Let's Torture Whiteness First
BOOK REVIEW: The Vanishing Half and hopelessness as the tragedy of whiteness.
Welcome to the first installment of Pop Torture. This week’s episode is a criticism of The Vanishing Half. When I say criticism I mean there was an aspect of the book that I thought should be addressed and so I articulated that here. Here goes nothing. Let’s torture whiteness, shall we?
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was one of 2020’s most talked about novels, and rightfully so. Weaving through past and present, Bennett’s graceful prose carries the reader through the horrors of its content. Dealing with both whiteness and Blackness, it addresses the nature of “passing” as a Black person in the white part of town, the relentlessness of generational trauma, and the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships.
Stella and Desiree Vignes are twin sisters growing up in Mallard, a small Black town where light skin is a hot commodity. Everyone in the town is light, and actively trying to ensure their lineage will be lighter. But there’s a marked distinction between having light skin and being white, which we learn at the offset with the murder of the young Vignes sisters’ father by a white mob. The sisters watch their father be brutalized and lynched—a memory seared so deeply into their minds it becomes a guiding force in each of their lives. When Stella and Desiree skip town together to make a life for themselves in New Orleans, Stella passes as white to get a better job. She eventually chooses to divorce herself from her Black origins entirely, cutting out her sister, mother, and any historical past she had, in order to successfully assume whiteness. As Stella moves into the lightening of her lineage by marrying white, Desiree moves in the opposite direction—marrying a dark-skinned man and bearing his child.
Soon we are introduced to the daughters who are now young adults living their lives apart from their mothers; Desiree’s daughter Jude, a dark skin Black girl who is going to UCLA for track, and Stella’s white daughter Kennedy, who dropped out of school to pursue acting. The girls don’t know the other exists—Kennedy doesn’t even know her mother has a sister, let alone that she is Black. But Jude has heard about Stella from her mother her entire life, and when she suddenly sees her mother’s mirror in Los Angeles she is shocked, but determined to talk to her. She soon befriends her unknowing cousin, and eventually tells her the truth about her mother. Kennedy suspects what Jude tells her is true and confronts Stella, but Stella continues to deny her past in fear that the facade she has created her whole life will crumble.
Whiteness is nothing more than a power relation. The whiteness of the characters in the novel is insubstantial, meaningless; its only role is to delay any potential for growth, to deny life. From the moment Bennett introduces the mob that kills the twins’ father, whiteness is understood as something that demands domination, that destroys and pillages, that cares for no one. Whiteness is unsure of itself; the only way it is realized is through its imposition on others. This trend continues with the main “white” characters we follow, Stella and Kennedy. Stella befriends her new Black neighbor, Loretta—the only true connection she has felt with someone since her journey into whiteness—but she soon loses Loretta because of the racism she has internalized. In the comfort of their home, Stella refers to their neighbors as the n-word one time when speaking to a young Kennedy. Kennedy, not knowing better, repeats the word to Loretta’s daughter one day as they are playing, and this becomes the catalyst that ends Stella and Loretta’s friendship, and eventually leads to Loretta’s family’s escape from the otherwise white neighborhood.
The racism that is learned by Stella in order for her to pass is in turn regurgitated by her to her daughter—reproducing the power structure and demanding another generation adhere to it. Loretta presents an opportunity for Stella to relieve herself from the power structure and allow her to let loose and be herself—but any possibility is marred by Stella’s fear and anxieties about being Black again. Loretta & Stella’s relationship is complicated; Stella plays the role of the white woman who tries to save face and act as though she cares about Loretta’s wellbeing—but only behind closed doors. When Stella hosts a house party, she fails to invite Loretta. When some of the other white housewives of the neighborhood tease Stella for always hanging out with Loretta, she explodes. Stella is the white woman that she fears her neighbors will become if they find out about her. Her whiteness is no longer merely an act; she has embodied the wicked cruelty that she fears so deeply. Stella uses her white skin to demean Loretta, to create that fear within another Black woman, thereby reinforcing that her only power as a white woman is to stifle hope.
