Claiming Bad Kin

Christina Sharpe’s piece “Lose Your Kin,” which came out shortly after the election of Donald Trump, invites white people to refuse white kinship. She writes, “One must be willing to say this is abhorrent. One must be willing to be more than uncomfortable. One must be willing to be on the outside. One must refuse to repair a familial rift on the bodies cast out as not kin.”11Christine Sharpe, “Lose Your Kin,” The New Inquiry, 16 November 2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/lose-your-kin. She is right, I think, to argue that “[k]inship relations structure the nation. Capitulation to their current configurations is the continued enfleshment of that ghost [of slavery].”22Ibid. In asking what it means to resist the continued enfleshment of the ghosts and present hauntings of slavery, eugenic projects, the violence of borders, racial distributions of environmental devastation, capitalism, and colonialism, I pivot to wonder if refusing to capitulate to current configurations might require white settlers to acknowledge our social and political entanglement with them.

What could it mean for those who benefit from oppression—white people, and settlers more generally—to claim kin with oppressors? If we are complicit in the pain of this suffering world, how might we take responsibility for our bad kin? I started thinking about these questions while hearing conversations over the past several years about people who claim various sorts of Indigenous identities without being able to trace their family history to the lived, community experience of indigeneity. I have attended especially to Kim TallBear and Audra Simpson’s articulations of the understanding that it does not only matter what we claim about who we are; it also matters who claims us as kin.

White nationalists claim me, as a white person, as kin. Though they may not know me personally and though they would likely despair of my politics, they are working for a world in which I and white people like me hold citizenship, reproduce “the white race,” and are safe and flourishing. I have started to wonder what would happen if I claimed them back.

Here I explore modes of relationality that might allow us to understand the histories we inherit and the webs of connection that shape the social situations within which we exist. I argue for a specific form of responding to whiteness that involves white settlers claiming rather than disavowing our connection to white supremacist people and social relations. I see at least three different roles we white people can take up in claiming our kin: as friends, comrades, and enemies.

Kyle Powys Whyte has cogently argued that ecological catastrophe is only a “new” experience for settlers: “Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island have already passed through human-caused ecological catastrophe at least once in their history.”33Kyle Powys Whyte, “Climate Change: An Unprecedentedly Old Catastrophe,” The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1 (June 2018), 8. In 2017, on a panel about the concept of “threat,” Kim TallBear talked about what it means to exist in the wake of a threat already manifest—to have already experienced attempted genocide and world-destruction, and to still continue. “Settlers,” she said in that talk, “make terrible kin.” There is a vast literature on kinship relations, much of it emanating from what Vine Deloria Jr. ironically named “Anthropologists and Other Friends” who discuss the kinship relations of their objects of study.44Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 78–101. In the academic circles I move in, there has been a return to talking about kin relations as “making kin not population.”55See Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway, Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018). Making kin, in this formulation, names a kind of relationality not based on biological markers or lineal descent, which are often seen as given and immutable, but instead on a chosen and ongoing process. These conceptions of kinship resonate with some Indigenous conceptions of relationality and being in relation as an ontological stance, densely situated in the specific, ongoing, collective lifeworlds of Indigenous people, and manifest in specific relationships to land and place, as well as in mobile social-material ecologies.

I believe we should reject any attempt to translate or transport specific Indigenous kin practices into settler contexts. Holding in view an understanding of colonialism as a structure rather than an event, settlers make terrible kin not because of who particular people are, but because settler colonialism is a structure based on betraying relationality, both historically and in the present. Settlership is formed in and through anti-Black racism and enslavement as a key piece of capitalism; it is formed in and through militarized border protectionism that simultaneously steals land and determines by force who will be allowed to cross into it. It is an artifact of whiteness to behave as though Black, Indigenous, and migrant struggles are in conflict with one another, and so it is worth attending to coalitional work, as when Black Lives Matter supported the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, or when Indigenous activists oppose travel bans and welcome migrants.66Lenard Monkman, “No Ban on Stolen Land,’ Say Indigenous Activists in U.S.,” CBC News, 2 February 2 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-activists-immigration-ban-1.3960814.

