Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism
... Such an acknowledgement-or confession-shows we are somehow morally better than other, unaware, white people, while situating racism around comfortably defined boundaries and failing to enact any anti-racist outcome. Without dimming the pervasive misogyny in the academy (Miller, 2019), I realized that as a white, economically advantaged woman, I straddle the oppressed-oppressor line from oppressed womanness, while remaining a social and racial oppressor (Sullivan, 2006(Sullivan, , 2014. Even as racism exists in plain sight, our own racism and privilege remains obscured as an unbreakable hook, despite the proliferation of spaces in which confessions as attempts to unhook are expected and normalized (Lockard, 2016;Sullivan, 2014). ...
... Without dimming the pervasive misogyny in the academy (Miller, 2019), I realized that as a white, economically advantaged woman, I straddle the oppressed-oppressor line from oppressed womanness, while remaining a social and racial oppressor (Sullivan, 2006(Sullivan, , 2014. Even as racism exists in plain sight, our own racism and privilege remains obscured as an unbreakable hook, despite the proliferation of spaces in which confessions as attempts to unhook are expected and normalized (Lockard, 2016;Sullivan, 2014). ...
... That does not mean that I cease to imagine creating and conceptualizing knowledge differently (Dimitriadis, 2016), or that I will cease more complicated efforts to unhook from whiteness-albeit a messy, haphazard, and imperfect pathway toward that unhooking. Instead, "repositioning the hook" (Fashing-Varner et al., 2013, p. 71) reflects efforts toward transforming whiteness (Sullivan, 2014)-of using my privilege against itself-toward vulnerably acknowledging the effects of my scholarly actions and course-correcting for the future (Bailey, 2015). ...
This paper outlines my experience as an early career researcher engaging with my power and privilege embedded in my white, English-speaking identity while working with Mexican American male-identifying research participants. Utilizing critical race theory as a framework, this paper chronicles my reflections on un/hooking from whiteness within the context of scholarly inquiry. Specifically, I draw inspiration from a qualitative research project to anchor the discussion of privileged epistemologies and power structures embedded in the inquiry process and academia more broadly, and how race can intersect with how we negotiate our roles, methods, and subjectivities as qualitative scholars. More broadly, this paper explores notions of knowledge and agency in educational inquiry against the question of whose stories are told, how, for whom, and by whom. This paper contributes to the conversation and efforts toward disentangling from whiteness and the epistemologies around which research, higher education, and society are structured to instead magnify the voices and experiences of participants through more egalitarian inquiry practices.
... The mutual cognitive dissonance we experienced caused us to re-evaluate our ideas and biases related to race. Our experience reflects Sullivan (2014): "The quest for middle-class white people for their moral redemption tends to be especially, though not uniquely attractive to white middle-class women" (p. 6). In other words, White women fixate on their own perceived "goodness" rather than on the realities of racial injustice. ...
... We find it ironic that as adult educators who hope to create transformative learning experiences for our students, this exhibition provided disorienting dilemmas for us that have caused us to re-evaluate our assumptions about race and about ourselves. As Sullivan (2014) wrote, At the heart of this anti-racism, however, is not necessarily an attempt to eliminate racial injustice-which, to be successful, might involve strategies or tactics that don't make white people look or feel morally good-but a desire to be recognized as Not Racist, perhaps especially by people of color. (p. 5) ...
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power is an exhibition of American black artists from the 1960s through 1980s. Originally developed by the Tate Modern in London, the exhibit traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, USA in early 2018. When we visited the exhibition we intended to study how women were represented. Instead we found the experience disturbing and disorienting. We were taken aback by the way the artists incorporated and owned images that we associated with racism, slavery, and segregation. As white, middle-class women from the American south, we felt ill-equipped to formulate an opinion or even to identify the emotions we experienced. We experienced mutual cognitive dissonance, causing us to re-evaluate our ideas and biases related to race. This essay describes our transformative learning in facing and confronting our white privilege and rethinking our attitudes and perceptions of race. Keywords: transformative learning, informal learning, museum, white privilege, adult education
... 165). Among the mechanisms of whiteness are white racial ignorance that obscures how racism is embedded in societal structures, an emphasis on individual intentions and actions, and prioritizing white people's comfort over racial justice [6,[22][23][24][25]. Within schools, many teachers evade information about systemic racism and resist institutional changes intended to advance racial equity and inclusion. ...
... Within the field of education, scholars [8,41] have linked Niceness to concepts from critical theories of race and whiteness such as white fragility [23], emotionalities of whiteness [52], white ignorance [24,53], good white people [25], and color-evasiveness [46,50]. Ethnographic work has shown how Niceness perpetuates racial inequities in schools and districts. ...
