Still on the trail of a decent explanation of the term “futurity,” your intrepid cub reporter turns to geographer Andrew Baldwin’s “Whiteness and Futurity: Towards a Research Agenda,” which Eve Tuck and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández cite as the source of their discussion of that term. Yes, I’m still avoiding studying for my Cree linguistics examination by doing other work. Yes, I know that’s a terrible idea. Yes, I promise to stop after I finish Baldwin’s essay.
Baldwin begins by stating his paper’s argument: “research on whiteness and geography is oriented almost exclusively around some notion of the past,” and 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” (172). By “analyzing discourses of ‘the future,’” geographers “can reveal important insights about the ways in which white geographies are configured that might otherwise be foreclosed if the past if privileged as the exclusive time-space through which such geographies are produced and maintained,” Baldwin writes. “As such, any politics seeking to challenge whitenesses and their hold on racist social imaginaries may benefit by analysing how the future is invoked and how such future-oriented articulations of all kinds” (173).
“By future I refer to an imagined time that is yet-to-come,” Baldwin continues. “The future can be understood to follow sequentially from a past-present trajectory, or it can be understood as a form of absent presence” (172). The future exerts a force on the present, as in religion (“moral judgements in the present are shaped by a concern for one’s safe passage into a future afterlife”) or finance (“the pricing of securities necessarily entails some calculation of future risk”) (173). Baldwin cites an article by Ben Anderson (the source of quotations Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández use in their essay): “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)” (173). Okay, so that’s the future. But futurity, Baldwin writes, is “an important feature of the affective dimensions of daily life” (173). His examples are fear and hope: “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” (173). He cites Brian Massumi’s argument that “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” (173). If the virtual is “things that are real but not actual,” then “the future is exemplary of the virtual,” he writes, citing Rob Shields (173). The future, he continues “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” (173). By analyzing “atmospheres of fear and hope,” one might learn something “about the way politics takes shape through the conjugation of the actual and the virtual, or at the threshold of the future event” (173).
However, “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,” Baldwin writes (173). “This essay argues for a research agenda that situates the future at the centre of analyses of white geographies,” he states. “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”—that is, and this clarification is for me, not anyone reading this summary, notions of “embodies experiences and atmospheric qualities animated by imagined futures” (173). By whiteness, Baldwin is referring “to a racialized subject position that is remarkable for its seeming invisibility” (173). Whiteness is only partly about skin colour; more importantly, it “plays a foundational role in racist epistemology by serving as the norm against which others come to be viewed as different” (173). For that reason, Whiteness is “a set of ‘narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and habits of perception’ that stand in for the normal,” he writes (Richard Dyer, qtd. 173-74). He cites Dyer as arguing that “the power of whiteness lies in its capacity for almost infinite variability” and suggests that “the power of racisms rest in their capacity to normalize their corresponding whitenesses” (174).
Geographies of whiteness are simply geographies that “are assumed to be white or are in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness” (174). Research on whiteness tends to be focused on the past, “as an expression of social relations that took shape in the past” (174). That 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. . . . The racist past is . . . used to explain the racist present” (174). He cites Alastair Bonnett (a psychogeographer, among other things) and his argument that “whiteness ought to be understood as a function of historical geography” (174) (Hooray! An example! Actually, Baldwin furnishes a lot of examples to support his claims.) But Baldwin wonders “whether a past-oriented approach to the study of white geographies reproduces the teleological assumption that white racism can be modernized away,” an assumption that “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” (174). (Any historian would assert the truth of that kind of ontology.) But, according to such a past-oriented temporality, “the future is the terrain upon or though which white racism will get resolved,” a perspective that “cleaves the future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form” (174). “[T]his 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,” Baldwin writes (174). Geographies of whiteness are, he argues, “not simply a function of the past but of the future as well” (174).
This statement leads Baldwin to several questions: “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?” (174). The “geographic literature on whiteness is silent on these questions,” because of its orientation towards the past (174). “[T]he 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, or how specific geographic expressions of whiteness are contingent on the future,” he states (175). For instance, how do “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” (175)? How are “discourses of white crisis” related to or shaped by “notions of futurity? They do relate to the future. The question is: how and to what effect?” (175).
Baldwin cites three reasons why these questions are important. First, “the future is an important site through which individuals and societies are governed,” he writes, citing Anderson again. “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,” he continues, citing eugenics as one example, and “future-oriented technologies, like genetic screening and nanotechnology,” as another (175). Second, “understanding how white geographies articulate with discourses of futurity opens up new terrains for conceptualizing and challenging racism,” he states (175). “If white supremacy is, in part, reproduced through shared practices of futurity, what then are these practices?” he asks. “What kinds of futures do such practices seek to expunge or produce, and how can they be resisted?” (175). Third, “a focus on whiteness and futurity points to the idea that affect shapes white racial formation,” he writes. “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”—although he acknowledges that it can also involve an attitude towards the presenceing of the past as well (175). “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?” he wonders (175). “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” (175).
