Abstract
Confessional critiques proliferate in contemporary culture, remodelling critical politics as self-purification. Within Foucault’s work, critique is associated with resistance to power and subjectification, whereas confession appears a technique of disciplinary and pastoral power. However, genealogy creates hybrids, and herein we observe how critique and confession are entangled in contemporary social justice discourses, focusing empirically on contemporary anti-racist texts. These critique their imagined readers and society more generally, demanding confessions, castigating denials and exhorting interminable purificatory self-work. This analysis draws from Foucault’s genealogies of parrhesia and avowal, through his latter works on the problem of ‘truth-telling’ and how it forms subjects, even by critique. Recognising this historical hybridisation of critique and confession within discourses such as anti-racism may help to clarify the political stakes of critique.
Critique is not a singular discursive practice, but a multitude of interrelated and hybrid modes, running from political unmasking (Baehr, 2019) to suspicious reading (Felski, 2015), with non-normative and normative modes (Hansen, 2016; Folkers, 2016), and unfortunately liable to being co-opted (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) or even rendered governmentalizing (Stypinska, 2020). Herein we examine ‘confessional critique’ within anti-racist books within the United Kingdom and United States, drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia and avowal to recognise these different modalities of ‘truth-telling’. Such discourses redirect anti-racist critiques of structural inequalities towards self-purification, distracting energies for political action with demands for interminable critiques of oneself which generate confessions of internalised racism – for any and all readers. Ironically, the anti-colonial impulses of political anti-racism are here diverted into confessional subjectification, a dominant discourse of European Christianity, long globalised via colonialism. Our aim here is to identify the hybrid of critical and confessional discourses which currently proliferate within anti-racism – and many other social justice movements – in the hope of contributing to revitalising effective political critique.
Confessional critique is increasingly prominent but has a longer history. Late Enlightenment figures from Rousseau to Wordsworth deployed forms of self-accusatory critique which led to ‘confessions’; self-purifying transformations of subjectivity (Taylor, 2008). Marx’s 1843 Letter to Ruge famously announces ‘the ruthless criticism of the existing order’ also demands purification. Marx presents himself not as a political dogmatist but as an interrogator of existing thought: ‘The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness’. Here, the socialist critic is akin to a medical professional, almost a therapist or pastor, stating ‘What is needed above all is a confession’. Thus, the critic appears as the auditor who tests the discourse of the repentant subject of society. Strikingly absent from Marx’s letter is any suspicion that he might need to confess or be critiqued. The compulsive character of confessional self-critique today is an indicator of the genealogical re-entanglement of critique and confession.
Truth-telling is a culturally complex, contested and hybrid practice. Whether the ‘truth’ told is accurate, relevant or new is less our concern than understanding the modes of ‘truth-telling’ which pervade our society and animate our politics. Foucault’s later works explore complex genealogies of the self and the politics of truth, ranging from ancient Athens to monasticism (Büttgen, 2021). Crucial modes of ‘truth-telling’ which emerge from these studies are confession and critique, avowal and parrhesia. Foucault traces the centrality of ‘avowal’ from early Christianity into monasticism as a form of ‘pastoral power’, which involves forming, controlling and cultivating people as subjects, wherein they must ‘tell the truth about themselves’ (2014). This requirement to ‘tell-all’ takes up Greek ‘parrhesia’, to ‘say-all’; which originally meant speaking truth to power, despite risks, a key precursor to modern practices of critique (Folkers, 2016).
The publication of Foucault’s lectures and posthumous works have seen a proliferation of historical and contemporary studies of confession and parrhesia, generally explored separately (Clements, 2021). Confession appears a mode of pastoral power, operating within disciplinary institutions, therapeutic and juridical settings to reconstitute subjects within normative frames – a power relation. By contrast, parrhesia develops Foucault’s concern with critique, sometimes connected to resistance and ‘counter-conduct’ (2007, pp. 191–216). Initially, confession and parrhesia appear incompatible, avowal implies submission to authority, yet ‘obedience and parrhesia are directly opposed’ (Foucault, 2011, p. 336). Yet, his final lectures trace the adoption and modification of parrhesia in Christian thought into the requirement to ‘tell all’, or even ‘publicise the self’. Since genealogical methods eschew simple lineages and highlight the historical promiscuity of practices and discourses, we examine how these supposed opposites are combined in contemporary critique.
While Foucault generally avoided normative prescriptions, evidently even his cautious genealogies endorse parrhesia and problematise confession, implying that the former is a tradition of critique to which he himself contributes (Folkers, 2016). This implicit normativity encourages ‘voluntary insubordination’ and makes critique into a virtue. Notably, Foucault models parrhesia and critique on a rather individualistic basis. Critique is even conceptualised as liberal resistance to governmentality, refusing to being ‘governed thus’, and parrhesia appears as a mode of truth-telling adopted by an individual in refusal of subjectification (Foucault, 1997). Herein, we both follow and extend upon that normativity – both by recognising the depoliticising dynamics of confession, as did Foucault, but also by insisting that critique is a social practice, which relies upon shared cultural models and normative values for its efficacy.
