This episode also featured an excerpt from Race Traitor, the ‘90s journal edited by John Garvey & Noel Ignatiev, which inspired the name of this series. You also heard part of Barnor Hesse’s 8 White Identities. And a quote from Denise Ferreira da Silva: “do we want to be somebody under the state or nobody against it?” The artist and filmmaker Tourmaline discusses the quote in the book Terrorizing Gender by Mia Fischer.
You heard the voice of Yonci Jameson from Minneapolis’ Black Visions Collective.
Music you heard in this episode: “Beanbag Fight,” “Concentric” & “We Win” by Scanglobe, “Objectif” by Demoiselle Döner, “Les Fleurs” by Minnie Riperton and “Divine Hammer” by the Breeders.
Below is a list of texts & resources that helped Phoebe shape the ideas articulated in this series.
The book Whites, Jews & Us by Houria Bouteldja, described aptly as a “polemical call for a militant antiracism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love.”
Survey for White Artists by Latham Zearfoss & Ruby T, which compiles white artists’ (very smart) responses to questions like Where do you locate whiteness within your work? What is the effect of your white identity on your practice?
The entire body of work of Mandy Harris Williams a.k.a. @idealblackfemale, a theorist, multimedia conceptual artist, writer, educator, radio host and internet/community academic who investigates the connections between white supremacy and desirability, and lovingly/brilliantly calls out all kinds of bullshit including racist algorithms.
Eula Biss’s essay White Debt in the New York Times, which talks about raising white children and responds to Claudia Rankine’s essay The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning by purporting that the condition of white life in America might be complacency, complicity, debt or forgotten debt.
The book Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mab Segrest.
The podcast/series Seeing White by John Biewen featuring Chenjerai Kumanyika is an excellent primer on the “buried” history of whiteness.
Chenjerai & Sandhya Dirks’ lecture All Stories Are Stories About Power has been extremely influential in my thinking about journalism. So has Lewis Wallace’s series (and book) The View From Somewhere, which breaks down the white supremacist construct of objectivity.
Sara Ahmed on whiteness. Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White by James Baldwin. Margaret Hagerman’s research on how white children are raised in the book White Kids. Tamara K. Nopper on white anti-racists. The characteristics of white supremacy culture, which were written by Tema Okun & Kenneth Jones for the workbook Dismantling Racism. The essay White People, You Have a Lying Problem by Talynn Kel. This essay by Kim McLarin on the possibility of friendships between Black & white women.
Lastly, Phoebe wants to acknowledge that this work is not in itself an anti-racist action. It is meant only to describe her experience. She made this in the hope that it would be useful for other people confronting white culture in themselves, their communities or the world, where there’s plenty of it.
She invites white people to join *actual* collective movement against white supremacy. Check out Community Ready Corps Allies & Accomplices and Make Yourself Useful. Wanna redistribute your generational wealth? Maybe start with Resource Generation. Give reparations to Black & Indigenous people.
In this current moment, here are some urgent actions white people can take:
GIVE REPARATIONS: here is a Twitter thread with the venmo/paypal/cashapp handles for individuals who are seeking reparations, focusing on Black trans women, but including many Black people and collectives. It’s important to give to individuals.
When you show up to protests, listen to Black organizers. If things get confrontational with the police, you are there to de-arrest people and put your body between Black people and the police. Do not post photos of protesters faces.
Email/call government officials and city council etc. asking them to defund the police.
Organize for any school, organization, office, etc. you’ve ever been a part of to terminate their contracts with police. This is happening in Minneapolis. Here is a doc for Chicago Police Dept that may be helpful as a model for writing your own letter.
transcript
Kaitlin Prest:
From Mermaid Palace and RadioTopia. Welcome, to The Heart, I'm Kaitlin Prest.
So this is the fourth episode of a four part mini season called Race Traitor, produced by Phoebe Unter. And if you haven't heard the first three episodes, you should start from the beginning. The first episode is called Who Taught You to Be White? After the last episode where Phoebe was asking questions about her inheritance as a white person and questions around giving that inheritance away. This episode, she's really looking for people who have taken action. Looking for people who have done more than just educate themselves or ask questions about what it would be like to give things up. Even though this is the final episode, this is not the end. I'm hoping that this will be a beginning of many conversations that you end up in the middle of, asking these same questions that Phoebe is asking and using her journey as a guide for yourself. A mirror like she talks about in episode one, to reflect on yourself and the people that you're close to.
