Toxic Whiteness: An Atmospheric Analysis of Institutional Racism

I gave this paper in the Political Performances Working Group at the 2021 conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Many thanks to the conference organisers and to the working group’s convenors Julia Boll, Cristina Delgado-García and Trish Reid for curating a brilliant programme and to my co-presenters Sarah Gorman and Jon Venn for their fascinating papers.

In June of this year, anonymous workers at London’s Barbican Centre published Barbican Stories, ‘a collection of first-hand and witnessed accounts of discrimination’, published to resemble ‘a company sanctioned policy handbook’ from 2016, titled ‘Everything You Want To Know About the Barbican’. In place of this instrument of bureaucratic interpellation (‘You Want To Know’), Barbican Stories offers a corrective and collective autoethnography of the institution. It begins with a memory set in verse. A member of the institution’s front-of-house team — and a person ‘of colour’ — is surveyed by a white visitor:

I stand here ready

To direct you round the place.

You look me over — up, down -

Then seek another

For help.

Reading this testimony recalls another poetic autoethnography, published 69 years earlier, the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s book Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952) and its famous memory of the gaze of a white child fixing Fanon with the words ‘Tiens, un nègre!’, ‘Maman, regarde le nègre, j’ai peur!’ (‘Look, a negro!’, ‘Mama, look at the negro, I’m frightened!’)

In this paper, however, I want to follow both Fanon and the authors and collators of Barbican Stories in shifting our gaze away from accounts such as these that implicitly posit racism as a primarily interpersonal phenomenon and towards its institutional operations.

Immediately following his encounter with the white child, Fanon describes a shift in his attention to what I want to think of as the atmospheric. The white man surrounds him in the figure of the sky tearing at a navel that seems both his and its own, the earth squeals, shrieks or ‘grates’ beneath his feet: ‘Alentour le Blanc, en haut le ciel s’arrache le nombril, la terre crisse sous mes pieds et un chant blanc, blanc’. Fanon’s evocation of this experience of racialized atmospheric violence as a ‘un chant blanc’ (‘a white song’) is echoed, in Barbican Stories, by a subsequent testimonial: ‘The best way I can describe it is it’s like there’s this low-level hum always in the background, a reminder that my presence here, in this role I’m in, is an anomaly’. The intangible, sonic metaphors of the hum and the song are also crucially atmospheric — they flow seamlessly within and outside us — and in both cases their function is toxic. ‘Toute cette blancheur’, writes Fanon, ‘qui me calcine…’ (‘All this whiteness burns me to a cinder’). The Barbican worker’s testimony echoes, in less explicitly violent terms, this account of skin transformed by contact with the toxicity of whiteness, the ‘low-level hum’ of institutional racism: ‘My brown skin is a commodity in this context’, they observe. Their skin is, however, not merely ‘burned’ by this toxic atmosphere, it is also — potentially at least — toxified in the process: if their skin ‘helps [the Barbican] appear diverse and inclusive’, the worker asks, it is ‘actually doing harm?’

In this paper I will draw both on Fanon and on examples of institutional racism from the contemporary British theatre to ask two questions: what kind of thing is institutional racism and how might performance help us to understand its operations? I would like to be able to propose more examples to concretise the somewhat abstract nature of this intervention, but I’m afraid that time constraints mean that we will have to postpone them to our discussion or to another day.

1: Institutional Racism

The subject of institutional racism has been a matter of more intense public debate in the UK over the last year than at any time since that term was brought into common parlance by Sir William Macpherson’s 1999 report following the inquiry he led into the 1993 murder of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a group of white men. On the one side, cultural and educational institutions, caught up in the global wave of protests for Black lives following the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, have sought, in unprecedented ways, to own their own racism and published action plans to address it. On the other side, the tendentially named Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has published a report that argues that institutional racism is substantially fictional and that the term should only be used where ‘an institution has treated an ethnic group differently to other groups because of their ethnic identity’ (my emphasis).

