White bodily inviolability is inversely proportional to black bodily vulnerability

Evidence

The South African writer Njabulo Ndebele puts this case most forcefully:We are all familiar with the global sanctity of the white body. Wherever the white body is violated in the world, severe retributions follow somehow for the perpetrators if they are non-white, regardless of the social status of the white body. The white body is inviolable, and that inviolability is in direct proportion to the vulnerability of the black body. This leads me to think that if South African whiteness is a beneficiary of the protectiveness assured by international whiteness, it has an opportunity to write a new chapter in world history… Putting itself at risk, it will have to declare that it is home now, sharing in the vulnerability of other compatriot bodies. South African whiteness will declare that its dignity is inseparable from the dignity of black bodies. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 156

Categorization

• XREF: Core material for the colonial/land strand of the polyad — a normative argument that privileged bodies must deliberately share vulnerability. — connects to: White-imposed dehumanization drives the black subject to seek whiteness; The racial epidermal schema replaces the corporeal schema under white regard — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 395; Whiteness means partaking in skin privileges above any excluded person — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 29
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-shifting inversion: inviolability-as-privilege is itself morally false because it is purchased by another’s vulnerability; the remedy sought is voluntary risk-sharing, not just redistribution of protection.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this voluntary-vulnerability exhortation play out in actual environmental justice struggles beyond rhetoric?
• STORYSTEM: The image of ‘declaring that it is home now’ by sharing in compatriot bodies’ vulnerability could seed a story about a privileged figure who abandons the shield of international whiteness to live inside the exposure zone.

Broader Connections

• The racial epidermal schema replaces the corporeal schema under white regard #expands (0.78) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 395
• White-imposed dehumanization drives the black subject to seek whiteness #complicates (0.75)