By Gillian Schutte
“The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: ‘We made this land.’ He is the one who brings truth into being.” (Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth)
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, American conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, forced the racial order into the open. His death was not only the silencing of a right-wing figure but a moment that exposed how racism is lived across its spectrum — from the raw hostility of the far right to the polite exclusions of liberal institutions.
Kirk built his career on transforming white grievance into performance. He mocked Black liberation, sneered at feminism, derided race politics, and dismissed decolonial critique. He was the inside-out orange of whiteness, its pulp and bitterness spilled into view. Nothing concealed, everything displayed. His politics embodied what Fanon called the coloniser’s claim to origin, rehearsing whiteness as authority while relegating Black existence to the margins.
The clarity of Kirk’s hostility was, paradoxically, its one redeeming feature. He was easy to name. The violence of his rhetoric was undisguised, which meant his contempt could be directly resisted. He showed whiteness in its raw form, stripped of masks.
The aftermath of his assassination revealed another layer. Across Black communities, celebration spread quickly. Memes, laughter, music — a release after years of hearing contempt directed at Black life. Some called the world safer without him. Others said it was justice. Yet not all Black voices joined the celebration. Some, invested in or aligned with his politics, mourned his death or expressed solidarity with his cause. The range of responses underscored the fractures within Black political life itself, even as the dominant affective register tilted toward relief. Still, this very celebration became the target of outrage. Right-wing commentators condemned it as barbaric. Liberal voices, speaking in the language of civility, echoed the same condemnation: “this is not how decent people respond.”
The convergence revealed the deeper structure. Whether loud or polite, whiteness insists on policing Black affect. It dictates how grief should be expressed, how anger should be contained, and how joy must be suppressed. Stuart Hall once described how hegemony works not through open force alone but through consent and cultural common sense. Liberal outrage at Black celebration was exactly this — the performance of “decency” as a tool of racial discipline.
Steve Biko warned of this long ago: “What of the claim that the blacks are becoming racists? This is a favourite pastime of frustrated liberals who feel their trusteeship ground being washed off from under their feet. These self-appointed trustees of black interests boast of years of experience in their fight for the “rights of the blacks.” They have been doing things for blacks, on behalf of blacks, and because of blacks. When the blacks announce that the time has come for them to do things for themselves and all by themselves, all white liberals shout blue murder: “Hey, you can’t do that. You’re being a racist. You’re falling into their trap.” Apparently it’s alright with the liberals as long as you remain caught by their trap.” Black Souls in White Skins? (1970)
This is no abstract claim. In South Africa, the university has been a stage for this liberal hegemony. At UCT, Black students who demanded decolonisation were framed as unreasonable, their protests reduced to pathology. When the statue of Rhodes fell, liberal commentary sympathised with symbolism but rejected deeper demands to unsettle Eurocentric authority. #FeesMustFall was met with statements of support for “the cause,” followed by repression, securitisation, and managerial discipline. Liberal faculty condemned state violence in principle while accusing students of being unruly in practice.
The same pattern extends into NGOs. Donor agendas decide what counts as acceptable activism. Projects that align with liberal frameworks are funded; those that challenge global capital or imperialism are quietly sidelined. In the newsroom, Black journalists are invited in for optics but told their work is “too emotional” when it unsettles the status quo. Unsurprisingly, it is the struggle whites who once marched under the banner of UDF liberation politics that now sit as gatekeepers, deciding whose voices matter, which critiques are permissible, and which are too disruptive. Their placards of solidarity have been replaced with donor frameworks, editorial guidelines, and tenure committees. In the past, they chanted freedom songs shoulder to shoulder with Black comrades; today, they invoke civility and procedure to determine which forms of Black politics are admissible and which must be silenced.
