Alexis Shotwell

Category: whiteness

  • Getting it together as race traitors

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    “Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.” (Ursula Le Guin) White people in North America don’t know what racism is – how it feels, what it does to Black, Indigenous, and racialized people’s lives, what it means to live entire lives…

  • Unclean eating for #settlervegans

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    I think of Brecht’s poem “To those who follow in our wake.” One stanza says: They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves! But how can I eat and drink When I take what I eat from the starving And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?…

  • Claiming Bad Kin

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    This is the first part of a talk I’m offering today at McMaster – access copy here. Many white people I know have been sparked to reflection in the wake of the “not guilty” verdicts in the Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier murder cases. Some have been moved to ask what it means to be…

  • Is it white shame?

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    Shame feels awful. It can feel like we want to crawl out of our skin, erase ourselves from the world, find someone else who’s the real problem. Feeling shame can be twisting desperately away from something that is inside us, having something on us that we can’t wash off, being something that we hate and…

  • Whiteness as method in philosophy

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    Ah, whiteness and philosophy. I spent a lot of time thinking about the racialized boundaries of the discipline a long time ago – this thing I wrote came out seven years ago and I still agree with it: “Significant occlusions structure philosophy as a discipline. They are not limited to racialized abstractions; partitioned social ontologies…

  • A politics of imperfection, a politics of responsibility.

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    The kind folks over at the University of Minnesota Press blog posted this short piece, and I’m reproducing it here, too. Lately it seems like every day brings a new bad thing for anyone not invested in white supremacy and capitalism. As the tweet went: “First they came for the Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, poor…

  • The problem with loving whiteness

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    This was later published as part of a section in Philosophy Today on the book The problem with loving whiteness SPEP, October 2015, response to S. Sullivan’s Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism Shannon Sullivan’s work on racialization and habits, and on relationality and transaction, was important to my philosophical formation. It…