How does ‘Unreality’ function as an integral part of the preservation of white supremacist colonial structures?

Another uni assignment I completed in the second semester of my first year. It touches on structural, academic, and individual unrealities which function to conserve and perpetuate colonialism and white supremacy. Fraught with issues but important to conserve, thank you!

---

In the genesis of a colonial settler state, its first and only goal begins as sustenance; it must find a way to maintain power and control over the indigenous people. This usually begins with a horrifying campaign of genocidal violence followed by hundreds of years of pretending that violence had never occurred, so even from the outset, an element of ‘Unreality’ becomes fundamental to the establishment of the state. Unreality, which here can be defined as an understanding of corporeality that dismisses or ignores the existence of white supremacism in favour of a race-blind outlook, acts as a requisite pillar of coloniality in that without it, there can be no argument for the legitimacy or integrity of the white supremacist settler state in the first place. Both Charles Mills and Chelsea Watego discuss a form of ‘Unreality’ in their texts. Mills employs the ideas of “ideal theory” (2017, p.34) and “consensual hallucinations” (2022, p.18)  in order to explain the function of  ‘Unreality’ in maintaining inequitable social structures and further perpetuating genocidal white supremacist systems of governance. Watego illuminates a different ‘Unreality’, hope, which she defines as “a suspension of Black trauma amid Black trauma, and a premature death sentence for those destined to be betrayed by it” (Watego, 2021 p.197), the goal of which is to create a cycle of disappointment, self-reproach, and distraction from the violence of the colony towards indigenous people. 

In his incredibly influential text 'Black Rights/ White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism' (2017), Mills dissects the habit of white philosophers to mythologise societal change divorced from the racially complicated reality. Mills (2017) argues that by focusing on abstracts or "ideal theories" (p.34), white philosophers avoid dealing with the real ramifications of a violently white supremacist system that they actively benefit from. They remain unburdened with reality and, therefore, never have to deal with the practical aspects of their ideology; their praxis exists in the ether. In this way, no real tangible change can surface, and all theorising about socio-political reform remains a theory. Mills draws on John Rawls' definition of ideal theory as asking "what justice demands in a perfectly just society" (Mills, 2017, p.34), highlighting that the issue with this outlook is that it does not take into account how a history of disenfranchisement and colonial violence would impact the establishment of a political and judicial system and that in the imagination of future systems, there must be some discussion of how to address these histories in an educated and practical way. Political scientist Laura Valentini constructs a similar characterisation of Rawls's definition of ideal theory, namely that he "simplifies the problem of social justice by assuming that society is self-contained, populated with fully capable adults and exists under favourable natural and historical conditions" (2009 p.332 ). Through both definitions, we begin to see how the state can manipulate and employ ideal theory to ensure that there can be no impactful theories of justice. In turn, we are left limited by the imaginations of those who are beneficiaries of the colonial system, i.e. white theorists. This characterisation of Rawls' theory speaks to the understanding of 'Unreality' as a device of social and political stagnation. While there is a sense in which any re-imagination of what a just society would look like would have to be an abstraction as it does not yet exist, I argue alongside Mills and Valentini that the 'Unreality' comes from theorising concepts of justice without considering the implications of racist histories and realities. 

Mills' critique of 'ideal theory' comes from a frustration with the lack of consideration of racist histories and the ignorance towards the existence of a racialised liberalism when speculating about the creation of future conceptualisations of justice. His focus, rather than on the specific horror and 'Unreality' of colonisation, delves into the less intrinsic suspensions of reality that permeate academic spaces to demythologise the idea of revolutionary social change. Mills' definition of racial liberalism is "a liberal theory whose terms originally restricted full personhood to whites … and relegated nonwhites to an inferior category" (2017, p.31). He argues that it was in the inception of liberalism that it became racialised as the foundational theories that underpin current liberal governance were created by theorists who actively participated in slavery or the dispossession of land from Indigenous peoples. This, however, does not mean that liberalism is an unsavable ideology for Mills; he makes the case that through de-racialising racial liberalism, there can be the creation of a far more equitable system that takes into account the histories of violence which have established the settler colonial state. The problem then comes in the imagination of a new system, where the focus on ideal theory distracts from the ability for actionable change and concrete examples of praxis to be established. I argue that the dissonance in this situation is that white political theorists have a vested interest in remaining ignorant towards the realities of white supremacist colonial violence, and it is for that reason that much of their imaginations of justice ignore the vital detail of racial oppression. 

