In a series of numbered written dialogues Call Centre correspondents Zahra Dallilah and Julie Tomlin respond to their own prompt: If we stop: Flourishing. Nourishment. Lockdown.
5.
White supremacy writ large in America, where as Catherine Keller writes, ideas of omnipotence, of the messianic white man have become secularised and are at work in the white population who have always seen whiteness as an exception, to be defended against the other.
And so we begin to see whiteness under scrutiny, although it’s never entirely under scrutiny, never really seen as a whole, an identity to be challenged, it is held to be the way, the truth, the life, so how can it be scrutinised, when it is the marker for all other bodies.
And now the whitest of white men are coming up with measures to get people back to a way of life - government discounts three days a week in cafes and restaurants - seem desperate and ill thought through.
Can we nudge ourselves into a different space, one which accepts that the whole edifice has to come down, that whiteness, white maleness, white womanhood, is a construct that we need to dismantle?
We have to find new ways of being that are not subjecting others to our dominance, our desire to control, to impose a way of thinking and being that is deemed correct.
And how is an edifice of thinking of this nature dismantled?
Image: Andrew Wilson
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