The embodied politics of pain in US anti-racism

The Embodied Politics of Pain in
US Anti-Racism

Rachel Slocum1
Department of Sociology and Anthropology St. Cloud State University
St. Cloud, MN 56301
Email: rachel_slocum@hotmail.com


Abstract
Scholarship in geography has underscored the importance of emotions to
our understanding of space and society. However, the dimension of emotion in
politics, particularly anti-racist politics, has not been adequately explored. This
paper reads these politics through a largely feminist poststructural conceptual
framework. The ideas of race and racism underlying anti-racist training and
activism promote tears and anger – a politics of pain. Anti-racism training elicits
sadness and contrition as a means to bring white people to cognizance of privilege.
This could make participation more difficult. Strategies adequate to the task of
confronting manifold racisms require more than tears and guilt, thus I make some
proposals for anti-racist politics. Though not a comparison with Australian race
politics, the paper does draw on several antipodean scholars, to suggest an
embodied anti-racist ethics. The critiques and proposals made here owe a debt to
feminist theories of embodiment and difference as they have been articulated by
geographers, cultural studies theorists and philosophers.
Keywords: emotion, anti-racism, race, embodiment, feminist theory

1 © Rachel Slocum, 2007

The Embodied Politics of Pain in US Anti-Racism 2
Introduction
Emotion is central to how race is felt, discussed and produced in the US.
Race is embodied in emotions – pleasure, pain, love, rage, shame, fear, boredom,
tranquility – that connect people and places. This paper explores white and
nonwhite people’s emotional responses, particularly of pain, in anti-racist
advocacy. The paper’s context is a growing interest in emotion and affect within
human geography, but it addresses an area not much covered: emotion in the realm
of progressive political activism against racism. Considering the question, ‘what do
emotions do (Berlant, 2001; Ahmed, 2004) in anti-racist politics’, I suggest that
sadness and anger spring from the way race and racism are conceptualized and
activated in anti-racist activism and training. The concept of race is static and
sharply drawn; racism is elaborated without geographic or historical multi-
dimensionality. Pain constitutes the politics I describe here in ways that are not
especially useful. As I will suggest, there are other ways of embodying anti-racism.
Foundations and Caveats
Emotions are materially important. They are constitutive of space, residing
in both bodies and places. Studies of emotional geographies were inspired and
enabled by feminist geographers’ work on the body (see e.g. Rose, 1993; Duncan,
1996; Callard, 1998; McDowell, 1999; Moss and Dyck, 1999; Longhurst, 2000;
Bondi, 2005; Mountz, 2004; Desbiens, 2004). Emotions are “relational flows,
fluxes or currents, in-between people and places” that are potentially
transformative of both (Bondi et al., 2005, 3). Emotional geographies are useful to
understand how power works through what can and cannot be said. In the Scottish
highlands, these dynamics work to silence some emotions (Parr et al., 2005, 98).
The embodiment of emotions positions bodies spatially, making them feel out of
place or comfortable, visible and invisible in specific ways (see Longhurst, 1997;
Nast and Pile, 1998; Longhurst, 2001). Documenting emotional responses can also
reveal how norm transgression and endorsement are embodied (Gatens, 2004).
Emotions involve the body’s mechanisms and capacities and cannot be subsumed
within the cultural. For example, shame rises with a glance at your bunions that
remind you of childhood’s too-tight shoes, stretched budgets, and losing a pair of
new shoes (Probyn, 2005, 63). Thus emotions are not limited to mediating and
replicating existing social categories (Anderson and Harrison, 2006). The work of
sorrow, in this paper, enables a politics: groups form, take up ways of acting, stick
together with the glue of guilt and disintegrate when people tire of feeling bad.
Metaphorically and physically, these politics divide. As an emotional geography,
they bring bodies together in the spaces of ‘white’ and ‘of color’. The anti-racism
discussed here makes spaces of pain in which race has more clear cut edges than it
can accommodate genetically and theoretically. This paper explores the
participation of sadness and anger in the production of a form of anti-racism. While
debate over the politics of a focus on emotion or affect exists, this paper does not