Métis feminist scholar Zoe Todd’s work on kinship is generative. Beginning from Leroy Little Bear’s reflections on the very narrow range of ideal conditions that humans need to live, Todd critically engages the context of an oil spill in the North Saskatchewan River. She considers not only the river and the critters that live in it, the rocks and plants it touches, but also the remnants of dinosaur denizens now manifest as petro-fuel or fossils, as kin. She writes about the human parts of this web, “My multigenerational urban Métis family found ways to situate ourselves with care in relation to more-than-human beings in the heart of the prairie metropolis where we found ourselves.”77Zoe Todd, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory,” Afterall 43, no. 1 (2017): 97. Reading Todd reminds me again about the dense, multi-layered history of being with kin over the long term. And learning from the work of people like Colleen Cardinal88See Colleen Cardinal, Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised somewhere else) (Winnipeg: Roseway, 2018).—who addresses the Sixties Scoop, in which Indigenous children were stolen from their families and adopted by settlers—I reflect on how the experience of displacement, discontinuity, and fragmentation has also come to be part of Indigenous experience; continuity of residence is not a condition of kinmaking under conditions of settler colonialism. Similarly, reflecting on what it would mean to include “petro progeny” as kin, understanding the conditions under which oil spills kill other beings, also kin, Todd concludes her piece with an invitation: “I hope that I can encourage settler Canadians to understand that tending to the reciprocal relationality we hold with fish and other more-than-human beings is integral to supporting the ‘narrow conditions of existence’ in this place.”99Todd, “Fish, Kin and Hope,” 99.

As Whyte writes, “Indigenous peoples are drawing on their own intellectual traditions in preparing for climate change. They are calling on settler nations like the US to finally live up to moral and just expectations for diplomacy and reciprocal responsibility by taking care of shared environments, including the climate system. But non-Indigenous leaders in the US and Canada will never be in the position to do right by Indigenous peoples until they acknowledge climate change as the unprecedentedly old ecological crisis that it is.”1010Whyte, “Climate Change,” 9. Not being able to tend to kin relations in the same way that Indigenous people do does not mean that settlers cannot tend to kin relations at all. On the contrary, if we care for the world, tending to reciprocal relationality is necessary work, perhaps especially for those of us structurally situated as settlers in relations of betrayal and broken promises. But if we are structurally situated as people defined by failures of relational reciprocity, what should we do?

Reckoning with reciprocal relationality includes understanding the histories that place us where we are, the relations that we inherit, as well as the webs of relations that benefit us in the present. As TallBear has argued, “White Americans make claims to Native American genetic ancestry and identity in ways that mirror the kinds of claims that whites have made to other forms of Native American patrimony—whether land, resources, remains, or cultural artifacts.”1111Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 136. Making knowledge claims usually carries a material reason for knowing one thing rather than another, a reason that truth matters. As both TallBear and Circe Sturm have examined, white people’s attempts to “race-shift” towards indigeneity carry a moral valence for them as well, in which it is somehow more virtuous to (attempt to) choose to be native than to acknowledge or affirm whiteness.

All of us inherit history; the life we enter into is a product of what has come before us. We inherit the life experiences of our ancestors as well as the material conditions in which those experiences unfolded. That inheritance sets the conditions for our individual lives. And all of us experience benefit or harm from the social relations currently constituting our lives. Differential inheritances mean that we do not enter the world with equal life chances; social relations of oppression mean that we receive harm (or help) simply because of how we are socially placed. We aren’t personally responsible for the social relations and material conditions that came before us or that we enter in to, but we can become responsible for what we do in response to those conditions. Thinking again about whiteness, we can mark the ways that it functions in the histories we inherit to unjustly benefit people designated white. We can mark the ways that we who are white benefit from racism in the present, whether or not we want to.

As George Lipsitz says:

In this sense, whiteness accrues to white people in our inheritance of the past, as well as our benefit in the present. Some of this is due to racism—both overt and structural—oriented toward securing a future for whiteness; this is why David Lane’s so-called “14 words” are so often evoked by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” This present commitment to the well-being of white people and to the eugenic project of white children marks something about white people’s inheritance, our present, and the imagined future that whiteness secures for its children.

I see the task, then, as one of situating ourselves in relation to whiteness in ways that do not disavow or evade its past and present, while simultaneously working toward a future in which more beings than just white children have any kind of future at all.

I have been thinking a lot about Canadian colonialism and its entanglement with capitalism and border militarism, so let me illustrate what I mean using Canada as an example. As James Daschuk’s book Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life illustrates, profit has been a major motor for the Canadian colonial project. The primary player in early capitalist colonialism was the Hudson’s Bay Company, which for the majority of its life in the colonies was a fur-trading business (with later ventures into department stores in the nineteenth century, and oil and gas in the twentieth). But pathways for extracting fur for profit were also disease vectors, transmitting smallpox and tuberculosis westward and northward. And the fur trade also contributed to ecological devastation and famine, as buffalo herds were hunted to near extinction to produce the pemmican that would feed fur hunters and traders in the north.