Genealogies start in the present by re-problematising practices (Hansen, 2016). This article was prompted by encountering texts which explicitly combined critique with self-critique, across the public sphere, described by Dean and Zamora (2023) as the translation of politics into confession. For instance, ‘Being an anti-racist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination’ (Kendi, 2020, p. 23). Furthermore, popular ‘anti-racism’ – not to be conflated with Critical Race Theory – is particularly apt for our study for several reasons. Firstly, recent high-profile writers, Kendi and DiAngelo have come to dominate and restructure the field and espouse a particularly confessional version of anti-racism. Indeed, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and widespread Black Lives Matter protests, sales of these and other guidebooks increased by over a million in the United States alone in April and May of 2020 (McEvoy, 2020), with the Covid-19 pandemic creating the conditions for more online engagement. Secondly, recent events have focalised attention on the politics of race, from Brexit to Trump’s presidency, the Ukrainian and Climate refugee crisis and the growth of right-wing reaction. Such events surely require policy and political responses, but these are undermined if anti-racism is focused primarily on confessional self-purification. Thus, while the diagnosis of confessional critique advanced here can be widely illuminating, for reasons of space and coherence, we focus on anti-racist texts herein.
Theorising truth-telling
Rather than discussing racism per se, our focus is the modalities of ‘truth-telling’ in anti-racism, particularly in texts oriented towards educating and transforming their readers. Regarding the reality of racism, we concur with the texts we are analysing; historical and ongoing inequality and violence around ethnicity are structurally and institutionally generated. No ‘unmasking’ of anti-racism as ‘ideology’ or ‘dogma’ is offered here – like McWhorter’s (2021) depiction of ‘woke’ as an unthinking cult. The problem of the proliferation of critical claims in the public sphere has been discussed as reflecting the lack of clear criteria of equivalence by Davies (2021). Analysing contemporary politics requires recognising that most voices are critical – including the backlash against anti-racism – because the trope of ‘unmasking’ is easily co-opted and imitated (Baehr, 2019). Herein we examine how confession is hybridised with critique and suggest that this creates depoliticising short-circuits of political action to personal purification. Strikingly, McWhorter as much as DiAngelo or Kendi demands readers purify themselves of false beliefs.
The complexity of ‘anti-racist’ critique has long been recognised: Ahmed (2006) discusses the ‘non-performative’ quality of some anti-racist discourse – those who identify and describe racism are implicitly not racist, creating an alibi in critique for political inertia amid the proliferation of discourse. Every accusation of racism peculiarly generates excuses and exculpations – someone else, somewhere else, is racist, and acknowledging this deflects the accusation of racism. Foucault distinguishes his approach to both parrhesia and confession from ‘performative speech act’ theory, describing them as dramatic scenes (2014, pp. 210–211; 2019, pp. 47–57). Nonetheless, Lorenzini (2015) identifies how these modes of ‘truth-telling’ are performative in a non-ceremonial fashion, by creating new subject positions and suturing the self to its words. Indeed, Foucault describes critique as ‘a task of permanent re-problematisation’ (2019, p. 227). There is a peculiar paradox here: Subjects adopt critical discourses to accuse themselves, extracting confessions of culpability, prompting transformations. Somehow, the accusatory self is posited as capable of deciding on truthful critical discourse, and of wielding it authoritatively against themselves, even though this is the same, culpable self. Furthermore, the recursive, nigh-interminable character of the process means that each newly transformed self will be accused again in turn, then confess and reform themselves again. Of course, such processes are not internal to the individual, but communicated to others socially, using cultural scripts – though the centring of individual critique and confession within them is depoliticising and limiting.
Foucault’s studies of confession precede his studies of parrhesia by years or even decades (Clements, 2021). However, no simple distinction separates these two modes of truth-telling, even if parrhesia is largely associated with Athens and politics and confession with Christian monasticism and sacraments. Both required ‘truthfulness’ where relationships of ‘truth-telling’ had the capacity to transform the self, obviously in confession, but by using parrhesia; ‘…through his own way of living and being, the parrhesiast shows us that it is not possible to consider true what he says without feeling the need to change our ethos’ (Lorenzini, 2015, p. 267). Here, the necessary social qualification of the parrhesiast or the virtue of the critic becomes clear (Maxwell, 2019). Later history sees confession and parrhesia hybridised, for instance, moralising sermons which drew on personal testimony wherein ‘…preaching intensifies the very sense of guilt for which it provides absolution’ (Tilli, 2019, p. 120). Furthermore, parrhesia is not only found in public critique but involved in self-examination, including the ‘spiritual exercises’ which precede confession as a ‘technique of self’. Truth-telling and subject-formation are thereby entangled.
Before becoming politically valorised, parrhesia initially was a dismissive term for a ‘chatterbox’ – parr-hesia literally meaning ‘saying everything’. Eventually, parrhesia came to mean speaking courageously, telling the truth to the agora despite personal risk of unpopularity or punishment, associated with Solon and Pericles, or brave counsellors who told unpalatable truths to their monarch. Such public critique is not simply political argument but reveals the truth; parrhesia can ‘…criticise, correct and reform the people’s opinions, the people’s desires’ (Foucault, 2019, p. 128). Thus, parrhesia is more than just wise advice at a crucial juncture, but a suturing of the subject to their truth which can transform auditors. Later, philosophical parrhesia is deployed by Socrates, Plato and others, dialogues directed at discovering truth – or revealing ignorance – to reform people: ‘…parrhesia becomes a technique…for conducting souls’ (Foucault, 2019, p. 61). Indeed, the Stoic idea that ignorance or error are akin to illnesses which must be purged from the mind or soul directly influenced ideas about sin (Ramelli, 2016). Finally, the life-conduct of Cynics is considered parrhesiastic, for instance Diogenes who challenged Alexander the Great and ‘told him the truth’ combatively, and moreover lived, exposed, in public – a test of all civilised or cultural pretensions. This philosophical militancy persists into the present in political groups, artists and alternative lifestyles (Foucault, 2011, p. 177). Throughout, parrhesia aspires to transformative truth-telling.
