Racist habits

Bodily response and gesture

To take up the scenario outlined by Yancy above, in what sense can this woman’s bodily response be analysed as habitually racist? In order to arrive at this question, we need first to work briefly through two others, namely: Can the woman’s response can be called racist? and, What is the significance of the bodily register in her response? The first of these is already extensively addressed by Yancy in the article ‘Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism’, and so will only be summarily treated here. In that article, Yancy defends his identification of the woman’s gesture as racist by appealing to the historical and discursive reality of racist praxis:

So, what is the evidence for my claim that the white woman’s behavior in the elevator is racist? Her gestures cohere with my knowledge of white racism, her gestures cohere with other experiences that I have had vis-à-vis whites performing racist gestures in the past and my experience is consistent with the shared experiences of other Blacks … The history of racism in the USA underwrites and supports my knowledge regarding the white woman’s gestures. ¹²

One might be tempted to argue that nonetheless, speaking now to our second question, this is not enough to render the gestures themselves racist, that instead what we are confronted with are gestures that merely express racist modes of thinking. In other words, it is the idea, and not its bodily manifestation, that is properly racist. The problem with this argument, however, is that it insists on a distinction between the idea and its expression, which as Merleau-Ponty points out, enforces a misleading separation. On the question of language, Merleau-Ponty writes in the Phenomenology that ‘speech does not translate a ready-made thought; rather, speech accomplishes thought’. ¹⁹ Insofar as gesture is a kind of bodily speech, it becomes difficult to separate a gesture from the content of its expression; as embodied speech, gesture accomplishes the body’s thoughts. As Merleau-Ponty notes, ‘The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is the anger itself’. ²⁰ One could argue, then, that the racist tropes around Blackness are not so much invoked at the woman’s tensing of the body, but rather are accomplished by them. Given that we are presently concerned with racism in the form of responsive gesture, that is to say, as distinct and apart from other explicitly intended forms of gestural racism (for example, ‘slanty-eyes’ or the Nazi salute), the distinction between idea and expression such that racism is located exclusively in the former, becomes tenuous. While the woman’s response in Yancy’s example undoubtedly draws on a racist discourse in which Black bodies (and specifically Black male bodies) are constructed as dangerous, rapacious, uncontrolled and so forth, it is also the case that her response participates in this discourse and breathes life into it, giving a lived reality to the projections and thereby reinscribing them onto the body.

Such reinscriptions happen not by way of further discursive contribution, but rather through direct bodily movement and gesture. Yancy himself remarks:

Notice that she need not speak a word (speech-acts are not necessary) to render my Black body ‘captive’. She need not scream ‘Rape!’ She need not call me ‘Nigger!’ to my face … Her nonverbal movements construct me, creating their own socio-ontological effects on my body. ²¹

In dispensing with the first two questions, I now extend the analysis in order to argue that what we are facing is not just racism in an embodied register, but also in a habitual one. ²³ We can return here to our primary question: can the woman’s response in the elevator be considered properly habitual, in a Merleau-Pontian sense explicated above? Proceeding on the basis of not knowing the woman’s particular bodily habits, history and mode of being in the world – indeed not knowing anyone’s, except perhaps one’s own ²⁴ – but, knowing the history of racism in its depth, character and scope, it is possible to speak at a level of generality, about the broad class of gestures associated with those described in Yancy’s ‘Elevator Effect’. Of this class of gestures (which also include: locking car doors, suspicious surveilling in shops, holding onto one’s handbag, pointedly crossing the street), can we justifiably consider them habitual? Recall that in the discussion of habit, we identified an important distinction between habit as repetitive or habitual gesture that has ‘sedimented’ into the body, and habit as a more general bodily orientation or that to which we have become habituated. It is this latter conception of habit which I suggest is especially useful to us. The flinches, the tensing, the moving away, the calling toward, the panic – these are examples of habits insofar as they represent a kind of response that is unthinking and nearby; they are responses that reside within the body schema, such that they become called upon readily and effortlessly in navigating encounters with the racialized ‘other’. They represent a certain bodily habituation. The white woman’s body is oriented such that responses of fear, suspicion, self-concern and -preservation have settled into her bodily repertoire, and are made immediately available to her upon the unanticipated interaction with a Black man; her bodily habits are racist.