As school and district leaders are confronted with explicit opposition to racial equity and inclusion policies and practices, they also continue to contend with Nice resistance. In this ethnographic case study, I draw on interviews with teachers and administrators as well as observations of meetings and professional learning sessions to explore how educational leaders in a predominantly white, small, Midwestern town navigated a culture of Niceness characterized by good intentions, comfort, and avoiding conflict. Though most educators said they supported equity and inclusion, they resisted the administration and the policies and practices administrators implemented. Leaders challenged the culture of Niceness in the school district by focusing on impacts, pushing teachers to do things they were not comfortable with, and having direct conversations. Ultimately, several administrators left the district, and some equity and inclusion efforts were stalled or rolled back. Based on the findings of this study, I conclude that it is difficult to interrupt Niceness in the interest of advancing racial equity and inclusion.
... Para distinguir el conjunto de acciones antirracistas cuestionables que usan las ignorancias audiovisuales, es necesario sumergirse en un entramado de funciones relacionales circunscritas en los debates de la TCR, el racismo y el antirracismo (Al Jazeera English, 2017;Beller, 2018Beller, , 2021McMillan, 2020;Mills, 2007;Sullivan, 2014). La premisa inicial es que la autorregulación del racismo es paradójica y se enuncia con prácticas antirracistas cuestionables sostenidas por creencias falsas o ausencia de creencias reales basadas en observaciones y experiencias, es decir, por las llamadas ignorancias audiovisuales. ...
... A esto se le suma una iluminación racial, porque se es consciente de esta inexorabilidad histórica. Y el peor efecto de esta reflexión, si ni el infalible tiempo ha cambiado el racismo, es que solo queda hacer nada (Jensen, 2015;Sullivan, 2014). Las disculpas para la inacción ya fueron dadas y el peso de lo histórico-social de la estructura racista es irrevocable. ...
Este ensayo reflexiona sobre cómo la alta definición digital de nuestras pantallas es un fenómeno que conjuga con la noción de racismo simbólico a través de la construcción de experiencias placenteras de marcas audiovisuales. Ello sucede porque el HD va sujeto a estructuras neoliberales digitales que llevan a obtener ingresos y fidelidad, pero que construyen paradojas de autorregulación y estructuras racistas inmutables. La interacción de los medios, los productores y las audiencias se ampara en lo que se ha nombrado ignorancias audiovisuales, creencias falsas o ausencia de creencias reales que se condicen con prácticas antirracistas cuestionables que sitúan el problema racista en lo circunstancial, sin llegar a reconfiguraciones críticas ni estructurales.
... A body of literature is emerging to address practical questions as to what applied theatre is and how to respond with appropriate methodologies to address the questions posed (Thompson, 2013;Prentki, 2013;Nicholson, 2014). An emerging theme is, the impact of applied theatre should influence and cause a measurable change beyond the immediate beneficiaries of a project, supporting audience members and those participating to feel less oppressed and more empowered (Boal, 2008;Prentki and Preston, 2008;Taylor, 2003;Sullivan, 2014). Despite a universal acceptance within commerce and government that there are positive social impacts because of the arts, there is little robust empirical evidence to prove this (Landry et al., 1993, Matarasso, 1997Jermyn, 2001;Reeves, 2002;Knowles and Cole, 2008). ...
Sex work, encompassing the exchange of sexual services for material gain, presents a complex and sensitive research terrain, associated with stigma and entrenched debates within feminism. This evaluation's central objective was to engage in a community-based dialogue, eliciting perspectives from a diverse range of participants, including audience members, women with lived experience of sex work, users of addiction services, and expert commentators, in response to the themes explored in the play 'Madame Geneva: A Tale of Gin and Prostitution'. This article delves into the study's findings, with a particular focus on the portrayal of sex work in contemporary Northern Irish society. The study demonstrates how the arts, particularly dramatic representations, serve as a potential catalyst for instigating essential and pragmatic policy discussions on issues that impact women and society at large. The findings shed light on the ongoing challenges faced by women in Northern Ireland within the context of sex work, revealing persistently high levels of oppression and discrimination. These issues often remain entangled within a male-dominated political discourse and structural frameworks, underscoring the urgent need for critical examination and reform.
... To further understand the relationship between hazing and whiteness, this study extends previous work by Harris and colleagues (2019) who are examined the functionality of whiteness as property in sorority and fraternity life by further connecting the practices thereof to white normativity and white racial ignorance within the context of historically predominantly white institutions' traditions. Conceptualizing campus traditions through the lenses of whiteness as property, white racial ignorance, and white racial comfort, is an active process that challenges the preoccupation many white people have with notions of goodness and racial innocence related to traditions (Applebaum, 2014;Sullivan, 2014) and moves toward an understanding of complicity regardless of intention (Applebaum, 2010;Foste & Jones, 2020;Yancy, 2015). Both private and public spaces at historically predominantly white institutions promote white supremacy and continue to oppress Students, Faculty, and Staff of Color in all spaces. ...
