Reading Journal

Please answer the questions below on a separate document based on attachment below and chapter 3 in BOOK: Sorrells, K. (2020). Intercultural communication: Globalization and social justice.

1. What is your relationship to whiteness that arose through the freewrite?

2. How do the ideas presented in Warren (2010) and Sorrells (chapter 3, 2020) help you better understand current racial conversations/media you’re engaging in about this current moment in time? How does your freewrite help you understand these conversations too?

25
It Really Isn’t About You
Whiteness and the Dangers ofThinkjng
You Got It
John TWarren
The first time I read something about whiteness, it was like a light had been turned
on – as if, for the first time, I had been brought into a conversation that, with a
complex and important history before me, I could now begin to engage. That first
book, Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of
vVhiteness, 1 had been assigned in a feminist theory course. I read it on a plane,
heading on my way to a conference in San Antonio, Texas. I was struck by
Frankenberg’s engaging tone, her nonaccusatory nature, and the clarity of the
issues involved. The stories of the women, the narratives of their experience often
met my own, in good and bad ways alike. While I never actually met Frankenberg
in person and am sad at her recent passing that will make such a meeting impossi­
ble, I credit her and that book with not only my research agenda in critical inter­
cultural communication studies, but also with my own entrance into what has
become a journey into my own whiteness. While it has been almost two decades
since reading her book, my journey is still in its infancy.
Frankenberg, R. (1993) White Women, Race Matters:
The Social Construction of Whiteness, University
of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Frankenberg’s research centered on a series of interviews in wllich she sought to
understand how wllite women narrated, understood, and, through their voicing of
these experiences, participate in the making of whiteness as a racialized identity.
Her book traces white identity along a continuum from race evasiveness (color­
blindness) to race cognizance (awareness and action). For Frankenberg, there are
morally/politically tolerable ways of doing whiteness, of living a raced life that
The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, edited by Thomas K Nakayama and
Rona Tamiko Halualani. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
It Really Isn’t About You
447
inflicts less violence upon others. Here, politically tolerable is not lip-service, but
an engagement with others that is politically relevant and socially just. To be color­
blind, argues Frankenberg, is to “dodge difference.”2 That is, to claim not to see
color, you are choosing to not see race and the underlying power structure that
continues to make race a difference that matters to people. To be race cognizant,
on the other hand, is when the women were concerned with “white people’s per­
sonal responsibility for and complicity with racism.”3 Here, one holds themselves
accountable for their actions and seeks ways of being that are more ethically sound.
Thus, whiteness, for Frankenberg, is “a location of structural advantage, of race
privilege … from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society …
[ in ways J that are usually unmarked and unnamed. “4
In graduate school, I began to read and process as much of this literature as pos­
sible, sketching out the various component parts of race and wlliteness. I was curi­
ous how my being white – of having white-appearing skin – might have effects
beyond my surface-level awareness. I was to learn that the stakes were much more
complex than skin. To this end, my goal was to know everything, to begiu to trace
all the lines of thought on the topic so that when I was done, I’d finally be able to
escape the guilt, the overwhelming sense of responsibility that being white had
created for me. This was problematic on two levels: first, it assumed that I could
read and process all that had been writren. The past century is littered with research
on the topic from multiple points of view. One need only to read Roediger’s col­
lection of literature on wlliteness written by Black writers to see the state of affairs,
to begin to understand the vast amount of work out there on this topic. 5 The lit­
erature, especially in the past decade, has exploded on the scene and talcen us all
quite by storm. Second, this assumption that by reading the literature on white­
ness, I might be able to escape my own cultural positionality only created a danger­
ous illusion – it provided me the luxury of imagining that by studying whiteness,
I might be able to avoid it. This was not a move toward being accountable, but a
move toward denial.
I decided my dissertation, that final project that, once completed, would grant
me access to my new name, my new title “Dr. Warren,” would be a study of a
classroom context that sought to examine how race was constructed, made, pro­
duced in/through student’s on-going communication. For me, whiteness was
communicatively constructed identity – a positionality that was produced through
communication and, as such, was then a place from which one speaks and, even
without being aware of how or in what ways, one levies power. Students in four
consecutive semesters allowed me to witness their classrooms, generating two years
worth of fascinating data on race and power within introductory communication
courses. I began by setting up my theoretical context and then moved to analyzing
their cultural performances, their enactments of self within this classroom space.
