Extraction as white supremacy | Moving towards anti-extraction practices in the arts
White supremacy, as a system of thought and action, relies on a number of interconnected pillars, seen and unseen, named and unnamed. All contribute to the project of domination.
Decolonial, African, and Black feminist scholars have made significant responses to the questions, what happened to this earth? What has happened to us? Their responses rarely yield answers. Instead, they allow us to name violence(s) we’d like to reject, violence we, as those who have been subjected to centuries of brutality, never want to re-produce. By identifying some of the ways in which extraction manifests in the arts, it becomes clear what paths allow us to disengage from violence, and what avenues can provide dignity or sincerity.
This work seeks to map extraction and its various forms onto various popular media and creative industries. The orientation of this work takes notes from abolitionist scholars who emphasise that reproducing the settler-state or a white supremacist system cannot lead to liberation. But, there are means of practicing the future we’d like to see. As such, while I focus on extractive tendencies in journalism, photography, interviewing, and research, I suggest tangible and conceptual anti-extraction practices. Overall, the aim of this work is to critique and imagine; to critique our current extractive iterations and imagine better means of moving forward.
Extraction as White Supremacy
Cause they killed the Carthaginians
in the great appian way
And they killed the Moors
“to civilize a nation”
And they just killed the earth
And blew out the sun
In the name of a god
Whose genesis was white
And war wooed god
And america was born
Where war became peace
And genocide patriotism
And honor is a happy slave
cause all god’s chillun need rhythm
And glory hallelujah why can’t peace
be still
- Nikki Giovanni, "The Great Pax Whitie”[1]
Illustration by Farhana Jacobs.
It is useful to understand the links between white supremacy and extraction. In settler colony states like the US or South Africa, slavery was a “profit maximising economic institution and a dehumanising institution.”[2] Black scholars like Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí[3] and Pumla Dineo Gqola[4] argue that sexualised violence, the gender binary, and body policing were all co-created through the systems of slavery and colonialism. In other words, our ideas about labour, the body, humanity, and morality are overwhelmingly shaped by anti-Black violence. Christina Sharpe’s theory of “wake work”[5] recognises that slavery and its catastrophes are not past events that can be mourned for, “How does one mourn the interminable event?” Sharpe uses wake work “as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance.”[6] These foundations are meant to emphasise the inextricable link between the violence of capitalism and the violence of extraction. In our most salient understandings, this is the extraction of Blackness, indigeneity, and all of us named ‘other.’
Extraction as in
The past is not, as Miriam Makeba notes, a “dead animal”[7] in western conceptualisations. Thus, extraction finds expression in nearly all contemporary economies. One can turn to what Jen Preston calls “racial extractivism” when contextualising the oil and gas extraction in the settler-colonial state of Canada, where “racial extractivism positions race and colonialism as central to extractivist projects under neoliberalism and underpins how these epistemologies are written into the economic structure and social relations of production and consumption.”[8] Preston argues that this relational mode is integral to conceptualising how Canadian gas and oil industries function. The logic of extraction is driven by racialised violence and sustained practice of genocide of indigenous peoples.
Extraction as in technology and policing
The fields of (broadly) technology, computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic science are reliant upon extraction as pointed out by various Black scholars and technological workers. Dorothy Roberts' prolific work on the child welfare system reveals the extractive nature of public ‘care’ systems, fundamentally utilizing technology to extract demographic information and transform it into policing mechanisms. Roberts argues that the institution relies entirely on the policing of the Black family, targeted specifically at Black women and Black working-class mothers. The child welfare system is “a state-run program that disrupts, restructures, and polices Black families.”[9] This is achieved through state supervision tactics of data targeting, policing, and policies that reinforce a white, nuclear, middle-class structure and punish all other modes of life. As such the extraction of data that relates to Black women and their families has fortified the institutionalisation of racism, sexism, and classism.