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 1-28 3
have room to address itself to that discussion (but see Thien, 2005; Anderson and
Harrison, 2006; Tolia-Kelly, 2006 and see the approach of Probyn, 2005).
Emotions are integral to human society – people make sense of life through
them, however differently, and they have a place in research and the public sphere
(Narayan, 1988; Anderson and Smith, 2001). Emotion figures in relations of power
and confrontations to change society. Rage over racism is inescapable, necessary.
Making that anger known and speaking about pain have been important in the
history of marginalized groups; it can provide politics with a sense of urgency
(Ahmed, 2004). Notes Cowlishaw, writing of Aboriginal violence in Australia, “[i]t
is useful…to imagine public violence as a way of breaking through the suffocating,
complacent façade of national solicitude. Rioting can be seen as expressing rage
consequent on the recognition that true recognition never occurs” (2003, 121).
Eliciting or expressing pain is an important element of anti-racism (see
Burman and Chantler, 2004; Lee and Lutz, 2005; Srivastava, 2005). I use the term
‘pain’ to mean feelings of sorrow, sensations of blushing, tears and tightened
throats as well as the anger from whites against other whites and nonwhites against
whites and the further sadness that such anger brings (see Ahmed 2004). My
argument concerns the invocation and expression of intense feelings of sadness in
multi-racial, anti-racist activism as the primary means to induce thought and
activism. This method seems an unsustainable foundation for confronting manifold
racisms. I am critical only of the politics I discuss in this paper, in which guilt,
sadness and anger are the key strategies, not of all emotion, nor certainly the
project of anti-racism. Equally, the point is not to position (good) reason against
(bad) feeling nor to label this pain as maudlin or melodramatic. Further, I am not
critical of anti-racist training and activism because it employs a politics of injury in
which subjects of color become invested in their pain (see Brown, 1995). Instead, I
am concerned with an anti-racism that tugs on white peoples’ feelings of guilt and
sadness, pulling them out, as a means to dismantle racism.
Methodology
The empirical basis of this paper is participant observation of anti-racism
training and activism conducted between October 2003 and October 2005. In the
first sub-section I write about my participant observation of four anti-racism
training sessions led by four separate organizations, all in the US. In the next, I
discuss the day to day work of an anti-racism group, ARG, (a pseudonym). Adding
to the complexity, two of these trainings were requested by the ARG and were
performed by two different anti-racism training organizations. The ARG is a
committee of a larger group, the Alliance (also a pseudonym); the Alliance is a
non-profit, national coalition with over 300 members that engages in policy and
programmatic work in an area of social change. Alliance organizations are
dispersed across the US. ARG committee members, also coming from a diversity

The Embodied Politics of Pain in US Anti-Racism 4
of places, mostly hold positions as directors or mid-level staff of organizations
active in the Alliance.
The quotes, all anonymous, are a combination of actual emails to me and to
the ARG members, verbatim notes and close approximations of conversations. I
use them to indicate general tendencies that I observed. The paper is not an account
based on interviewing others for their views; it is a partial perspective derived from
my observations supplemented by the quotes of other participants. Someone else
might highlight other aspects of this experience. Nonetheless, that fact does not
diminish the paper’s effort to think about the anti-racism discussed here through
poststructural scholars’ theories of difference, race, geography and history.
Throughout the paper I have used terms such as ‘brown’ ‘nonwhite’ ‘light-
skinned’ to identify bodies. I also use ‘white’ and ‘of color’, which were the two
terms most often used by the ARG and the anti-racism trainers. Of color is derived
from a politics that suggests that the diversity of nonwhite people should recognize
themselves as united through the experience of being of color in a white
supremacist society even though they may be divided by class, culture, nation,
gender and so on. I use multi-racial to mean different raced bodies were present but
the very term many plus racial suggests there are ‘races’ when there are not. One
consolation is that ‘multi’, unlike ‘inter’, could mean the embodiment of mixing,
even though what we see is shades of pink and brown. While I recognize that all of
these are imperfect terms, it being theoretically impossible to apply racial
categories to any individual, they are, nonetheless, ways in which people are
embodied in racist society. In anti-racist activism consciousness of racial
phenotype is acute. It happens to be acute here in essentialist terms. I do not buy
into the categories that I use to mark who said what but in this context, there is
some tendency for connections to occur between practice, skin and sadness or
anger. It is also interesting to note when connections occur that do not line up.
My participation in the ARG was very important to me. I wanted to be
engaged in anti-racist work because racism is a deeply embedded and disastrous
aspect of this society. As a white woman, it mattered greatly to me that I act. The
work was important emotionally – at the time, these were the people with whom I
interacted most regularly, mostly by conference call and email conversations (and
infrequently in person). My participation also helped me to develop my ideas about
race, racism and anti-racism. As I will discuss below, I approached my work in the
ARG with zeal – too much. As one nonwhite colleague in the ARG remarked
(without intent to judge), I was often ahead of the group in terms of the time I
could commit (I was then unwaged), the things I was able to write and the
questions I was raising. This zeal was so powerful that I at first did not apply the
theoretical position that I now use in this paper to my work with the group.
Gradually, as things happened that made me think, ‘but wait a minute’, I would
raise these concerns. Further, I had a troubled role in the trainings. On the one hand
I had read a lot and wanted to observe, on the other I was expected to participate. It