Mills (2022) establishes a framework through which we can understand the white liberal hesitancy to grapple with the ugly parts of social justice in his text ‘The Racial Contract’. Mills (2022) defines the racial contract as an agreement between members of a group of people to categorise the ‘foreign’ group as outsiders or, in this specific case, white people having an agreement to classify others as ‘non-white’. The classification carries negative connotations and creates an arbitrary system of stratification that shifts with what is socially and politically convenient for the dominant social group. Mills does argue that while “all whites are beneficiaries of the contract, … some are not signatories to it.” (2022, p.11); this may be, in this case, the ‘well-meaning’ white liberals who struggle to conceptualise a non-ideal theory of justice that is situationally appropriate. In order for this ‘Racial contract’ to maintain itself when there may be ‘conscientious objectors’ is through an “inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance” (2022, p.18).  It is through what Mills (2022) describes as a “consensual hallucination” (p.18) that allows for white people to create an imaginative reality that makes it impossible to truly understand the depth of racial injustice and their role in it. Their perception of reality, therefore, becomes one of some racial utopia, fostering a distinctively politically impotent group of people. It is here that the benefit of this ‘Unreality’ begins to take shape; it allows for little to no tangible social change where white theorists are unable to conceptualise practical theories of justice and non-white political theorists and philosophers are systematically undermined and disregarded at every turn.

Hagar Kotef works to investigate how the violence of colonialism becomes embedded in the settler colony and the ways in which beneficiaries of colonialism have a vested interest in the ignorance or unrecognition of that violence. In her text ‘The Colonizing Self (Or: Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine)’, she asks of a settler coming face to face with the original inhabitant of the land they now live on,

“Would this moment, in which one realises their own role on the colonial playing field, not fracture the very being of those who see the ‘political situation,’..., as the product of the unwillingness of ‘leaders’?” (2020 p.141)

She continues, 

“And if one can remain indifferent, what are the … redirections of sentiments fostered by colonial regimes’ that give rise to such peacefulness ... even when one can no longer deny their own role in history?” (2020 p.141)

Kotef highlights the reason that ‘Unreality’ is so important. The cognitive dissonance required between settler/Indigenous person, White/Non-white is so great that anything short of a complete suspension of reality, ignorant to race and racism entirely, leaves open a gaping hole of dissent in the white supremacist colonial system. Both the state and the settler themselves have a stake in maintaining the settler’s ignorance towards the violence of the settler colony. For the state, ignorance offers self-protection and sustenance. For the settlers, it leaves them unburdened by their role in the horrors of colonial violence and the ways in which they continue to benefit from it. In this way, we see the indispensability of ‘Unreality’ for the colony in allowing it to preserve its own existence. 

Chelsea Watego posits a different kind of ‘Unreality’, used as a tool of colonialism by settler states: hope. Watego argues that hope functions as maintaining the status of the colony through trivial placations of Indigenous people via means such as “reconciliation action plans and indigenousness derived from nowhere” (2021, p.198). She contends that hope, through these empty demonstrations made by the state to mollify Indigenous peoples, offers a situation where colonised peoples are forced to accept the vapid demonstrations of kinship from colonisers with the knowledge that nothing will change as a result. This cycle of manipulation by the colony towards Indigenous peoples allows it to create a sense of plausible deniability where they can state that they have made an effort to recognise their relationship with the peoples whom they spent the last 250 systematically genociding. Hope, in turn, becomes an “enabler” (Watego, 2021, p.198) of the colony’s existence and a mode of blindness for beneficiaries of colonialism in that they never have to confront the realities of their place on stolen land. They can view these ‘attempts for reconciliation’ as nothing but progress and swear in the face of Indigenous peoples that they understand what they are going through but that everything will work out in the end. They craft a detached reality where Indigenous people have overcome the history of oppression, which has allowed the state to erect itself on top of them. So, due to the peace and tranquillity this offers non-indigenous peoples, they prescribe it to indigenous folk as a viable and realistic understanding of how the world works. Watego grapples with the prescription of hope to Indigenous people, stating, 