I became exceptionally good at calling students out on their enactments of white­
ness, claiming that whiteness is remade in and though their actions. I found that,
in my careful analysis of their voices, I was missing the same critique of my own
observing eye/I. The final chapter was my effort to return the gaze upon myself.
p:warren
It Really Isn’t About You
When I published the work as a book several years later, I was unsure how to feel
about it.6 It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done, seeing my name in print;
yet, it was also terribly troubling to know that my book, written by a white gny on
whiteness, was going to re-center the conversation back on to my ( and others like
my) cultural location. Whiteness was going to benefit, even if under the pressure of
my own critique.
In the book as a whole, my basic premise is that whiteness is a repetition, a refor­
mulation of a pattern that works to reproduce the very idea of race. Thus, my body
has a substance that is white-appearing (and that is powerful cultural capital in this
environment to be sure), but to just look at that materiality, that body, outside a
historical context is to forget the process that has made this white body possible.
Biological reproduction certainly made this body, but the players in my past are no
accident – they are subjects of a history, a social situation, a contextualized forma­
tion of individuals that got together within norms and regulations of the established
social order. This is to say, my whiteness is strategic, a reproduction of an idea that,
in the end, made me possible. The fact that my parents (necessarily products of their
time) chose to mate is the ground from which I came (and their whiteness was cer­
tainly a factor). The point ofmy book is simple: we are a product of our communi­
cative histories and, because this is so, we continue to reproduce these norms in and
through our everyday communication. In this sense, our communication is perfor­
mative, a generative making (again) of a historical idea, a social pattern.
recovering the past and seeing their actions in light of what has preceded them. It
was my effort to make this literature matter. However, my lack of understanding
and my limited exposure to this work made my efforts tougb – I was less successful
than I thought I would be, reproducing more privilege than I was undermining.
My effort to sustain critique was coopted with an inability to articulate the current
political/social implications of what I was saying. I was green, new to the ideas,
and not yet capable of addressing them in a way that made an impact. Critical ques­
tions from students flowed like water and I was unable to hold back the tide,
unsure, and unconfident of my own strength.
Additionally, I was unable to know what was within my power as an activist
teacher. First, as a graduate student, I lacked the institutional support and author­
ity to be “too radical” in the classroom; further, once I was an assistant professor,
I struggled with earning tenure and proving myself a worthy colleague in the class­
room, often relying on student evaluations for evidence of my effectiveness. While
it is inappropriate to blame the institution of academy with one’s lack of political
activity, I did notice that I tempered my voice and actions during tenuous moments
in my career. So I had to find my footing, seeking support with those others in the
department, the university, and discipline that could feed my eagerness to do right
by what I was studying.
I kept at it, determined to make these issues matter – I felt certain that in
courses like introduction to public speaking, communication theory, intercultural
communication, and introduction to performance studies, these issues were para­
mount. How can we understand the power of oratory, of literature, of communi­
cation without understanding that our subject locations are loaded with
significancd That when we speak, we do not speak singularly; rather, we speak
within a communicative context, as signifiers embedded in history. It is this lens,
this effort to see context and history and power as significant that makes critical
intercultural communication such a unique location to theorize culture, identity,
and discourse.
448
Johnson, A.G. (2006) Privilege, Power, and Difference,
2nd edn, McGraw-Hill, Boston, MA.
In Johnson’s remarkable book on privilege and power, he establishes a way of
understanding white privilege, contextualizing it within discourses of difference.
His argument circles around how well-meaning and kind individuals reproduce
normative patterns that work to sustain and keep secure privilege systems. In par­
ticular, he considers gender, sexuality, race, class, and nondisability privilege to
demonstrate how and why systems of power persist. From considering how capital­
ism, an economic system that requires more interest in making money and estab­
lishing differences than in sustaining equality, to tracing the mechanisms of power’s
production, he creates a wonderful narrative that puts privilege in context, asking
for folks to be accountable without feeling solely responsible. White privilege, as
Johnson might argne, is certainly a system beyond just our own self, but that does
not mean we are forever destined to repeat the problems of the past.
I first began teaching the topic of whiteness and racial privilege in my classroom
in 1996. I incorporated Peggy McIntosh’s classic essay on white privilege that lists
specific and material benefits she gets just by being white.7 I began to discuss the
ideas that Nakayama and Krizek offered in their now pivotal Quarterly Journal of
Speech essay in which they importantly located whiteness as a rhetorical force that
is sustained in and through our strategic use of language. 8 In my classro om
moments, I asked students to engage in whiteness, to begin their own journey in
449
McIntosh, P. (1997) White privilege and male privilege:
A personal account of coming to see correspondences
through work in Women’s Studies, in Critical White Studies:
Looki ng Behind the Mirror, (eds R. Delgado and J. Stefancic),
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 291-299.