Just before we start, for another glossary moment, Phoebe talks about abolitionism in this episode. And we've been talking a lot right now about police abolition, but it's part of a larger movement of prison abolitionism, which essentially is just about ending incarceration and punishment as a way of dealing with social problems.
The police are like an arm of that punitive system. And so when we say abolitionism, it's sort of both of those things. Yeah. Just in case you didn't know the lingo.
OK. Here's Phoebe.
Phoebe:
The whole time I've been working on this series, taking inventory of how white supremacy lives in me and having hard conversations with my friends about it. Every time I feel like I've gotten somewhere new in conversations with my family and the times it feels like we're all back at square one. All this time, I've heard this nagging question in my own head
[inner monologue] … is any of this even really doing anything?
When I'm feeling doubtful that my individual actions can change anything, I like to look for sources of inspiration, models for how to meaningfully contribute to dismantling whiteness as a white person. And then after many months of working on this, right as it was about to be released, a Black led abolition movement that has been building power for a very long time reached a tipping point. And alongside the outrage and the burning cop cars and the grieving and the mourning, it's like a doorway appeared.
[light dreamy wind chime sounds]
Phoebe's mom:
[recording from inside car on the way somewhere] We went...when we first moved here, we went there to see it because we'd heard about it. And I don't even know if you could go, you know, I mean, if you could see anything.
Phoebe:
[narrating] I'm making my mom drive us to a place in my hometown I've never been before. A place called Quindaro, which I read about in a book by a poet named Anne Boyer.
Phoebe:
So it's called Kansas City. “There is a ghost town in Kansas City, Kansas....
[soft inquisitive glitchy music underneath]
“There is a ghost town in Kansas City, Kansas, called Quindaro. It's hard to get to. It is its own set of ruins. Its name means a bundle of sticks tied together. To find it, you must first go deep on Quindaro Boulevard. And if you are lucky, you will find the wooden John Brown statue. Then you must walk up a muddy bluff past it. If you get to Quindaro, you will see the ruins of an autonomous community built by former enslaved people, indigenous people, and abolitionists. It was the site at which people who cross the river could finally be free.”
Phoebe:
[recording from inside car on the way somewhere] You can park down here...
Phoebe's mom:
Looks like it's closed right now.
Phoebe:
[narrating] When I read this, I couldn't believe it. There was an entire abolitionist town on the banks of the Missouri River near where I grew up? In the 1850s, before slavery had been abolished, white abolitionists settled the town and lived in community with people of the Wyandotte tribe. Together, they smuggled in runaway enslaved people. Quindaro grew to be one hundred buildings. There were stone houses, a sawmill, two churches and a schoolhouse. A free Black town supported by white people and indigenous people. And I grew up 50 miles away, and I never knew about it.
[music fades]
When Anne Boyer went to Quindaro, her tour guide, a local historian, told her that this was by design. It was deliberately hidden. Because powerful people, the arbiters of history, don't want people to know that Black people had a community devoted to liberation. And that there were indigenous people and white people who would be so crazy to fight and die for justice. People like John Brown, the famous white abolitionist. After his death, history textbooks abruptly changed his narrative to say that for a century he was medically insane.
[Race Traiter theme, lo fi keyboard and electric guitar]
The Kansas City they do want you to see is the one created by people like J.C. Nichols, the man who built the neighborhood I grew up in. I learned about him and I was taught to appreciate his accomplishments. His Kansas City is still standing. It's preserved and continues to fulfill its original purpose: to be a refuge for white homeowners, a place they and their property values can stay insulated from everybody else. But Anne Boyer is right about Quindaro. It is hard to find.
automated phone system:
...An item number followed by the pound sign, or you may hang up and call back later...
Phoebe's mom:
Well, that's because you're supposed to call to have someone meet you here.
Phoebe:
[narrating] The site of the ruins is not as hidden as it once was. It became a national historic landmark in 2019.
You can stand in a pavilion and read from a plaque.
Phoebe:
[at Quindaro] It says what you can see are the ruins...
[narrating] And look out on the river, which used to separate slavery from freedom.
[at Quindaro] From here you can see like there's some stairs that go down to what I'm guessing are the ruins.
[camera clicking]
Let's try going down.