Baldwin looks at labour history, postcolonialism and identity, and critical whiteness and anti-racism as examples of phenomena understood through orientations towards the past but that could also benefit from “attention to futurity” (175-76). He begins with labour studies texts that “illustrate how white privilege operates as as form of economic currency, or ‘cash value’” (176). “[B]eing white has meant (and continues to mean) greater likelihood of employment, higher wages, access to finance capital and mobility,” he writes. “This line of research is further developed in work that recognizes a ‘possessive investment in whiteness,’ the idea that white people invest politically, economically, culturally and socially in a racialized value system that confers material advantage” (Lipsitz, qtd. 176). “Whiteness here operates as a form of property,” he continues, and in the U.S. “an identifiable system of legal and social norms has evolved” to ensure “that the asset value of whiteness is not undermined” (176). According to Baldwin, this work is important to his argument because it recognizes “that the economic value that attaches to whiteness is historically constituted and that confronting white racism in America necessarily entails exposing the historical production of whiteness as a form of economic value” (177). He cites many examples of geographical research that set out to expose that historical production of whiteness, particularly studies of white flight and white nostalgia (177). “How then might attending to the future shape the labour history of whiteness?” he asks. “What is missing from this approach such that it requires attention to discourses of futurity?” (177). The interests of the White workers benefitting from higher wages, for instance, “of which the future forms an indispensable part, are not objectively expressed in the wage but are indeterminate and worked out in struggles over the wage,” he states. “As such, the future, specifically how it might be configured, is an object of struggle in wage politics. But so is whiteness, if we follow the logic that whiteness is a form of economic value. Whiteness, in this sense, has a stake in the future, and hence wage politics, to the extent that white people seek to maintain the future value of whiteness” (177-78).
Covenants intended to exclude African Americans from owning suburban houses is another example (although not specific to labour studies): “the covenant can be interpreted as a form of white asset protector that safeguards against the ever-present possibility but never materialized future of Black homeownership” (178). “In this sense,” Baldwin continues, “the covenant is the political expression of an affective logic itself produced through the conjugation of an actual value of white home ownership and the virtuality of future Black homeownership” (178). Another geographic example (not connected to labour studies either) is the delinking of property taxes from the financing of municipal services, “which allowed suburban housing associations greater local control over zoning and thereby the capacity to insulate home values through exclusionary zoning,” and which meant that “affluent, white suburban homeowners no longer had to pay for the municipal services associated with low-income areas” (178). According to Baldwin, restrictive covenants and delinking taxes from services expressed “similar white anxieties about the virtual event of Blackness,” although “while the former was a defensive strategy that ‘priced’ the future into the economic value of whiteness through a restrictive policy, the later ‘priced’ the future into the economic value of whiteness by way of regressive taxation” (178). Both are “expressions of white anticipation where what is anticipated are the effects on the economic value of whiteness of an always present but never realized virtuality of Blackness,” and therefore “we might understand the economic value of whiteness not simply as the accrual of value over time, but as an anticipatory system of valuation in which the value of whiteness is preserved through the imagined effects and infinite deferral of undesirable Black futures” (178-79).
Next, Baldwin takes on poscolonialism and white identity. He begins by distinguishing between two forms of racism. One is biological, focused on innate racial difference, and is associated with eugenics and Naziism. The other is cultural, and it claims that differences between peoples is cultural; this version “finds expression in the denigration of cultural others, but also, paradoxically, through tropes of tolerance and accommodation (i.e. multiculturalism)” (179). Both forms of racism work together, but what is important about them is that, “through each, difference comes to be understood as a function of time”: biological racism understands difference as “a function of natural history,” whereas cultural racism sees it as “a function of cultural history” (179). “Moreover, each privileges a corresponding form of whiteness also expressed as a function of historical time,” Baldwin writes. “In this sense, white identity is either biologically or culturally prefigured, lived out temporally through either determinist or historicist teleology, respectively” (179). In that way, “white identity is said to be essentialist to the extent it accounts for its existence not through any constitutive relation with an Other, but through genetics, common ancestry and/or national history” (179). White essentialism is non-relational; its “epistemological system . . . presupposes its boundedness held together through a belief in shared origins” (179).
