PicoBlog

What I love about the word ‘dismantle’ is how frequently it is misused.

When you say you’re going to dismantle something, the implication is that you’re going to take it apart, or undo its components into separate pieces. It’s a process we associate with a kind of careful destruction.

So obviously, it’s a word that can create a deal of unease or even fear, because if you take something apart, the risk is that you won’t be able to put it back together again. Also, there is an implied pain or trauma that comes with this process. If a scary giant threatened to dismantle your body, you’d (rightly so) be afraid for your life.

The very thought of dismantling other things can be scary too. One example is society itself – our shared structures and institutions. I won’t spend this post detailing the various problems that modern society embodies, bit I’m sure you’ll agree that a lot of it is broken, faulty and in need of fixing.

To fix a problem, you need to find access to it. If I have a broken toaster, I might need to open it up in order to see what’s going on and what’s going wrong. I might need to dismantle it, hopeful that I can reassemble the pieces after I’ve taken it apart.

But here’s the thing: the word dismantle isn’t really concerned with the taking apart part of the process. A ‘mantle’ (noun) is a cloak or cover, meaning that ‘to mantle’ (verb) means to cover or conceal. So to ‘dismantle’, in this understanding, means to unmantle, uncloak, uncover, discover or reveal. When I take my faulty toaster apart I’m not doing it because I want to wilfully destroy my toaster; I’m doing it because I need to discover what’s going on inside.

Society is a faulty toaster. History is a faulty toaster. Dominant ideologies are faulty toasters too. And to understand them well enough in order to fix them, we need to truly discover them. We need to remove the mantle of ignorance that has been placed over them. We need to take them apart, in order to gain insights that will allow us to make them better.

I recently launched a new series on this Substack that aims to dismantle whiteness and white supremacy. I’m excited for this one. The plan is to interrogate whiteness via the physics of storytelling and narrative, examining how whiteness has been constructed and the role it plays in the grand narrative of history. In this, my unpicking of race theory serves a wider aim of uncovering the truths of white supremacy that are hard to see because they have been obscured (or mantled) so successfully, for so long. If you’re reading this far, I invite you to come along for the journey.

Click here for a little 15 second Hay Festival TikTok video of me explaining these thoughts.

• Think about aspects of contemporary society that need to be dismantled.

• Consider where there is a lack of transparency. It might be in particular histories, the narratives of different groups, or institutions over time.

• Think about the difference between destruction and deconstruction, the former aiming to destroy and the latter aiming to reveal.

• Then, finally, stay tuned in for Understanding Whiteness Part 2.

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