🎶 although we stick together it seems that we are stranging one another

[safi_khan3]

Both Yancy and Fanon grapple with the concept of “innocence.” Yancy frames the young boy from the train as ostensibly innocent which is something that Fanon’s letter also echoes (though, Yancy is echoing Fanon, chronologically speaking). Fanon frames the innocence itself as the crime being committed. Ahmed describes whiteness as something that is habitual and lived—white individuals move through the world with an unspoken ease because the world has been shaped around their needs and expectations. Whiteness, therefore, it can be argued, is a form of social and material dominance that structures everyday life, often invisibly to those who benefit from it. The anecdote she draws from, herself navigating security at an airport in New York City, illustrates what Yancy refers to as the existential traumas that bodies marked as strange experience when navigating seemingly benign structures and spaces which ultimately serve as sites that create a racialized subject through heightened surveillance, suspicion, and exclusion, often without overt acknowledgment of the racialized dynamics at play. It is only certain unstrange bodies which can navigate these interactions “unraced.” This is the context that Baldwin tries to convey to his Nephew so that he may resist internalizing the racializing process to which he will undoubtedly be subjected.

The reason that Yancy frames "Look, a white!" as a gift is because of the ability the phrase has to bring to the foreground all of the invisible enculturation which normally mediates interactions between strange and unstrange bodies. It names and centres an invisible and unspoken reality of hegemony. The phrase is an invitation for self-reflection, making a pernicious dynamic visible in its historical and social reality. Baldwin sees this act of naming as altruistic, as it can initiate the process of recognizing and discarding a harmful delusion—one that robs all parties of their humanity. The reason that this burden of "love" falls to the already disenfranchised is something Yancy alludes to with his invocation of feminist standpoint theory. In its classic Hegelian manifestation, it is the slave that has the privileged standpoint over the master as he must anticipate his master's needs while also being aware of his own. The feminist iteration of the theory asserts that marginalized groups have a clearer or more accurate understanding of social realities and power structures, due to their social positions, than those who occupy more privileged positions. Therefore, this theory posits, it is only the disenfranchised groups that are able to give the gift of recognition and awareness to those who traverse the world as unstrange and unraced.