... Such framing of first-generation Canadians does little to encourage deeper forms of integration through genuine curiosity about others, or to challenge the arrogance of many white settler Canadians of Anglo-Celtic or French ethnicity. The prominence of these narratives in the Canadian mainstream, in fact, fosters such arrogance and reinforces self/representations of Canada as the 'good, white, liberal' and savior nation, as attitudes reflecting colonial ideology passed down from the British empire (Stevens 2020;Sullivan 2014). ...
This paper is based on a conversation I had with D.Š., a 42-year-old woman who emigrated to Nova Scotia in 2014 from Bosnia and Herzegovina with her husband and young son. We met in December 2022 to talk about the idea of 'home' when it comes to being an immigrant and a first-generation Canadian. As a first-generation Canadian who emigrated to Canada from the former Yugoslavia in 1992 and someone who has been personally interested in diasporic identities in the Canadian context, I found D.Š.'s perspective meaningful and illustrative of many issues relating to challenges and potentials in Canada's official status as a multicultural nation. D.Š.'s narrative identifies, restructures, and deconstructs in multiple ways a key social boundary, 'foreignness,' which is embedded in the practice of homemaking and the process of integration understood as relational. My analysis of D.Š.'s narrative is conceptualized in terms of the identity work that is required of all Canadians for Canada to live up to its official status as a multicultural country. In the analysis, I draw upon the philosophy of encounter, the concept of 'homemaking' and recent studies on relational integration. The paper engages empirically the meaning of relational integration in the context of everyday 'homemaking.' Résumé: Cet article est fondé sur une conversation que j'ai eue avec D.Š. une femme de 42 ans qui a émigré de Bosnie-Herzégovine pour la Nouvelle-Écosse en 2014 avec son mari et son jeune fils. Nous nous sommes rencontrées en décembre 2022 pour parler de l'idée de "chez soi" en tant qu'immigrante et Canadienne de première génération. En tant que Canadienne de première génération ayant émigré au Canada depuis l'ex-Yougoslavie en 1992 et m'étant personnellement intéressée aux identités diasporiques dans le contexte canadien, j'ai trouvé le point de vue de D.Š. significatif et illustrant de nombreuses questions relatives aux défis et aux potentiels du statut officiel du Canada en tant que nation multiculturelle. Le récit de D.Š. identifie, restructure et déconstruit de multiples façons une frontière sociale clé, l'"extranéité," qui est ancrée dans la pratique du ménage et dans le processus d'intégration compris comme relationnel. Mon analyse du récit de D.Š. est conceptualisée en termes de travail identitaire requis de tous les Canadiens pour que le Canada soit à la hauteur de son statut officiel de pays multiculturel. Dans cette analyse, je m'appuie sur la philosophie de la rencontre, le concept de "hospitalité" et des études récentes sur l'intégration relationnelle. L'article aborde de manière empirique la signification de l'intégration relationnelle dans le contexte du "hospitalité" quotidien.
... This account of the origins of resilience research provides a fairly simple example of the need to decolonize American psychology and its history. The first generation of resilience researchers were, we can assume, "Good White People" (Sullivan, 2014 ). But, they were in thrall to the unexamined world view of White middle class folks. ...
In earlier work, I addressed questions regarding how psychology or psychological constructs get taken up in different cultural settings. I used the term indigenous psychologies and the term indigenization to describe the process of cultural uptake. My approach fit within a larger project examining transnational/ transcultural transfer of knowledge and practice. If, as anthropologist Richard Shweder famously argued, culture and psyche make each other up then it is relevant to ask about the admixture. I would argue that culture and psychology hold each other in a reflexive embrace. Every culture holds within itself the materials for psychological thought and praxis, while the enactment of psyche molds the culture in which it emerges (Shweder, 1991). But the embrace is never static, as cultures/ psychologies are dynamic, permeable, and fluid, with constant borrowing and adapting of ideas and practices in the nexus of cultural contact zones. This reflexivity plays out in historical contexts that facilitate horizons of significance crucial for personal and cultural identity (C. Taylor, 1995). What has this meant for our understanding of the history of psychological research on resilience? For surely, resilience is culturally constructed and historically situated (Ungar, 2008 , 2012). In this chapter, I reexamine my work on indigenization to ask questions about colonization and power relations as aspects of the history of oppression. I then propose the possibility of using a cultural lens to begin the process of decolonizing psychology and its history. I use as my example the internal colonization of people of African descent in the United States of America (USA) and the historical role of psychologists in constructing the concept of resilience. Local knowledge meets cultural contact zones Decolonizing the mind (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1986) is essential for the minds of both the colonized and the colonizers. On neither side can the colonial legacy 9781138677210_pi-428.indd 220 9781138677210_pi-428.indd 220
... The majority need to agree that the system is fair, which underscores the importance of promoting the American Dream ideology discussed previously. And if people do not generally see the system as just, stoking the fires of racial and political acrimony can allay the prospect of any united opposition (Sullivan, 2014). ...