While this claim might appear to dovetail the discourse on unconscious or implicit bias, I suggest that they differ in some important ways. Many studies have shown the way in which we may ‘unconsciously’ hold certain biases or ascribe certain stereotypes to differently racialized ‘others’ in situations of work, education, public life and so forth. However, while this discourse is effective in illuminating the depth of racist attitudes and perceptions in our psychical being, as well as their near-imperceptibility (for often the results of these studies surprise participants themselves), its framing in terms of the unconscious makes it difficult to give an account of the uptake involved in such racist orientations. That is, there is little room for asking how racist stereotypes and attitudes come to be embedded, and the role or participation of the bias-holder in this process; unconscious or implicit bias confirms that these biases exist, but says little about the way they come to be actively embedded in our ways of being. The potential for habit to redress such questions, through its analysis as habituation, and through a rereading of sedimentation, is something I will explore toward the end of this article.

Moreover, nor do the terms ‘casual racism’ or ‘microaggression’ sufficiently adequate what I am seeking to capture here. The term ‘casual racism’, which has gained some traction in public discourse in Australia, for example, refers to the small, ‘everyday’ acts of racism, much like the kinds we have been considering in this article. (In fact in 2014 a far-reaching public television campaign portrayed similar scenarios in relation to Indigenous Australians; people shuffling away in public seats, suspicious surveilling in shops, heightened skepticism at job interviews, the subtle rejection of an open bus seat, and the casual racist joking among white friends at a pub. ²⁵ ) However, I argue that what here gets called ‘casual racism’ is in fact a misnomer; for while such forms of racism are casual in the sense of being relaxed or unreflective on the part of racist whites, they are not casual in the sense of being irregular, unexpected, or intermittent. Rather they are held together by a certain underlying and overarching bodily orientation toward racialized ‘others’. Casting it as ‘casual’, then, misses the systematicity and cohesion of the separate acts with related expressions of racism in that same person, and in the broader cultural milieu. A similar argument pertains to the discourse of ‘microaggression’, a term coined by psychiatrist Chester Pierce in the 1970s, and subsequently expanded in the psychological literature (and now widely levied in public discourse). This concept, defined by Pierce and others as the ‘subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are “put downs” of blacks by offenders’, ²⁶ identifies two important things: first, the micro-level coding of anti-Black racist messages into the fabric of popular culture (Pierce and his team of researchers were interested in TV commercials), and second, its psychical impact on Blacks. In addition to effectively naming racism’s beneath-surface register and infusion into all aspects of public life, the concept also points to the affective toll accumulated and experienced by those on the ‘receiving’ end (a toll which thinkers such as Fanon have also sought to articulate). This is undoubtedly critical work – in both senses of the term – but it draws a slightly different emphasis from my present concern by focusing on the perspective of the racialized person. ²⁷ What I am after in this article, however, is a way to analyse racism from the vantage point of its ‘doing’ or its ‘doer’, to find ways to think about racism as it is enacted or performed, and to open up questions about the complicity and responsibility of those who perform it.

In view of these present concerns, I suggest that these kinds of gestural and responsive modes of racism are better framed as habits, both in the narrower sense of repetition and in the broader sense of habituation. Recall that Merleau-Ponty earlier speaks of habit in terms of ‘the power of responding with a certain type of solution to a certain form of situation’. ²⁸ The ease with which such gestures are enacted in response to the racialized ‘other’ – that is to say, the extent to which they are not anomalous or exceptional in the history of one’s body schema, but rather coherent and consistent with it – supports the ascription of habit. It is not only that these kinds of responses are like habits – they are habits, insofar as they reflect a comportment or mode of responding that has ‘sedimented’ in and been taken up by the body, supported by deeply embedded discourses and histories of racist praxis. Further, following our earlier analysis, we can say that such racist responses are neither conscious in the sense of fully deliberate and considered (indeed, they are most often denied and defended precisely on the grounds of being ‘unintentional’), nor non-conscious in the sense of unmediated bodily reflex, ²⁹ but rather sit in the grey region of acquired orientation – and in this case, they reflect an orientation that is shaped by and enacts racist stereotypes and projections. Racism, on this account, is not only or always consciously enacted, but operates equally – indeed more insidiously – beneath the level of consciousness. As we will see in the final section of the article, this raises some interesting and difficult questions around responsibility for one’s racist habits.

