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Toward the Place of Bad Debt: Disfiguring White Benevolence through Radical Humility

If white people feel at ease about holding onto structural power by taking credit for the beneficial effects of their reparative actions, perhaps a different orientation could begin from a stance of radical humility. A stance of radical humility assumes that white people cannot actually do anything to fundamentally address the violence of white supremacy. This premise of radical humility does not mean that white people should do nothing. It does mean, however, that white people cannot assume that their actions give rise to consequential effects that they can take ownership (and thus credit) over. In contrast to calls for white epistemic humility, where white people are encouraged to act as if they cannot “truly” know (Medina, 2012), here I suggest humility in relation to moral agency. In this, I am inspired by Riggs’s (2004) argument that white claims to moral agency always reify hierarchical orderings of agency and allow white people to manage their stake in white supremacy.

When white people operate under the assumption that their actions actually cannot bring about significant consequences, they cannot arrive at a place where they imagine that giving reparations adequately compensates for the violence of whiteness. I am not arguing that reparative giving does not bring about meaningful consequences, but instead seeking to explore the ways that a stance that disavows consequential agency can make white benevolence inoperable. In effect, white people who are denied consequential agency lose the capacity to use giving to “balance the score” and are instead positioned to give reparations continuously, without expecting that each payment lessens their implication or responsibility. It is not that actions do not matter in the stance of radical humility, but that white people are re-oriented away from remembering, tallying, and accumulating credit for the impact of their actions. As Harney and Moten argue, justice can begin when we recognize that “there is no payment possible” but give repayment anyways (2013, 61). The stance of radical humility is a tool for orienting white people toward an ethic of giving reparations that is suffused with forgetfulness rather than accounting.

The stance of radical humility is useful insofar as it has the potential to scramble the frameworks of white benevolence. As Rigby Jr. and Ziyad (2016) argue,

There is nothing redeeming or redeemable about whiteness—by definition. Only the radical negation of it is helpful or freeing … Therefore, white people should move comfortably in neither Black spaces nor white spaces. Even those who are wellmeaning should drive themselves into the ground trying to figure out how to occupy a positive whiteness—because it is impossible. Only in this frenzy, when the sense of order that is critical to whiteness turns to chaos in every place, can the motivation to destroy it overcome the compulsion to reform it (para. 7).

Ribgy Jr. and Ziyad argue that the internal sensibilities of whiteness must become uninhabitable chaos for white people to forego the hope of inhabiting a non-harmful whiteness. The internal sensibilities of benevolent whiteness are informed by frameworks of consequential agency, individuality, and transactional responsibility. A stance of radical humility denies white people consequential agency, insists that they do not have individual ownership over their actions, and presents a vision of an ongoing, never finished responsibility to redress racial injustice. As such, the stance of radical humility scrambles the frameworks that make white benevolence into an operable and inhabitable position. By locating white people firmly within whiteness and then inviting them to give in ways that make white benevolence nonsensical, a stance of radical humility might productively turn the internal order of whiteness into uninhabitable chaos.

The stance of radical humility is useful for the reorientation it can provide, not necessarily for its truthfulness or falseness. However, it is worth noting that the premise is not as far from truth as it might first appear. As Rigby Jr. and Ziyad (2016) argue,

[white people have] been the conduits for necessary Black liberation work. White people surely played integral roles … But those roles were meticulously crafted by the toils, lives, death and suffering of Black people. The energy forced through those conduits was painstakingly produced by Black folks” (para. 16).

The orienting premise that white people cannot, in fact, achieve anything through their actions does not mean that they should do nothing. It simply means that white people must recognize that their actions are profoundly contingent upon the work of others. Consequently, the stance of radical humility is also useful because it denies white entitlement to autonomous moral agency in the work of racial justice.

For Sullivan (2008), however, granting moral agency to white people is essential if they are to avoid becoming paralyzed by guilt and are instead going to be able to enact antiracist decisions and actions, even if imperfect. Similarly, Martín Alcoff (1988) argues that white people need to feel that they can act to repair racist harm and be good to others, even as they recognize that the weight of their racial history is against them, in order to feel connected to others and act against racial injustice. Sullivan and Martín Alcoff are correct in raising concerns about the tendency for white people to sink into defeatist attitudes when faced with the weight of white supremacy; at the same time, it seems that denying white people their entitlement to moral agency might actually allow them to feel more connected to others and the work of reparations. In denying consequential agency, the stance of radical humility pushes white people to understand their relationships and responsibility to others in sustained, rather than transactional, ways. Sullivan is concerned that denying white people moral agency “tends to make [B]lack and other non-white people solely responsible for white redemption and deliverance from racism” (2008, 252-3), yet the stance of radical humility operates to make white responsibility to give reparations into an unfinished and never-ending commitment. As such, the stance of radical humility can productively deepen white people’s sense of responsibility to act on racial injustice, rather than allowing them to sink into complacency.

To be clear, the stance of radical humility is useful as an orienting principle for white organizing around reparative action, not as a call for white people to individually act out reparations with humility. Unlike Ignatiev and Garvey’s (1996) framework of race traitorship, I do not assume that individual disobedience toward whiteness presents a challenge to the structure of white supremacy. Individualizing and interiorizing the work to disfigure whiteness is not necessarily useful because whiteness is a structuring force, not an aggregation of individual white identities. The stance of radical humility has the potential to disfigure whiteness only insofar as it cultivates the conditions for white people to organize collective redistributive politics in ways that scramble the internal sensibilities of whiteness.