This redefinition of racism not as the existence of racialized inequalities but their cause, has been substantially advanced by the commission’s report, but they did not begin this process. Macpherson also allowed causality to creep into his definition: ‘The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin’, although he added the nuance that ‘It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’.

Returning to the roots of the term in Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s 1967 book Black Power reveals the distance travelled from its origins. Here, Ture and Hamilton assert that institutional racism ‘originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society’, ‘relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti-black attitudes and practices’, and ‘has another name: colonialism’. They acknowledge that the analogy is imperfect, but nonetheless persuasively demonstrate both the colonial status of Black people in the United States in economic, political and social terms, and the roots of institutional racism not so much in racial prejudice (‘unwitting’ or not), as in an ‘established system of vested interests’.

2: Atmospheric Analysis

Returning to the sphere of cultural production with this account of the dependence of institutional racism on a ‘system of vested interests’, I am indebted to Anamik Saha’s detailed theoretical development of an approach to studying ‘race and ethnicity in cultural production’. I cannot engage these insights in detail today, but draw from them the prompt to consider ‘how race-thinking and raciality penetrate the production of cultural commodities’. My approach to this question is to think about how performance can help us understand this process without a tacit, anthropocentric commitment to the causal significance of the human actor over and above the histories, networks of relation, and indeed non-human forces that constitute both Ture and Hamilton’s ‘system of vested interests’, and Fanon’s vision of a sky that tears at its navel and an earth that shrieks under his feet.

In his essay ‘Racism and Culture’, Fanon describes this experience in plain terms: ‘the oppressed […] perceives that the racist atmosphere impregnates all the elements of the social life’ (and I am very grateful to Renisa Mawani for sharing work in development on this subject with me). The most sophisticated account of the operation of atmosphere in performance is to be found in the work of Michael Chekhov, for whom, atmosphere is ‘a feeling which does not belong to anybody’, and therefore necessarily exists prior to subjectivity: ‘[i]t is a feeling which is independent of anyone — the feeling which lives in the space in the room and belongs to no-one’. Chekhov’s use of the word ‘independent’ here is potentially misleading, because, in his conception, atmosphere is not impervious to action. The ‘feeling which lives in the space in the room’ is dynamic and both produces and responds to the events in that room. An atmosphere is therefore an articulation of the feeling of a hybrid event-space, and a particular atmosphere may both produce action, in that it may make those who perceive it alter their behaviour, and be produced by action, in that it may be re-shaped by changes in behaviour. Atmosphere, for Chekhov, is not, however, merely an intersubjective phenomenon, rather it exceeds subjectivity: it is a movement not of being but becoming and not of emplacement but displacement. It is therefore an affective phenomenon, in the sense first developed by Spinoza, of constituting ‘the capacity to affect and to be affected’. The atmospheres of a performance are thus a measure of the ways in which the feeling of an event-space affects and is affected by those who occupy it.

The reverberating ‘white song’ that Fanon perceives impregnating ‘all elements of [his] social life’ after he has been singled out as a ‘negro’ and his shivers misrecognised as a threat by the white child is thus the substrate of the event of racism that Fanon recalls: ‘the material on or from which [it] lives, grows or obtains its nourishment’, and which is — in turn — sustained by the actions of that event. For Chekhov, this relationship between action and its atmospheric substrate was literal. He described actions ‘born out of the atmosphere’ and asked his acting students to explore the qualities of atmosphere physically: ‘[w]e must penetrate into the atmosphere with our hands, legs, bodies, voices, etc’, so as to discover the physical properties that shaped the conditions of interaction and altered along with them. He proposed that in rehearsal ‘the first step is to research the various atmospheres’ of a play, which he considered to be objective, and therefore implicitly to ask what kinds of lives and relations are supported by them, and what kinds inhibited or poisoned. While working with his students on an adaptation of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, Chekhov gave them this direction:

Imagine the air around you filled with atmosphere — filled with this raging thing around you. […] Everything is in tremendous movement, in you and around you. If you will imagine this raging atmosphere truly, you will become either as small as a mouse or as big as King Lear. You will merge with it. Rachel will become like a mouse and Jingle like King Lear. Stiggins takes the atmosphere as inspiration. He is always involved in it, throughout the whole scene. The thunder storm is his inspiration. It forms a cloud around him.

