White Flights Quotes

“Today, what I want to talk about is having no hope,” the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck once said, in an informal talk to her students. “All hope, of course, is about sizing up the past and projecting it into the future. Anyone who sits for any length of time sees that there is no past and no future except in our mind.” She went on to say, “We are usually living in vain hope for something or someone that will make my life easier, more pleasant. We spend most of our time trying to set life up in a way so that will be true; when, contrariwise, the joy of our life is just in totally doing and just bearing what must be borne, in just doing what has to be done. It’s not even what has to be done; it’s there to be done so we do it.” She ended by saying, “So if we practice like this, what reward will we get? If we really practice like this, it takes everything we have. What will we get out of it? The answer, of course, is nothing. So let’s not have hope. We won’t get anything. We’ll get our life, of course, but we’ve got that already…. We can be rewarded with this nothing at all.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“What is the social function of tenderness? To do what a person can’t do privately, I want to say. So that we’re not trapped within a family resemblance. Justice makes love manifest in public what it can’t do in private.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“Artists, as human beings, need to be involved, primarily, in the struggle to protect life, provide relief and sanctuary, aid other people’s survival. And then, because they’re artists, secondarily, they have to struggle with the word “as.” What it means to be called, included, invoked, seen, named.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“As a man, a heterosexual man, I experience speaking—writing—and being heard—being “received”—with the phallus. I experience being silenced, being deprived of the right to speak, with castration. How many metaphysical systems—or antimetaphysical critiques—are rooted in the symbolic castration of the opponent, the denial of his (it’s always a “his”) right to speak?”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“All concepts of race,” Richard Dyer writes in White, “are always concepts of the body and of hetero-sexuality.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“negation) but living death (a state of affirmation), being not a noncitizen but a citizen of the necropolis, which makes you a necropolitan. Which means (among other things) getting used to death—administered, systematic, programmatic death, random and predictable—as a condition of life, and getting along with life in spite of it. In”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“I’m no longer clear about where the imagination ends and politics begins, or what it means to do political analysis apart from the imagined worlds of individual subjects. I can only say this much: whenever I travel by plane I feel reduced to a passport and a credit card. This is a perverse reversal of Agamben’s most famous concept, the idea of the dehumanized noncitizen, reduced to “bare life.” I go from duty-free shop to duty-free shop, a profit center in transit, a purchasing agent. I’m reminded that I’m participating in climate change on a massive scale; that the capital I accumulate and invest—my retirement account in TIAA, invested in arms manufacturers, and energy companies, despite years of customer protests—takes part in transactions I never authorized, to say nothing of my taxes, which have paid for KBR-Halliburton’s kidnapping of Nepalis to work in the Green Zone during the Gulf War, extraordinary renditions and drone strikes, deportations and private prisons and the world’s largest nuclear stockpile.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“Every language on the apocalypse is also apocalyptic,” says Derrida, “and cannot be excluded from its object.” I want to resist this idea, in the following small way: fictions, consciously fictional narratives, end without ending everything around them. Fiction reminds the reader that the end is not really the end. (“‘Strophe’ … is not only the Greek word for ‘turn,’” Sonya Posmentier writes in Cultivation and Catastrophe, “but also for the poetic unit of a stanza…. Catastrophe, then, is always involved with art making. It contains … the making of form in the first place.”) I’m looking for, and hoping for, a literature that resists death, that resists the identification of “death” and “ending.” Our lives end in death, but the world and the culture do not have to die. One does not require the other. Time does not have to pull incessantly in the direction of oblivion.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“These cultural forms—coolness, the hipster, and emo, the white blues—have a history and a prehistory derived from African American culture; they are black cultural forms turned white. In this way they follow the long trajectory of conscious and unconscious appropriation Kevin Young traces in The Grey Album: “In the face of alienation and anomie the mask, modern and often racial, becomes necessary,”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“If the problem of closed endings is one of false necessity—bringing the narrative back to the limitations of the so-called real world—the problem of open endings, in late capitalist culture, is that they are always subject to cynical recirculation: they can always become objectless gestures, “meaning” nothing but themselves.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“The central difficulty in our understanding of ourselves and of society is that we cannot mark out the limits of the possible. The possible … is not a well-defined, closed set of transmutations within which actual historical experience has developed as a subset. The possible is just what we can do next, getting there from here. However, so long as we make a living connection between our ideas about how we got here and our ideas about how we can get to the next place, we do not need to stare at what exists and to represent that stare as insight. We can imagine what exists as the resting place and the starting point that it always really is.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“Racial classification is a reductive process: any way of simplifying the world, making it artificial, involves first taking things away. Severing connections and bonds: practicing symbolic, as well as actual, violence. One of the results of this symbolic violence is to make interesting lives, layered histories, and complex identifications disappear. In other words: by flattening life, racism makes it feel boring, exhausting, embarrassing. This is what happened to me, when I tried to write the story of my great-grandparents: I stopped because I was afraid it would be pointless. I had nothing to build on and nothing to go on.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“What would it mean to accept that America’s great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together? A culture so accomplished at breaking and abandoning things, by definition, lacks an intuitive grasp of repair, reparation, reconciliation. But literature works according to its own eccentric logic. And maybe the most eccentric, unacceptable imaginative projection is a vision of an imperfectly reconciled world, the alternate realities already here but unseen. Leave the monument open so that people can walk through it and see what lies on the other side.