Phoebe:
[narrating] But the ruins themselves aren't visible.
[at Quindaro] You can see the steps.
[narrating] There are some steps and an overgrown path. I want to hike down and my mom wants to stay. She's afraid of snakes.
Phoebe's mom:
It looks like it could have snakes in the grass, which makes me nervous.
Phoebe:
I'll go first.
Phoebe's mom:
Yeah, well, that doesn't make me feel any better.
[footsteps and walking through brush inthe area]
Phoebe:
[narrating] As I'm wandering around, I can't find any remnants of the once thriving community. No foundations of houses or any signs of the lives that were once lived there. After thriving for a decade, the town suffered from economic decline. There had been some over speculation and the town along the riverbank became abandoned.
In the 1980s, the landowners proposed turning it into a landfill. But when they were required to do an archeological excavation, they uncovered Quindaro's remains. The fact that there is little remaining evidence of Quindaro and that it isn't well known that it wasn't taught in my school, even though I grew up so close by, this all strikes me as one of the many reasons it can feel difficult for me to envision a future beyond white supremacy. Why didn't I learn about this important example that could have been something to strive for? Instead of learning the stupid history of J.C. Nichols. I think it's because the system that upholds white supremacy wants little white kids, like I once was, to hope to be homeowners and hope to live prosperously without thinking about the other world that is possible. Where we have less materially, so that others can have more. Before I started working on this series, I was hungry for examples of white people who do act as instruments for this kind of change. I wanted to meet someone who hasn't just talked to their family about changing, but has really done it. You could say the type of white people I was looking for were race traitors. The scholar Barnor Hesse says that there are eight white identities. They are arranged on a line from white supremacist to abolitionist. The first four kinds of white people on this list are all very obviously invested in the continuation of white supremacy. But the last four on the list are an illuminating map of where I think we should be going.
They are:
White confessional: they expose whiteness a little bit, but they'll seek validation from people of color after.
White critical: they'll critique whiteness and are invested in exposing the white regime. This is someone who refuses to be complicit with the regime and speaks to other white people about it.
White traitor: a person who actively refuses complicity and names what's going on. Their intention is to subvert white authority, encourage the dismantling of institutions and tell the truth at whatever cost.
White abolitionist: changes institutions, dismantles whiteness and does not allow whiteness to reassert itself.
[Race Traiter theme music, lo fi synth music]
Kaitlin Prest:
Please forgive this brief interruption. We'll be right back.
Phoebe:
I think I just might have met a race traitor when I talk to Stephanie Hofeller, the early ‘50s anarchist whistleblower of my dreams. She is still as angry as I am about systemic white supremacy. And she's been questioning her role in it for a long time.
Phoebe:
[to Stephanie, on the phone] It's like cool talking to you about this, because I feel pretty similarly about the world. And I mean, I'm — my parents they're liberals, but, you know — instilled a lot of things in me that I that I later unlearned. But I'm often dismissed by older people as this is something like, you'll grow out of or this is something that like, isn't sustainable. Like to fight for certain things. And so —
Stephanie Hofeller:
Yeah, well, you know, it is - their system is not sustainable.
Phoebe:
[giggles]
Stephanie Hofeller:
That's what's not sustainable. My lived experience has done nothing but radicalized me further over the years.
Phoebe:
[narrating] Stephanie's lived experience is this: she grew up the daughter of Tom Hofeller. Tom was a political guy.
He worked for the Republican National Committee and his biggest contribution to upholding white supremacy was his work in gerrymandering. In fact, he's known as the Michelangelo of the modern gerrymander.
[subtle meandering swirl underneath with light percussive taps]
Gerrymandering is a way of doing redistricting, and redistricting is the very regular government practice of redrawing the lines around congressional districts so they're roughly equal in population. This happens after the census every 10 years. Whichever party is in control at that time does it. And when the Republicans have been in power, they've had people like Tom Hoffeler used gerrymandering as a technique to suppress some people's votes and make others more powerful. And he was known for being an innovator, for coming up with new ways to use technology and out of the box ideas for new forms of voter suppression.
Overall, you could describe Tom Hofeller’s career as doing his best to rig elections for one party. And if you're rigging elections for the Republicans, you can pretty safely say you're rigging elections for the interests and power of white America.