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 1-28 5
was inevitable that from this experience, I would draw theoretical and political
conclusions. Again, mine are not the only conclusions to be drawn.
The following section presents the research in two parts, one on anti-racism
trainings and the other on the ARG’s activism. I look at four difficulties I find with
both the trainings and the activism. I have titled these ‘Emotional intensity’,
‘Racism first’, ‘Non-specific geographies and histories’ and ‘Essentializing
whiteness’. I then analyze the empirical data as evidence of a politics of pain and,
in the next section, offer other ways that anti-racist training and activism might
conceptualize race and racism. The second to last part proposes an embodied anti-
racist ethics.
Emotional anti-racism
When some white people talk about race in a space where they are asked to
think about white privilege and the history of raced oppression in the United States,
they feel anguished, torn, scared, confused, guilty (see also Cooper, 1997). Much
anti-racism training is specifically designed to force white people to see that they
gain from and perpetuate the negative historical legacy of whiteness. Thus in anti-
racism training, white people come to know (“feel”) that they are white (Alcoff,
1998, 7).
Anti-racism training
Formal anti-racism training began with diversity workshops called
‘ethnotherapy’ in the 1960s, which then gained strength in the 1980s (Lasch-Quinn,
1999; 2002). In addition to earlier efforts aimed at consciousness-raising, two
strands of training developed: one focuses on individuals, inter-personal relations
and cultural beliefs, another, anti-racism, confronts the structural relations of
racism. The first strand is referred to as diversity training, which teaches people to
accord equal respect to all cultures (Lasch-Quinn, 1999). Diversity training
explores all differences. Similarly, the ‘unlearning racism’ or prejudice model
suggests that racism consists of misconceptions about nonwhite groups (Scott,
2000). The majority of trainers focus on inter-personal relations whereas a minority
analyzes institutional racism (the anti-racism strand) (Shapiro, 2002). Despite these
differences in approach, techniques to get people in touch with their feelings seem
to be applied by both (Scott, 2000). Indeed, even though the institutions that
support racism are emphasized in anti-racism, the method relies on evoking
individuals’ emotions. Trainers of any type conduct one-off trainings of 1-3 days,
day-long workshops and/or a process that spans several years. They take place in
the workplace, whether corporate or nonprofit, universities and churches. This
paper concerns trainers who use the anti-racism approach.

The Embodied Politics of Pain in US Anti-Racism 6
Emotional intensity Emotional response is central to the learning process in anti-
racism training. It has two purposes: for whites, it enables an “emotional
confrontation with no exit”; for nonwhites, the emotional impact is designed to
“melt [away] denial, apologetics, and an identification with oppression” (Luft,
2005, 11).2 The spaces of anti-racism training are meant for soul-baring. Here
emotional displays of sadness are acceptable, whereas in other arenas they may not
be. The training can be an emotionally harrowing experience for whites, but not
necessarily for people of color. Anti-racism training explicitly does not invite
people of color to explain racism unless they want to and does not ask for their
testimonies. This method is based on the understanding that nonwhites should not
be burdened with the responsibility of explanation or asked to demonstrate
suffering.
One of the more wrenching exercises of one training required participants
to form a bunch on one side of the room. The trainer then asked all those who
consider themselves nonwhite, to cross over to the other side. When both sides face
each other, each side is asked to ‘feel what it’s like to be on this side, looking
over’. In my experience, a small group of nonwhite people faced a large group of
white people. The distance created by our colleagues moving away and their act of
looking back is a tremendously difficult experience, at least for the white people I
saw. By the end of the exercise, which went through disability, poverty and so on,
many participants had tears in their eyes. On another occasion, small groups were
asked to discuss the question ‘why is racism important to you?’ Clearly not
convinced by my arguments about social justice, the woman of color leading the
group asked me, “but how do you feel?” Regardless of how much I had thought
about racism, it was an emotional response that the other participants (all non-
white) in my group wanted.
Some of anti-racism training exercises reinforce racial division. During one
training, a group of participants listened to some young people talk about
participating for several months in a multi-racial youth group. One college age
white man said he felt jealous of his nonwhite friends who, he thought, had
something that bonds them and leaves him out. He said, “sometimes I wish I were
[brown] like them”. A young woman of color responded, “that really hurts me to
hear you say that”, as she started to cry. The contagion of tears meant that there
were few dry eyes as she spoke about the pain of racism and why he should not
desire to be a person of color. While I cannot question the validity of her sadness, I
do wonder at the perspective that suggests his wish is hurtful, particularly given
that we, the participants, knew he was struggling to think about race and privilege.

