On decoloniality, whiteness, and the news media
*Please reach out to me on Instagram @shweeze. Special thanks to Colin Kimzey and Tasha Patel for their edits, input, and friendship.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin
There is no place in the world like South Asia. I close my eyes, and I see farms, mountains, and rain clouds. I love this land, and these people are mine. I walk on bare feet across hurting, hot earth towards sounds, movements, and history. America feels so far away.
Oral tradition has always been central to South Asian cultures, especially that of Dakshina Karnataka, the place of my roots. We sing, dance, and laugh down the aisles of time, each song and gesture lusciously laden with the humidity and greenery of the landscape. Today I live in San Francisco/occupied Ohlone territory. I am eager to allow the natural beauty of the Bay area to bear upon my sensibilities as an artist. It is in this spirit that I have recorded a reading of this essay with the sounds of the Bay Area interwoven. It will be released soon. This essay is dedicated to millennials of color who seek to decolonize the spaces they occupy. With these words, welcome to On decoloniality, whiteness, and the news media.
News media, whiteness, and supremacy
At the start of the Trump presidency I was exiting Stanford University as a BLM activist, budding Marxist, and intersectional feminist. These identities were the lens through which I analyzed the news. I believed I needed a working analysis of race, class, gender, and capitalism to accurately interpret current events. Today I am adding another filter, one which links capitalism and racism to create the category of colonialism.
Upon graduation, and throughout the four years of Trump, I worked at a tech-focused news media start-up. Like many media organizations at the time, we defaulted towards a Western, colonial framework for understanding the news. Organizations are not “white” not simply because of how their teams look, but because of the European episteme from which they operate. It is a logic that does not have use for critical race or gender theory; this results in the erasure of the marginalized and thus upholds existing colonial power structures. The cycle completes itself.
I felt this in my body while sitting in the newsroom. I read account after account of women reporting sexual assault during the #MeToo movement, culminating in what felt like a national ring fight of “women” versus “men”, or, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford versus Justice Brett Kavanaugh. During this period of time I often took bathroom breaks where I would sit on the floor by the toilet, turn on the exhaust fan, and cry. Between sobs I asked myself what I could do with my spiritual destabilization. What unique analysis did I have to offer because of my emotions, not in spite of them?
Ida B. Wells shines as an example of decolonial journalism.
Ida B. Wells’ investigative journalism on racial violence in the American South undid the myth of white moral superiority. She exposed the truth because she wrote from a particular perspective, not despite.
Over time it dawned upon me that there is a class of people documenting and curating the news who operate from a white, male, and heterosexual set of concepts, patterns, and theories which are born of their own experiences in the world. Against what standard do we measure their objectivity? The news industry, like most, is dominated by whiteness. This is made quite clear by the industry-wide nostalgia for the golden age of journalism (1940’s to 80s). Is it really so true that at any point in its past, the white news media managed to capture the collective reality of all Americans? This belief in the universality of the white experience is whiteness itself.
I must be precise here in that whiteness is not dependent upon the exclusive participation of white people. It can be embraced and propagated by anyone of any race or ethnicity. Whiteness is the one-sided tale of modernity/coloniality. It is a lens through which to view the history of the modern world. It has been constructed lie by lie, and fueled by the mythology of its own superiority.
Between 2016 and 2020, multiple camps viewing the same event were not only interpreting what they saw differently, but actively taking in disparate information. Readers could not agree on objective truths. How many people actually attended Trump’s inauguration? Did LaQuan McDonald walk towards or away from the police officers before they fired sixteen shots? Did Mohammed Bin Salman order the killing of Jamal Khashoggi or was it a “rogue operation”? How many people in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein’s predation? Is the Coronavirus a real threat? Are the wealthy paying their way into universities? Is Kaepernick a patriot or an insurrectionist?
I watched our newsroom debate if Trump’s tweet telling “the squad” to “go back [to] the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” should be labeled as “racist”. What do you do when a President uses state authority to make legitimate the illegitimate? (AOC, 2020) Is it spin to contextualize racism, xenophobia, and patriarchy? Is a decolonial framing of the news a distortion? And if the framing is not decolonial, is it, by default, colonial? Which framing is spin and which is objective?
Between 2017–2020 nations burrowed into right-wing populism: India, Brazil, Italy, the Netherlands, Philippines, the United Kingdom, Israel, Sri Lanka, Hungary, North Korea, Russia, China, and Ukraine. What are nonwhite nations of the Global South learning from the Global North? The rallying cries in Hong Kong matched the deafening silence of a blanketed Kashmir. Black Lives Matter marched on Washington D.C. as Punjabi farmers marched on Delhi. North African and Syrian refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as Latin American migrants drowned in rivers and cages.
This is what you can see from the newsroom. You witness daily events cascading into what becomes the arc of geopolitics. There is an energy that builds for years but explodes in a single moment which, only when collectively witnessed, becomes history. I remain humbled by the size of us and all that we have been.