This schematic movement of parrhesia from political speech to philosophical practices of self-examination necessarily simplifies, and ‘parrhesia’ is internally variable and historically contingent. For Foucault, one crucial element of parrhesia is the unity of truth and self; the individual parrhesiast speaks their own opinion without recourse to outside authority. They take a risk, either of offending the assembly, the king or their friend to whom they tell the truth. By ‘telling the truth’ they take a particular position, ‘giving themselves licence to speak freely’. Maxwell (2019) describes this as the political predicament of the ‘truth-teller’, who must draw on powerful discourses and definitions of truth to make their words convincing, but also exhibit distance from power, so as not to be consubstantial with the society or polity which they criticise. Obviously, much social critique is simultaneously self-critique, but whether critics acknowledge how they draw on a critical tradition from within culture is important, as this establishes a normative basis to critique rather than merely unmasking (Baehr, 2019). Insofar as ‘critique’ retains the etymological meaning of ‘kritik’, it involves judgement, normative claims (Koselleck, 2006). Suggesting this is less an endorsement of any normative critical theory than a recognition that critique is culturally and historically constituted in entanglements with social normativity.
Rather than just words or discourse in the abstract, the practice of parrhesia transforms individuals into critics. Parrhesia involves taking responsibility for one’s words, via a performative speech act or even an oath which identifies the person with their critique (Stypinska, 2020). Parrhesia is a social practice, and implicitly any parrhesiast confronts the public or an interlocutor ‘To refute the other person and turn his mind, will succeed in transforming the attitude of the person who errs’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 140). This resonates with contemporary emphases on ‘lived experience’ and the injunction to ‘speak your truth’. Regardless of the accuracy of particular ‘truth-telling’, what matters here is that the ‘genealogy of truth-telling’ serves to historicise the ‘critical attitude’ in the West (2019, pp. 224–227). Parrhesia is a significant historical legacy constituting the modern practices of ‘speaking truth to power’, critical thinking or examining individual beliefs and concepts, and transgressive life-conduct – respectively political, philosophical and cynic parrhesia.
Moving from the Greeks to Christianity, from parrhesia to confession, from the critical attitude to diagnosing power-relations, there are complex connections, discontinuities and transformations. The requirement that subjects tell the truth about themselves in relationships of power is central to Foucault’s diagnosis of power in asylums and prisons. Confession is discussed as early as the Abnormal lectures of 1974–1975, and central to his History of Sexuality: ‘Western man has become a confessing animal’ (1976, p. 59). Modes of ‘subjectification’ are so central to Foucault’s diagnosis of power that his politics is sometimes summarised through his invitation to ‘refuse what we are’, framing a host of contemporary contestations around the governmentalisation of identity. Before tracing the contours of confession however, it is worth noting the genealogical complexity: ‘parrhesia’ was used to describe the frank speech of Judaic prophets and evangelisers from Isaiah to St Paul and Luther translated parrhesia as speaking freely or even brazenly (Tilli, 2019, p. 122).
Within Christianity confession varied, the medieval mode of private avowal of sins was preceded by the Roman practice of publicly declaring oneself a sinner, with sackcloth and ashes – a profession of faith and sinfulness, termed exomologesis. The monastic and latterly sacramental practice of admitting thoughts and actions to a confessor is termed exagoreusis, putting the self into discourse through an account made to an auditor (Foucault, 2014). Whether confession is public or private, critical or therapeutic, it aims at the transformation of the subject through self-purification (Faustino, 2020).
Monastic confession adapted philosophical parrhesia, moving ‘…from the master telling the disciple that he knows nothing to the disciple telling the master everything he knows about himself’ (Foucault, 2011, p. 55). Confession requires that the penitent speak, that they tell the truth about themselves – ‘telling-all’ – effectively a ‘permanent examination and exhaustive verbalisation’ (Foucault, 2014, p. 225). Every thought was under scrutiny, with a constant ‘suspicion of illusion’ (Foucault, 2014b, p. 164). Avowals of sins were implicitly difficult, positioned as a battle with wicked carnal urges or even devilish influences, a test of the soul and fortitude, ‘One was ashamed of avowing one’s act to someone else, and this sacrifice through verbalisation was the beginning of satisfaction’ (Foucault, 2014, p. 184). Within this relationship, the truthfulness of the utterance was crucial to achieving the transformation of the subject, and this was assured by a relationship of obedience, even to the point of automatic obedience, renouncing one’s own will; ‘The sin, however grave is less important than the debt of telling truth to God’ (Foucault, 2021, p. 320).
While anti-racist texts confront their readers with critique but cannot directly extract obedience, they exhort confessions. Self-reform, the ‘conduct of conduct’ produced by critical texts can transpire through distant power-relations: one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile. (Foucault, 1976, p. 62, italics added)
Initially contrasting, parrhesia and avowal certainly intersect, especially in philosophical exercises of parrhesia; both compose the genealogy of ‘truth-telling’ which involve putting the self into discourse; suturing self and truth or ‘affirming the affirmation’ (Büttgen, 2021, p. 15). Indeed, there are historical continuities, in Foucault’s discussion of post-Platonic philosophers such as Seneca, Aurellius or Epicutus, wherein ‘techniques of self’ require ‘indefinite struggle and…attitude of distrust towards oneself’ (2019, p. 191), coming quite close to confession – indeed their examination of thoughts required ‘a permanent trial for our representations […] an attitude of permanent surveillance’ (2019, p. 212).