2 Rachel Luft’s paper is a work in progress. I am grateful for her willingness to let me cite
it.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 1-28 7
Racism first A model of oppression that privileges racism is used in the trainings.
Rachel Luft (2005), an anti-racism trainer with the People’s Institute, describes
anti-racism training as one of the few surviving examples of single issue identity
politics that eschews an examination of other oppressions. The reasoning behind
the approach is that if racism is to be deeply understood, other oppressions cannot
be discussed. Further, this training pursues an additive concept of oppression – it is
always worse to be someone of color and GLBT or poor.
Defining race is a standard training activity. Part way through one such
discussion, a woman (light-skinned and indigenous) wanted to add ‘economic’ to
the definition of race conceived in the training. She argued that rural poor whites
are oppressed almost as much as people of color as they have the least social
capital. The trainer asked if this participant thought that poor whites were
oppressed because of race, because they are white. A young white woman
answered “Yes, in a way – they’re called white trash”. The trainers insisted, along
with others in the group, that poor whites are oppressed by class but not by race
and therefore cannot be included in the definition of race. This would suggest that a
dominant form of whiteness is not oppressive of those groups that did not meet its
standards. Yet, if one is named ‘white trash’ then one is immediately defined by
race (Skelton, pers. comm. September 25, 2007). Unpacking the whiteness of white
rural poor Southerners, Jamie Winders (2003) suggests moving beyond the
framework that claims that with whiteness necessarily comes privilege (see also
Jarosz and Lawson, 2002). Class and geography need to be central to analyses of
race if scholars (and activists) are to challenge representations of race (Kobayashi
and Peake, 2000 cited in Winders, 2003). Trainers, further, argue that when white
people mention differences such as ‘white trash’, gender or class, it is to divert
attention and subvert the central message which is about white privilege. Luft
describes questions raised about anti-Semitism or gender as attempts to find “a
release valve to the intensity of confrontation with racism and anti-racism that the
trainers were specifically attempting to cultivate” (2005, 13).
Non-specific geographies and histories The trainings that I have seen are not
tailored to the audience, the place nor to the issue the trainees work on. Similar
exercises and the same conception of race were used by four organizations in
trainings for a) a mostly white group confronting white hostility against nonwhite
immigrants b) at an anti-racism workshop during an Alliance conference c) in an
ARG-organized training and d) in a workshop with anti-racism trainers to discuss
the need for an anti-racism training.
The history explained in the trainings that I attended is the history of
African Americans and white people. Dates establish the birth and progression of
racism. While 1492, the year Columbus arrived in the Caribbean is noted, the
history of racism for these trainings begins in 1607 when Virginia was established
and laws to institutionalize racial inequality were created. According to the trainers,
the 1640 uprising of indentured Black, Dutch and Irish servants established a clear

The Embodied Politics of Pain in US Anti-Racism 8
separation—as punishment, the latter two groups were given four more years of
servitude, the black man received a sentence of servitude in perpetuity. Law was
the vehicle by which racism was institutionalized – for instance, the rule of hypo-
descent3. A nonwhite woman from outside the US suggested that racism was alive
before 1607, but her claim was not addressed. Left out was how US forms of
racism were connected to or distinct from racism in other colonized places, slave
economies or Europe over the ages. Equally absent was geopolitical considerations
like race and imperialism in the Philippines (see San Juan, 2002) and the subtleties
of race in North and South America (see Dzidzienyo and Oboler, 2005). The
training evinced scant spatial or temporal specificity, while these are arguably
elements of critical importance to any anti-racist practice (Bonnett, 1993a; Nayak,
2003).
Essentializing whiteness Anti-racism training tends to present an essentialist theory
of whiteness and ‘color’. The training philosophy promotes the principle that
“racial color is the lifeblood of resistance” (Luft, 2005, 10). It draws on ideas such
as “[the] culture of color is authentic,” and “whiteness is organizational culture,
characterized by bureaucratic norms of individualism and linear thinking” (Luft,
2005, 10). According to the trainers whose material I analyzed, nonwhites with
power will never be racist because people of color can only be prejudiced but not
racist. And though, as one trainer argued, not all whites are ‘in charge of things’, all
white people are on ‘the line of white privilege’ together. Ultimately, because of
the benefits that accrue from white skin, this means that all whites are racist – the
take home message of anti-racism training that is left to be spoken on the final day.
All the exercises are means to prepare participants to accept that statement.
Trainers also ask trainees: what do you appreciate about your culture, what
are you proud of? This is done to show that whiteness has no culture – it is so
empty that it must appropriate everyone else’s (see Bonnett, 1993b for counter
argument). Some replied nothing or, sadly, ‘now I see and I’m ashamed of my
culture’. One white man noted that the diversity training in which his organization
is engaged has been “an emotional process” and that now he thinks of himself “as
having grown up in a cultural prison – really white, really wealthy, I remember
feeling imprisoned by that, and I look back on my desire to know people who were
different from the box I was in”. At one point, I questioned whether the
relationship between nonwhite culture and whiteness was always one of theft (as
the training proposed). The trainers argued, yes, whiteness was a process of taking
what was not a part of white culture and exploiting it. Alcoff proposes that the