Racialized perception

Having considered the way in which racist gestures and responses can become inscribed in the body through habits and habituated orientation, I now turn to the related question of racism in the mode of habitual perception. The question here becomes: How does racist practice manifest in the basic level of bodily (and primarily visual) perception? ³⁰ This question is, of course, deeply entangled with the preceding analysis of bodily response and gesture, and indeed in some sense may seem logically prior: surely it is in response to racialized perception that certain bodily movements or gestures are enacted? However, as we will see from the Merleau-Pontian accounts developed by Linda Martín Alcoff and Alia Al-Saji, the rigid insistence of a perception-then-response logic obscures the way in which our processes of perception are themselves developed through embodied and lived experiences. In view of this, the following analysis of racialized perception is best placed alongside the earlier analysis of racist gesture and orientation, as a complementary and supplementary contribution to the broader investigation into the different aspects of embodied racism.

Drawing on the phenomenological tradition, Linda Martín Alcoff in Visible Identities develops the argument that the perception of race is informed by our perceptual frameworks, themselves learnt and acquired through bodily habit. She writes: ‘Because race works through the domain of the visible, the experience of race is predicated first and foremost on the perception of race, a perception whose specific mode is a learned ability’ (emphasis added). ³¹ One of her claims, then, is that contrary to what we might ordinarily assume, race ‘is the [perceptual] field, rather than that which stands out’. ³² That is to say, whereas we usually take race to be the characteristic perceived, Alcoff instead argues that race is in fact operative at the level of our perceptual framework or horizon, and is that through and against which we perceive. In earlier passages of the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty offers a corrective to classical psychology’s version of gestalt perception, arguing that

… one’s own body is the always implied third term of the figure–background structure, and each figure appears perspectivally against the double horizon of external space and bodily space. ³³

What Alcoff rallies against in this analysis is a naturalistic account which uncritically accepts the ‘self-evidence’ of race and racial difference, and to which phenomenology may itself fall susceptible. ³⁶ That is, in attending to the experience of racialization one risks mistaking experience for explanation, and chalking down perceptible racial differences to ‘natural’ coping mechanisms in response to living among racial diversity. Alcoff writes:

Against this, I will argue that although racial classification does operate on the basis of perceptual difference, it is also the case that, as Merleau-Ponty argues, perception represents sedimented contextual knowledges. So the process by which human bodies are differentiated and categorized by type is a process preceded by group oppression, rather than one that causes and thus ‘explains’ racism … ³⁷

But given their interlacing, as noted earlier, we can also identify here habit in its broader sense of habituation. That is, such racist seeing speaks to an underlying perceptual orientation; one inhabits this mode of racialized perception. Together then, Alcoff and Al-Saji’s analyses underscore the workings of habit at both ends. Further, as we noted in our explication of Merleau-Ponty, it is the hallmark of habits that they are seamlessly integrated into our body schemata so as to render themselves invisible to us, absent their explicit thematization. Al-Saji thus writes:

Through sedimentation and habituation, the constitutive operations of vision remain tacit or pre-reflective; its intentionality works in us without our reflective awareness, as Merleau-Ponty has shown.…We see through our habits; we do not see them, Alcoff notes. ⁵⁰

To this ethical concern I add another of my own, one that presents itself in the larger project of framing racist praxis in the terms of habit. I am referring here to the question of responsibility. Before I turn to this question, however, I think it may be useful, as a way to bring closure to this discussion, to consider the entwinement of the two registers of racist habits I have examined here, that of bodily gesture or response, and racialized perception.

Habitual perception and response: Two recent cases of embodied racism

As noted in the introduction to the different aspects of bodily racism (perception and responsive gesture), these two threads are not brought together by a relationship of causality, but as interlacing and mutually reinforcing aspects of habitual embodied racism. And while it might be argued that the examples I have considered so far have involved relatively ‘benign’ or ‘harmless’ forms of racism – a claim I do not accept; they are harmful precisely because they are insidious and seemingly benign – I argue that the structural operations at work in these analyses can have far more extreme expressions. Here I turn briefly to the cases of Jonathan Ferrell and Renisha McBride, two young African-Americans killed in 2013, in order to bring together the two sides of habitual perception and response, while bearing out the gravity of these modes of bodily habituation.