Nakayama, T.K., and Krizek, R.L. (1995) Whiteness: A
strategic rhetoric. Quarterly journal of Speech, 81, 291-309.
In Peggy McIntosh’s essay, first printed in 1988 througb the Wellesley College
Center for Research on Women, stands as, I would guess, the most cited of all
research articles on whiteness and privilege. In a sense, it was so pawerful not only
because McIntosh speaks in and througb a language of privilege, considering rac­
ism through the white body, but because in a rare move of honesty, McIntosh
•
}.T.Warren
It Really Isn’t About You
names her privilege directly. In this sense, she aclmowledges that she is privileged,
she has benefits (most of them built on others), and she is willing to name them.
In a list of 46 privileges, she shows what whiteness does to/for her own social
power. Each time readers encounter this list, different elements of her privilege rise
up as significant. From not having to be a spokesperson for her racial group to liv­
ing in a mediated world where people with her own skin color are readily available
to her on TV, print, or (now) online. Such privileges work to make her social posi­
tion taken for granted, expected, and normal. Of course such privilege is not natu­
ral, but made to seem as if it were. Here lies the power behind McIntosh’s
theorizing of whiteness in and through her own experience.
In Nakayama and Krizek’s essay “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” the authors
established the communicative link to theorizing and writing about whiteness and
social power. In the first major article in intercultural communication studies on
whiteness, Nakayama and Krizek lay out the ways whiteness might be seen not in
the seemingly concrete ways theorized through folks like McIntosh and others
who link whiteness to white people, but rather within our every talk, our everyday
communicative practices. The move here is to wilink whiteness as a system of
power from the body – that is, many argue that we make a big mistake to assume
that whiteness and white people are the same. To help clarify, the authors here
begin to establish careful distinctions, outlining small codes in talk that work to
re-establish power within those who are white. For instance, in a self description of
racial identity, several students in their study noted that their race was “American,”
leaving this marker as their major identifier. Common sense might suggest that this
is a progressive idea, promoting less divisiveness. So, while this may seem open­
minded, Nakayama and Krizek note that this only works to recenter whiteness
within the logic of America – they argue that nonwhite folks do not get the same
credit for such claims, reminding us that policing of borders of national identity are
common. One need only look to the aftermath of 9/11 to see the question mark
that surrounds some claims to the ideal of “American” � citizens with Middle­
Eastern/North African Arab backgronnd are often singled out. American is not an
identity without racial implications. Such work has been foJlowed by a number of
intercultural researchers working along similar trajectories.9
My first graduate course, as a teacher, was entitled “Communication, Race, and
Power,” a complicated name for a course that examines whiteness in/through per­
formative theories of communication. It was a remarkable experience, not only for
the new found joys of teaching a graduate seminar, but more so for the quality of
people with whom I had the pleasure of working and learning. Indeed, the course
was filled with people who genuinely cared about their growth and tl1e growth of
their colleagues. We read scholarship from communication, education, cultural
studies, and philosophy, each advancing critical arguments about the nature of
whiteness and race as identities inscribed on our collective bodies.
The problem, almost inherent in this kind of class, is the mixture of folks and the
diverse set of exposure to work of this kind. One student, an international student
from Taiwan, -wrote a complicated and intricate analysis of race and identity at play
within the ESL program she was enduring. Her claim was that such programs ofren
treat students as damaged entries into the university, as diseased participants that
require correction. This, she argued, continues to mark and systemically margi�al­
ize students with different backgrounds, promoting the taken-for-granted white­
ness upon which these Others were measured. For her, the singling out of students
of color via language was less about helping them translate their experiences and
more about reinscribing difference upon the lived bodies of students. Her remedial
status, in effect, was a required part of her educational training.
Such students were common in this course, making the joy of working and
thinking with them so worthwhile. However, this class also housed some folks
who were, perhaps, not quite ready to enter this conversation. One particular
student left each class with an exit line: “I guess I’m just a racist.” This, of
course, missed the point entirely. It was not that she was not a racist: she was,
just as I am and the other students were. The nature of racism is that it is beyond
the individual control of any one student, any particular person. Surely, if racism
is a system that builds upon and maintains racism as an ideological ideal, then as
members of this system, we are all implicated. This student may feel implicated
by the research on whiteness to be sure � the reason for her feelings is because
she is part of this machine, this system of racial privilege and power. Of course,
the flip side is that she is not solely responsible for racism either. As a system that
is beyond her individual control, she is caught up in the machine – she is swept
up in the flow. The point is that as part of the machine, she gets benefits. In the
end whiteness is both about her and not about her – it is the both/and that
450
451
,
makes this tough.