Stephanie Hofeller:
He saw himself as the heir of the framers, the founding fathers, as we call them.
Phoebe:
[narrating] And the crux of the whole game of gerrymandering is not getting caught. No one's supposed to know that you're intentionally trying to suppress the votes of certain groups.
[music picks up speed]
So one of the things that made Tom Hofeller Michelangelo level was just how good he was at covering his tracks. Enter his daughter, Stephanie, while her dad was alive and doing all this fucked up work, she was never able to convince him to quit.
Stephanie Hofeller:
Over the years, I had plenty of opportunity to attempt to explain it to him. And, you know, sometimes I would briefly win him over, but that wouldn't last long.
Phoebe:
But when he died two years ago, she went into his house and happened to find a bunch of his hard drives. And when she realized what was on the hard drives, she handed them over to lawyers who found actual proof that his work in voter suppression was deliberately racist and partisan.
Stephanie Hofeller:
With the addition of the Hofeller files, the musings, the way he put these things together, just made everything that we suspected blatantly clear.
Phoebe:
One thing they found has to do with a news story from 2018.
news clip:
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced Monday that it plans to add back a question on citizenship status to the 2020 census.
Phoebe:
The Department of Commerce's official reason for this was it's necessary to adhere to the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
At the time, people thought this was fishy. Lawyers got on the case to prove that in fact, it was discrimination fueling the census question. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. What people hadn't known before Stephanie released the Hofeller files was that the citizenship question was her father's idea. And in the Hofeller files, they found this key piece of evidence: an unpublished analysis Tom Hofeller wrote, which said in his own words, that the maps made with citizenship data from the census would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
They would dilute the political power of Latinx people, and the citizenship data would allow for even more pernicious gerrymandering. The Hofeller files also revealed records of his communication, urging Trump's transition team to add the question. And as we know, they went forward with the plan. But the Supreme Court, likely convinced by the evidence in the Hofeller files, agreed that the government's official reason for having the citizenship question was bogus and it wasn't allowed to go through.
I asked Stephanie if it was a hard decision to give up these files exposing her dad, to betray him. But she says it wasn't.
She had been waiting her whole life to expose and undo the great injustices that her father had orchestrated against Black people and people of color all over the country.
But Stephanie also feels connected to her dad. She was his only child. She does feel responsible for not having been able to change his mind. So she also feels like releasing the files does a service to him and her whole family.
Stephanie Hofeller:
So one thing that my father could not do that you really kind of have to do in order to obtain forgiveness is you have to fucking confess! You have to come to terms with it and say, I did this. And only on the other end of this can you find any kind of redemption.
Phoebe:
When I hear her talk about her seeking her father's redemption, it feels kind of like a ritual to halt a white intergenerational pattern of passing on and maintaining power. She wants to stop this pattern in its tracks, not to clear her father's name, but so future generations can do better.
Stephanie Hofeller:
We thought you know, it's not disrespectful to the dead to try and correct their mistakes.
[steady and pensive guitar and drum melody]
Phoebe:
Something I've thought about a lot while making this is that individual actions cannot fix systemic racism. All the education, the correcting of blind spots, the exposure of oneself, the reckoning with one's personal privilege, even the giving of reparations as an individual will not change the systems around us unless a critical mass of people do this.
I don't say this because I think we should give up.
I say this because I think we should be a lot more organized. White people should be working a lot harder together than we currently are. A few years ago, a friend told me about a journal called Race Traitor, which first came out in the early 90s.
It highlights the work of white people who refuse to be complicit in white supremacy.
The editors of Race Traitor write:
Race Traitor quote:
Probably the greatest weakness in the journal and in this collection, is the absence of reports and analysis of collective struggles. We appreciate the accounts of individual race traitors, say some. But what can people do in groups? We think this complaint is well taken, but we hasten to add that the shortcoming is not mainly our fault. If Race Traitor suffers from a shortage of accounts of collective struggles against whiteness, it is because few such struggles are taking place involving so-called whites. We note that in Minneapolis...
Phoebe:
[narrating] And in this quote, they're talking about Minneapolis 25 years ago.
Race Traitor quote
In Minneapolis and Boston and a few other places, small groups of people have begun implementing copwatch programs. Campaigns to observe and record police misconduct.
Phoebe:
[narrating] These Copwatch programs were created decades ago, and they're a great example of white people working together to shut down a system that was supposedly built for their protection.