3 Hypo-descent, or, the ‘one drop’ rule, categorized someone with an African American
ancestor as African American. “The rule of hypo-descent is, therefore, an invention which we in the
United States have made in order to keep biological facts from intruding into our collective racist
fantasies” (Harris, 1964, 56 cited in Omi and Winant, 1986).

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 1-28 9
argument of appropriation needs some nuance (see her discussion of cultural
crossover and the blues, 1998, 19-21).
Lines of difference are precise in the trainings in order to ensure that white
people understand white privilege and to prevent backsliding away from an
acknowledgement of that privilege. One woman who refused to identify as
anything but ‘human’ was pressed repeatedly to claim her true (white) identity.
Whites commonly engage in a “flight from feeling” which “accompanies a desire
to ‘not see’ difference”, both of which serve as a means to evade recognition of
power (Frankenberg, 1993, 155, 14). And even if the white people are anti-racism
trainers themselves, they will have a tough time figuring things out: one white
trainer told us that the white people in her organization thought long and hard about
privilege and when they came back to the people of color and reported their self-
analysis, they were told, “you’re not even close.”
Anti-racism training divides people into ‘caucuses’ of whites and people of
color. Groups go into separate rooms to ensure privacy. In these caucuses, each
group, respectively, talks about how white supremacy and oppression are
internalized. If the training will lead to work over several years, these caucuses will
continue working separately, but some members of each caucus will also meet as a
‘change team’ to address institutionalized racism. The caucuses are designed to
confront a problem identified by anti-racism trainers that white anti-racists tend to
work with people of color, when, ideally, they should work in white groups. On the
other hand, trainers also stipulate that no white group should act on its own against
racism without doing so collaboratively with a group of color.
Questions about difference are bound to come up, but while there is space
for emotional outpouring, there is little place for sustained examination of the
complexities of social difference. A woman of color noted at a training that
sometimes she feels more like a man than a woman and was unsure of when to
cross over in the exercise described above, but she crossed when women were
asked to cross over. A young woman with light skin whose father is white and
whose mother is mestizo felt unsure of which caucus she belonged in. Her sister
identifies as a person of color. A nonwhite woman told her, ‘but you can’t just
choose to be a person of color’. She ended up in the white caucus. A woman who
could pass as white but identifies with her indigenous ancestry, was welcomed
when she joined the nonwhite caucus. At another training, a young white woman
said that while she has white skin, half of her family is black and she feels more
comfortable with that side of the family. “But,” insisted a woman of color, “you are
white and you have white skin privilege.” A moment later the same woman of
color included Jews as “people of color who have been oppressed for generations”.
These junctures are important places for re-examining identity-based truths, yet the
anti-racist model applied in these examples is designed to avoid them. Anti-racism
tends to require that people make clear choices about which racial grouping they

