Whiteness’ Politics of Looking:Bad Faith&the Present Absence of All Lives Matter

• In Event: Theorizing Structures of Domination, Challenging Modalities of Racial Exclusion

Abstract

“All Lives Matter” has been frequently deployed on social media as an obfuscating rejoinder to #BlackLivesMatter (Carney 2016; Gallagher et al. 2018). One also finds it on bumper stickers, tshirts, and faux-inspirational Pinterest posters. It has even made its way into the messaging from Republican and Democratic politicians. At the same time, it would be difficult to construe All Lives Matter as an activating political movement or platform. This paper interrogates the way that ‘All Lives Matter’ is thus both present as a response to #BlackLivesMatter and absent as a tangible political phenomenon. In doing so, it interrogates the antiblack logics that are constitutive of ‘All Lives Matter.’

This paper pursues an analysis of the antiblackness and the present absence of All Lives Matter, which ultimately proves emblematic of political whiteness itself. To do this, I turn to Lewis Gordon’s classic “existential phenomenological” analysis of antiblack racism in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. I will first examine the multiple ways in which ‘All Lives Matter’ engages in bad faith in its apparent response to Black Lives Matter. It denies the reality of antiblack violence in favor of the comfort of a superficial universality, in turn evading a confrontation with the necessity of choosing either to complicitly do nothing or to work against white supremacy. I then engage Gordon’s analysis of perspective and the phenomenological look to argue that if #BlackLivesMatter compels whiteness to be looked at from the perspective of blackness, then All Lives Matter evades the look and seeks to prevent itself from being seen.

Author

• John McMahon, SUNY Plattsburgh