Yet there are important distinctions: Greek ‘techniques of self’ involved an examination of one’s life to create harmony of bios and logos – life and thought; philosophical masters would speak and tell the truth to the student – using parrhesia – within a temporary apprenticeship oriented to achieving self-mastery. Such philosophers were concerned with actual conduct and particular thoughts, identifying errors and mistakes, but to administer rather than purify the self. By contrast, Christian confession generally involved a ‘hermeneutics of the self’, constantly examining every thought, desire and action as a symptom of an inner sinful nature to be deciphered. The confessor role, though often taken by an abbot or priest could be taken by anyone – what mattered was that the penitent obediently told the truth about themselves, rather than receive instruction. Implicitly the ‘judge’ who listened, whomsoever they were, stood in for divine judgement. Finally, confession is interminable, required until death as a perpetual trial of the self, where any denial of sinfulness was pride and disobedience was sin.
States of sinfulness serve as a metonym for impure subject positions, foreshadowing the juridical shift from ‘acts’ to ‘persons’ identified in Discipline and Punish. Tell (2010) shows how the shift from Greek techniques of self which examined the minute particulars of conduct to Christian notions of a ‘soul’ as a deep substance of personhood which was expressed in every thought, word and deed was a long-running concern for Foucault. The production of the ‘soul’ or ‘conscience’ generated a model of subjecthood which was malleable and open to indefinite reformation and transformation. Similarly, anti-racist texts posit ‘racism’ as existing beyond specific instances, always suspected within the subject, no matter how much ‘self-work’ they undertake. Rather than contributing to the analysis of structural or institutional forms of racism which might be challenged through policy initiatives or collective action, the metonymy which turns racist social outcomes into virtually inextinguishable internalised racism is a discourse which re-channels critique away from politics and towards purification.
Effectively, we argue that contemporary critical discourse in general – and anti-racist discourse by way of example – hybridises parrhesia with confession; this applies to many social justice causes we support such as feminism but also opposing critiques, like the alt-right demanding people ‘take the red pill’ (Davis, 2021). Just as ‘pastoral power’ is secularised by states, this version of critique and confession pervades modernity in the ‘…religious colonization of interior life’ (Bernauer, 2005, p. 559). Recognising the cultural specificity of practices of confessional critique allows us to reconsider the political intersections of activism and academia. The co-opting of critique is less the issue (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) than the proliferation of individualised critiques which emphasise interminable self-transformation. Even where it ‘speaks truth to power’, parrhesia draws on cultural discourses to validate its ‘truth-telling’, the model of confession being a case in point. However, confessional critique principally orients its accusations against the self, implicitly the privileged powerful self, implicitly in need of transformation. Modelled upon confession, critique is reduced to the demand that others confess and purify themselves. Furthermore, the excoriations of confessional critique risks obscuring the cultural and ethical resources of critique, as any extant aspect of self or society is implicitly contaminated by power and ideology and needs to be purged. Ironically, this occurs through obscuring the historicity of ‘truth-telling’ practices, restored above through the foregoing genealogy of the complex relations of confession and critique.
Approach
Contemporary ‘anti-racist’ texts proliferate and are internally diverse: Our selection of texts all address their imagined reader with the aim of transforming them – they exhort confession of internalised racism and criticise denial as ideological self-flattery. This ambiguous genre bridges popular sociology or history, long-form journalism and self-help books. Prominent within this field are DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Kendi’s How to be an Anti-racist (2018) – indeed, each of these authors released upcycled versions of their contributions, Nice Racism and Be Anti-Racist respectively. Similarly, Oluo (2018) and Dabiri (2021) both reacted to the proliferation of anti-racist guides. Illustratively, O’Brien’s How not to be Wrong (2020) moves to confessional self-improvement after his How to be Right promoting critical thinking. We examined intersections of feminism and anti-racism, for instance, Eddo-Lodge (2017) or Kendall (2020). Ostensibly, some texts were addressed to others – Coates (2015) positions his text as a letter to his son, and Hutchinson (2020) composes a message for his grandchildren – but implicitly they are transformative guides.
Such texts have already generated considerable academic attention, for instance, Phipps (2020) critique of ‘White feminist’ neglect of anti-racist agendas, or by contrast Táíwò’s (2022) critique of how social justice activism is co-opted by neoliberal agendas. These commentaries are critical but sympathetic, whereas by contrast McWhorter (2021) calls these texts Woke Racism, basically by inverting the direction of critique and confession. Clearly, there is contestation from outside and within this corpus, unsurprising within a fractious public sphere (Davies, 2021), but among these texts there are key authors, and so the analysis herein eventually focuses on DiAngelo and Kendi.
Each text addresses its reader; usually a ‘White’ person learning to be anti-racist, whether they are still ‘in denial’ or aspire to be an ‘ally’, but extending to anyone who has internalised racism – implicitly everyone. The reader is framed in two ways; addressed as a culpable racist, ‘in denial’ about racism, but also as potentially transformable, becoming less racist by eschewing such denials and confessing racism – even capable of becoming a critic. Methodologically, reading these texts was not an easy analytic exercise in neutrally observing the discourse – the ‘grey, patient and documentary’ work of genealogy – rather it was subjectively involving; as readers we are criticised by the texts. Indeed, ‘what we are’ is re-categorised by these texts – yet following Foucault’s political pointer, should we ‘refuse what we are’?