In what ways does access to economic or cultural resources impact success within the context of educational wind bands?
How do issues of social class or the distribution of wealth relate to broader questions of social justice within the context of instrumental music education?
... Yet, I argue that colonial care is ordinary in, and consistent with, White supremacy. The following example, coming from contemporary Germany and the discourse around the integration of Muslim men with refugee backgrounds working in the eldercare sector, brings to the fore that many of the same discursive figures of rescue and help are employed by "good White people" (Sullivan 2014). Colonial care discourses continue to be employed in cases where by helping the "other, " privileged subjects make sure to help themselves in the process. ...
This article adds to critiques of discourses and practices of care that are enmeshed with coloniality. It does so via examining the prominent model of helping marginalized people through giving them the opportunity to care for themselves and their own by being recruited into paid (care) work, thus, becoming “useful” participants in society. This usefulness is read as a colonial project of subordinate inclusion into neoliberal racial capitalism. A perverse ideology of care is mobilized to extract surplus value from marginalized workers “integrated” into the lower echelons of social reproduction. Using historic and contemporary examples, the argument is developed in three steps: First, I discuss how care workers are included via subordination. Second, I analyze how an inversion of care receiver and caregiver transforms marginalized care workers into recipients of integration measures, rendering their care work invisible. Third, I show how racial usefulness, the interpellation that racialized workers be/come “useful,” is undergirded by productivism within neoliberal racial capitalism.
... The consequences of this are apparent today in the brutalising impacts of institutionalised racism on the social, physical, sexual, emotional, and economic lives of African Americans. Sullivan (2014) identifies common attitudes among well-meaning white people and unravels the complicated relationships between race and class in contemporary supremacist sections of white society. She argues that whites need to transform their whiteness and supremacy in the pursuit of racial justice. ...
As the world continues to struggle with violence and the devastating legacies of racism, colonialism, and slavery, the systems and structures designed to subjugate and enslave fellow human beings still plague human society, even in an age of human dignity, freedom, and civil liberties. The brutal murders, lynching, and crimes of hate we witness against black people in America point to the existence of racism as a thriving, underground force, often institutionalised and perpetuated by the very system mandated to eradicate this menace. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye offers several insights into how inhuman portrayals of black people inform white discourse. Blackness evokes fear and insecurity in the minds of white supremacists, and systemic racism even creates a hierarchy among black people. Some, having grown up with a deeply disturbing self-image, develop an all-consuming desire to be white in order to count as human. This study focuses on how racism is perpetuated by financial interests and white supremacy, coupled with discrimination and prejudice within law enforcement and ambiguities in the laws enacted to eradicate these issues. The study suggests that systemic racism dehumanises not only the black victims but also the white oppressors, distorting perspectives and perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence.
... For this woman, as for Moran, "the civil rights struggle was not about freedom for us all, it was about acquiring a kind of purchase on black life" (Holland, 2012, p. 2). Such emotionally charged attitudes permeate White society, regardless of gender or education level (Jensen, 2005;Roediger, 1999;Sullivan, 2014). ...
... Historically and contemporarily, white women play powerful roles in excluding People of Color from whiteness's privileges (Harris, 1993). Research on white women's racial identity exploration demonstrates white women seek to be seen as good (Applebaum, 2010;Sullivan, 2014), kind, and not racist (Linder, 2015) while resisting race cognizance through color-evasive discourses and emotional outbursts that further harm People of Color, particularly Women of Color (Accapadi, 2007;Watt, 2007). White women may talk about race in nice and color-evasive ways (e.g., attribute instances of racism to other causes) and respond with tears or anger when challenged (Accapadi, 2007;Wegwert & Charles, 2019). ...