Race Traitor quote
These programs are examples of race treason because those who patrol the police repudiate the protection of white skin.
[quiet energetic music building on itself]
Phoebe:
[narrating] In the past two weeks before publishing this, you know what has happened. A Black-led liberation and abolition movement that has been building for decades met another righteous burst of outrage over a slew of police murders of Black people.
And the movement is having one of those months where literal and imaginative walls are coming down and going up in flames with a renewed urgency. Of course, white people's attention and investment in this fight is long overdue.
But right now, this question of what we can do in groups feels like something we can actually answer and how we show up to meet the demands of Black people to overthrow the systems that threaten black life. And support new ones that allow Black people to thrive.
Phoebe:
In the past two weeks:
Yonci Jameson:
We've seen like what, five to 10 different organizations cut ties with the police already? So really, it's it's feeling like we're getting nearer to liberation and it just hurts that, you know, it has to come at the expense of people's lives being lost...
Phoebe:
This is the voice of youth abolitionist Yonci Jameson from Minnesota's Black Vision's collective. The Minneapolis City Council has agreed to dismantle its police force.
Some cities have formed autonomous zones where police are no longer allowed to patrol. Fundraisers for black trans people to own their own housing have been flooded with support.
Yonci Jameson:
The resource, the networking, the mutual aid. I feel like that's really the coming together- we were just talking about how, like, if there's always this much food and water, like, why can't we just always have it like this? You know what I'm saying? We have the capacity to to create these mechanisms that are keeping each other safe and fed and taken care of.
Phoebe:
And there's this small victory that's close to my own heart. The public fountain and street in my hometown named after J.C. Nichols will be renamed.
Recently, I saw a quote going around on social media from the artist Denise Ferreira da Silva. Do we want to be somebody under the state or nobody against it? I think we need to be nobody's if we're going to make meaningful change as a group. That means spending more time and effort on non glamorous stuff you don't get credit for. Things like care for your community, volunteering, showing up, being of service. This is what I'm going to reinvest in right now. And I'm going to make sure that I'm doing it in a group, which can be harder than just doing it alone. To be a nobody requires humility, a modest or low view of one's own importance. White people don't know how to fix this. And that's part of being a nobody. Everything that has happened in this last month, it's been because of Black people, because of hundreds of years of uprising and decades of work, educating and fighting for the abolition of police.
The best thing people who aren't Black have done to help the movement in these last weeks has been to listen to Black people, to show up and do what is being asked to be done.
[sound of walking through Quindaro]
How can you contribute to today's Quindaro?
What if right now also became a turning point for white people? The point at which we no longer accept what we've been given? The point at which we no longer accept the systems that exist for our supposed protection, the systems that manage our wealth?
What if this was the point at which we let our imaginations be transformed? What if we all identify something in our lives that's like our own personal Hofeller files. The black box of our white power, and we release it.
[defiant electric guitar]
Kaitlin Prest:
Race Traitor is a serialized mini season of The Heart produced by Phoebe Unter. Story goddess Sharon Mashihi edited this series with additional editorial support from Nicole Kelly and me, Kaitlin Prest. A very special thank you to Stephanie Hofeller for sharing her story with Phoebe. This episode featured writing from the book A Handbook of Disappointed Fate by Anne Boyer and the journal Race Traitor. Find links to the texts and other resources that guided and inspired Phoebe at theheartradio.org There are also resources that reflect the uprising happening right now on our web site for white people who are looking to get more educated and involved in confronting white supremacy. The Heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi, Chiquita Pasqual and me Kaitlin Prest. Follow us on Instagram @theheartradio, you can follow me @KaitlinPrest. You can follow Mermaid Palace @MermaidPalaceArt. It is the organization that makes this show happen and you may find other shows that you like by following. You can donate to The Heart at theHeartRadio.org We need your dollars to keep making this work. If you're new to the show, leave us a review on iTunes, tell us what you think! Every time someone reviews it kind of- it helps other people find the show. So if you like us, leave us a review. This show is a more than 10 years old queer feminist platform and it's passed through the hands of many, many people over the years. Big thanks to the original co-creator and senior producer Mitra Kaboli and the other original co-creator and maker of audio magic's Jess Grossmann. Our next season is a special summer throwback series. OK. We are a proud member of Radiotopia.