The Embodied Politics of Pain in US Anti-Racism 10
fit. I turn now to an analysis of the ARG’s activism – its meetings, composition,
decisions and strategies.
The Activism of the Anti-Racism Group
The active membership of the ARG, at the time I joined, consisted of two
nonwhite women chairs, a white man who later become co-chair and a white
Jewish woman, two men of color, a white woman representative from the Alliance,
and, occasionally others who were white, indigenous, Indian and black. Active
membership consisted of being on all or most monthly conference calls and
participating in emails almost daily. It meant further, contributing to ARG internal
policy and pursuing its work plan goals. Most ARG members had full time jobs in
organizations associated with the Alliance, a fact that made it difficult for many to
devote much time to the ARG. Nonetheless, the ARG members put together a work
plan, wrote various statements, held a meeting with anti-racism trainers, board, and
staff, conducted a series of sessions at the annual Alliance conference on racial
justice and organized an anti-racism training. The ARG’s activism made racism
visible within the Alliance, which had not considered this dimension in their work.
Emotional intensity Relations within the ARG and between the ARG and the staff,
board and some representatives of other organizations in the Alliance were tense
throughout the two years. Significant bouts of hostility occurred among group
members. The fact that the ARG conversed monthly on a conference call but used
email as the primary mode of communication was partly responsible for the
destructive atmosphere. We all assumed the worst of each other, misunderstood
communications, flamed in response, shouted in caps, wrote lengthy emails to
explain, justify or pontificate and so on. Ultimately one nonwhite co-chair left the
group, in part as a consequence of these hostile relations.
Unfriendly relationships between ARG members and other Alliance
members had developed over the decade of the Alliance’s existence. The Alliance
staff had been white for most of its short history. The assumption was that when
people disagreed with the ARG, institutionalized racism was at the root. On the
Alliance side there may have been a sense that racism was peripheral to their work
and instead that class was the difference that mattered. ARG members were certain
that the Alliance staff was at best resistant to change and at worst, deliberately
thwarting ARG efforts to have an anti-racism training. This training, if it could
happen, was seen by ARG as the necessary catalyst for real change. This idea was
so strong that at times it seemed we could not develop our own analyses and
definitions, we instead had to wait for the training.
After this tension over thwarted agendas had continued unabated, a meeting
was held to discuss tensions between the ARG and the Alliance (board and staff).
To lead off the discussion, the woman of color co-chair of the ARG noted how
much pain people of color felt at the annual conference one year ago. The response

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 1-28 11
from an Alliance board member was: “we didn’t realize that you had experienced
such pain, we really didn’t know. And if we had known, we would have paid more
attention.” Another ARG member, over the years, had used anger and accusations
of racism against Alliance board and staff, which did not move the anti-racism
process forward collectively and certainly not as well, apparently, as the expression
of pain did. In any event, the Alliance agreed to put racism on its agenda, to
address it at the next conference and to begin a training process.
Racism first The ARG chose to focus on racism rather than the articulation of
oppressions in their area of work. It was not as if ARG members did not recognize
class or gender, but they made a strategic decision to address racism because of its
invisibility to Alliance members. The ARG’s primary concern was that resources
and decision making power were not shared equally among white groups and
groups of color within the Alliance as a consequence of institutionalized racism.
Another concern was that the staff of many organizations did not reflect, racially,
their client base (nonwhites) and their internal processes (hiring, decision making)
were derived from dominant, white society. The ARG knew that many in the
Alliance understood class to be central to the problem the Alliance addresses. An
indigenous man, an intermittent member, in a conversation about what the ARG’s
focus should be noted, “there are many poor whites, you know”. Silence – and the
conversation died there. In discussing whether a call for sessions for an Alliance
conference would include the word class in addition to race, a white male ARG
member commented that using class might bring people who do not relate to race
“in through the side door” which did not seem honest to him (because this would
indicate that the term race makes them uncomfortable or they are blind to racism).
Non-specific geographies and histories The ARG membership represented a
diversity of racialized groups but this diversity was not a resource for the group’s
analysis of race or its activist practice. While racisms must continue to be revealed,
the ARG tended to be unreceptive to the significance of variably located racialized
differences whether outside the US or within. Anti-racism in Texas or Atlanta
might be approached differently than in New York or Maine. For instance, the
mostly black organizing committee for the 2005 Alliance conference (held in a
southern city) was not pleased with the ARG blurb (that I wrote) announcing
racism as a new, central interest of the Alliance. The chair of the organizing
committee noted, that their city ‘is not just about Martin Luther King anymore’.
Further, in planning for the same conference, slavery and civil rights were aspects
that some ARG members proposed highlighting. A conversation ensued about the
indigenous and Latino migrant histories and present day lives that are part of this
city’s landscape as well, but the group decided to focus field trips on the history of
civil rights (see Alcoff, 2003 for a discussion of the black/white binary). Finally, an
ARG member from an indigenous nation pointed out that many American Indians
are more comfortable remaining out of view rather than in the confrontational anti-
racist politics that the ARG practiced.