Here, the atmosphere is ‘raging’, ‘in tremendous movement, in you and around you’, and the same, objective atmosphere is experienced by everyone, but — and this point is crucial — it does not affect them in the same way. One character is inspired by it, another overwhelmed.

To analyse institutional racism atmospherically, then, is to analyse its objective operation and subjective consequences at an embodied level, but such an analysis cannot be confined to the framework of subjectivity. Atmospheres also inhere in what we might call — following Jane Bennett — the ‘vibrant matter’ of spaces and objects, and the forces of history and association that reverberate through buildings and institutions. To return to my question, then, institutional racism is an atmospheric phenomenon, a ‘white song’, or ‘low-level hum’, a pervasive, seemingly intangible presence that reciprocally shapes and is shaped by all of the elements of the institution’s social life, human and non-human, and creates the relational conditions that sustain established systems of vested interests.

Part 3: Toxic Whiteness

And so we turn to the question of the significance of this analysis for anti-racist politics. First, an atmospheric analysis of the function of racism avoids the ubiquitous bifurcation of anti-racist practices into the importantly incompatible framings of the politics of representation on the one hand and the psychopathology of trauma on the other. The wave of recent protests led by the movement for Black lives generated responses from our cultural institutions that followed these divergent axes. One set in train renewed institutional diversity initiatives such as the UK National Theatre’s commitment for 20% of its workforce to ‘be from a BAME background’. The necessity but insufficiency of such commitments is amply demonstrated by the fact that Boris Johnson’s current cabinet exceeds this target, with 22% of its ministers of Black or global majority heritage, and is committed to an overtly ethno-nationalist platform, as well as to the engagement of its supporters and outriders in civil society in a process of institutional capture and/or erasure known colloquially as the ‘culture wars’.

The second axis of institutional response posited racism not as a problem of unequal representation, but a personal burden of exhaustion and trauma. In my own institution, it is now standard practice for any prominent incident of racist abuse or violence in the public sphere to be met with emails offering counselling support to those affected by these issues. It is not my purpose here to suggest that people who experience racism are not traumatised by it — clearly they are, and clearly they must be supported. The object of my critique is, rather, the political consequences of these framings, which knock the issue of racism back and forth between the pillar of representation and the post of racial trauma, where the former cannot account either for the lived experience of inclusion in toxic environments or for their capacity to sustain structural and inferential forms of racism regardless of their diversity, and the latter is powerless to address the systemic reproduction of racialized inequalities that generates the atmospheric conditions for exhaustion and trauma.

By contrast, atmospheric analysis is simultaneously affective and structural, enabling it to connect institutionality with lived experience. Furthermore, it can enable us to expose those interests which are sustained by the bifurcated framing of representation and trauma. The politics of representation, for example, may alter the subjects of inclusion but does not offer us grounds for a critique of the organisational structures into which they are interpellated. The observation, for example, that fewer than 1% of professors in the UK are Black exposes a racialized inequality of representation, but if our response is to appoint more Black professors, we will also naturalize academic hierarchies in the process. Conversely, framing racism as trauma not only naturalizes the idea that it is an experience of interpersonal prejudice with primarily psychological consequences, but presents it as a social pathology rather than a convenient means of securing social order in the interests of the elite.