* Content warning PTSD — to avoid skip to next full paragraph *
Though imposing her whiteness in her relationship with a Black woman, Stella also experiences a disconnect with her race when interacting with white men. In one of the most horrific scenes of the novel, Stella and her husband Blake are in the middle of an intimate moment in bed when Stella’s mind wanders:
Sometimes when he touched her, she saw the man who’d dragged her father onto the porch, the one with the red-gold hair. Tall, gray shirt partially unbuttoned, a scab on his cheek as if he’d nicked himself while shaving. Blake pressed open her thighs and the man with the red-gold hair was on top of her—she could almost smell his sweat, see the freckles on his back. Then it was Blake’s clean Ivory soap again, his voice whispering her name. It was ridiculous—the men looked nothing alike and Blake had never hurt her. But he could, which made her grip him even tighter as she felt him sink inside.
The monolith of whiteness demands that its fundamental existence create the dichotomy that Stella struggles with here—the white man she is married to is not the same white man who killed her father—but by extension, they are the same. The entire passage rests on the phrase “But he could.” Stella’s mind is overburdened with the looming threat that her Blackness could be found out and the certainty that if she is found out, violence will follow. Whiteness is inseparable from the man in the lynch mob and her husband precisely because it is the thing that connects them. It is that which maintains dominion and threatens people into submission.
“But he could” is the same logic that identifies Stella in the context of her and Loretta’s friendship. Loretta trusts Stella; she invites her into her home and is friendly with her. To Loretta, Stella is not like the other women who look down at her and sneer or ignore her outright—but it is not long before the depravity of whiteness shows itself in Stella. “But she could” hurt Loretta... and she did.
When Stella first decides to permanently entrench herself in whiteness, the ease with which she is able to pass startles her. She walks into department stores acting as if she belongs there, she visits the white-specific part of museums—all while existing in perpetual anxiety about being found out for who she truly is. Stella’s ability as well as her willingness to sway between Black and white, disconnected from any deep rooted understanding of self, is at the helm of her unfulfilling life. Her self-awareness cannot seem to move past the power relation that has come to command her life. She knows that receding back into her Blackness will mean being denied the access to all the privileges she was once afforded. These privileges are material, but her and Kennedy are doomed—desperately seeking happiness in their relationships with children, partners, and friends to no avail. The sacrifice is happiness, making hopelessness the tragedy of whiteness.
Desiree Vignes, on the other hand, has always been Black, even in her proximity to whiteness outside of her hometown. After marrying a dark-skinned man, she gave birth to her daughter, Jude, also dark-skinned. Jude grew up the darkest Black girl in town, teased and tormented for years because of her skin tone. This mother and daughter work within their Blackness, and don’t allow the prospect of whiteness to torture them. Whereas Stella is suffocated by her obsession, Desiree and Jude spend time growing more vulnerable in their personal relationships.
By the end of the novel, Jude and Desiree’s romantic relationships, which we witness develop over the course of the novel, begin to grow in new directions, traversing new territory. But Kennedy and Stella’s relationships meet dead ends. Their connection to anything outside themselves is unsure. Their insistent claim to whiteness denies them the same freedom to love; a freedom which they have benefitted from by “passing” all along. Unrealized as whole people, there is no way for them to feel content in their relationships. Both Stella and Kennedy struggle to develop the deep connections that come so easily for Jude and Desiree—as if the hyper-fixation on power that is whiteness is what prevents a relationship from flowering. The only relationships that seem to have any value is that between them and their Black familial counterparts: Kennedy and Jude, and Stella and Desiree. That these relationships are with Black women denotes the importance of feeling seen and heard in ways that are impossible except with each other.
What is a life without people to hold close? Stella and Kennedy’s final scene is a reckoning of their mother-daughter relationship, which has been strained for the bulk of the novel. “I want you to know me,” Stella admits, and a truth telling ensues—for the first time, the world opens up to hear them. There is hope for them to grow into themselves together, and develop their interpersonal relationships along the way, but that hope is contingent on them shedding their whiteness. Blackness is these white women’s freedom from doom. What implications must that carry?