Extraction as in prisons
This work takes note from abolitionist scholars who disengage from what Angela Davis calls a “treadmill of reform.”[10] Samudzi and Anderson note that mass incarceration “saw the maintenance of the system of Black slavery despite the formal emancipation in 1865.”[11] Many of the markers of enslavement are reproduced in mass incarceration. Extraction remains a central function of contemporary economies, whether it expresses itself through incarcerated firefighters in California remunerated at .36 cents per hour[12] or the use of convict labour in the building and construction of Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town.[13]
Extraction as in the Creative Arts, Media and Research
When considering how extraction translates into modalities of creativity, case studies of Paris Is Burning and three photojournalism/journalism awards present useful departure points. In a conversation that takes place in the documentary How Do I Look? (widely considered a follow up to Paris is Burning) one of the filmmakers asks Octavia Saint Laurent, a star in Paris is Burning, about their opinions on Paris is Burning, amidst its success and love within the queer community.
How do you explain how other people have then seen Paris is Burning as something good?
Cause they’re looking outside in and anything gay people do is first of all a bunch of entertainment. Paris is Burning is like their momato or something; they don’t know anything about the gay community or the ball scene.
So how do you feel about Paris is Burning?
(laughs) It's a terrible movie. [14]
-
Paris is Burning, the 1990 documentary directed by Jennie Livingston, is often regarded as a quintessential representation of Black queer ball culture in New York in the late 80s and early 90s. However, following the film’s release, the celebratory tone of the film was challenged by the predominantly Black cast as well as scholars like bell hooks. hooks noted that her excitement about the nature of the film was flattened by the film itself, largely due to the nature of spectacle at the forefront of the film by the white, middle-class lesbian director, Jennie Livingston. hooks writes:
Livingston’s film is presented as though it is a politically neutral documentary providing a candid, even celebratory, look at black drag balls. And it is precisely the mood of celebration that masks the extent to which the balls are not necessarily radical expressions of subversive imagination at work undermining and challenging the status quo... Those of us who have grown up in a segregated black setting where we participated in diverse pageants and rituals know that those elements of a given ritual that are empowering and subversive may not be readily visible to an outsider looking in. Hence it is easy for white observers to depict black rituals as spectacle.[15]
Interviews with cast members in the years following Paris is Burning (such as those in the 2006 documentary How Do I Look?) demonstrate the extractive nature of works that attempt to ‘capture’ or ‘celebrate’, when in fact they are mere cooption. After all, Jennie Livingston profited off of the film and its royalties (for example, its Netflix tenure) in contrast to working-class cast members who received little to no compensation from the project. Extraction on this level has a lifespan that extends beyond the people on screen. It demands an “undisciplined”[16] approach to research, filmmaking, and the (attempted) capturing of others’ essence.
at home they believe
that you are a musician heard by thousands
your arthritis strumming a guitar on a train in berlin can verify
years after your death
your gallerist still makes euros from your art
while your children piece together your belongings
in the shack you left behind
- Koleka Putuma, “jukebox on demand”[17]
Illustration by Farhana Jacobs.
The world of photojournalism (as well as journalism as a whole) are major vehicles of neocolonial and paternal narratives about development and how we as a ‘global community’ should relate to stories of ‘human catastrophe.’ We can consider the Scripps Howard Awards, a 69-year-old american (lowercase intentional) institution, as an important kind of reification of power dynamics. The annual ceremony awards $160,000 in 14 categories to newsrooms and individuals for what they dub as “one of the nation’s most prestigious American journalism competitions.”[18] Neocolonial power dynamics – what Lewis calls “colonial scripts”[19] – are observable in the 2018 award in innovation to the BBC for their story "Anatomy of a Killing.” This project used forensic analysis of viral video footage to prove a series of executions in Cameroon. The reporting and research used interactive graphics to pinpoint where and when a woman and child were executed through a video that circulated online. Dubbed a ‘human rights violation’ and news piece of interest, a large team of journalists and researchers used ‘innovative’ research methods and Google Earth satellite to identify the faces of six Cameroonian soldiers, whom the government denied being involved.