Another “route into the study of whiteness works against such non-relational epistemology, which, for better or worse, I refer to as postcolonialism and identity,” Baldwin continues (179). In this case, “the methodological orientation” isn’t towards whiteness as an economic value, but rather “more towards understanding the meaning of whiteness as a function of colonial otherness” (179). “In this line of thought, the various meanings of whiteness, alongside its various collateral concepts (i.e. European, Occidental, Eurowestern, colonial settler and white settler, to name only a few) are constructed through specific historical narratives in relation to an Other,” Baldwin writes (179). He cites the work of Edward Said and Judith Butler to suggest that “whiteness can be said to be performative”; that is, “whatever object white identities take as their foundational points of reference (i.e. history, language, ancestry and genetic lineage) are fully contingent on their ‘founding reputations’” (179-80). “Thus the story of whiteness is not internal to itself but forged in relation to that which has been excluded from it, for instance, blackness, indigeneity or all manner of ethnicities,” he continues. “Moreover, that the meaning of whiteness shifts and changes as a function of time and place further underscores the contingency of whiteness” (180). Postcolonial analyses are about exposing that contingency, “about showing how forms of identity that aspire to domination are constituted in relation to the perceived inferiority of others,” although they are also interested in demonstrating how “contingent forms of domination” endure even after “the period of formal colonialism came to a close” (180). In that way, postcolonial analyses are “another good example of a methodological orientation to the study of whiteness that is past-oriented” (180). He cites examples from feminist scholarship and from work on “postcolonial social formations in white settler societies” (180).
However, Baldwin suggests that “[t]he geographic literature that examines whiteness from the vantage of postcolonial geography is surprisingly sparse” (180). Nevertheless, the work he has found “looks to past (colonial) signification to understand how white identities are constructed both historically and in the present in relation to Others,” and “[m]uch of it also seeks to foreground the contingency of whiteness in both the past and present” (181). He finds this ironic, “given how future-directed notions of progress, betterment and modernity have been and remain so foundation to colonial ontology” (181). “What, then, might be gained by examining constructions of postcolonial whiteness through futurity?” he asks. One possibility is “the issue of climate change and migration” (181). Climate change-induced migration (due to, for instance, rising sea levels) “is almost always configured as a future phenomenon,” as in the case of a Museum of London exhibit called London Futures, “a collection of magical realist photographs that depict London under conditions of climate change” which included a photo of Buckingham Palace surrounded by a shantytown (181). “[T]he image works, in part, as an affective technology by conjuring the white anxieties of postcolonial Britain in order to mobilize the environmental citizen to action,” Baldwin writes. “As such, the image tethers the politics of climate change and environmental citizenship to those of race and whiteness through an appeal to the future” (181). The image, “alongside the entire discourse of climate change and migration, offers a way of thinking about how whiteness is constituted through an imagined future, even if that future is itself a colonial artifact. What this suggests is that while postcolonial white identity in Britian is, indeed a contingent formation, it is contingent not solely on the events of an imperial past, but on some form of future other as well” (181). In that sense, Britain’s postcolonial identity “is forged as much through anticipation as melancholy, as much through a glance forward as a citation of past signification” (181-82).
Finally, Baldwin turns to critical whiteness and anti-racism scholarship, another route into whiteness studies that is oriented to the past. “One of the most important insights four in this work is the idea that the anti-racist white subject is a political impossibility,” he writes, citing an article by Sara Ahmed (182). “Although a potentially paralysing analysis for white people wishing to engage in anti-racist struggle, this work is important for showing how whiteness scholarship engages in a form of dis-affiliation,” he continues. “It argues that whiteness scholars gain distance from the violent legacies of white supremacy through the act of disrupting or historicizing the category of whiteness while simultaneously reproducing their white privilege” (182). This work’s orientation to the past “lies in its use of genealogy,” and therefore “this work is concerned less with the ways in which whiteness is socially or historically constructed than with the way in which whiteness scholars themselves obtain material and cultural benefit by analysing discourses of whiteness” (182). For Ahmed, for instance, “whiteness scholarship is replete with ‘declarations of whiteness’ that are non-performative. What she means is that declaring one’s whiteness or even one’s racism in critiques of whiteness is not a route to anti-racism, nor does it make one an anti-racist” (182). What such declarations do, rather, is “nothing more than position white subjectivity as a central agent in anti-racist politics where the declaration is figured not as something beyond race, but as a speech act that merely reconfigures the way in which the politics or race are spoken” (182). Whiteness studies, in this account, is “constructed as an object of analysis, the meanings fo which are themselves effects of past and contemporary racialization” (182). Such work “is deeply self-reflexive” but “has been taken up only sparingly in geography,” since it would, among other things, prevent “white people from retreating into a position thought to be anti-racist” (182). “Instead of allowing white people the comfortable experience of being anti-racist (as opposed to the discomforting experience of acknowledging one’s racism or being perceived to be racist), this body of scholarship asks that white people get used to the uncomfortable experience of being white,” Baldwin writes (182-83). He does not exempt his own writing on whiteness from this critique (183).