Hartigan, J. ( 1999) Racial Situations: Class Predicaments
of Whiteness in Detroit, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Sometimes a book captures the imagination and forces (allows) one to forget the
basic components that make the book possible. In Hartigan ‘s book, it is easy to get
pulled into his ethnographic descriptions, his images, and the people who live in
the pages of his tale. The book is colorful and presents a world of privilege juxta­
posed to abject poverty. One is reminded in these pages that classed people – the
wealthy and the poor and the in-between – are slammed together in Detroit, post­
white flight. Detroit, like so many other Midwestern industrial cities, suffers from
the pains of dis/location and decaying infrastructure. Parts of these once magnifi­
cent cities look like the third world images on TV, gutted and collapsed buildings,
broken down cars, and empty streets. Getting lost in his descriptions of these places
juxtaposed to some of the wealthiest suburbs and the gentrification of certain “his­
toric” districts can make one forget the powerful ways whiteness is at play in the
making of Detroit. In his introduction, Hartigan notes: “Whiteness effectiv�ly
names practices pursued by whites in the course of maintaining a position of social
privilege and political dominance in this country. ” 10 Hartigan continues to explain
j.TWorren
ft Really /sn’tAboutYou
that whiteness links white folks collectively to a legacy of racism – they are named
as benefactors of racism as a productive system of power. What has happened in
Detroit (or the flooded and drowned streets of New Orleans, as one might extend
from Hartigan’s work) is not without its links to racism as a system of decay in
which we are all collectively linked. The bodies of those under the weight of white­
ness’s touch lifr up the bodies of white folks, making a bed of comfort for them to
rest upon.
Detroit is actually a powerful metaphor for what happens in my classroom. Like
any member of the Detroit community, the students in my classroom are not indi­
vidually responsible for racism, nor are they completely free from blame – indeed,
to believe otherwise is to reduce the problem from a large systemic issue of social/
political power to individual intent. Such moves are about protecting power from
real critique.
This kind of analysis is not easy. Very quickly in conversations about racism we
spin to the level of the individual as students become obsessed with their own
intentions and mark the conversation as being about their own actions. In a recent
semester, Ted, a white, traditional aged student, spoke of his unease with the con­
versation about whiteness and racism. As we talked about racism, he noted that
too many classes are centered around culture, noting “it’s not like I had slaves or
anything.” This line of thought is so common in my classrooms, the appeal to the
extremes of racism and power. It is easy to call upon slavery ( or any other overt
kind of racial violence like the KKK, burning crosses, Japanese internment/con­
centration camps or Native American displacement practices) – to do so, is to
mark one’s behavior as a comparison. I am not as bad that those others, the logic
goes. However, such modes of thinking only work to secure the more subtle ways
power moves in and through us. Racism is surely reproduced when Rodney King
is beaten in the streets of Los Angeles (1991), James Byrd Jr. is dragged to death
in Texas (1999) or Arnadou Diallo is shot to death by police in New York City
(2000), not to mention the deaths of poor citizens (mostly African American)
who died in the streets of New Orleans when governmental support was lacking
or absent (2005). Indeed, the recent election of President Obama brought about
its own brand of reinvented racism, including Tennessee Republican Chip Saltsman,
a one time candidate for the Republic National Committee chairmanship, who
mailed Christmas CDs to RNC members with the song “Barack the Magic Negro”
(2009). These moments of overt action are relatively rare (though any such acts
are too many). What is much more common are the small things, small moments
in which what we say, what we do, how we gesture or look, reproduce racism. For
instance, shifting conversation away from the structural elements of racism ( as
embedded in our talk or in our daily actions) toward overt acts of violence is
exactly the way racism gets reproduced in and through our everyday logics. To
shift the conversation from structure to intention is to shift the conversation from
our participation to our witnessing – as if witnessing erases our culpability in the.
situation. As if our disapproving eye is somehow a way of letting us off the hook
for what we (do not?) do.
