The 1AC’s politics cannot be disimbricated from its affirmation of white futurity as a necessary pre condition for preserving the human. The future is not a neutral space for policy experimentation, but an investment in racialized speculation that ontologizes the right of self-preservation and expands liberal governance.

This paper argues that research on whiteness and geography is oriented almost exclusively around some notion of the past. While this is perhaps to be expected given that whiteness studies builds off two past-oriented bodies of scholarship – US labour studies (Roediger, 1991) and postcolonial theory (Said, 1994) – the argument is that privileging the past when researching geographies of whiteness risks overlooking the ways in which whiteness and hence various forms of racism are configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future. In pressing this claim, the argument is not to suggest that history is irrelevant for understanding the politics of whiteness. Analysing the past remains indispensable for understanding the numerous forms whiteness can take. Instead, the argument is that analysing discourses of ‘the future’ can reveal important insights about the ways in which white geographies are configured that might otherwise be foreclosed if the past is privileged as the exclusive time-space through which such geographies are produced and maintained. As such, any politics seeking to challenge whitenesses and their hold on racist social imaginaries may benefit by analysing how the future is invoked in articulations of white identity and how such future-oriented articulations shape geographies of all kinds.¶ Why the future? By future I refer to an imagined time that is yet-to-come. The future can be understood to follow sequentially from a past-present trajectory, or it can be understood as a form of absent presence. From tropes of uncertainty, Utopia, apocalypse, prophesy, hope, fear, possibility and potentiality, the future shapes the present in all manner of ways. For instance, in politics, rights are often suspended to safeguard against future events of insurrection, catastrophe and terror. In religion, moral judgements in the present are shaped by a concern for one’s safe passage into a future afterlife, and, in finance, the pricing of securities necessarily entails some calculation of future risk. Given the ubiquity of the future in the present, it is perhaps no surprise that the future is an important object of inquiry in contemporary thought (see, for example, Adams and Groves, 2007; Anderson, 2010b; Jameson, 2005; Luhmann, 1993).¶ Ben Anderson (2010a) provides a useful sketch of this research in a recent article in this journal. His point is that the future is rendered knowable through specific practices (i.e. calculation, imagination and performance) and, in turn, intervenes on the present through three anticipatory logics (i.e. pre-caution, pre-emption and preparedness). So, too, others have made the case that pre-empting the future is now a common feature of contemporary political life (Braun, 2007; Cooper, 2006). Futurity is also an important feature of the affective dimensions of daily life. Take, for instance, fear (Pain, 2009) and hope (Anderson, 2006; Anderson and Holden, 2008). Both are simultaneously embodied experiences and atmospheric qualities animated by imagined futures: one fears the yet-to-come and the other hopes for better things to come. In both, the here-and-now of the psyche or of collective mood is shaped by the yet-to-come. Or, as Brian Massumi (2002) argues, affect occurs precisely in the overlap between the actual and the virtual, which I take to mean an overlap between that which is and a very specific form of the virtual – the yet-to-come. By virtual I refer to things that are real but not actual (Shields, 2003); in this way, the future is exemplary of the virtual. It can be known and hence real, as Anderson suggests, but because it can never be fully actualized as the future, the future remains a permanent virtuality. Thus, analysing atmospheres of fear and hope, for instance, may tell us something about the way politics takes shape through the conjugation of the actual and the virtual, or at the threshold of the future event.¶ But the future as an object or orientation of inquiry is not limited to the affective, and nor is it confined to an actual-virtual binary. Hegel, for instance, paid considerable attention to transactions of the actual and the possible. For Hegel, the dialectic is made possible by the actual-possible relation where the dialectical movement of the actual is the possible.1 So, too, Heidegger argued that the future is indispensable to meaning. For instance, the significance that attaches to certain kinds of information would vanish were it not for the anticipated (i.e. future) consequences that lay dormant in information. Currency exchange rates would matter little, for instance, were it not for the anticipated consequences of exchange rate volatility. Although radically different, the Hegelian and Heideggerian traditions share in common the idea not simply that politics take shape through the collision of social forces that gathered pace in the past, but that political contests are shaped by the future as well.¶ This essay argues for a research agenda that situates the future at the centre of analyses of white geographies. It shows how the geographic literature on whiteness is past-oriented and suggests how this literature might benefit by attending to the ways in which white geographies are infused by notions of futurity. I develop this argument more fully below. For now let me offer a few preliminary thoughts about geographies of whiteness. By whiteness I refer to a racialized subject position that is remarkable for its seeming invisibility (Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Dyer, 1997). In this sense, whiteness is only partially about skin. More important, whiteness plays a foundational role in racist epistemology by serving as the norm against which others come to be viewed as different (Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Kobayashi and Peake, 2000). As such, whiteness does not name a set of stereotypes, so much as a set of ‘narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and habits of perception’ (Dyer, 1997: 12) that stand in for the normal. This makes defining whiteness almost impossible but then, as Richard Dyer (1997) argues, the power of whiteness lies in its capacity for almost infinite variability (see also Kobayashi, 2003; Vanderbeck, 2006). For myself, the power of racisms rest in their capacity to normalize their corresponding whitenesses (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000).