Whiteness Quantomania: Racial Microaggressions, Subatomic Racism and the Multiverse of White Supremacy

‘Whiteness Quantomania’ is a creative-autoethnographic thought experiment combining memoir with sociology and the Marvel Cinematic Universe to think about oppression differently. This paper introduces ‘subatomic racism’, inspired by the fictional subatomic Pym Particle that takes us into a racist world at the scale of a millionth of an inch. Like subatomic particles, white supremacy is all-travelling and can be in many places at once, doing untold damage to our perceptions of space, time and reality. Combining racial microaggressions with Black feminist theory, Marvel’s multiverse can be a cipher for other racial dimensions illustrating that our local world on Earth is just one of many.
Using the imagery of insect-sized heroes Ant-Man and The Wasp, alongside the Infinity Stones that in this world grant users god-like power over teleportation, mind mastery, reality alteration, energy, time manipulation, and soul control, this paper asks, ‘Are there higher dimensions of terror beyond our world of intersecting oppressions?’ For instance, how my schooling in rural England, raised the spirits of white enslavers in the present. Spiralling out of my lived experiences, this paper employs Marvel as serious waste illustrating how fictional artefacts like the Infinity Stones may be vehicles for talking about racism. Jack Halberstam (2011: 20) uses the term ‘silly archive – borrowed from Lauren Berlant (1997: 11) illustrating how insights may be found in alleged low cultural spaces that academia scorns. At the crossroads of Berlant and Halberstam, my ‘silly archive’ uses Marvel to extend lived experiences of racism, from covert to institutional, into a strange multiverse of white supremacy.