These moments of relying on extremes11 work a certain kind of magic – it is like
a spell that affects the classroom. In McIntosh’s early essay on white privilege, she
discussed the notion of meritocracy, calling it a myth. The myth of meritocracy, an
illusion that assumes that what we get in life we get because we earn it, is like
magic, spinning a tale that works to reproduce the status of power, rather than
remark on how we actually get to where we are in life. One need only look to local,
regional, or federal political officers to see that power is embedded in these
“achievements.” In the state of Ohio where I lived for 5 years, our governor was
Bob Tafr (1999-2007). While no longer Governor, he was convicted of felony
charges for accepting gifts and not reporting them while in office. Bob Taft is part
of the Taft family- a political family that includes many powerful fi gures, including
William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States and the 10th Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court. Certainly, Bob Taft’s position in the state of Ohio
was not only because of his own efforts – having this family in this state helped him
achieve that office. The myth of meritocracy, however, is powerful – it has a charm
to it, a kind of”that’s the way I want things to be” and, because we are so seduced,
we tend to allow what is to be what should be. It is easier to assume that the rela­
tive of President Taft (or, for that matter, President George H.W. Bush) had just
earned his position rather than to assume that the presence of his family made his
road to power easier. We want to believe. It is a better story. It also makes us feel
better for having voted for him. This is why the myth is so powerful – because we
wish it to be so, and when you want something that badly, you can begin to make
it so, even when the evidence speaks otherwise.
452
453
Keating, A. (1995) Interrogating “whiteness,”
(De)constructing “race,” College English, 57, 901-918.
Moon, D. (1999) White enculturation and bourgeois
ideology: The discursive production of”good (white) girls,”
in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, (eds. T.K
Nakayama and J.N. Martin), Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp.
177-197.
Consider Keating’s claim that an individual’s skin color and his/her actions and
thoughts are not causally connected: “The fact that a person is born with ‘white’
skin does not necessarily mean that s/he will think, act, and write in the ‘white’
ways. ” 12 To this end, Keating suggests that white skin does not necessarily cause
individuals to levy whiteness in such oppressive ways. Keating tries to make clear
distinctions between white people and whiteness, focusing her energies on the
actor – that individual in culture – while then examining separately the circulation
of power that whiteness grants to some over others. This is a useful correction to assume all actors do whiteness in the same way ( that is, embodied whiteness)
is certainly a caution worth keeping at the forefront of our conversations.
).I Warren
It Really lsn’tAboutYou
Yet, Dreama Moon articulates the problem of denying the materiality of race:
“While I agree that it is important not to conflate [ whiteness and white people], I
would argue that it is politically unwise to pretend that white people somehow are
not implicated in the everyday production and reproduction of’whiteness’ _ ” 13 What
Moon reminds us of, ultimately, is the very real material benefit of whiteness that is, whiteness may not be the same as white people but that distinction does not
erase the real connections between the two. One may certainly (and wisely) ask for
a more careful theorizing of the differences between whiteness and the members of
our society that are produced as white, but such work should keep whiteness and
white people in tension. To divorce them completely is to let white folks off the
hook for their complicity in the perpetuation ofwhiteness.
This dialogue is one to remember; it points us, as caring and thoughtful mem­
bers of society, to recognize how power is working through us, even as we resist
the conflation of power and people. One needs to see their implication in racism,
even as they seek to more sophisticatedly work out the language we use to talk
about it.
In a class this summer, a student boldly stated that she was tired of reading all
this whiteness stuff, claiming that we had “talked the issue to death” and that she
was “done with it.” The dynamics of my classroom permit this kind of dialogue I ask students to tell me ifthey are bored as it is part of our community obligations
to make ourselves committed to academic climates that are engaging and dynamic.
Yet, I was, nonetheless, more than a little surprised, especially since this was early
in a semester in which we would be reading much more about this subject. Indeed,
my first concern was that she had not yet done the work that would enable one to
make such a statement, to be so flippant about her ability to dismiss racism and her
role within it.
Sandy was a white-identified student who, iflooks could tell, was of a middle- to
upper-class background. Between Sandy’s laptop, cell phone, and PDA, she was
well equipped and suggested an ease with material goods. Anyway, Sandy made
this statement during our discussion of Harri.s’s essay on whiteness as property. 14
I love this essay as it discusses how whiteness, legally conceived of as a possession,
can be owned and counted on as a form ofproperty. It is original and effective. In
the midst of this conversation, Sandy announces that she has had enough. Since
she offers this as a point of entry, I engage – her willingness to announce publicly
her concern means a public issue is now on the table.