Critical and justice-oriented approaches to leadership are incomplete without attention to racism and racialization. This study employed basic qualitative inquiry to examine racialized legitimation within student affairs leadership education through lenses of whiteness as property and legitimacy. Findings detail how leadership educators sought to gain and/or maintain legitimacy and the ways racialization is embedded in these processes through professional experiences, leadership knowledge, and identity. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
... Yet, anti-racism has also been criticised for putting emphasis on white people (Lawrence and Dua, 2005;McWhorter, 2021;Sullivan, 2014); and on convincing them to accept, in mind, spirit and body, the equality of all human beings and act as such (Noon, 2018). Historically, abolitionist movements worldwide and many civil rights leaders after them have essentially appealed to the white ruling class, while these struggles have mainly involved resistance against white domination and oppression of racial minorities and the dismantling of settler colonialism. ...
Racism and anti-racism have received widespread attention in academic debates and public discourse. Having universal features, racism manifests differently nationally and locally, and has been met with diverse anti-racism efforts. Despite historical achievements of struggles against racial oppression, racism endures, and continues to evolve and adapt, posing challenges to racial justice and equity. Parallel to this, anti-racism scholarship and action have evolved over the past decade, targeting an increasing number of arenas of everyday life. However, the place of anti-racism within organisations remains overwhelmingly peripheral and often tokenistic. This article draws attention to this and argues for re-imagining anti-racism as a core organisational value. We critically evaluate current anti-racism practices, and call for broader, holistic, committed and well-funded anti-racism approaches within organisations. We then argue why establishing anti-racism as a core organisational value may help in addressing systemic/structural racism.
... Yet, anti-racism has also been criticised for putting emphasis on white people (Lawrence and Dua, 2005;McWhorter, 2021;Sullivan, 2014); and on convincing them to accept, in mind, spirit and body, the equality of all human beings and act as such (Noon, 2018). Historically, abolitionist movements worldwide and many civil rights leaders after them have essentially appealed to the white ruling class, while these struggles have mainly involved resistance against white domination and oppression of racial minorities and the dismantling of settler colonialism. ...
Racism and anti-racism have received widespread attention in academic debates and public discourse. Having universal features, racism manifests differently nationally and locally, and has been met with diverse anti-racism efforts. Despite historical achievements of struggles against racial oppression, racism endures, and continues to evolve and adapt, posing challenges to racial justice and equity. Parallel to this, anti-racism scholarship and action have evolved over the past decade, targeting an increasing number of arenas of everyday life. However, the place of anti-racism within organisations remains overwhelmingly peripheral and often tokenistic. This article draws attention to this and argues for re-imagining anti-racism as a core organisational value. We critically evaluate current anti-racism practices, and call for broader, holistic, committed and well-funded anti-racism approaches within organisations. We then argue why establishing anti-racism as a core organisational value may help in addressing systemic/structural racism.
JEL Classification
J15, J71, M14, Z13
... In other words, racist individuals can be characterized as "bad" people who can, in theory, be corrected and taught to not be racist. They confirm the normative position of "good white people," reinforcing a liberal view of "race" and racism in a postracial society (Sullivan 2014). ...
The university is situated within white colonial projects that underpin the nation in the UK, US and Canada. While the institutional whiteness of universities reflects these structural conditions of whiteness in society, it is also more flexible and dynamic in the present, reflecting both national and transnational racial politics. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 and student movements calling on universities to be accountable for their ties to slavery and colonialism have made this connection visible. In this context, this paper examines how racial politics affects postracial whiteness in the university, using two cases from a British and Canadian university, respectively, and drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2007;, 2019) work on whiteness and the university and David Theo Goldberg’s (2015) theorization of the postracial.
Il saggio esplora le concettualizzazioni di apprendimento trasformativo che il femminismo postumano delineato da Braidotti (2022a, 2023) e quello intersezionale entro cui si inserisce il contributo di bell hooks (2004, 2010) offrono a studiose/i e practitioner impegnate/i nella pratica di promuoverne lo sviluppo in contesti educativi e formativi. Sono affrontati i limiti delle teorie individuali dell’apprendimento trasformativo (Mezirow, 1998, 2000; Cranton, 2000; Daloz, 2000; Dirx, 2006) e analizzate categorie sociali fondamentali, quali classe, razza, genere e orientamento sessuale, età e conformazione fisica, come centrali per comprendere a coltivarne la dimensione emancipatoria nei setting educativi e costruire le nostre identità professionali bianche in senso antirazzista e femminista – abbandonando il mito dell’epistemologia bianca o Euro-Americana (Brookfield, 2014, 2021; Teo, 2022) della facilitazione neutrale e non impositiva.