Methodologically, we adopted a strict nominalism (Hansen & Triantafillou, 2022), without normatively assessing claims, but tracing how they described and constructed situations, processes and subjects. This approach is ‘post-structural’ in Bacchi’s sense (2015), focusing on how discourses ‘posed problems’ without assuming anything about human agents or society in general. Continuous readings of rather repetitive texts was crucial – the selected texts cover much of the same material despite internal differences – once the reality of racism is a repeated revelation, the contours of critique and confession emerge more clearly.
Furthermore, our approach follows Felski (2015), who addresses the reductive tendency of contemporary hermeneutics to either suspect texts of containing cloaked ideologies or projecting subversion and critique onto them. The pervasiveness of such critical routines narrows the field of interpretation, highlighting power over meaning; indeed, Foucauldian readings of ‘truth-production’ which tend to neglect meaning and culture can be equally narrowing. Rather than an interpretation which critiques or condones, the key is to recognise the meanings and discourses elaborated by the text, and the techniques of subject formation elaborated by them. This does not privilege auto-biographical responses to texts as ‘revealing’ the ‘true’ meaning of texts; rather it ties shared social experiences to cultural understanding, so that interpretative sociology ‘discloses’ rather than unmasks texts (Baehr, 2019).
Essentially, our method is a ‘genealogy of the present’, proceeding not through unmasking but recognition, by identifying the persistence of confessional ‘truth-telling’ among other elements in contemporary critical practice (Folkers, 2016). These are promiscuous intersections of truth-telling; considering for instance, ‘…the internalisation of the coercion to confess, such that it is today experienced as a pleasure and a desire’ (Taylor, 2008, p. 68). Such a diagnosis illuminates multiple areas, feminism, for instance, or the ‘other-side’ – the backlash or liberal free-speech texts. It entails examining the ‘politics of truth’ by separating normative questions of the truth from the techniques and practices of ‘truth-telling’ elaborated by contemporary discourses.
Analysing anti-racist texts
Anti-racist texts are not homogenous: Kendall recommends anger or even rage, whereas Hutchinson lauds love and forgiveness. They are intellectually distinctive: DiAngelo is a sociologist, whereas Dabiri resists ‘sociological reductionism’ and Kendi insists on the primacy of the individual. The corpus is self-critical, Kendall (2020, p. 254) decries ‘…oppression tourists, virtue-signalling volunteers…they reap the benefits of straddling white supremacy and being woke’. Many features of the texts cannot be discussed adequately due to limits on space, nor can the larger ‘social context’ be adequately described. Duffy et al. (2021) suggest that the ‘culture wars’ are not all-encompassing, but a sectional political battle, over-represented in media and even academic commentary.
Confessional elements emerge most distinctly from Kendi and DiAngelo’s works – epitomising the whole genre, though perhaps reflecting the Christian milieu of contemporary America. Yet, even Dabiri’s What White people can do next (2021) which explicitly describes guilt as counterproductive opens by addressing readerly denial: First things first. This is the most basic. It’s at once the easiest and perhaps the most difficult because I know you’ve already started denying it. No more. Stop the vehement denial, especially to yourself, that you have racist beliefs. (2021, p. 31)
Alongside the repeated revelation in anti-racist discourse that the reader (implicitly White) is complicit with racism, Dabiri positions this reader as a victim of institutionalised racism – which injures them both economically and culturally: Instead, I am suggesting that you ‘give up your own oppression’…Why is it that despite all of your ‘privilege’ you still feel overworked, underpaid, exhausted and quite possibly spiritually bereft?’ (p. 148)
Oftentimes these texts accuse themselves, with the authors confessing their internalised racism; even strident critic of ‘White feminism’ Reni Eddo-Lodge recalls: ‘When I was four, I asked my mum when I would turn white’ (2017, p. 85). Similarly, Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist takes the form of an autobiography, akin to Augustine or Rousseau’s Confessions, a narrative of youth, coming of age, maturation, highlighting the reformation of his consciousness: ‘I arrived at Temple as a racist sexist homophobe’ (2017, p.182) – implying that he is no longer these things, once culpable, now redeemed. Kendi’s chapters start with definitions of terms, typically dichotomies of racist and anti-racist versions of spaces, bodies, sexualities and so forth. In his concluding chapters, despite having stated that ‘Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism’ (2019, p. 209). Kendi moves into a narration of his struggle with racism via his experience of cancer and recovery – a medical model of disease and chemotherapy – where the medicine is confession.
Cancer stands as a metaphor for racism, a parasitic and expanding growth; temporary, emerging historically and possible to eradicate. He recalls writing a history of American racism as purgative, but ‘All that trash, ironically, cleansed my mind if it did not cleanse my gut’ (Kendi, 2018, p. 225). The body politic and individual subjectivity are linked: ‘A mission to uncover and critique America’s life of racist ideas turned into a mission to uncover and critique my life of racist ideas which turned into a lifelong mission to be antiracist’ (Kendi, 2019, p. 226). Fortunately, he recovers from cancer, and this experience informs his new model of anti-racism, focalised on the self, a practice with distinctive, repeated steps; Kendi describes how he stops, admits, confesses, accepts and acknowledges his own racism, in a continuous struggle for self-purification – in service of a wider, political and social mission of anti-racism.