You’re a bad person? Fm not sure Ifollow.
I’m a racist – all these readings tell me so, so I must be so. I’m the reason for racism
– it’s my fault. Fine.
You know Sandy, Iguess Fm not in agreement here. Yes the readings are discussing white
folks’ privilege and their contribution to racism as a system. I see where you might be
feeling like you are the object of their critique, but remember that ideology – the notion
that what is, should be – is built through logics embedded in our everyday talk. That
That makes me the big racist. I know. It’s my fault, I get it.
Sandy, do you know what?
454
We have talked the issue to death. I’m done with it.
Well, what about the topic are you done with?
This whole whiteness thing. I get that I’m the problem – I’m white, I’m the devil, I’m the
cause and reason for racism, m y life is great so I’m the reason everyone is miserable.
Is that what you are getting out ofthese readings?
Well, the readings tell me I’m privileged, I’m racist, I’m hording power, I’m doing
things that hurt others. And because I’m white, I can’t say anything about it I can’t diSagree because then I’m being racist again. It is a trap, so I’m done. I accept
my racism, recognize I’m a bad person, and now I want to stop talking about it.
455
What.
It really isn’t about you.
I look at her, waiting for it to hit her- to see where she takes it. She shrugs and sits back
down. I realize in the moment that I’ve failed to follow though and before I can get it
back, the moment moves on and the point I’m making, that symptom I am struggling
to name, has flown by and we are now in a different place. I can’t back up.
Richardson, T., and Villenas, S. (2000) “Other” encounters:
Dances with whiteness in multicultural education.
Educational Theory, 50, 255-273.
Warren, J.T., and Hytten, K (2004) The faces of whiteness:
Pitfalls and the critical democrat. Communication Education,
53, 321-339.
From educational foundations, Richardson and Villenas warn against white solutions
to whiteness. That is, they remind us that “one of the many paradoxes here is that the
underlying political culture, commitments, and habits of mind are a master narrative
rooted in whiteness and yet proposed as multicultural education. “15 In other words,
often what counters whiteness in dominant research on whiteness are solutions or
responses embedded in whiteness. What does it mean to have your solution enforce
power rather than work against it? For instance, how does the logic of democracy,
inclusion, and integration work to benefit whiteness more than undermine it? How do
these ways ofconstructing our social order work to benefit the dominant culture? What
if being one big happy community is not what everyone wants? What if there were
other ways of organizing ourselves toward some other, potentially better, end? Can we
imagine that? The charge in Richardson and Villenas is to question the underlying
nature of research before we assume there is not a negative effect of what we say.
In response, my friend and I wrote a response, a way of recovering elements of
democracy within the logic of whiteness. Advocating a critical stance we called the
“Critical Democrat,” we claim that to occupy the space of democracy, to live in the
space of lirninality and humility that democracy might make possible, is to chart
out innovative ways of imagining our futures in ways that breed less violence and a
greater ability to hear others. 16 In the end, before white constituted folks can
).T.Warren
It Really Isn’t About You
imagine the possibilities that Richardson and Villenas advocate, we must first learn
to listen, understanding the Critical Democrat is a paradoxical, ever-changing,
temporary space of possibility. In this moment, we might find new ways to see our
futures.
In the moment with Sandy, what I wish I could have said in a more meaningful
way was that whiteness is not an individual matter, regardless of how much we desire
it to be. Sandy was trapped in class to be sure, but not, I would argue, by the read­
ings. Rather, the readings were trying to create a complex matrix for her to see her­
self within. That is, whether she likes the idea or not, she is implicated in conversations
of racism and power because she is a member of this social system. She did not sign
up anywhere, she was never given her free pass, never joined any country club that
provided freedom and luxury at the expense of others. Yet, she is implicated – the
moment her body enters this social system and becomes part of our social machine,
she became wrapped up in this system of power and privilege. This happens because
we live in a social system that remakes skin and race meaningful – we talk about it,
trunk about it, and thus produce it as meaningful. So, of course she is trapped, as we
all are as members of this communicative context. Indeed, regardless of where we fall
in terms of race, we are always already part of a system of power. She did not sign up
to be sure, but she also cannot sign out simply because that is what she desires. It is
the nature of her (and our) location within systems of power.