Steve Biko foresaw this dynamic clearly: “So ultimately, in spite of their good intentions, the liberals have to be said to be foreigners in the country of revolution. They want to direct change from above, and in so doing, they end up holding it back.” His warning resonates in the present — liberal whiteness claims to guard the legacy of liberation while ensuring that the struggle remains contained within boundaries it controls.
This mode of liberal racism has a distinct psychological violence. It does not announce itself with Kirk’s contempt but corrodes through gaslighting. When Black Academics raise the question of Eurocentrism, they are told they are overreacting. When Black journalists name structural racism, they are accused of exaggeration. When Black activists challenge donor priorities, they are dismissed as ungrateful. Over time, this denial destabilises Black beingness itself, forcing individuals to doubt their own perceptions, to question whether the racism they experience is real or imagined.
Cheryl Harris’s idea of whiteness as property clarifies how this power is exercised: Black participation is managed, celebrated when compliant, curtailed when disruptive (Harris, 1993). Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framing of the structural double bind explains the trap: Black people are punished if they resist exclusion and diminished if they accept it (Crenshaw, 1991). Celebration at Kirk’s death fell into this bind. To resist his memory through joy was condemned; to grieve him would have been mocked. Whiteness demanded silence either way.
Psychoanalysis sharpens the point. Kirk externalised his aggression. Liberal whiteness represses it and projects it onto Black life in more insidious ways. Black laughter is recast as menace, Black art is branded excessive, Black protest songs are dismissed as death threats, Black joy itself is made suspect. Fanon described this projection as the mechanism through which white society displaces its own anxieties (Fanon, 1952). In the outrage at Black celebration, whiteness once again projected its horror onto Black vitality, unable to tolerate joy that refuses its codes of civility.
Kirk was the inside-out orange — grotesque, exposed, impossible to ignore. Liberalism, meanwhile, presents itself as smooth rind, polished surface, seemingly palatable. Yet the bitterness remains the same. His assassination revealed how both modes converge.
But there is more to draw from this moment than recognition of convergence. What Kirk’s death laid bare was the fragility of whiteness itself. The fury with which both conservatives and liberals sought to police Black celebration revealed how intolerable it is for whiteness to lose command over meaning. Black laughter in the face of Kirk’s fall unsettled the very grammar of racial power. It refused the demand for respectability, refused to grieve where grief was expected, refused to carry the burden of civility that whiteness insists upon.
Here, the celebration was not merely reactive but generative. It created a space of freedom, however fleeting — a glimpse of being outside the disciplinary gaze. This refusal to mourn whiteness, to submit to its codes of decency, signals a break in the order that Hall described as hegemony. It is an assertion that Black life will not only survive but will delight in the collapse of its tormentors.
Liberals, on the other hand, rushed to condemn Kirk, yet in the same gesture condemn Black expression. Their suppressed racism seeps out in the value judgements they cast over those they paternalistically teach and claim to defend. They distance themselves from the inside-out orange of reactionary whiteness while quietly enforcing the boundaries of civility. In the outrage at Black laughter, in the censure of Black relief, we see the truth laid bare: liberalism disavows its own violence by projecting it onto those it disciplines. To deny Black joy at the fall of an oppressor is to guard the sanctity of whiteness itself — smiling, polished, and every bit as brutal.
The task, then, is not simply dismantling whiteness in its obvious forms but learning from these ruptures of affect. Fanon showed us that colonial power insists on being history’s beginning. Biko warned against liberalism’s paternal grip. What this moment reveals is the possibility of another beginning — laughter as politics, joy as refusal, celebration as insurgency. In these flashes, Black beingness reclaims itself from the corrosion of gaslighting, from the dictates of civility, and from the endless demand to carry whiteness with care.
Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power. Armed with an MA in Creative Writing, a BA in African politics, and boots-on-the-ground activistivism, Schutte fuses personal narrative with anti-empire, critical race theory and decolonial thought to interrogate entrenched systems of domination. Her body of work confronts oppression head-on, and advances a radical vision for social, economic, and political transformation.
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