This dynamic is made clear in a New York Times article of January 2018; ‘the heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of antiracism is confession’ (Kendi, 2019, p. 235). Partially, these interventions are critiques – accusing society in general and particular organisations and policies of being racist, irrationally fixated on bogus constructs, unjust, oppressive and probably delusional – except where ‘White Supremacy’ is overtly, strategically self-interested. Kendi’s work recapitulates the dynamic of confession – whereby a sin is characterised by the difficulty of admitting it and if racism is denied, this proves it exists. Speaking about racism is difficult, yet this modality of telling the truth about the self is transformative: confession positions the past self as an ‘other’, non-continuous with the speaking subject, rendering the critique accurate yet peculiarly wielded by a subject who accuses and judges themselves. Regardless of the ‘truth’ about racism, this discourse has an accelerating dynamic, leading to the elaboration of increasingly radical critiques, for instance, Kendall’s critique of ‘White feminism’, but also the counter-critical rejection of anti-racism as an ideological false-accusation – like McWhorter’s accusation that Kendi’s anti-racism is ‘Woke Racism’.
While Kendi attempts to refocus the question of racism and anti-racism on power, policy and activism rather than consciousness raising, this critique slides into confession: Not just enlightenment or awakening is required – becoming ‘woke’ in the terminology of these texts – but wholesale transformations of the self is needed to purify rather than redeem the self, and this is posited as central to the struggle, the ‘heartbeat’ upon which perhaps all else relies. Elsewhere, confession, contrition and repentance even outweigh understanding: Apologize. You’ve done something that hurt another human being. Even if you don’t fully understand why or how, you should apologize. (Oluo, 2018, p. 170) You have to get over the fear of facing the worst in yourself. You should instead fear unexamined racism. Fear the thought that right now, you could be contributing to the oppression of others and you don’t know it. But do not fear those who bring that oppression to light. Do not fear the opportunity to do better. (Oluo, 2018, p. 214)
While Kendi and others focus on individuals, eschewing generalisation about groups as potentially racist, sociological approaches exist, perhaps exemplified by DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Drawing on years of work as a diversity workshop trainer, DiAngelo explains resistance to admitting racism as ‘White Fragility’, a reversion to emotional denial, anger, repudiation and ‘white women’s tears’ (Phipps, 2020). White Fragility comprises sociological diagnosis, personal confession and a training manual for those who wish to change and become less racist – a struggle described as interminable, merely moving people along a continuum from more to less racist. ‘Everyone has prejudice and everyone discriminates’ (2018, p. 21). Mixed in with the history of oppression and evidence about current inequality are striking instances of religious language – the author’s ‘missionary zeal’ for instance (2018, p. 8). Strikingly, the problem is located not elsewhere, but in the book’s most likely readers ‘I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of colour’ (2018, p. 5). Thus, racism is not ‘elsewhere’ in palpable prejudice, practices of discrimination or visible violence, but insidiously located in the audience most anxious to overcome it. In Nice Racism (2021) DiAngelo argues this claim at length, by critiquing her readers, but also by confessing her (past) racism.
Strikingly White Fragility is an instance of metonymy, wherein the multiple reactions of White people in DiAngelo’s diversity training workshops or anti-racist conversations are subsumed in her critical diagnosis of ‘lack of racial stamina’, the incapacity to have frank and honest discussions, that is, to converse parrhesiastically. Peculiarly, White Americans are positioned as simultaneously dominant and vulnerable, exhibiting ‘White fragility’. Equally their reactions could be interpreted as reactions to critique, either in denial, deflection or confession, or a counter-critique against DiAngelo’s sociological generalisation ‘all White people are racist’ – a position DiAngelo heartily endorses but Kendi would dispute – but more acutely because it is delivered as an accusation even against ‘White progressives’. Public confessions – exomologesis – are demanded and the process of lifelong exagoreusis by self-examination is exhorted.
White Fragility as a textbook echoes diversity training workshops, demanding that its readers recognise and confront their racism, a form of conversion – as modelled by the author: ‘It is a messy, lifelong process, but one that is necessary to align my professed values with my real actions. It is also deeply compelling and transformative’ (2018, p. 154). Whether this actually occurs or what the political consequences of reading these and other texts are is uncertain. Evidently people buy it, read it, discuss it online, in book clubs and even pay for dinner parties with DiAngelo, where White women discuss their internalised White supremacy. Ironically, while the book unequivocally condemns her culture ‘…a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist…’ (2018, p. 149), she draws on a much longer, deeper historical Judeo-Christian culture of confession and critique, which suffuses American identity, White, Black or otherwise.
The targeting of critique and the exhortation to confess is clear in DiAngelo’s follow-up: Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm. Those ‘progressive White people’ accused here are ironically the most likely to buy it – anyone else reading it is excused from its main accusation. Yet other books, by Black anti-racist authors or Black feminists will level critique or extract confessions from them in turn. Effectively, if the accused is reading the book – or if the reader recognises themselves as the accused, they are posited as either guilty or in denial, but always on a transformative journey – howsoever interminable. Beyond readers’ errors, even critical Black authors recall falling into ideology: ‘I had forgotten my own self-interrogations…I didn’t yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble’ (Coates, 2015, p. 50). Critical authority is paradoxically established by confessing past errors and transformations, implicitly conversion narratives. Strikingly, these ideas are being taken up, in wider discourse, not just in academia (Phipps, 2020) but even in attempts to measure ‘white fragility’ using psychological scales (Langrehr et al., 2021). Our concern however is the political problem of confessional critique.
