From “Get Over It” to “Tear It Down”

Abstract

This chapter examines how racialized and white bodies are differentially temporalized, drawing inspiration from Fanon’s account of racialized “lateness,” as elaborated by Alia Al-Saji. Extending such analyses of racialized bodies as predetermined by and tethered to the past, I argue that such temporalization serves not only to anachronize the racialized body, but also to close off its projective possibilities for being or becoming otherwise. Drawing on Charles Mills' accounts of “white ignorance” and “white time,” I then examine how racialization relies on a forgetting or a disavowal and leaving behind of its own process. The result is to render whiteness and white bodies as temporally present and even futural in their orientation, free from the vestiges of racism’s history and free to adopt any number of stances on its continuing legacy. It is against this setting that exhortations to “get over it” – whenever charges of racism are leveled in the public domain by racialized subjects – are not only dangerous in their denial of racism, but also disingenuous in the way they purport to move beyond a racially divided world, when in fact this very gesture serves to reinscribe differential racialized temporalities. Further, looking to typical responses in the contestations over public commemorations of events and figures within “white time” (for example, calls to tear down the monuments of colonialism and slavery), I conclude with an examination of ways these responses cast the deep attachments and temporal “untetheredness” of whiteness in a different light.