This project was awarded a Peabody Award in the same year. The introduction and acceptance of the awards[20] were carried out by three white men, all of whom were disturbed that such a heinous crime that was denied by the Cameroonian government (how barbaric). Their speeches demonstrate paternalism, homogenisation, and exotification of the ‘subject’ matter – Cameroon – a place an average american may have a hard time identifying on a map. These kinds of stories are what Chandra Mohanty calls curated narratives of “third world women'' that are identifiable “purely on the basis of shared dependencies.”[21] These discourses take on legitimacy through scholarship, research, NGO-ism, and journalism in the global north. The ‘violence, brutality, and incivility’ they imagine justify colonialism in the past and present. It begs the question, why do acts of violence in remote areas of Cameroon become the target of incredibly well funded investigative journalism, instead of the human rights violations that are perpetuated by the empire? What would an investigation of the sale, packaging, transportation, and usage of arms between the US to Israel look like, using satellite imagery and crowdsourcing material? What would satellite images show of the mines in Cameroon or Congo or South Africa? Would there still be multi-million-dollar award shows where the perpetrators congratulate themselves on their own doings?
The World Press Photo Awards can be similarly understood, overemphasising ‘human-ness’ and ‘human interest’ rather than what several scholars have dubbed poverty porn. In the 2021 World Press Photo Awards, the awards for World Press Photo of the Year, World Press Photo Story of the Year, World Press Photo Interactive of the Year[22] prove similar power dynamics. Global north and/or white freelance photographers capture ‘war zones,’ parts of the ‘global south,’ or the ‘plight’ of marginalised communities and receive incredible prestige for the circulation of images of people often in pain.
These case studies elucidate the power dynamics that dominate creative production. They exemplify how ‘the wake’ is visible in media and the creative arts.
Decolonial, Imaginative, and Anti-extractive methodologies
Taking note from Linda Tuhiwai Smith, an often-cited scholar in the field of decolonial research methods, anti-extractive methodologies must take place on several planes. Conceptually, it is imperative to interrogate power relationships inherent in research methodologies and to find new ways of creating knowledge as a result. As Smith points out, traditional research methods are imbued with power dynamics that reveal themselves when the ‘subjects’ of said research are considered to be indigenous or structurally marginalised groups. Smith calls the re-annihilation of marginalised peoples “research through imperial eyes”[23] which undermines their knowledge. Smith’s conceptualisation is complemented by abolitionist conceptions that Black feminist scholars have been refining for several generations. Ruth Gilmore notes that abolition is “a theory of change, it's a theory of social life. It's about making things.”[24] Gilmore, James,[25] Davis,[26] and Kaba[27] all emphasise that reforms hinder the radical positioning needed to understand the violence of systems like prisons. Ruha Benjamin asks, “[If] imagination is a terrain of struggle … whose imagination reigns?”[28] With this in mind, it is important to imagine ecosystems that beget cooperation rather than faceless transactions. When thinking about how to practice anti-extractive methodologies, I look to abolitionists and decolonial scholars who note that the future is practice. The landscape of capitalism has its limitations; when possible, practicing the future we’d like to see offers roads to turn down that aren’t oversaturated with extraction.
Carrying these concepts into praxis, we begin to work towards the liberation we’d like to see. Within a journalism and photojournalism space, it is useful to consider one’s work in a bigger picture. When documenting communities, building sincere, ongoing relationships with those photographed/interviewed transforms practice of journalism. Instead of a single photo or single story, a relationship-based praxis inserts the journalist into the story, acting as a stakeholder rather than being arbiter, director, or producer. Seeing oneself within a community can shift the nature of reporting. If praxis is governed by participation rather than ‘representation’ – exploiting community stories that will land well on the eyes and ears of neoliberal and neo-colonial institutions – liberation becomes a more real possibility.
This isn’t to say that conceptualisation and praxis are achievable simply by thinking and doing differently. Bringing in my own experience as a journalist in Cape Town, South Africa, there are numerous circumstances that dictate how and why one may land in a newsroom. Working at small scale, NGO and civil society adjacent, ‘human rights’ orientated newspapers, the newsroom dynamics are palpable, at times, with the racist and neo-colonist needs of the paper. These dynamics manifested at the centre of several stories and the means of finding sources. Racism and paternalism left Black journalists with little room to conceptualise something different or better. The fast-paced nature of a newsroom was an often-used excuse to ignore subjugation and dysfunction in the work culture. While one may not want to write stories that maintain narratives about poverty or violence within marginalised communities, resistance is limited. As such, the orientation of this text is not meant to put an onus on us, marginalised and Black people, to fix and/or condemn each other for the limited choice we have within a dictatorial game. Rather, this text encourages adaptable structures of thinking and practices of care even on the smallest of scales.