The Embodied Politics of Pain in US Anti-Racism 12
The centrality of a painful interpretation of history encouraged what were
unspoken certainties about race, racism, white privilege and anti-racism. The ARG
insisted on the importance of people of color leadership and the need to recognize
the capabilities and constraints of people of color. But it left unanalyzed questions
concerning how exactly people are differently racialized, the role of class and
gender and what those differences mean for its own area of work. Embedded in a
US movement concerning a global issue, the ARG membership did not consider
the complexities of race, anti-racism and racism within and outside the US. The
geography of race and its connection to practice was not analyzed. My argument is
not that the ARG was wrong to focus on racism. As Cindi Katz (1998, 258) notes,
politics requires “figuring out which differences matter when” in order to work
through alliance for meaningful change. Alliance was disabled due to the ARG’s
inability to work with the frictions of difference (see Tsing, 2004).
Essentializing whiteness White people in the ARG tended to react harshly toward
themselves and other whites in anti-racist activism. This occurred when white
people felt that someone failed to understand the analysis or when they wanted to
prove their anti-racist credentials. For instance, in reply to a white woman
explaining that she had experienced racism as a girl at the hands of nonwhite
students, I said, “but the training would help you to understand that only white
people can be racist”. Expressing some fear but also desire to prove she could be
anti-racist, an Alliance staff member, a white woman, new to the ARG noted in an
email to me,
…I really want to understand…how I can be an effective ally and
not an obnoxious wannabe “good white”! That is very important to
me. I feel like I’m still building trust and relationships in a very
charged and tricky environment that I don’t understand very well,
which makes me very cautious about what I say to whom. But I am
planning to hang in there and hoping I can contribute more over time
(2004).
White people are understood to be unquestionably “obnoxious” if they want
to be “good whites” (liberals who just want to ‘get along’) and they are better when
they have figured out the way to be allies. A white man who became an ARG co-
chair was often apologizing to people of color in the group and being careful not to
challenge them. After this same co-chair wrote a harsh email to the Alliance board
for being too slow in getting on the ‘anti-racism train’, he apologized profusely to
us and the Board (and was reminded for months after by some ARG members of
his wrong doing). When I wanted to quit the ARG out of frustration, I was told by
this white co-chair that this is the luxury of white privilege – to be able to walk
away from the struggle of anti-racism and thus, to counter my white privilege, I
should continue.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 1-28 13
The volatile environment was also produced by people of color. On three
occasions, white women were subjected to harsh words by C__ a man of color.
One was silenced for a suggestion she made and another was held responsible for
something far beyond her control. No one rebuked him. White people were
sometimes described in conference calls as falling back on the safe language of
diversity. They were guilty, some thought, of jumping on the ARG bandwagon
when they had not previously shown interest, but then were criticized for not
joining soon enough. In our online and phone conversations, white people were
encouraged (not required) to wait for the nonwhite people to speak. To speak first
would mean deploying the privilege that enables that speech and further
institutionalizing the silencing of people of color. Some of us (like me) did not
always adhere to this principle, but felt guilty when we did not.
At the 2005 Alliance conference the ARG held two meetings, the first to
invite new members and the second to enable more discussion. I went to the first
during which time, a white woman, N__, suggested that the role of white people in
the ARG should be discussed in the second meeting. The second meeting began
with introductions and answers to the question of why we were interested in the
ARG. The white co-chair said that as a participant in institutionalized racism, he is
less than human. By being part of anti-racist work, he regains his humanity. C__
(mentioned earlier) expressed the pain he had felt from a personal experience as a
teenager and then later in life when his professional credentials were questioned.
Introducing myself, I explained my research on whiteness and anti-racism and
described my work with the ARG over the past two years. Before the next person
had gotten through her introduction, a man of color new to the ARG, J__,
interrupted her saying he was uncomfortable with my research, did not want to be a
subject and further said, as he began to weep, that if I were in his neighborhood in
New York, he would “settle this on the street”. The mostly white audience then
peppered me with questions, but I was not given time to answer. One white woman
said she didn’t agree with the research if it was only for my benefit. Older
grievances were brought up. My stomach twisted. A woman of color who had
recently become active on the ARG burst into tears while expressing the pain I had
caused her when I had (accidentally) interrupted her on a conference call. She
added, “you’re doing research on racism, but practicing white supremacy”. An
interchange between me and N__, was the first time I could speak. It went like this:
N: Did you hear J__?
RS: Yes, I…
N: (interrupts) No. I need to know that you heard him.
RS: Yes, I did hear him.
N: Tell me what he said.
RS: He said he feels pain.
N: Why do you think he feels pain?
RS: Because he is upset about my research, researching here