Urban nature stewardships can connect people to nature in their neighbourhood, foster a sense of belonging and citizenship, and increase well-being and place-making. This article examines how race intersects with urban nature stewardship, via a critical autoethnography by two co-authors who are racialised volunteers, Black and South Asian, in stewardship projects. Race is centered as a unit of analysis. In Toronto, Canada, racialised people are the majority of the population but are noticeable by their absence in nature stewardships and the broader environmentalism. Most urban nature stewardships operate on a colour-blind approach which masks how systemic racial inequities shape stewardship projects at the personal, place-making, and ecological levels. The article is illustrated by stewardship in tree planting and community gardens as urban ecology restoration projects. It concludes with some recommendations on how to engage racialised volunteers in nature stewardship.
We know relatively little about how to mobilize and sustain White involvement in politically impactful, antiracist collective action. Adding to the literature on the vexations of White people’s approaches to antiracism, this study takes the case of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national organization that seeks to bring a critical mass of U.S.-based White people into antiracist campaigns at a scale not previously attempted. It traces the shift from a White privilege analytic that has been dominant in many White-led antiracist spaces, often in ways that can be individualizing and depoliticizing, to a “mutual” or “shared” interest approach, which identifies White people’s own stake in dismantling White supremacy, though not without its own perils. Findings suggest that a mutual interest orientation prioritizes collective action over personal morality, holding important benefits for the recruitment, retention, and principled engagement of White people in racial justice struggles.
This theoretical paper proposes to expand our understanding of ‘confessions of racism’ in the context of anti-racist education through the lens of ‘affective governmentality’. Confessions of racism are admissions of racism or declarations of privilege that foreground self-criticism and self-purification. The notion of affective governmentality turns attention to how confessions of racism function to normalize psychologized, individualized and depoliticized understandings of racism. Rather than outrightly dismissing confessions of racism though, given their probable persistence in popular and education discourses, an attempt is made here to re-frame them in order to highlight structural racism and inspire transformative action. It is argued that this re-framing could provide students and educators engaged in anti-racist education with a more effective path ahead. The paper concludes by suggesting that confessions of racism are used pedagogically in the classroom to revitalize attention to structural racism and transformative action rather than to foreground self-criticism and self-purification.
This article argues that racism is pervasive in China's English language teaching (ELT) industry, yet it is often ignored. It presents that English language education in China should be understood historically in a way that recognizes English as a racializing technology. As a race‐making technology, English has continued making modern Chinese subjects while also posing a threat to Chineseness in the 21st century. This intertwining of race and the English language has translated into a massive ELT industry in China that reproduces whiteness, influencing hiring practices and preferences for White English teachers. Additionally, race intersects with gender, nationality, and class, leading to a highly racialized and gendered ELT industry, exemplified in discourses of “foreign experts” and “foreign trash” popular in China's context. The article concludes by asserting that the English language, as a race‐making technology, has structured the ELT industry, and discussing its implications for future research and practical changes to challenge intersectional racism in the industry.
This paper considers two conceptual expansions of Du Boisian double consciousness—white double consciousness (Alcoff 2015) and kaleidoscopic consciousness (Medina 2013)—both of which aim to articulate the moral-epistemic potential of cultivating double consciousness from racially dominant or other socially privileged positions. We analyze these concepts and challenge them on the grounds that they lack continuity with their Du Boisian predecessor and face problems of practical feasibility. As we show, these expansions obscure structural barriers that make white double consciousness and kaleidoscopic consciousness unlikely antidotes to the kind of racial domination that double consciousness was introduced to illuminate. We conclude that while more intersectional and pluralistic accounts of double consciousness may be desirable, the project of expansion has moral limits. Identifying these limitations, we outline ways in which double consciousness—as a tool for conceptualizing the genealogy of structural anti-Blackness—remains valuable in the absence of ever-expanding revision.
Given the abolitionism professed by successive labor leaders in the years following the U.S. Civil War, why did the cause of interracial solidarity fail to gain traction in postbellum organized labor? Drawing on archival and secondary data on the encounter of Black and White labor from Reconstruction to the turn of the twentieth century, we trace the failure of interracial solidarity to the labor movement’s refusal to reckon institutionally with what Hartman calls the “nonevent of emancipation” and the “afterlife of slavery” for Black populations. Enslaved artisans dominated the skilled trades before the war, and White unions emerged correspondingly to exclude Black labor. When, after the Civil War, the formerly enslaved began to argue that they were being excluded from unions, White labor used emancipation as an anti-Black discursive technology to deny those claims. White labor also employed violence to exclude Black people from the labor movement. By addressing the research puzzle in this way, we offer a novel synthesis of Black studies and the sparse but important body of work on the sociology of slavery to reframe the mainstream approach to interracial solidarity in the sociology of labor and labor movements.