In the early hours of 14 September 2013, a young Black man by the name of Jonathan Ferrell, aged 24, was gunned down by police in a residential North Carolina street. ⁵³ Around 2 a.m. that morning, Ferrell was driving home before getting into a serious car crash on a quiet country road; so badly damaged was his car that he had to kick through the rear window in order to escape. Having done that, he then – most likely in a considerable amount of shock, pain, disorientation and fear – climbed through a thicket of bushes and trees in the dead of the night, to reach a residential street where upon he sought help at the first house. Sarah McCartney, a young white woman, and mother of a young child sleeping upstairs, answered the door expecting to find her husband. Upon seeing Ferrell, however, she immediately mistook him for an intruder. McCartney called 911 in a state of distress, reporting that a man was banging on her door, trying to break in. Three white police officers arrived, and when Ferrell – unarmed and, it bears repeating, injured and in need of help – started moving toward them, one police officer shot him with a taser. Since that did not stop him, another police officer proceeded to fire 12 shots, 10 of which hit Ferrell, shooting him dead. As exceptional an event as this would appear to be, a strikingly similar scene unfolded only 6 weeks later on 2 November 2013 in Detroit, involving a young Black woman named Renisha McBride, aged 19. Like Ferrell, McBride had gotten into a car accident early one morning. In a disoriented state (in her case partly due to intoxication, but also due to shock and possible brain injury), McBride was described by a first witness as having held her head in her bloodied hands, repeatedly stating that she wanted to go home. ⁵⁴ After wandering off she eventually found her way to the front porch of another house, where in seeking assistance, she was mistaken for an intruder, and shot in the face at close range by a white middle-aged man, Theodore Wafer. ⁵⁵

While both cases call for more careful analysis, and would be rightly considered in the context of the recent spate of killings of Blacks in the USA (itself a historically grounded phenomenon), I raise them briefly here to offer examples of how habitual racialized perceptions of Blackness as dangerous, threatening, or ‘thuggish’, accompanied by habitual responses of fear, defensiveness, or even dis-empathy, operate across a wide spectrum of racist response and action. That a Black person seeking help or refuge is instantly – though by no means randomly – perceived as violent or threatening, and responded to without hesitation ⁵⁶ in violence, indicates that the problem of habitual racism is not merely some disinterested academic question, but one of profound and urgent import, even if that urgency can at times become obfuscated or derailed by the slowness and precision of academic inquiry. ⁵⁷ Further, while both cases resonate strongly with the heavily criticized police killings of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York, or neighbourhood guard killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, the cases of Ferrell and McBride show us that the problem of habitual and embodied racism lies not only with the police and authorities (although institutional violence against Blacks in the United States is desperately real and chronic), but also with everyday citizens in the course of their daily lives. (This point was of course devastatingly played out in the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina – although the pre-mediation and overtly racist ideology behind Dylan Roof’s actions moves that case well beyond the question of habit and responsive gesture.) While the Brown and Garner cases generated much heated public debate and scrutiny of practices in the policing of Black bodies – understandably, given the public power and responsibility vested in police – what Ferrell’s and McBride’s deaths remind us is that there is a broader narrative uniting all of these events, that of the habitual perception of Blacks and bodily responses to them as dangerous, violent and less worthy.

While not framed in terms of habit, Judith Butler’s reading of the Rodney King beating some 20 years ago, which of course is quietly recalled in these contemporary cases, shows how pervasive and deeply embedded such embodied racism is. In her chapter ‘Endangered/Endangering’, Butler argues that such pre-determinations of Blackness not only are operative in the moment of racist violence but are powerful enough to secure ‘not guilty’ verdicts and editorial vindication long after the ‘heat’ of that moment has faded. She writes:

What struck me on the morning after the verdict was delivered were reports which reiterated the phantasmic production of ‘intention,’ the intention inscribed in and read off Rodney King’s frozen body on the street, his intention to do harm, to endanger. The video was used as ‘evidence’ to support the claim that the frozen black male body on the ground receiving blows was himself producing those blows, about to produce them, was himself the imminent threat of a blow and, therefore, was himself responsible for the blows he received. That body thus received those blows in return for the ones it was about to deliver, the blows which were that body in its essential gestures, even as the one gesture that body can be seen to make is to raise its palm outward to stave off the blows against it. According to this racist episteme, he is hit in exchange for the blows he never delivered, but which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about to deliver. ⁵⁸