The Embodied Politics of Pain in US Anti-Racism 14
N: Say why he feels pain.
RS: Because he did not agree to it, but I thought…
N: (interrupts). And what does he want you to do?
RS: He wants me to stop taking notes.
Eventually the group voted to ask me to leave the meeting, which I did,
turning over my notes to one of the white, women members, a friend of mine, who
said she had to do it if she wanted to continue working with the group. During this
process, C__ said that if I did not turn over my notes he would personally go to my
university and get me fired. When I expressed my fear of further repercussions
from the group, a woman of color who had recently joined the ARG said, “but
we’re not like you”, indicating that while the group could be trusted, I could not.
As I began to walk downstairs, a young black man called out to me. He said he
could not let me walk away without speaking to me. This man told me that he had
not known what to say in the meeting but he wanted to tell me that he didn’t feel
that I was hurting him in the way that the others did. He noted that I seemed to
become very powerful in the eyes of the participants – that I became larger than
life. “The others let you take away all of their power”, he said. And the fact that
neither my voice nor my hands shook and I did not cry, he thought, made me even
more of an imposing a figure. Later that evening a white woman who had been
present explained to me, that if I had just showed some emotion, if I had cried, they
might not have been so tough. As Tracy Skelton points out, these demands are
gendered (pers. comm. September 25, 2007).
A Politics of Pain
It is no wonder that these emotions spark forth and leak out when race is
addressed in this way – anti-racism, in these cases, is a politics of pain. It is pain
that is deployed, gets attention and is legitimized (‘oh, you were in pain, we didn’t
know, now we’ll pay attention’). On the one hand, pain is truth. The pain of
subalterns, because of its source, is universally intelligible and already available as
knowledge (Berlant, 2001). Pain, as the focus of interaction keeps anti-racist
politics in the realm of ‘what was done to you’ ‘by’ white people. By keeping the
actions of others as well as the past foregrounded might preclude attention to the
future. Further, if emotional response is the primary means by which racism gets
attention, this belittles racism’s historical and structural significance. Additionally,
regarding white privilege, it is only through painful emotional experience, from
which there is no escape, that whiteness can be learned, according to anti-racism
trainers. Perhaps for some white and nonwhite people this method is cathartic, but
it is also exhausting. Sentimental politics mobilize empathy through stories of
others’ pain (Berlant, 2001) and, in this case, guilt about the white-nonwhite
relation. However, for some middle class white progressives, thinking about others’
suffering could well be transitory; you feel sadness, perhaps quite deeply, and then,
you stop weeping and life moves on. It does not help anti-racism if people feel sad
and guilty about their privilege, bow and scrape because they have been ‘bad

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 1-28 15
whites’, lash out at each other or, finally, leave. This emotionalism grows from the
anti-racist thinking described above.
A “harangue-flagellation” (Lasch-Quinn, 2001, xv) model of anti-racism
that emerged in the 1960s became the basis of present day training techniques.
Initially, this model called for rage on the part of blacks and restrained submission
via admission of guilt for whites (Lasch-Quinn, 2001, xv). Since then, anti-racism
has been ‘enterprised-up’ into a marketable object that continues to rely on
emotionalism rather than critical, subtle analyses. Jo-Anne Lee and John Lutz
(2005, 19) wonder whether the confessional style of moral education applied by
anti-racism will be effective and whether greater awareness of suffering will do
more than make whites feel guilty or simply feel bad. A moral preoccupation is
evident in anti-racist social movements whereby therapy and emotional expression
become associated with social change (Srivastava, 2005).
It is crucial that white people are part of anti-racism and they clearly do
need to recognize the privilege that comes with certain forms of whiteness.
However, the theory and method of anti-racism training and advocacy lend an
emotional intensity to the politics that makes white participation and recognition of
privilege very difficult. Even though anti-racist discourse emphasizes
institutionalized oppression, the techniques are personalized to make people think
about their own privilege. And despite the acknowledgement, eventually, of
privilege, there is a built-in futility – it will take an inestimable amount of time
before white anti-racism trainers entirely understand their privilege, let alone those
who are not trainers. This task of understanding racism is difficult, but the
emphasis on its near impossibility frames racism as a permanent divisive
(interpersonal) presence.
Pain, whether articulated from the position of victim providing a
biographical account or called up by nonprofits to make a point, can escape
accountability and slip around the strategies that aim to harness it. As a researcher,
Gerry Pratt (2007) questioned her right to make people re-experience their pain, to
bring people to tears. She described her feelings about this which occurred when,
while giving a speech, the audience dissolved into tears. At that point someone in
her audience said, ‘let’s change the tears to anger’ (see also her discussion of
melodrama, Pratt, 2004). But unlike researchers, organizations or movements may
not question this right to move people, continuing to use emotion and supplanting
social justice with sentimental politics and the staging of tears. When organizations
raised money to fund advocacy on behalf of young women murdered in the border
town of Ciudad Juarez (see Wright, 2001; 2006), they were susceptible to the
accusation of selling pain (Wright, 2007). Non-governmental organizations fought
over who had the most mothers of the murdered as members and traded on the
legitimacy of the personal testimonial, evoking sorrow that comes to stand for
collective experience. The repetition of stories of pain took diverse experiences and
bundled them into a static image of women as mothers of murdered daughters (not