“It relies upon a false sense of respite from the reality of everyday racial violence in the colony; that we suspend all logic and cling to hope, a waiting for a future good while living in a permanent hell” (2021, p.197)

Watego argues a similar point to Mills, where the insistence from colonisers that colonised people should have hope is the perpetuation of an ideal theory, the imagination of a world where injustice ceases to exist. Indigenous people are asked to remain hopeful of a future in a way that is ultimately detrimental to their ability to focus on the now or develop an un-mythologised praxis, allowing the state to guard its own self-interest. Glenn Sean Coulthard, an Indigenous Yellowknive philosopher, reflects on the tactics of self-preservation the state employs towards colonised peoples. In Coulthard's theory, the existence and reproduction of the state rely on its ability to manipulate Indigenous people into "identify{ing} either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society" (2014, p.25). The indigenous person must begin to see the world as fair and just, to accept the facetious, mirage-like friendship of the coloniser, always far in the distance and perpetually out of reach.  It is in this way that we see 'Unreality' tighten its grip on society in every facet; Indigenous peoples, non-indigenous peoples, and white political theorists are all encouraged or forced into a sphere of suspended reality, which is indispensable for the settler colony to sustain itself as without it there is no possible argument for the legitimacy of the state as it stands. Coulthard suggests that philosophies of recognition posed by Hegel in 'The Phenomenology of Mind' (1910) cannot be applied to a colonial context due to the absence of mutuality of power between the coloniser and the colonised persons. He draws on Fanon's work in 'Black Skins, White Masks' (1986)  to further elucidate the idea that by nature of the disproportion of power between master and slave in the dialectic, the enslaved person develops an attachment to the small gestures of recognition offered to them by the master. This attachment, Coulthard argues, is "essential in maintaining the economic and political structure of master/slave (coloniser/colonised) relations themselves". (2014, p.26) This 'recognition offered to Indigenous peoples falls under Watego's illustration of the methods employed by the state in an attempt to fool indIndigenousople into believing false progress, and it, in turn, asks them once again to suspend their disbelief in favour of viewing the state as one of racial equality and justice. 

Hope, consensual hallucinations, and Ideal theory thus function as individual manifestations of 'Unreality' assisting with the preservation of white supremacist colonial structures by distracting from their abject horror. Unreality works on multiple levels: Structural, academic, and individual. The structural 'Unreality' of Hope comes in the form of gestures and conciliations by the state towards Indigenous people in the hope that they adopt a settler outlook towards the colony, in so far as they become attached to it and all it represents. Academic 'Unreality' begs that white theorists and philosophers ignore the histories of racism and colonisation that underpin new imaginations of theories of justice. The individual 'Unreality' shows its face through consensual hallucinations, which cause one group to alienate another based on a set of changing characteristics while rendering the ingroup unable to recognise the everyday violence of that alienation. Ultimately, the state uses these different embodiments of 'Unreality' as a highly effective tool of conservation. Conservation of power, of land, and a loyal, unquestioning citizenry.

References:

1. Coulthard, G.S 2014, Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota

2. Fanon, F. 1986, Black Skin,White Masks, Pluto Press, London

3. Hegel, G.W.F 1910, The phenomenology of mind, London Swan Sonnenschein & Co, Limited, London

4. Hogan, B 2018, Frantz Fanon’s Engagement with Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, Vol.11, no.8, pp. 16-32

5. Kotef, H. 2020, The Colonizing Self : Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine, Duke University Press, North Carolina

6. Mills, C. 2017, Racial Liberalism, in Black Rights/ White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford

7. Mills, C. 2022, The racial contract , Twenty-fifth anniversary edn., Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York

8. Moreton-Robinson, A 2015, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota

9. Stemplowska, Z 2008, What’s Ideal About Ideal Theory?, Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 319-340 

10. Valentini, L. 2009, On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 332–355

11. Watego, C. 2021, Another Day in the Colony, University of Queensland Press, Chicago

12. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs 2021, Hagar Kotef: Book Talk ─ The Colonizing Self (Or: Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine), online video, 14 September, Youtube, Viewed October 15, 2024, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0I93uXlc9A>