The framing of anti-racism as a practice of either improving representation or healing trauma, then, offers us an account of racism that remains locked within the terms of race, which are thereby reified rather than exposed to critical analysis. Here, I would like to lightly modify an argument made by Stuart Hall, and now familiar from critiques of racial capitalism, that ‘capital reproduces class relations, including their internal contradictions, as a whole, structured by race’. Race, for Hall, then, becomes a means by which capital ‘contains and disables representative class institutions, by neutralizing them, confining them to strategies and struggles, which are race-specific’, and therefore, ‘is able to defeat the alternative means of representation which could more adequately unify the class as a whole — against capitalism, against racism’. I would add that, if racism works under capitalism to divide a multi-racial, multi-ethnic working class against itself, along racial lines, then we should be wary of any anti-racism that can be co-opted to function similarly, and it seems clear that both the politics of representation and the psychopathology of racial trauma can be co-opted in this way, to neutralize emergent forms of class unity by containing, disabling and confining them to ‘race-specific’ questions.

An anti-racist politics rooted in atmospheric analysis can resist such reversals because of the objective and inclusive nature of atmospheres, that do not belong to anyone and cannot be divided, but inhere in the totality of an event-space. This means that the atmosphere of racism (unlike racism itself) is experienced by everyone within its event-space, though this does not mean that its effects are equally distributed or even comparable. This point was made forcefully by Toni Morrison in a 1993 interview with American talk-show host Charlie Rose. Asked about her experiences of racism, Morrison turned the question back on her white interviewer and focused instead on the consequences of racism for white racists, whom she described as ‘bereft’ and suffering within ‘a distortion, like a profound neurosis’, which ‘has just as much of a deleterious effect on white people […] as it does on Black people’.

Morrison’s argument chimed improbably with the claims of the men’s movement of the 1980s and 90s, who promoted the concept of toxic masculinity as a way of framing the operations of gendered oppression and gender-based violence. Toxicity, as a metaphor, was attractive to men’s movement activists partly because it made masculinity recuperable: toxicity is a matter of dosage, and all substances — even water — reach a toxic dosage at some point. Therefore gendered oppression is caused by an excess of masculinity, not its mere existence. It was similarly important for these activists to stress that at the point where masculinity becomes toxic it also becomes toxic to men, echoing Morrison’s assertion of the damage caused by racial logics to racists.

An atmospheric analysis of the toxicity of whiteness would have to agree that its toxicity is, potentially, universal, while pointing out that organisms are capable of adapting to environments that are toxic to other life-forms, and that such a process of successful adaptation cannot be compared with the exposure to toxicity of those whose Black skin, as Fanon so trenchantly observed, means they can never hope to adapt entirely to its conditions. Nonetheless, an atmospheric analysis of toxic whiteness would have to insist that the hostility of immigration enforcement, the racial abuse of Black English footballers, and the successful adaptation of a Tory politician of Indian heritage to the ideology of ethno-nationalism are all ‘distortions’ (to use Morrison’s term) with the same root cause: a toxic atmosphere that creates the conditions for forms of relationality that are divisive, competitive and hierarchical.

Reading Barbican Stories, it is striking how often their testimonies are predicated upon the elite status of the Barbican as a cultural institution, and on relationships with managers, supervisors, or the organisation’s leadership. An atmospheric analysis of the operations of institutional racism reveals, then, that its shifting production and reproduction of racializing logics is predicated not only on the existence of race as a conceptual frame for articulating difference, but on structures of management and funding and rhetorics of excellence and value that depend fundamentally upon division and inequality, and require their continual reproduction. Those logics are visible in organisational structures, the architectural configurations of their buildings, their interpersonal relationships, histories and genealogies, the languages and imagery they produce, and countless details that need have no obvious or direct relation to the conceptual vocabulary of race. Nonetheless, these complexly inter-articulated factors create conditions within which racism continues to thrive, conditions which are also essential to sustaining the fundamental inequalities upon which our cultural sector depends. An atmospheric analysis of the toxic whiteness of cultural institutions reveals that to be transformed they must be fundamentally reimagined.