However, the thing I was trying (and probably failed to do) was to tell Sandy that
only a white person, cloaked within the glory of privilege, could assume that this
conversation was about her – that racism was about her, as an individual. It is a trap
to make racism about her individual intent, her value as a person, her desire or effort
to participate in racism. Racism, as it is propagated through everyday life, is not a
T-shirt we wear on purpose, marginalizing those others we come in contact with;
rather, it is embedded in our talk, in our assumptions, and in our everyday logics. It
is invisible, guiding our interactions without our direct control, nor our consent. It
is, as Nakayama and Krizek made clear, an unnoticeable logic, a communicative con­
struct that promotes and secures racism without any direct effort on her/our part/s.
It is truly a trap for Sandy to believe that she was responsible, for it is so much bigger
than Sandy, bigger than me, bigger than any one individual. So while we, Sandy and
I, are surely benefactors of whiteness, we are not the cause. To assume we are ( or
could be) is to make ourselves much more important than we really are. Racism is a
process of power, shared power that functions as a social machlne. The more we
remember this, the better armed we are at speaking back to it.
The struggle with defining whiteness, naming whiteness, and locaring our place
Mthin whiteness ( and the critical intercultural communication scholarship analyz­
ing whiteness) is the assumption that we can get to the root of whiteness that we
can get the “it” of whiteness. Sandy is only an example of someone who sought,
perhaps desperately, to know the monster that is whiteness and come to terms with
it. Indeed, this essay is my attempt to talk about how one person makes sense of
whiteness and his (my) role in the system. This essay may very well also participate
in the doing ofwhiteness, the reproduction ofpower; yet, such fear does not let me
off the hook from making my case, drawing my line, and standing a ground toward
some better way of imagining my relationship to others. Whiteness is slippery. As
varied as the different voices critiquing racism and whiteness become when placed
next to each other, it shows how whiteness shifts over time (both our understand­
ing of it and our ways of imagining our response). And because whiteness resists
our efforts to speak back, we continue, even without trying, to remake whiteness
and cultural power. That is its power, of course. To shift once one names it, to take
on different clothes, to grow more powerful with critique, to manipulate around
critique is the nature of whiteness. Our ongoing struggle is to be well read, well
versed, humble and willing to be accountable for things we did not know we were
doing. It is about taking a stance of grace in this conversation, being active without
assuming we know how it will ( or through what efforts it might) end.
456
457
From the Library of the Future
One can ouly imagine the future. A close of the eyes, a reaching forward to those
texts and authors that change our lives by a detail, an insight, a critical argument
that forever alters how we see our situated-ness in systems of power. I imagine the
library has a promising future, filled with the innovarions of my students, my
friends, my colleagues who struggle to name hope in the face of injusrice. Perhaps
it is the final paper in a class or a presentation I witness at a conference – the
moment of seeing something that is just different enough to raise the bar and com­
plicate that which I have not yet seen. Sometimes it is a student question – an
undergraduate who, perhaps unaware of the richness of the query, drives home a
level of complication that makes me pause. The future is imagination, but if I were
to lay down a bet, I might rely on three ruptures in fabric of academia that I see as
hopeful.
First, I recently read George Yancy’s new book Black Bodies, White Gazes’-7 and
have been raving about it to all my closest friends, even if they are not “academics.”
Quite frankly, the book is too good for it not to appear on more bookshelves than it
currently is. In Yancy’s book, he creates an “embodied philosophy of race” that
incorporates philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, and critical intercultural
communication to argue that the study of whiteness is still a productive and impor­
tant venture. 18 Standing against those who argue that Whiteness Studies is passe,
Yancy makes clear that such work is still developing that we all, as a community of
scholars, need to invest. As a prominent African-American philosopher, Yancy argues
that race and whiteness continues to affect us in meaningful ways and that we need
to recommit to the work of social justice. In his final chapter, he offers a powerful
insight on why whiteness needs to be examined by scholars of color as well as white
folks, noting that white subjects can be ambushed by whiteness: “racism is embed­
ded within one’s embodied habitual engagement with the social world and how it is
weaved within the unconscious, impacting everyday mundane transactions. ” 19 In
other words, because white subjects have been constituted through a racist culture,
458
we/they are not always able to foresee the ways whiteness can arise. It is a useful
reminder for me, as a scholar in this area of research, that more work is needed in
order to fully understand the role of racial power in maintaining dominance.