The collapse of beavers in the west likely contributed to drought conditions, which contributed to the collapse of buffalo herds, which in turn undermined Indigenous subsistence capacities. Simultaneously, the government confined people to reserves if they wanted to access the food and medicine promised to them in treaty agreements. The prime minister at the time, John A. Macdonald, commenting on the government’s policy towards plains people, said in the House of Commons “We cannot allow them to die for want of food… [We] are doing all that we can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.”1313James W. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013), 123. In practice, this meant that representatives of the Canadian state kept food in storehouses on reserves while people went hungry, fed them rancid pork and flour, and kept rations at below-subsistence levels. Made vulnerable by starvation, people frequently succumbed to sicknesses.

None of this was done just to be mean. Macdonald and his henchmen starved the Indigenous people of the plains to make money for themselves (as investors in the companies supplying tainted food to reserves) and to open the plains for settlement by mostly European immigrants. My immigrant ancestors directly benefited from the starvation of plains Indians and preferential immigration policies aimed at bringing in Europeans; great-great grandmother Eliza Ritchie moved to Winnipeg to join her brothers and parents, who had moved there from Nova Scotia. My family biography is not extraordinary; it is a genealogy of settlers just trying to make a life, often fleeing starvation in their own homelands (it is likely that my great grandmother’s family left Ireland because of the Great Famine of the 1840s). Ordinary settlers just trying to make a life lived their lives because of the immiseration and death of ordinary Indigenous people, because of the systematic and planned betrayal of treaty agreements and land theft, and for a few settlers to extract money from the people and places they invaded. I, and the many other descendants of ordinary settlers, inherit this history.

Canada remains a state engaged in an ongoing colonial project of attempting to dispossess Indigenous people of places, resources, and culture. It is a resource-extraction economy where wealth continues to be pipelined, primarily from the oil fields of the north and the west to the south and east. And Canada continues to ignore its treaty obligations with what frequently seems like the flattest contempt—despite promising a turn to “nation-to-nation” relations, our current prime minister has, for example, flouted agreements with, among many others, Treaty 8 First Nations in relation to the development of the Site C dam project, including the Prophet River and West Moberly First Nations. As I write, Canada is actively violating Wet’suwet’en sovereignty in pursuit of TransCanada’s Coastal GasLink pipeline. The Canadian government continues to fight against paying for dental and medical care for First Nations children; it continues to fail to provide clean drinking water to more than 150 reserves; continues to fail to meet its obligations for Indigenous education. Canada just spent half a billion dollars celebrating its 150th anniversary. White nationalist Canadians buttress the government’s colonial project with a growing anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, anti-Black popular project. Over the last year there has been an upswing in overt, militarized, white supremacist organizing across the Canadian context, from Soldiers of Odin patrols to Quebec’s La Meute. I, and everyone else living on stolen native land, benefit from these social relations that distribute harm and death.

So we have differential inheritances, and the material effects of what we receive bequeath differential responsibilities. And while Indigenous people and Black people and people of color are related to white settlers, the inheritances and social relations that constitute those connections are different. Those relations have been and are systematically set up to refuse, harm, and kill people not rendered white and to break their relations with their ancestors, places, and people. The ethical and political imperative to claim bad kin also falls solely on the people—white settlers—who benefit from white supremacist actions, policies, and inheritances. As with all political imperatives, this is a hypothetical one. Whiteness is an inheritance we cannot disavow or divest from, only reckon with. The question, both for individuals and collectives, is how we will reckon with it.

I have been returning to Mab Segrest’s formulation of race treason, especially in her book Memoir of a Race Traitor. Reflecting on going to visit her sick father, who had been a key organizer in North Carolina for segregation and someone who figured for Segrest everything wrong with her family, she writes, “When had my ‘racist daddy’ contracted to himself—to one aging man—from the balloon into which I had inflated him: a caricature of everything in the culture that I hated, my archetypical white person, whom I could never convert because I could never accept, the him of me? No Black friend had ever asked me not to love my daddy.”1414Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor (Cambridge: South End Press, 1994), 173. The context for this quote is a sustained personal and political reflection on decades of organizing, Segrest’s lifelong work to confront and transform whiteness and the harm it does. She discusses the historical creation of white identity in the seventeenth century, saying: “The implications are profound: If we white folks were constructed by history, we can, over time and as a people, unconstruct ourselves. The Klan knows this possibility and recognizes those whites who disavow this history as […] race traitors […]. How, then, to move masses of white people to become traitors to the concept of race?”1515Ibid., 195.

Unless we’re talking about people who are in the position to be literal traitors, such as whistleblowers who use their inside knowledge to disclose information, this evocation of race treason has always seemed primarily rhetorical to me. It is useful to understand the traitor as an individual in relation to a collective situation, in relation to a formation that they, at least in part, want to destroy. Individual treason is only possible because of how someone is placed in relation to a collective situation (like the state, or, perhaps, whiteness). But what race treason actually means needs to be more explicitly developed and worked through.