Modernity/coloniality and its undoing
Western civilization was an idea before it was a reality (Mignolo, 2017). Even today it is both story and institution, and its keepers are also its storytellers. They have brilliantly and consistently told a single story about the last 400 years of modernity, an enchanting tale of enlightenment and salvation. Yet, many of us know that to believe in a single story is not only dangerous, it is totalitarian. Scholars of the Global South, for example Gloria Anzaldúa and Anibal Quijano, gave life and language to understanding the underbelly of modernity, thus making modernity/coloniality two sides of a coin.
Coloniality reminds us that modernity has been a period of human dispensability, exploitation, and domination, also the essential characteristics of capitalism. When the Global North speaks of peace, justice, inclusion, or equity, it must first name coloniality and its undoing. Should it wish to be a more just society, it must retell the story about itself.
White nations cannot claim non-whiteness matters while fully invested in modernity/coloniality and capitalism. Simultaneously, we children of the Global South, dwelling in immigrant consciousness, have much to understand about ourselves and what has been buried by Western colonialism. Decolonial work will shape the trajectories of our immigrant communities and diasporas. The synchronous self-diagnosis by the Global North combined with the knowledge production of the Global South is the duality of decoloniality. We must have decolonial analysis and practice for they “are two sides of the same movement” (Mignolo, 2015). Thankfully the process of de-Westernization has already begun.
On decoloniality
Decoloniality is a school of thought, a social movement, an aesthetic, a political weapon, “an epistemic reconstitution” driven by “non-Western conceptions of creativity” (Mignolo, 2017). Epistemic meaning it seeks to resurrect non-Western “ways of thinking… and being… that the rhetoric of modernity disavowed and the logic of coloniality implement” by purposefully detaching from a European structure of knowledge (Mignolo, 2017). The stated goals of decolonial academic scholars is not to “update or improve a discipline” but to use “the disciplines to advance political goals” (Mignolo, 2017). The project of decoloniality belongs to us, the emerging political society of students, artists, curators, writers, technologists, philosophers, critics, and activists. Our work is in disputing the faceless behemoths of coloniality with innumerable, small acts of decoloniality.
As the vitriolic rhetoric of Trumpism cracked the formerly respectable veneer of white supremacy, writers scrambled for new language, grasping at objectivity which, like water, slipped through our fingers. The chaos of this otherworldly period can be distilled into Kellyanne Conway’s elision of “alternative facts”. Unbeknownst to her, the United States is itself an alternative fact, and this country asking “what is, in fact, a fact” challenges its own mythology. This questioning of the facts is an entry point for decoloniality. We now have the opportunity to re-author objectivity through an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and, by extension, decolonial lens. Let us seize it!
The personal as the political
The inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Devi Harris opened space for personal reflection on the last four years of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Living under the racial violence of a right-wing administration, not only did I feel that my family and I were not welcome in this country, I felt we did not belong to this country. This feeling of mine is not unique to immigrants in the United States. Indigenous communities worldwide face immense threat from their respective nationalistic governments.
While I had always thought of us as an extension of a diaspora, I had also assumed we were creating a new American as we lived; an Asianness added to the whiteness and blackness of America, expanding America’s definition and possibilities. Such expansion halted in 2016. For four years I did not want to be American or live in America.
This destabilization catalyzed my desire to look inwards. If I did not want to identify as American, what other options existed? I realize now that my natural delinking from Westernization is a crucial aspect of my own decolonial journey. When I disconnected from my Americanness I felt closer to the diaspora. This process was, of course, years in the making. My large and vibrant family, whom I love with all my heart, inherited deep anticolonial tendencies from Mahatma Gandhi. Our commitment to the preservation of a culture indigenous to the land is a desire common to the Hindu Brahmin farming class of south India. My sister, our cousins, and I know firsthand that language is the water in which we swim. Kannada, our mother tongue, has been the basis of our connection to ourselves, our family, and India. We eat home-cooked south Indian meals with our hands, participate in the Indian arts, visit the temple, oil and braid our hair, and have embraced many of the moral (or lack thereof) values, norms, and familial structures of Havyaka Brahmins* in south India. We live the dialectic of eastern-western and ancient-modern.
Today I am beginning to see decoloniality as a tool to understand myself, my community, and our history. Tools we were never given in Western/colonial education, but were handed to us by parents, grand-parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and community members. I dedicate and owe my decolonial journey to them.
“Where do we go from here?” — Solange
Human activity begins and ends with the imagination. If you are a person of color in the United States, there is currently a great need for your imagination within the decolonization movement. If you are white, it is incumbent upon you to face your own whiteness. Western civilization was an idea before it was a reality. If we are to de-Westernize, we must first tell the story of decoloniality to ourselves, one another, and our children.
*I do not wish to romanticize my people. There is genuine likeness between white supremacy and the Hindu caste system, as reflected in the sympathy the Hindu fundamentalist has for the neo-Nazi. Decoloniality calls for the end of all exploitation therefore it must also be abolitionist. In college, I was introduced to the teachings of Dalit activist B.R. Ambedkar who directed me towards a closer meditation on the nature of liberation. More on this later.
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