Revolution, Encumbered by White Allyship: Review of Catherine Hernandez’s Crosshairs
Catherine Hernandez, Crosshairs.
HarperCollins, 2020. $22.99 CAD
Order a copy from HarperCollins.
What if the rising tide of fascism amidst climate disaster manifested in a violent reorganization of society? What would resistance to white supremacy and its attendant systems of control look like? What would we retain of our past lives, and how would our past selves help, haunt, or hinder us?
Catherine Hernandez’s Crosshairs is, on its surface, a story of BIPOC-led uprising against swift and brutal fascism. Crosshairs imagines a near-future Toronto, which has been devastated by disastrous flooding. In response to growing unrest and resource scarcity, the government has teamed up with a shady corporation to impose a violent new order. All those who are not white, cisgender, straight and able-bodied are lumped into the category of “Other.” They are either exterminated, or rounded up to serve in labour camps that are the central organizing structure of the newly established and ominously-named Renovation. The narrative follows a loose group of Others: Kay, a mixed-race Black drag queen; Bahadur, a genderqueer migrant without status; and Firuzeh, a former frontline community worker. The three main characters are plucked from where they have been hiding from the new regime by two white queers working on behalf of a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour)-led resistance movement. Hernandez asks important questions about the future, and thoughtfully presents a wide array of characters from different backgrounds, imagining how each of them will react to and survive in the midst of ecological and political collapse. Unfortunately, the book suffers from an overly didactic tone, and a puzzling fixation on white allyship, which jars in a book that seems to want to subvert whiteness.
Hernandez takes care to flesh out all her Black, brown, trans and queer characters, providing a richly detailed back-story each time a new member of the ragtag group is introduced. These flashbacks are beautifully wrought, thick with memories of drag bar performances, hookups, roommate dynamics, and frontline service work. In one scene, Kay remembers his friend Nadine, who gave him his name:
Kay. I liked that. Nadine made a crown of twigs left over from an abandoned pigeon’s nest on the balcony. In the last light of that night, she raised the crown above her head, above the subway tracks, above the rustle of the forest and townhomes below, and said, ‘I now crown you Queen Kay!’ She placed the crown on my head. I became me.” (68)
It is telling, however, that descriptions of the past are the most evocative passages in the book; the scenes and narrative threads that occur in the present, dystopian reality are much less naturally rendered. These scenes focus too intently on the dos and don’ts of white allyship.
The two most sympathetic white characters, Liv and Beck, are secret actors in the resistance movement. Both are able to disguise their queerness and are deeply identified as white allies. Though they are also in danger, they exercise agency in ways that would get Kay, Bahadur and Firuzeh killed. After finding and recruiting the BIPOC characters, Liv and Beck clarify that they are not leading the revolution, but simply following orders from a BIPOC group of organizers. This reads as Hernandez’s way of assuring the reader that though these white people are constantly issuing orders and coordinating action plans, they are not actually perpetuating white power cycles. She makes the strange choice to never show the behind-the-scenes BIPOC masterminds. We readers, like the Others, have to trust that these movement leaders do in fact exist. Meanwhile, the white allies fall over backwards to prove their ally credentials to their non-white collaborators.
In one of the most bizarre scenes in the book, Kay and Bahadur come across Liv and Beck performing a repetitive physical and verbal ritual that supposedly breaks down their ingrained racism. They raise their arms, they lunge, they kneel, while repeating:
When I do not act, I am complicit!
When I know wrong is happening, I act!
When the oppressed tell me I am wrong, I open my heart and change!
When change is led by the oppressed, I move aside and uplift!” 149)
Kay and Bahadur are mystified by this display. When confronted, Beck says, “‘If I survive the uprising, I want to teach other white people to know this feeling. It feels like…like…taking off your backpack after wearing it for a lifetime’” (151). Later on, Hannah, Beck’s mother, adds a gesture to the ritual, to symbolize that “‘being an ally is a verb and not a noun’” (247), and is met with awed approval from both the white and the BIPOC characters. The idea that white supremacy will perish once white people can name and subsume their privileges correctly is representative of the kind of simplistic identity politics that obscures the ways in which white supremacy is entwined with capitalism. It is naive to imply that merely acknowledging white privilege, and having white allies apologize to BIPOC whenever they misstep, will dismantle the violence of the settler-colonial capitalist state.
While it is unfair to expect one novel to solve the problems of capitalism and white supremacy, Hernandez misses an opportunity to tell a story that decenters whiteness and offers a more surprising narrative of revolution. Instead of subverting whiteness, Crosshairs winds up re-centering the concerns of white liberalism: the narrative focuses on white people’s emotional literacy, racial awareness, and performances of solidarity, as strategies to eradicate racial injustice. Meanwhile BIPOC are expected to welcome “good” white people into their circles of trust, and even to follow their orders, instead of organizing autonomously for their own survival and well-being. The book makes a strong effort, but yields disappointing results.
Helen Chau Bradley is the author of Automatic Object Lessons (House House Press, 2020) and Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press, 2021). Their essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in carte blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy Magazine, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, and elsewhere. They host the Strange Futures book club, a bi-monthly discussion group that focuses on BIPOC speculative fiction, via Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.