¶ What, then, are geographies of whiteness? For my purposes here, they refer to geographies – spaces, places, landscapes, natures, mobilities, bodies, etc. – that are assumed to be white or are in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness (Bonnett, 1997; McCarthy and Hague, 2004; Vanderbeck, 2006). The argument put forward in this paper is that research on geographies of whiteness is almost invariably past-oriented (Bonnett, 1997, 2000; Hoelscher, 2003; Pulido, 2000). By ‘past-oriented’ I mean that whiteness, whether understood as a past or present phenomenon, tends to be explained, accounted for and examined as an expression of social relations that took shape in the past (Satzewich, 2007). In the paper, I aim to show how this work is dominated by an orientation that looks to the past as the temporal horizon through which research and learning about past or present white racial identity occurs. By and large, this work assumes that in order to challenge or reconfigure whitenesses and their corresponding racisms whiteness must be diagnosed using some form of past-oriented analysis (Bonnett, 1997). The racist past is, thus, used to explain the racist present. A brief example makes the point. In an essay that many (Baldwin, 2009a; Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Jackson, 1998; McCarthy and Hague, 2004) suggest is a main point of reference for debate about whiteness in geography, Alastair Bonnett (1997) argues that whiteness ought to be understood as a function of historical geography.2 As such, Bonnett privileges a methodological approach that reaches into the past for answers about contemporary race and racism. Elsewhere, Audrey Kobayashi and Linda Peake (2000) make a similar claim that whiteness is a historically constructed position: to understand whiteness requires understanding its multiple genealogies.¶ I do wonder, though, whether a past-oriented approach to the study of white geographies reproduces the teleological assumption that white racism can be modernized away. Such an assumption privileges an ontology of linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is said to be an effect of whatever came before. Consequently, efforts to understand racism are thought to proceed from, or be enhanced by, some correct historical analysis of whiteness. According to this kind of temporality, the future is the terrain upon or through which white racism will get resolved. It cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. Yet, in so doing, this kind of temporality disregards the ways in which the future is very often already present in the present not as a discrete ontological time-space, but as an absent or virtual presence that constitutes the very meaning of the present (Anderson, 2010a; Massumi, 2007). This is a rather significant oversight when attempting to account for geographies of whiteness because it means that such geographies are not simply a function of the past but of the future as well.¶ So, then, what about the future? To what extent are geographies of whiteness a function not just of the past but of the future? How are white geographies maintained in relation to the future? In what ways is the future already present in various forms of whiteness? It seems that the geographic literature on whiteness is silent on these questions. In pointing this out, I do not mean to indict or discredit the historicist approach that has come to dominate understandings of whiteness. Again, past-oriented analyses of various kinds have been and continue to be critical for understanding whitenesses and the various racisms to which they give rise. I simply wish to acknowledge that by foregrounding the past in the present the geographic study of whiteness risks overlooking how whitenesses are made and maintained in relation to futures both distant and immanent. Here, the task for a future-oriented geographic research on whiteness might be to understand how both contemporary and past forms of whiteness relate to the future (Anderson, 2010a), or how specific geographic expressions of whiteness are contingent on the future. For instance, the task might be to understand how discourses of futurity shape various forms of white supremacy from right-wing xenophobias to left-nationalisms to practices of liberal humanitarianism, and how these shape, for instance, geographies of place, nature, space, mobility, bodies and so on. A worthwhile starting point for this work might be to analyse how discourses of white crisis, such as those found in Great Britain in the early 1900s (Bonnett, 2004) or throughout the West during processes of post-Second World War decolonization (Thobani, 2007), relate to and are shaped by notions of futurity. They do relate to the future. The question is: how and to what effect?¶ Acknowledging how the future is made present in white geographies is important for at least three reasons. First, as many now argue (Grusin, 2010; Massumi, 2007), the future is an important site through which individuals and societies are governed (Anderson, 2010a). A focus on whiteness and futurity provides scope for thinking about the way in which governing through the future might inaugurate new or reconfigure old forms of whiteness. Eugenic science is a useful example here. Eugenics was underwritten by an imagined future eradicated of human imperfections. Thus we might seek to understand how white geographies are reproduced through new future-oriented technologies, like genetic screening and nanotechnology (Rose, 2007). Second, understanding how white geographies articulate with discourses of futurity opens up new terrains for conceptualizing and challenging racism. If white supremacy is, in part, reproduced through shared practices of futurity, what then are these practices? What kinds of futures do such practices seek to expunge or produce, and how can they be resisted? The case of genetic medicine is again illustrative. For instance, individual gene mapping allows ‘genetic citizens’ to witness their ‘future’ health by assessing their genetic predisposition for disease (Rose, 2007). Genetic citizenship is, in turn, shaped by new practices of bodily purification aimed at foreclosing certain ‘unhealthy’ futures. We might ask whether and how these practices are white. Third, a focus on whiteness and futurity points to the idea that affect shapes white racial formation (Hook, 2005). For the future can never exist except as a form of virtual present, and affect can be understood, in part, as a generalized attitude towards the presencing of particular futures. (Important, however, is that affect can also be understood as a generalized attitude towards presencings of the past. Think, for example, affects of nostalgia and loss.) Thus, we might ask: what futures infuse the affective logics of whiteness? How does this future presencing occur? And how, if at all, are these futures constitutive of specific white spatio-temporalities? These reasons together provide a rationale for a research agenda concerned with understanding how the future works as a resource in the geographic expression of whitenesses.