So I would like to close by exploring other possible roles, perhaps less metaphoric than a relationship of treason: friendship, comradeship, and direct opposition.

Aristotle saw friendship as a practice of virtue through which we develop excellence and share it with others. It is a kind of individual orientation only possible to manifest in the context of a relationship. Confronting the racist uncle, calling in, supporting people targeted by social relations of racism and colonialism—these can all be seen as part of the work of friendship. For Aristotle, friendship requires duration and commitment. The friendship of resisting racism could involve helping one another to become excellent, situationally, acknowledging the dense histories and presents that place us as needing to do some work on the world in order to practice virtue ourselves.

In practice this might look like what Ngọc Loan Trần calls “calling in,”1616Ngọc Loan Trần, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable,” https://www.humanityinaction.org/files/567-N.Trn-CallingIN.pdf. a departure from “calling out,” where the project is to identify, often publically, what someone has done wrong. Calling in is a practice that can only happen when there is some basis of solidarity. Sometimes people of colour, Black people, and Indigenous people offer this kind of friendship to white settlers, through calling us out or calling us in on issues of race and colonization; these practices of friendship are incredibly generous, especially in light of how resistant, whitesplainey, angry, or defensive we white people get when people tell us we’ve done something racist. In arguing for taking the role of a friend who opposes racism, among other social relations of oppression, I look toward how calling one another in should be primarily a practice for white people and settlers to take up with one another. This kind of friendship can be a way of claiming kin with the parts of ourselves and our world that we want to designate as “bad” and reject, including actual people.

Such work is intimate, and it is likely there are not many people we can practice this kind of friendship with. But work on the world is always collective, and moving beyond our individual family and friend relations will be the only way we make any actual change to this world. I suggest that comradeship is a useable framework for thinking about how we might work against whiteness and for a world in which many worlds can flourish. Comradeship names collective formations organized around future-oriented solidarities or extant shared social conditions; it assumes that we all have a stake in the transformation at hand. It implies actively supporting existing struggle without abdicating responsibility for understanding which work to engage in, and why. Frequently the kind of work that people like Segrest describe involves taking the lead of people directly affected by social relations of harm, recognizing that the resources white people have to offer to resistance are not our own, even as we use them.

In practicing political friendship or comradeship, the question of race treason can be a usable heuristic in tuning our political goals. It can be a tool for asking oneself: In this specific situation in all its complexity, which side of the line am I going to stand on? Am I going to participate in something that consolidates or loosens whiteness’s hold on the world? What might be the effects, strategic value, and dangers involved in claiming kin through practices of friendship or comradeship in rejecting whiteness while perceiving how it claims us?

In holding friendship and comradeship as relational practices we can take up, then, a conception of treason to whiteness can offer normative guidance. If we understand whiteness as the systematic denial of being in relation, in particular to Black and Indigenous people, we can ask what being in right relations, relations of reciprocity, could mean or look like. White treason is a way to claim kin. We can only be treasonous to something we claim, or that claims us. And so a final way to claim our bad kin is direct opposition to the white supremacism that benefits us. Direct opposition includes policy work, documenting systemic racism, legal defense, copwatching, and using our position as white settlers to redirect resources away from whiteness. It includes putting our bodies between torch-bearing white boys in MAGA hats and the people they target, shouting down Soldiers of Odin when they claim to be protecting a community, refusing to let known Proud Boys disrupt a book reading about the history of opposing fascism, showing up to the Unist’ot’en camp when asked to stand between land defenders and the RCMP. Direct opposition to white supremacy is safer for white people than anyone else, and it is also, crucially, claiming a relationship. People opposing immigration, Indigenous sovereignty, and Black self-determination do these things to defend what they think of as the white race. We white people who benefit from their work—all of us, whether or not we think we want to—can claim our relation to them through fighting them.

Sharpes offers us this injunction in “Lose Your Kin”: “Refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality. Refuse to feast on the corpse of others. Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any other choice.”1717Sharpe, “Lose Your Kin.” I have tried to argue here that only through actively beginning from our understanding of our complicity in ongoing brutality can white settlers participate in the project of remaking the world. Any solidarity relation we can take up will have to start from our understanding of who is claiming us as kin, and from a commitment to pulling back on the ties that bind us to kinship relations of expropriation and violence. Perhaps we can make better kin out of what we inherit, and be of some benefit to this good world. Perhaps we can transform our relations. I hope so.1818Conversations with my friend and comrade Angus McGuire (http://www.beclouded.net/) have helped this piece in every way, and I thank him for thinking about whiteness with me. All mistakes are mine.