III Responsibility and habit: Rethinking sedimentation

It is of course true that Merleau-Ponty himself invokes the motif of sedimentation on several occasions, not only in his reference to the ‘double moment of sedimentation and spontaneity’, ⁶⁰ but also in his consideration of the practices or behaviours which become in his word (following Bergson), ‘deposited’ ⁶¹ in our cultural world. Commentators are therefore right to run with the analogy; habits are sedimentations insofar as they express the past’s grounding or anchoring effect on our present and anticipatory bodies. Yancy, Alcoff and Al-Saji, for example, have each invoked the concept of ‘sedimentation’ or ‘calcification’ in their consideration of habitual racist practices, and with good reason: in the case of Black bodies, they are perceived as violent and responded to pre-reflectively in defence, owing to the long and fraught histories of racism accumulated in the cultural imaginary and collected in our lived bodies. This is equally true of the habitual perception and responses toward differently racialized bodies, whether the exoticization and fetishizing of Asian women, the suspicious distrust of ‘Arab-looking’ men, and so forth. And yet as I have suggested, the problem with invoking sedimentation is that it tends to point to the passive and inert – both of which obscure the innovative moment in Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of habit and, moreover, close over questions of responsibility in the cultivation and persistence of one’s bodily habits. This claim, however, presumes a meaning for the term which we have not yet sufficiently interrogated.

The term ‘sedimentation’ is commonly employed in scientific fields such as Geology, where it designates the process in which minerals get deposited onto surfaces and, in time, turn into rock. Significantly, this already betrays the sense of passivity and inertia we normally attribute to it: materials get deposited onto a surface (passivity), and once sedimented the materials solidify and remain fixed in their layers and order (inertia). ⁶² We see similar connections if we look to other domains: the word ‘sedentary’ in our everyday language refers to inactivity, slowness, even stillness. Think, for example, of the contemporary occupational health discourse around the problem of our increasingly sedentary work- and life-styles. In Zoology, the term refers to species that are non-migratory and inhabit the same place (sessile animals). If the weight of sedimentation is heavy and unmoving, how then does this square with our earlier descriptions of habit as bodily habituation and orientation, and the sense of ‘I can’ embedded within Merleau-Ponty’s account of the habitual body? Further, how can we begin to articulate a notion of responsibility for one’s habits if their acquisition is mostly passive and inert? ⁶³

But we should press further. For example, in geological sedimentation, the depositing of materials is passive insofar as surfaces do not solicit them – but they do receive them. This entails a measure of material and compositional compatibility such that the new material does not simply ‘run off’ the existing surface. In the way that catching a ball involves receptivity – we open our hands to make the shape of the ball – something similar can be said here: the surface contains a receptivity to the material, with its own edges and formations co-determining which new materials get deposited and how. Transposing this idea to the realm of bodily habit, we could say that the acquisition of new habits hangs not only on one’s cultural and social milieux, but also on one’s own bodily receptivity and compatibility. Sedimentation on this reading, is not wholly passive; habits do not just get ‘deposited’ in our bodies, but rather extend and fill out existing bodily orientations and dispositions. In the habitual response of clutching of one’s handbag upon the approach of the Black man, for example, does the acquisition of this habit cohere with existing bodily habituations, or does it in fact jar with one’s bodily orientation? The question of receptivity thus introduces a sense of activity into the usually passive designation of habit as sedimentation.

In addition to this receptivity (as opposed to pure passivity), I want to suggest that habit also entails an ongoing activity (as opposed to pure inertia). Note that in Merleau-Ponty’s account, the acquisition and possession of habits are never fully accomplished, but rather undergo continual reworking and instantiation. The movement is similar to his account of time and thought:

Likewise, my acquired thoughts are not an absolute acquisition; they feed off my present thought at each moment; they offer me a sense, but this is a sense that I reflect back to them. In fact, the acquisition that is available to us expresses, at each moment, the energy of our present consciousness. ⁶⁴

Habitual movements and orientations, insofar as they continue to participate in the body schema, are held in the body in a continuous and ongoing way. This reconceptualization of habit as being held – requiring ongoing maintenance and servicing – is made even clearer when we note that for Merleau-Ponty, habit has a distinctively ‘lived’ dimension: the acquisition of a new habit never fully crosses over the threshold into the acquired, but involves a constant holding or inhabiting. Speaking here of the body’s familiar and habitual motility around the home-space, he writes:

But this word ‘sedimentation’ must not trick us: this contracted knowledge is not an inert mass at the foundation of our consciousness. For me, my apartment is not a series of strongly connected images. It only remains around me as my familiar domain if I still hold ‘in my hands’ or ‘in my legs’ its principal distances and directions, and only if a multitude of intentional threads run out toward it from my body. ⁶⁶ (Emphasis added)