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“What would it mean to accept that America’s great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together? A culture so accomplished at breaking and abandoning things, by definition, lacks an intuitive grasp of repair, reparation, reconciliation.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“This is what creates the theodicy, the racecraft, of American writing: the belief that because white writers can most easily pretend to possess disinterest, abstraction, and generality, that quality is necessarily and naturally white.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“you cut away the parts of the story body you’re most ashamed of, the parts you want no one to see.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“When a work of art seems deliberately self-obscuring and opaque, it’s always worth asking: what is being hidden, and why? When a process of art making seems consumed with obscuration and secrecy, again: why?”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“The term “white flight,” when used by demographers and political scientists, refers to the abandonment by whites of a downtown area, an urban core, for surrounding communities—garden suburbs, inner-ring postwar suburbs, planned and gated subdivisions, formerly rural “exurbs.” To me it has at least three crucial additional meanings. It describes my father’s effort to escape the violent and explicitly racist atmosphere of his childhood and both my parents’ responses to the riots of the late sixties—which is to say the effort of a generation of white Americans to escape scenes and situations of racialized violence, whether on Native American land, in the South, in cities like Washington and Detroit and Baltimore and Newark. It implies the abandonment of the ideals of integration, coexistence, brotherhood, racial harmony that my parents’ generation cherished in their early adulthood. But it also represents a flight toward a kind of perverse ideal, represented by the world in which I grew up: an overwhelmingly white world that tried to become colorblind, somehow innocent, but ultimately dissolved and sublimated and assimilated racial self-consciousness and culpability until it was no longer recognizable as itself.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler writes, “Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“When Dillard, as a young girl, performs a racist act toward a black woman she loves and then is chastised for it, she awakens to three separate groups of people in the world: black people, who she can never be; racist whites, who she is in danger of becoming; and nonracist whites, who she is supposed to be. She feels the power of the word, the label, but also the power of judgment. Using a racial word is dangerous and wrong; therefore it must have some special power, even magic, but a magic that is forbidden. Power and goodness are associated with withholding the word, with not mentioning or acknowledging race at all. This is a power that is, obviously, reserved only for white people.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“But there’s an even more fundamental way to answer this question: whiteness needs blackness to confirm that it is white.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“How is it possible to describe the ways American whiteness needs American blackness? It’s such a fraught question, so simultaneously obvious and grievous, that it’s hard to know where to begin. Enslaved Africans were commodified as labor, as the economic engine that created American capitalism as it is known today; in his recent book The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist documents how the slave trade was intrinsic to the market economy that transformed luxuries into necessities and created patterns of consumption that still exist today. As enslaved people and as free laborers, or servants, African Americans were also intimately intertwined with the lives of many white families, especially (but of course not only) in the South, as personal servants and caregivers, nurses, nannies. African and African American women, throughout the entire history and prehistory of the United States, have been subjected to the sexual needs of white men, which is why so many white and black Americans are actually related, as family.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“This might sound abstruse and speculative if there weren’t so many situations and narratives in American racial history that correspond to the same pattern. As Anne Anlin Cheng puts it in The Melancholy of Race: American national idealism has always been caught in this melancholic bind between incorporation and rejection…. Like melancholia, racism is hardly ever a clear rejection of the other…. Racist institutions in fact often do not want to fully expel the racial other; instead, they wish to maintain that other within existing structures…. Segregation and colonialism are internally fraught institutions not because they have eliminated the other but because they need the very thing they hate or fear…. It is this imbricated but denied relationship that forms the basis of white racial melancholia. [italics mine]”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“BALDWIN: To be a Negro in this country is really … never to be looked at. What white people see when they look at you is not visible. What they do see when they do look at you is what they have invested you with.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“So put it this way: the kind of seeing I’m interested in is the kind that measures the cost of my perceptions. What am I being asked not to see? What kind of seer, or artist, or person am I being asked not to be? The awkwardness of the syntax implies the torsion of the thought. It feels “unnatural.” Or, you could say, it’s a new muscle being tested.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“An epiphany is supposed to be immobilizing and transforming. It’s supposed to point to the impoverishment or debasement or bad faith of the subject and give a direction for the future. This is an inherently faulty idea on any number of levels, but nonetheless an extremely potent one: the belief that change not only shapes the future but also obliterates the past.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“I can go on making art simply by noticing. I can still be transformed by the obvious.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“—My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“What I can say, from my own experience, is that white American writers are almost never asked to bring their own sadness or their own bodies into play when writing about race or racism; their dreams, their sources of shame, their most nightmarish or unacceptable or crippling fantasies, or their feelings of sadness, paralysis, isolation, or alienation. American culture has evolved a theory of the white psyche that rarely, if ever, considers racism as a direct or even proximate cause of its disorder and distress. I’m convinced that struggling with feelings of shame, and the possibility of humiliation, is psychologically, politically, artistically meaningful. This”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

“reconciliation is not a single event in time but a process that never actually ends; it’s not something that comes from one person but an exchange, an interplay, that happens between people, in stages, as long as memory persists.”
― Jess Row, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination