Jillian Michaels missed the point.
Arguing for the sweeping changes proposed by the Trump regime to entirely erase "woke" references to slavery and white supremacy at Smithsonian Museums, the US American fitness trainer recently forwarded a curious claim on a CNN television show that has since gone viral: that less than 2 percent of white people were involved with slavery in its heydays, and as such white people were not to be villainized as they have been pathologized in contemporary culture. In her view, "white -people-bad!" was exactly the kind of outrageous political messaging the liberals have long promoted that necessitated Trump's ameliorative emergence.
There are critical problems with Michaels' claim, and getting the correct data is hardly central here. In the Southern colonies of the United States, for instance, slaves constituted 31% of the population in the 17th century, and by the time of the 1860 census, about 25% of white southern families owned at least one enslaved person.
But erroneous data does not constitute the main issue. The problem with the "2 percent" claim - even if we were to somehow accept it in good faith - is that it pixelates the frame into isolated boxes, obscuring flows and atmospheric conditions and patterns, then attempts to read entire histories through the isolation of quantity.
For instance, I recently found out (for no particular reason) that there are approximately 1.6 billion cars on our planet. Only about 18% of humans own cars. By adjusting that calculation to account for multiple car owners, the percentage drops to, say, 10%. If I were a professor from Planet B6-12 taking a sabbatical on the alluringly blue neighbourhood planet called Earth, and I skimmed briefly through an alien brochure to learn about humans and car ownership, I might be led to think that 10% is not significant enough to constitute a major industrial presence on said planet. But I would be wrong, you see. Because the number of cars owned is just the tip of an iceberg, a sprawling web of machinic relations that territorializes vast swaths of land into pristine highways, proliferates secondary technologies to augment car ownership, invents new language to keep up with auto-related phenomena, and even modulates popular understandings of mental illness and human behaviour to include concepts like "road rage" and post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from auto accidents. We have diners, drive-ins, "fast-food", road trips, and other car-adjacent phenomena that make it extremely difficult to delineate where cars end and where society begins. That's because phenomena leak into other phenomena, forming rhizomatic strings instead of particulate categories.
If I were that Earth-visiting professor, I'd be shocked to see how much is defined by cars - even though an arguably negligible number of humans "own" them.
There are critical problems with Michaels' claim, and getting the correct data is hardly central here.
In short, a car is not just a car. A car is an assemblage of dynamic moving pieces and qualities and territories. A "car" is all the conditions that need to be present for an automobile to exist and keep existing: roads, billboards, policies, Elon Musk, the desire to own a car, salaries, and the perception that owning a car is valuable.
One might argue then that just because I don't own a car doesn't mean I am not already participating in sustaining the conditions that make it possible.
The data rules too much out. Whether "2 percent" or 30 percent, slavery was not a side-quest in the United States. It was ironically the very engine room for the construction of its mythology of freedom. The plantation was the laboratory that instrumentalized African and Black bodies for the manufacturing of Empire. Jillian Michaels would probably vomit to know how "fitness" was determined by slavers and their admiring publics.
But there's something else that needs to be said. Something even more critical than "correcting the record". Something that runs obliquely across the land like a Navajo "spirit line" races through the embroidered fabric pattern it cannot be braided into.
The correction of Jillian Michaels also misses the point.
By merely pointing out that there were more white people involved in the institution of slavery than reductionistic data could ever account for, many commentators today risk reifying a kind of "white-people-bad" thesis that Michaels laments. And this is because of the tendency to reduce "whiteness" to "white people".
Whiteness was (and is) the condition of Trans-Atlantic slavery. It is the world-shaping thesis that flattened bumps and filled up holes to enforce the managerial logic of the neurotypical body. Its mere operations racialized some bodies as less than other kinds of bodies. But it is not reducible to those bodies; it is the sorting mechanism that precedes, directs, and exceeds embodiment. It is the atmosphere that enlists bodies into larger than human logics. It moves like a spirit, but wants its constituents to think like categories and in terms of totalizing, rigid identities.
...whiteness is a shape, a geometry of experience, an arrangement of subjectivity.
Whiteness is not "white people"; it is too swift, too molecular for such spectacular affixations. It moves like minor tendency - not the whole face, but a hair follicle - and recruits bodies to its machine. Instead of a colour, whiteness is a shape, a geometry of experience, an arrangement of subjectivity.
For Michaels, "white-people-bad" (a phrase she repeated ad nauseam on the show) is the "leftist" critique of white people that is perhaps adequately addressed by reducing the percentage of bad white people until she can make the point that more white people are good than bad. And for those across the aisle, the argument is usually to suggest otherwise: that a significant number of white people were bad and most white people today are indeed participants in a privileging logic they ought to apologize for (if they could understand the real implications of their participation).
Both point and counterpoint miss the ‘point’. Or rather, I should say, they miss the meandering flow and process-like nature of things in their ongoing spillage. Whether it's two percent or a hundred percent, if one begins an analysis of atmospheric patterns and logics with a count, you are already too late. The count is alluring. It beguiles and blinds one away from meeting the Cthulhu-like sprawl and impossible geometry of this planet-shaping art. The count is comforting. Two good white people in a room of 50 people leaves more to be desired. 27 good white people in a room of 50 is making progress. But what if that room were a slave ship? What does it matter how many good people or bad people are in a room, when the room itself - the moral field - is already a racializing cut in the fabric of embodiment?
So perhaps the question was never about arithmetic at all. The architecture of the slave ship was not only in its planks and chains but in the air it created – an air that still lingers. Whiteness remains less a headcount than a weather pattern: the storm that arranges what counts, who counts, and how counting itself seduces us into thinking we have grasped the thing. To step outside of Michaels’ frame is not to improve the math but to unlearn its grammar altogether: to remember that storms are not measured by percentages but by how they alter the horizon.