Anti-extractive methodologies seek to unveil what keeps power structures in place. While risky (especially for those of us who are subjects of white supremacy’s despise), understanding the larger power structure allows for better negotiation with it. If working with an institution that is well-funded, including remuneration for interviewees or community members can provide overdue compensation for collaborators who are from communities subjected to marginalisation and centuries of subjugation. In conjunction with this, a rigorous sense of mentorship and honesty can point towards less extractive means of work. Within arts, media, and research fields, the precarity of moving through, up, and around is dictated by the silence of things like white supremacist patriarchy, misogynoir, payment rates, abusers, and hierarchies. Given that most societies underfund and undervalue art, unpaid internships are normal. Art projects are centred in cities which are prohibitive on the basis of transport, access, technology, and time. Further, arts spaces are imbued with white supremacist value systems where thinness, whiteness (or proximity to it), able-bodied-ness, middle-classness, and alignment with the status quo are heavily rewarded, while challenges to this are readily and materially squashed. These all add up to dishonesty about what the creative space actually ‘resists’ or ‘disrupts.’ As such, mentorship, unionisation, threads on Twitter, message boards, and community building allow us to circulate experiences and negotiation tactics as well as practices of solidarity that create honest foundations, even if community is not an option or desire.
If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.
- Charlie Parker[29]
Illustration by Farhana Jacobs.
This intervention offers up a malleable understanding of positionality that is less concerned with tangible measurements and their policing. That is not the adage Parker is proposing here. Scholarship, as a way of thinking and living in the world, demonstrates that there are very few structures that can achieve a ‘correct.’ praxis. Such demands reveal the narrow, white supremacist thinking that requires a binary, voiding multiplicity and the range to understand it. Parker provides an overarching sentiment, a guiding principle, one that invites people into autonomous thinking as a place from which accountability can arise and critique on a deeper level than identity markers can be expressed. Moreover, Parker's sentiments can guide us as Black people, people subjected to colonisation, as a means to practice freedom with ourselves and dismantle/disrespect/pay no mind to the things they extract from us.
References
Boehi, M. (2018). “Multispecies histories of South African imperial formations in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden.” In Uriel Orlow and Shela Sheikh (eds.), Theatrum Botanicum.
Sternberg Press/The Showroom, 81-87.
Brown University (2019). Joy James: The Architects of Abolitionism (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9rvRsWKDx0&t=31s
Bunting, A.; Quirk, J. (2019). “Research as more than extraction? Knowledge production and gender-based violence in African conflicts,” Open Democracy.
Busch, W. (Director). (2006). How Do I Look? [Documentary Film] . Art From The Heart Films.
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Carroll K. K. (2008). “Africana studies and research methodology: Revisiting the centrality of Afrikan worldview,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, 2 (2), 5-27.
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GirlTrek Movement (2020). Angela Davis and Nikki Giovanni's LIVE Discussion with GirlTrek (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esPHDvx_aZc
Gqola, P. (2015). Rape: a South African nightmare. MF Books.
Gilmore, R.W. (2019) “Prisons and Class Warfare,” Historical Materialism. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/interviews/prisons-and-class-warfare
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Haymarket Books (2020). Policing Without the Police: Race, Technology and the New Jim Code (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf0nEQTLw04
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Kaba, M. (2021). We do this ‘til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Haymarket Books.
Lewis, D. (2011). “Representing African Sexualities.” In Sylvia Tamale (ed.), African Sexualities: A experiences of language dominance,” Journal of Thought, 39 (1), 45-81.
Livingston, J. (1990). Paris Is Burning. Off White Productions Inc.