Second, a colleague and I recently published Critical Communication Pedagogy,20
a book that attempts to capture a moment in time where, like intercultural com­
munication, scholars are in the process of transforming toward a more critical and
social justice oriented research trajectory. While I have great hope that the book will
make a difference in the field, I am more inspired by what I have witnessed in the
field since the publication of the book. From conference panels to graduate semi­
nars, there has been rich conversation about the field and where pedagogical research
should go in the future. The work I have witnessed has been humbling and I imag­
ine a generation of scholarship that breeds more possibility and more innovation in
(and outside) the classroom. Such new ways of seeing the relationship between
critical communication pedagogy and critical intercu1tural communication might
foster new and innovative ways of addressing the complicated ways citations of
whiteness are offered by white and nonwhite bodies, suggesting a need to see how
identity and discourse are not the same, but mutually inform each other.
Third (and finally), I see quite a bit of hope in critical intercultural communica­
tion as a field of inquiry. Perhaps one need only study the history of intercultnral
communication to see the ways that our scholarship has not always lived up to its
potential. Yet, new scholarship is being written on diaspora,21 gender and race,22
transnationalism,23 difference,24 Latina/a studies,25 and whiteness26 (to name but a
few areas of research) that pushes borders and challenges how and to what end we
do our writing. What is significant about research conducted and published under
critical intercultural communication is the extent to which communication – as
both a vehicle for, as well as a producer of, power – plays a central role in the theo­
rizing. \¥bile other critical avenues of research are important, it is this new move­
ment in the field that locates theorizes power and difference within and through
communication. It is for this reason that I am a critical intercultural communica­
tion scholar – because within this politically inflected, activist oriented, and hopeful
body of work I find my theoretical and methodological home. In that movement,
production and sustainment of power replaces the raw fact of its presence and, in
the end, a much more complicated picture of intercultural exchange is painted.
With starts like this, one can only imagine the future.
Notes
The structure of this essay is inspired, in part, by Pacanowski (1988).
1
2
3
4
5
Frankenberg (1993).
Frankenberg (1993, p. 142).
Frankenberg (1993, p. 176).
Frankenberg (1993, p. 1).
Roediger (1998).
It Really Isn’t About You
j.TWarren
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
459
Warren (2003).
McIntosh (1997).
Nakayama and Krizek (1995).
See Crenshaw (1997); Hytten and Warren (2003); Johnson, Rich and Cargile (2008);
Moon and Flores (2000); Shome (1999).
Hartigan (1999, p. 16).
See Hytten and Warren (2003).
Keating (1995, p. 907).
Moon, (1999, p. 179).
Hartis (1998), pp. 103-118.
Richardson and Villenas (2000, p. 264).
Warren and Hytten (2004, p. 330).
Yancy (2008).
Warren (2009).
Yancy (2008, p. 230).
Fassett and Warren (2007).
Halualani (2002).
Alexander (2006); Jackson (2006).
Cheng (2008).
Warren (2008, pp. 290-308).
Calafell (2007).
Cooks and Simpson (2007).
References
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AltaMira Press, Lanham MD.
Calafell, B.M. (2007) Latina/a Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance, Peter
Lang, New York.
.
Cheng, H-1. (2008) Culturing Interface: Identity, Communication, and Chinese
Transnationalism, Peter Lang, New York.
Cooks, L.M., and Simpson, J.S. (eds) (2007) Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance: Dis/Placing
Race, Lexington Books, Lanham MD.
Crenshaw, C. (1997) Resisting whiteness’ rhetorical silence. Western Journal of
Communication, 61, 253-278.
Fassett, D.L., and Warren, J.T. (2007) Critical Communication Pedagogy, Sage, Thousand
Oalcs, CA.
Frankenberg, R. (1993) vVhite Women, Race Matters: Tbe Social Construction of Whiteness,
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..
Halualani, R.T. (2002) In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities & Cultural Politics,
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to be White, (ed. D. Roediger), Schocken Books, New York, pp. 103-118.
Hartigan J. (1999) Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit, Princeton
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Reading Journal Response Sheet
Part 1: Model for Reading Articles
Fill out each section
Full Citation in APA:
Keywords (your own keywords that jog your memory):
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Questions you have about the article:
Part 2: Prompts
Respond to one of the
prompts below (be sure to put which one you’re answering – delete the others).
1. What connections does this work have to you and your cultural identities?
2. How did this chapter or article change your understanding of the world?
3. How do the ideas in this chapter or article challenge, stretch, or violate your usual ways
of thinking?
4. Play devils advocate. Respond to this chapter from the opposite of your usual viewpoint.
5. How does this work relate to other chapters we have read? How do they engage in
dialogue?
6. Create your own prompt.