not us, with our self serving economic system or political and policy decisions.

White people need to understand that whiteness is used to coerce and control them. The ways in which whiteness is leveraged against them, and is evoked to mobilise them to act against their own best interest. By redirecting all of their ire about the shit circumstances of their lives, towards immigrants, the ruling class offer themselves as the solution, when they are in fact the fucking cause, and before you know it your rights that are being eroded and you are being shot and killed in the streets too, as though your life is worth little more than that of a n*****s. In the evergreen words of Fred Moten -which I should probably just tat on myself at this stage- “I don’t need your help, I just need you to recognise that this shit is killing you too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker”…(but perhaps not so softly anymore beloveds)

What White People Can Do Next available here