Racism, Dominion, and Suffering: An Ethnographic Vignette

The living room is a place where honest conversations about vulnerability and racism are had.

Ford and Margo sat across from me on their living room couch. There was a feeling of heaviness in the air, in part because of the stories that they told me: struggling to feed their kids, unable to turn the heat on in the winter, public school furloughs and forced holidays compromising their ability to hold down jobs. Margo unsuccessfully held back tears, recounting how she lost her job as a waitress for bringing her 7 year old son with her, because the “in-service day” — as she called it, marking scarequotes with her fingers — and repeated run-ins with the Department of Family and Child Services over unsupervised children gave her no other option. “I gave him my discount at the counter, because I was skipping lunch. It was the first time he wasn’t having one of those socialist brick meals at school, or Spaghetti-o’s at home. And it was the last.” Ford, also out of work as a machinist, continued. “I can’t take them to the shop with me. And I sure as hell am not paying $30 an hour for daycare. Who makes $30 an hour and can afford that?! Hell, you’d have to make $50 an hour to afford that and still put food on the table.”

I ashamedly did the quick math in my head to confirm that I, as an assistant professor, did not make $50 an hour. I don’t. Far from it, actually. But I still made substantially more than anyone in that room could dream of.

And, not even I could afford Daycare if I had kids.

It was a cold December day, and I hadn’t meant to get them upset. In fact, I was bringing a few Christmas presents for them — simple things, a gift card for pizza hut (a family favorite), a pair of boots for their son Max, and a couple of fleece blankets I made to match their living room. They were things that I had gotten them because, although they started as “ethnographic informants,” they had become people I genuinely cared about. I knew things about them as people, human beings — their favorite colors, their favorite food, what music they liked — because I had been doing in-depth participant observation and interviews with them and their political allies. And that sense of care, I believe still, is crucial to the political work that my project is inspired by and committed to.

But I had gotten them riled up while we sat and drank a case of “that fancy import shit” that I like — Heineken. (I don’t actually like it. But it’s better than Bud). They were most grateful for the blankets, although the Pizza Hut was something they looked forward to. But that led us to a difficult conversation.

They started to tell me about last winter, when a snowstorm ripped through the region. They lost electricity. And because Gas is unaffordable, and fixing their furnace is unaffordable, and applying for state-aid is unaffordable, and going to a cold shelter without a car is unaffordable, they stayed home and weathered the storm the best they could. They told me about burning old encyclopedias, because they ran out of firewood over the long weekend. And in the story, they told me about how it was a fitting metaphor for Max’s education — an education that promises to lift people out of poverty. Ford, with his arm around Margo, thanked me in a way that felt honest and deep.

And all the while, the Confederate Flag over the couch stared me in the face. The “No immigrants allowed” coasters on the table stared me in the face. The “Make America Great Again” poster stared me, most baldly, in the face.

“If they were like you, we’d actually like bleeding heart liberals,” Margo said a few moments later. Ford chimed in, with a laugh, “but we wouldn’t let you sell us those nigger programs.”

My research for the past 2 years has focused on an emerging white nationalist movement, and the ways in which the political field of possibilities is structured by oversimplified mediations of racism. What happens if we redefine racism, not as a type of oppression, but as a type of dominion — as the symptoms of a type of compromising and collaborative suffering that is re-encoded into racial antagonisms, such that racism obscures and preserves economic hierarchies that cause suffering? What happens when we take the suffering of those people we call racists seriously? Or compassionately? Who should do this carework?

And, perhaps most perplexing: how do we intervene against racist organizing as racist, when African American families like Ford, Margo, and Max join these white movements?