Understanding confessional critique
While historically varied and transmitted in complex ways unto the present, Foucault describes confession as ‘a purifying test of oneself conducted by oneself’ (2021, p. 292). However, such confessions are inescapably social, whether before a group, to an auditor or in the examination of conscience. Like DiAngelo’s description of anti-racism as a ‘lifelong’ process, ‘…the whole of Christian life must be a life of penance’ (Foucault, 2021, pp. 300–301). Claiming to have overcome racism is automatically critiqued – ‘not having a racist bone’ in one’s body or ‘not seeing colour’ are spurned as symptomatic of unreflexive progressivist ideologies. Claiming to have ‘overcome’ racism is implicitly hubris. Even participating in anti-racist activism is insufficient. Only bearing witness against the self, a confessional critique which accuses the self of being racist suffices as an indicator of truthfulness. Effectively, the only guarantee of ‘truth-telling’ within this discourse is the confession of culpability, not just of unjust actions, but more importantly, of ideological attitudes and racist thoughts. Paradoxically, the guarantee of ‘truth’ is the revelation of past ideology; only by bearing witness against themselves can readers tell the truth. Yet this does not disqualify them from wider critique; by confessing their own sins, subjects can critique others in turn, but mainly by exhorting confessions.
Wider politics do emerge: Kendi insists that only focusing on policy and power can resolve racism, rather than changing attitudes, Kendall repeatedly insists that ‘White feminism’ has failed to address issues around housing, education and work for all women, and rightly insists that feminism should be intersectional and address all inequalities. However, both propose policy prescriptions from leftist social democracy which are neither new nor surprising – then proceed to focus on unmasking the faults of the imagined reader, whether imagined as a novice in ‘anti-racism’ or a ‘White feminist’ or ‘respectable’ person of colour. More radically, Dabiri and Lodge imagine revolutionary alternatives, uniting activists against racism, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and so forth. However, having invoked these long-standing critical theory tropes, each text principally encourages their reader to critically accuse themselves of racism, confess and purify themselves.
Each book references a longer history of racial injustice, from the slave-trade to Jim Crow laws, to colonialism, violence against migrants and racialised police violence. Rather than celebrate modernity, these are ‘counter-histories’ marshalling the ‘…perpetual denunciation of the evil that has been done in history’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 135). Obviously, there are no neutral histories, because all retellings are discourses which modify the present by relating it to the past. Recounting past atrocities positions readers in a continuum with appalling injustices, rather than separated by recent reforms – history appears alive with ongoing struggles. These critical visions of history, as a battle of opposed forces occluded by ideological coverings, have recognisably Marxist but also theological precursors, a gnostic struggle of good and evil. Peculiarly, within such an overwhelming, all-encompassing civilisational or cosmic battle, the duty of the individual is awakening, enlightenment, conversion, to recognise the true epochal power-struggle, a spiritual movement anticipating the imminent apocalypse (Boer, 2013). Nevertheless, the interminable work of self-accusation, confession and circulating critique to others predominates – politics and power becomes focalised on ‘speaking the truth’; parrhesia provokes confessions.
Importantly, pastoral power is not limited to institutional requirements in schools, work, therapy or other disciplinary institutions that subjects must tell the truth about themselves, wherein ‘…life as a whole is a de-ritualized site of repentance’ (Tilli, 2019, p. 125). While modelling confession and self-transformation by avowing culpability, the anti-racist authors discussed above are certainly critics, ‘calling out’ prejudice and oppression. Beyond conformity with normative demands, confessional critique requires verbalisation, admitting complicity with racism or White supremacy or owning our ‘privilege’. Truth-telling speech is compulsory, silence is complicity with power-relations; critique ‘…is now an institutionally mandated attitude’ (Felski, 2015, p. 47). Readers posited as the inhabitants of a racist society have presumably internalised racism and must confess it to others – whether in private conversation or public social media posts – but always to others who stand as proxy judges, secularised figures of ‘divine judgement’. Any auditor who does not accept this confessional role might well be subjected to critique and exhorted to confess in turn.
‘Society’ is the source of racism; paradoxically the reader is victim of oppression, a dupe or pawn of ‘White supremacy’ but also responsible for anti-racist self-work, especially if they are privileged (Phipps, 2020). For Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) this is ‘critical imperialism’ which positions society as oppression which indoctrinates people who are supposedly unlikely to escape or mitigate this burden through emancipation or subversion. Certainly, society or culture is not represented as an inheritance which makes critique or even thought possible. Anti-racist texts internally oscillate between critiquing society and highlighting individual responsibility, somewhat replicating the tension of structure and agency in sociological discourse (Boland, 2021). Counter-intuitively, something of the model of the Christian in tension with the ‘worldly’ order appears: The reader implicitly struggles with the racist structures and culture which suffuses their world, just as the Christian was modelled as a fallible soul thrown into the ‘world’ of external temptations and internal urges. The self thereby becomes a battleground of testing and transformation in an interminable struggle of purification.
Critiques circulate, inspiring confessional self-excoriation, which re-localises and updates existing critiques as they are re-articulated. In optimistic readings, this embeds critique into concrete struggles in specific contexts, inspiring people into activism; for pessimists, it flattens different lived experiences into the contours of confessional critique. For certain, confessional critique confronts subjects in a distinctive fashion; Lorenzini and Tazzioli (2018) argue that beyond the pastoral power of the imperative to confess within the ‘West’, the ‘truth-telling’ and self-representation of colonial subjects was posed as untrustworthy, as recalcitrance, lies even. Historically, through evangelical colonialism, othered subjects became Christianised and had their internal lives transformed by avowal – after much critical, moralising preaching alongside violent domination. Obviously, the power-relations of colonialism are not reproduced in anti-racism – colonialism’s historical inheritance is addressed by anti-racism – yet the discursive injunction to confess persists. Faced by critique, the subject must confess or be condemned as denying culpability and thereby enters an interminable process of self-purification.