In this paper we analyze the relationship between antiracism and black self-defense. We draw a distinction between liberal and political black self-defense and argue that antiracism can at most sanction a juridical and individualistic notion of self-defense rather than a communal one. We argue that any and all theoretical conceptions of contestation, resistance, or revolution need to seriously grapple with the necessity of theorizing black self-defense. In doing so, we thematize antiblack violence through accounts of self-defense given by black radicals. Together, these arguments outline a perpetual conditional threat of violence against any and all black freedom projects, which in turn justifies enunciative black counterviolence.
In this chapter, we reference and explain the most relevant theories, frameworks, key terms, and concepts that led to the development and understanding of the gendered transaction of whiteness. Because of the distinctive position white women occupy within society and educational spaces as oppressed and oppressor, we offer readers foundational knowledge about the meaning of whiteness and specific framings related to white women that inform our understanding of the transactional nature of whiteness, such as: white matriarchy, white benevolence, and white women’s victimhood. We offer what each of these concepts and frameworks look like in practice, and we conclude with a clear articulation of what it means to transact whiteness.
This chapter focuses on the role white women play in social justice work in education and how whiteness is reified and transacted within spaces seemingly dedicated to antiracism and racial equity. We posit that white women play an outsized role in social justice initiatives in educational spaces and, through this work, recenter and transact whiteness. To demonstrate how whiteness is transacted, we highlight specific rituals performed by white women in the context of social justice education that reify whiteness and thereby present obstacles to social justice. We examine how these rituals manifest, how readers may recognize them in context, and how they function in relation to each other to uphold the affective and communicative norms of whiteness that remain hegemonic particularly within education institutions.
This chapter explores how paternalism and patriarchal whiteness manifest in classroom instruction in primary, secondary, and postsecondary education. By doing so, it begins to offer how whiteness is transacted and gendered, more specifically the transactional approaches of white women in the educational context. This chapter also offers an explanation of how white women steward both white supremacy and patriarchy through their behaviors and actions as educators.
This chapter turns to John A. Williams’ Night Song (1961) as a Black humanist novel to study its profound analysis of the workings of race and how they impede on interracial relationships. Racial habits and embodied whiteness stand in the way of true friendship and romantic relationships. At the same time, the author argues that the novel offers glimpses of how a love ethic as found in Cornel West’s work can begin to undo white supremacy’s impact. Consequently, the novel explores both the failure and possibilities of intersubjective ties under the constraints of an antiblack world.
In my previous chapter (see Evans, Chapter 5, this volume) I defined the theoretical frame of the Establishment man as a utility term and his colonising behaviours through the SDGs. I also explored concepts of Whiteness, Blackcuriosity, and faux-wokeness, and illustrated how the Establishment man weaponises these in his pursuits of perpetual colonisation globally.
Volunteer moderators serve as gatekeepers for problematic content, such as racism and other forms of hate speech, on digital platforms. Prior studies have reported volunteer moderators' diverse roles in different governance models, highlighting the tensions between moderators and other stakeholders (e.g., administrative teams and users). Building upon prior research, this paper focuses on how volunteer moderators moderate racist content and how a platform's governance influences these practices. To understand how moderators deal with racist content, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 moderators from city subreddits on Reddit. We found that moderators heavily relied on AutoMod to regulate racist content and racist user accounts. However, content that was crafted through covert racism and "color-blind'' racial frames was not addressed well. We attributed these challenges in moderating racist content to (1) moderators' concerns of power corruption, (2) arbitrary moderator team structures, and (3) evolving forms of covert racism. Our results demonstrate that decentralized governance on Reddit could not support local efforts to regulate color-blind racism. Finally, we discuss the conceptual and practical ways to disrupt color-blind moderation.
This article aims to synthesize the extant literature that brings sociological analysis to the context, production and perpetuation of the antiracist identity. Our aim is to distinguish this analysis from the huge body of literature written from inside antiracism. Antiracism began in the latter half of the twentieth century. This examination reveals antiracism as an identity and a project of organizational production maintained through discursive and symbolic formations and institutionalized forms of governance. Its members espouse easily digestible ‘common sense’ ideologies of racism and anti-racism premised on a belief in the ‘absolute nature’ of categories of ethnicity and race. It then builds on this discursive framing with commensurate solutions at these levels. It does this through discursive projects and codification of institutional self governance. However, this racializing identity work may perpetuate racism through its classifications and its obfuscation of class privilege and economic inequalities. Its ever-expanding codified extension into organizations, businesses and global grassroots movements calls for a critical lens to direct historical, economic and political analysis onto the obfuscating work of this identity.