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Mohanty, C. (2003). “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (2), 499–535.
Mota, A. (2020). “I saved lives as an incarcerated firefighter. To California, I was just cheap labor,”
The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/california-incarcerated firefighters-prison
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Peabody (2018). “Anatomy of a Killing,” Peabody Awards. https://peabodyawards.com/award-profile/anatomy-of-a-killing/
Preston, J. (2017). “Racial extractivism and white settler colonialism: An examination of the Canadian Tar Sands mega-projects,” Cultural Studies, 31 (2-3), 353–375.
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Roberts, D. (2001). Shattered bonds the color of child welfare. Basic Books.
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Springer, D. W. (2007). The teaching of evidence-based practice in social work higher education—Living by the Charlie Parker dictum: A response to papers by Shlonsky and Stern, and Soydan. Research on Social Work Practice, 17(5), 619-624.
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https://www.worldpressphoto.org/news/2021/contests-winners
[1] Giovanni, N. (1968). “The Great Pax Whitie,” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48221/the-great-pax-whitie
[2] Samudzi, Z.; Anderson, W.C. (2018). As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. AK Press, 8.
[3] Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press.
[4] Gqola, P. (2015). Rape: A South African Nightmare. MF Books.
[5] Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 53.
[6] Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 43.
[7] Makeba, M.; Hall, J. (1988). Makeba: My Story. Skotaville, 2. .
[8] Preston, J. (2017). “Racial extractivism and white settler colonialism: An examination of the
Canadian Tar Sands mega-projects,” Cultural Studies, 31 (2-3), 353–3756.
[9] Roberts, D. (2001). Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. Basic Books, viii.
[10] GirlTrek Movement (2020). Angela Davis and Nikki Giovanni's LIVE Discussion with GirlTrek (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esPHDvx_aZc
[11] Samudzi, Z.; Anderson, W.C. (2018). As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. AK Press, 46.
[12] Mota, A (2020). “I saved lives as an incarcerated firefighter. To California, I was just cheap labor,” TheGuardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/california-incarceratedfirefighters-prison
[13] Boehi, M. (2018). “Multispecies histories of South African imperial formations in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden.” In Uriel Orlow and Shela Sheikh (eds.), Theatrum Botanicum, Sternberg Press/The Showroom, 81-87. Also see Reynolds, K. M. (2020). “Cape Town’s Garden of Good and Evil,” New Frame. https://www.newframe.com/long-read-cape-towns-garden-of-good-and-evil/
[14] Busch, W. (Director). (2006). How Do I Look? [Documentary Film] . Art From The Heart Films.
[15] hooks, b. (2015). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Routledge, 150.
[16] Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 43.
[17] Putuma, K. (2021). Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In. Manyano Media.
[18] https://scripps.com/foundation/journalism/scripps-howard-awards/
[19] Lewis, D. (2011). “Representing African Sexualities.” In Sylvia Tamale (ed.), African Sexualities: A Reader. Pambazuka Press, 199-216.
[20] Peabody (2018). "Anatomy of a Killing,” Peabody Awards. https://peabodyawards.com/award-profile/anatomy-of-a-killing/
[21] Mohanty, C. (2003). “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist
Struggles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (2), 24. 499–535.
[22] World Press Photo (2021). “World Press Photo Contests winners announced,” World Press Photo. https://www.worldpressphoto.org/news/2021/contests-winners
[23] Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. University of Otago Press, 24..
[24] Gilmore, R.W. (2019). “Prisons and Class Warfare,” Historical Materialism. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/interviews/prisons-and-class-warfare
[25] Brown University (2019). Joy James: The Architects of Abolitionism (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9rvRsWKDx0&t=31s
[26] Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.
[27] Kaba, M. (2021). We do this ‘til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Haymarket Books.
[28] Haymarket Books (2020). Policing Without the Police: Race, Technology and the New Jim Code (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf0nEQTLw04
[29] Springer, D. W. (2007). The teaching of evidence-based practice in social work higher education—Living by the Charlie Parker dictum: A response to papers by Shlonsky and Stern, and Soydan. Research on Social Work Practice, 17(5), 619-624.