The sociology of critique has long problematised the redirection of external critiques of structures and ideology to individuating self-critique (Stypinska, 2020). Our genealogy traces how this internalisation of critique reflects the redirection of parrhesia into confession – the entanglement and tension between these two modes of truth-telling – which is neither new nor fixed but needs detailed historical and contemporary study. Recognising the elements of critique and confession as they are recomposed and redeployed in different situations is clarified by historical genealogies, initially following Foucault’s work on modalities of ‘truth-telling’ but recognising that his work is partial and needs updating to address contemporary culture. Confessional critique might be a prelude to political engagement, but it also can short-circuit critical energies into relentless self-purification.
Considered historically, we can recognise how many contemporary activist discourses are peculiarly confessional, for instance, in the critique of denial, the exhortation to ‘publicise the self’, the repetitiousness of the process and the rejection and condemnation of society. Contrition is conflated with efficacious political action. The entanglement of confession and critique focalises discourse on the metonymic substance of ‘self’ as needing purification as a prerequisite for change, rather than on structural, policy or organisational possibilities. Whether confessional critique inspires more effective activism or diverts energy and attention from protest, campaigns, coalition-building and other practical political action is an empirical question which cannot be answered here. However, the modelling of critique upon confessional largely redirects politics towards self-purification. This cultural practice of critically purging ‘internalised ideologies’ is easily imitated – for instance, in backlash narratives that ‘feminism’ is some sort of cultural straitjacket which stifles individuality (Boland, 2019). Normative critique or idealistic politics are displaced here by the focus on cultural inheritances as ‘problematic’, wherein almost any element of contemporary socialisation can be critically redescribed as an ‘internalised prejudice’ which needs to be purged.
Conclusion
Concluding his letter to Ruge, Marx proposed an agenda of ‘self-clarification’ or ‘critical philosophy’. Our analysis of anti-racist texts makes a similar attempt at clarification, which draws on a historical genealogy to distinguish between parrhesia and confession. Thus, the political insights of anti-racism in analysing society as structured by racism remain as important as ever, but the confessional practices of relentless self-critique emerge here as a problem. This is not just ‘problematic’ in the non-normative Foucauldian sense of being contingent and open to transformation (Hansen, 2016), but problematic in the sense of being limiting, distracting or even depoliticising. Confessional critiques, perhaps reflecting the contemporary culture of neoliberal individualism and self-responsibilisation, reconfigure critique as an endless struggle for purification, akin to a secularisation of the pursuit of personal salvation. Such critical subjects are broadly compatible with contemporary neoliberal governmentality, and politically inefficacious (Stypinska, 2020).
‘Critique’ designates multiple discursive practices which form subjects, incompletely and variously. Rather than a critic with relative self-mastery who can engage in politics, a ‘good-enough’ critic, confessional critique orients subjects towards relentless self-purification. Perhaps there is some threshold of confessional critique after which subjects might engage in political action, but this is rarely indicated and never made clear within this genre. And even if political action is pursued, such confessional critics must divert their energies and attention to self-critique, and second guess their impulses as potential reflections of racist socialisation, ideologies yet to be examined and excised from their subjectivity.
While the main contribution of this article is a historicisation and examination of confessional critique which distinguishes between parrhesia and confession, politics and self-work, it is also written with the intention of sparking reflection about how we do politics. As Marx declared to Ruge in 1843, ‘we shall simply show the world why it is struggling’, which we attempt through reconnecting contemporary critique to longer histories. Of course, ‘self-clarification’ is far from a simple task, owing to the complexity and fragmentation of critical discourses, within anti-racism and beyond that within feminism and the left generally, and unfortunately risks the possibility of internal conflict. To be clear, we write in support of anti-racist and similar politics but identify the short-circuiting and draining elements of confession within them and hope to contribute to refocusing critique unto politics. Within some anti-racist texts, these dead ends of guilt are noticed (Dabiri, 2021), yet the demand for self-critical confession persists. Perhaps these guides occasionally spur connections to actual activism, or contributions to anti-racist organisations, but equally they divert attention and energy towards self-transformation rather than collective action; somewhat paralleling self-help books (Faustino, 2020).
Strikingly, these anti-racist texts are all-encompassing critiques, damning indictments of society as generally oppressive, yet frequently they explain themselves as emerging from political conditions wherein the lives and voices of marginalised or oppressed groups are increasingly heard and respected. This society is condemned as racist, White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, colonial, homophobic, ableist, transphobic and other such accusations. While these injustices are undeniable and inexcusable, surely the capacity to critique, subvert and resist them is also derived from society, unless critique is somehow outside history and culture, or the world divides simply into good and evil. Recognising the social sources of critique and moral opposition to injustice might be fruitful within such debates. Indeed, anti-racist texts which demand confession by self-accusation might consider the potentiality within forgiveness: Whereas the medieval confessional erased sins after they were verbalised, disciplinary power makes each transgression a permanent trace (Foucault, 2014b). Perhaps forgiving the sins identified by confessional critique could be a swift precursor to politics, but largely the accusations of critique lead to interminably confessing subjects. Finding alternatives to the subjectifying powers of confessional critique is perhaps another way of ‘refusing what we are’.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