Responsibility and change

If this is right then what we have is an opening within the concept of habit, for a consideration of questions of responsibility and change. For example, we do not have to locate the possibility of change in that which is external, as Alcoff does when she writes:

… are we not led to pessimism about the possibility of altering the perceptual habits of racializations? Here I would think that the multiple schemas operating in many if not most social spaces today would mitigate against an absolute determinism and thus pessimism. Perceptual practices are dynamic even when congealed into habit, and that dynamism can be activated by the existence of multiple forms of gaze in various cultural productions and by the challenge of contradictory perceptions. ⁷⁰

Returning to the cases of Jonathan Ferrell and Renisha McBride, what this analysis opens up is a way to talk about responsibility in relation to the racist habits that buttressed the immediate perception of and response to their bodies as dangerous and violent. To the extent that the first responses of Theodore Wafer and Sarah McCartney (to say nothing of the police) were to cast the bodies of McBride and Ferrell as criminal, according to the racist orientations of their bodily horizons, they can be held responsible for the racist habits that were acquired, maintained and activated in those critical moments. Now of course we can – and should – be nuanced in our understanding of responsibility, allowing for important gradations across the range of actors involved (e.g. the police in Ferrell’s case, who bear additional responsibility as people entrusted with state power), as well as the cultural and historical milieux that give rise, shape and meaning to these particular habits of racist perception and response. In other words, my argument ought not to distract us from these important conversations about the role of structures and institutions in racism, but instead broaden our purview so as to allow us to ask how such macro-level workings of racism can find expression in our bodily being, and what role we each play in the uptake, maintenance and perpetuation of such racist schemata. ⁷¹ Further, this analysis of racism in terms of habit throws up another important consequence: in public discourse we too often see the diffusion of racist controversies with the unsatisfactory defence, ‘I did not mean to offend’. This misplaces the meaning and significance of racism to its actor, sidelining the experiential effect on the offended person or community, which is endured independently of the actor’s intentions, though not independently of the world already experienced racially. But in addition to the argument that meanings of gestures are located outside the exclusive control of their actors, habit renders blunt the notion of intention in a second way: by highlighting a register of movement and action that sits below cognitive intention, which nonetheless involves some acquired and maintained bodily orientation toward racial ‘others’. In other words, my reading of habit in its more active voice assigns some responsibility to those whose racist habits and bodily orientations remain uninterrogated and unchallenged.

This is different from, though not unrelated to, the kind of responsibility Emily Lee discusses in her essay, ‘Body Movement and Responsibility for a Situation’. Although she is there concerned with the questions of the habitual body, her argument in relation to responsibility plays out primarily in the political context of the ‘race treason’ movement, which entailed disavowing whiteness as an anti-racist strategy. Lee is rightly critical of such strategies insofar as they allow whites to avoid responsibility for the historical benefits that continue to accrue to them, regardless of their own intentions. ⁷² My claim, however, is that in addition to responsibility for one’s situation, one can and ought to also be responsible for one’s bodily habits, especially insofar as we hold habits in the active sense, and to the extent that such habits racially objectify, harm and oppress others. ⁷³ Racism is not a matter of wilful ‘intention’ as noted but is deeply embedded in our habitual bodies. And as I have argued, this level of inscription does not diminish the imperative or responsibility to work on our habits. George Yancy has argued elsewhere that ‘the threshold for perpetuating White racism is very low; all that is necessary is for White people to do nothing at all’. ⁷⁴ In part, this echoes Lee’s point above; in a system of long-standing, entrenched and continuing racism, whites who ‘do nothing’ continue to benefit from the accrued advantages of white racism, which can range from economic benefits, ⁷⁵ cultural and political benefits of representation and participation, to the existential benefits of facing a more open and not-yet-determined project of being and becoming, in contrast to the overdetermination of racialized bodies. In other words, ‘doing nothing’ can still mean one benefits from one’s situation within the racist schema. Following the analysis of habit, however, I argue that white racism can also take the form of ‘doing nothing’ insofar as one’s racist habits of perception and bodily orientation remain uninterrogated and unworked upon. As Yancy writes:

By the time White students have arrived to our classrooms, they have already been shaped by White ways of being-in-the-world, White ways of avoiding the issue of White privilege, White ways of constructing nonwhite bodies as ‘different’, White ways of seeing themselves as ‘innocent’ of White racism, and White ways of taking up space and moving through that space in the capacity of ownership and possession. ⁷⁶