“Perhaps one of the important contributions critical whiteness scholarship makes to whiteness studies is to recognize the way in which the meaning of whiteness rests, in part, on the mobility of whiteness: whiteness moves,” Baldwin continues. “It disaffiliates from ‘old’ racisms” and “gains distance from racists” (183). Both “white anti-racists and the British National Party share in common the view that they are avowedly not racist,” he suggests (183) (of course, the BNP are either deluded or lying). Whitness also “gains distance from blackness” as well as “from whiteness itself” (183). “What might futurity mean to a critical whiteness approach to whiteness studies?” Baldwin asks (183). Answering such a question might begin with positioning futurity “at the centre of reflexive engagement on questions about whiteness by both people of colour and white people” (183). “Ahmed offers the beginnings of such an exercise,” Baldwin suggests, since she argues that “in asking ‘what can I do’ upon hearing about racism, white people shift the politics of racism from the present ‘what is’ to the future ‘what can be done’” (183). For Ahmed, that movement “blocks white people from hearing the message of racism. The fact of racism thus gets deferred into the future through the hope of its future reconciliation, abolition or even absolution” (183). “A reflexive engagement with futurity might therefore build on Ahmed’s insight by asking how whiteness studies rely on some notion of the future,” Baldwin states (183). Thinking carefully about how the future of whiteness “is integral to ways in which the meanings of whiteness scholarship shift and change” might “disrupt the power of whiteness,” he continues (183), a suggestion that grants far too much power to a relatively minor academic discipline in my opinion, although that overestimation of the efficacy of scholarship seems to be common in the work I’ve been reading for this project.
Baldwin’s conclusion summarizes his argument. “[A] past-oriented approach to accounting for geographies of whiteness often neglects to consider how various forms of whiteness are shaped by discourses of futurity,” he states (184). Focusing exclusively on the past “obscures the way the category of the future is invoked in the articulation of whiteness. As such, any analysis that seeks to understand how whitenesses of all kinds shape contemporary (and indeed past) racisms operates with only a partial understanding of the time-spaces of whiteness” (184). Baldwin’s argument, he continues, “is that we can learn much about whitenesses and their corresponding forms of racism by paying special attention to the ways in which such whitenesses are constituted by futurity” (184). What would be involved in such a project? “For one, geographers would do well to identity whether and how the practice of governing through the future inaugurates new and repeats old forms of whiteness,” he suggests:
It would also be worth comparing and contrasting how the future is made present in various dialectical accounts of whiteness. For instance, what becomes of whiteness when understood through the binary actual-possible as opposed to an actual-virtual binary, which has been my main concern? Alternatively, what becomes of the category of whiteness if it is shown to be constituted by a future that has no ontology except as a virtual presence? And, perhaps more pressing, how might whiteness be newly politicized? (184)
“Futurity provides a productive vocabulary for thinking about and challenging whiteness,” he continues. “It does not offer a means of overcoming white supremacy, nor does it provide white people with a normative prescription for living with their whiteness guilt- or worry-free. Futurity is, however, a lacuna in the study of whiteness both in geography and outside the discipline, and this alone suggests the need to take it seriously” (184). More urgent, however, “is the need to study whiteness and futurity given how central the future is to contemporary governance and politics” (184). “[H]ow people orient themselves towards the future is indelibly political,” he writes. “The future impels action” (184). “Attention to whiteness and futurity may at minimum enable us to see more clearly the extent to which the pull of whiteness into the future reconfigures what is to be valued in the decades ahead,” he concludes (184).
“Whiteness and Futurity” could end up being an important part of my exegisis—or at least an important point of entry into fields of scholarship that might be important when I come to write that thing. For the present, though, I like the way that Baldwin provides a clear definition of the term “futurity” as an affective anticipation, a simultaneously embodied experience and an atmospheric quality “animated by imagined futures,” the affective product of an overlap between the actual (what is) and the virtual (what is known and real but never fully actualized) (173). I don’t know if that’s the only definition, or even the best definition, but it’s one definition, and that will do for this afternoon. The connotations of the term “settler futurity,” though, given this definition, aren’t quite clear to me, particularly given the way that it tends to be used in settler colonial theory as something terrible that must be destroyed. Somebody somewhere must give a clear and useful definition of that term. I just haven’t found it quite yet.
Work Cited
Baldwin, Andrew. “Whiteness and Futurity: Towards a Research Agenda.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 36, no. 2, 2012, pp. 172-87.
Tuck, Eve, and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández. “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, vol. 29, no. 1, 2013, pp. 72-89.