One Monday night, I am sitting around a table with a group of men at one of the monthly meetings with the Fathers’ Group, a support group for a dozen of men who have been meeting for 15 years. Each monthly meeting is about a particular topic. This one in particular is about parenting and the issues of race and racism. The meeting occurs after a consecutive string of high-profile police shootings of Black men happened throughout the country. Pete recalls out loud a private conversation with Mathias, who he is friends with, about the recent events, a conversation which “brought up the dynamics of us and how there’s so many … types of men that we are as parents, as men, as races”. The meeting’s agenda was to “raise awareness”. Mathias and Pete, two Black men, were running the meeting.
In this chapter, the premise established in the introductory chapter is developed and elaborated. The new racial sensibility is described as a popular cultural form which expresses a specific relationship to textual and verbal expression. The therapeutic appeal to white interiority that it pursues is read in relation to wider emotional patterns which disrupt the white subject through experiences of shame. In response to such a disruption, the textual form of the new racial sensibility imposes narrative and discursive coherence through a discourse on white interiority intended to offset shame’s disruptive effects. Moreover, this wider tendency is read through Michel Foucault’s theory of subjection, translated from a field of discourse to one of affect, specifically shame and guilt.KeywordsShameGuiltWokeDiscourseFoucaultSubjection
Throughout his career, Kenny G has been heralded by some audiences as a jazz icon, even as he portrays ambivalence toward well-recognized jazz histories and is often critiqued by self-described members of jazz communities. By diving deeply into the cringe-worthy moments in which Kenny G’s refusal of jazz knowledge are most evident, Klotz examines Kenny G’s performance of white ignorance as a form of white privilege. The essay closes with a meditation on what exclusion of Kenny G might tell jazz scholars about gender exclusivity and the jazz genre.
Societal hauntings overlap with, and yet are distinct from, individual traumas. They are nested systems with interrelated dynamics. Weaving insights from clinical interactions, an incident in a professional space, and her personal experiences, the author explores conceptual expansions that move clinical and personal work beyond the realm of trauma-based language of victim and perpetrator into the realm of implication. Examples of how societal hauntings inform the shape of individual and familial trauma are explored as the author acknowledges the interpenetrating and clashing experiences of injustice, trauma, and privilege. The article concludes with a reminder of how psychoanalysis can be a crucible in which these contradictory experiences can be welcomed and transformed if we are willing to move through our own shame and beyond our individual and collective silence.
This doctoral dissertation has as its main focus the discussion of an English language education experience from a posthumanist perspective. This study was done with a group of six students at a private language school located in Goiânia, in the state of Goiás, in the Central West region of Brazil, in 2019. In addition to being the inquirer, I was also the teacher of that group. In this investigation, supported by arguments from posthumanism aligned with critical applied linguistics, I seek to promote a deconstruction of understandings of what it means to be human, along with the questioning of what language is and what it involves, and the problematization of relations between human and nonhuman entities. In this regard, materiality and discourse are conceived as intertwined. This undertaking is grounded in reflections from postqualitative inquiry and postfoundational frameworks; more specifically, it is characterized as a posthumanist study. For the generation of empirical material, which occurred from August to December (i.e., during one semester), the apparatuses that became part of the study were the following: a) an initial questionnaire; b) classroom intra-actions with the learners, which were filmed, audio recorded, and transcribed; c) students’ activities done throughout the semester; d) reflective and diffractive field notes; and e) intraviews. The discussion of the empirical material is divided into two main topics: sociomateriality of (human) bodies and material-discursive ideologies of language and language education. As posthumanist scholars have pointed out, by and large, academics involved in the humanities and social sciences have often neglected material aspects when it comes to discourse, and because of that my objective is to problematize not simply social aspects (as it has been the focus of critical applied linguistics), but rather sociomaterial ones, based on the events that occurred throughout the study. As unfoldings of this experience, the reflections on bodies, issues of identity, especially class, race and ethnicity, gender, and age presented in this work offer a post-anthropocentric viewpoint from events that the students and I experienced. Regarding language and language education, I discuss the learners’ perceptions, attitudes, and actions as well as my own as material-discursive practices, with a focus on our intra-actions with the classroomscape and technologies, the assessment and tests, and their language learning projects. As I draw on the aforementioned perspectives, I aim to show how matter mattered in this language education experience.
This article puts forth a malleable framework for critical reflective practice that includes five movements: intention, flashpoint, description, consciousness, and transformation. The framework emerges from the authors’ developing attempts to continuously enact a praxis that moves pedagogy towards anti-oppressive teaching, learning, and curriculum in art education learning spaces. The authors see arts learning spaces as contexts for meaningful engagement of sociocultural differences such as race, gender, ethnicity, class, and so on via artmaking, dialogue, and interpretation. This article delineates how art educators can begin to enact a critical reflective practice.
In this article, we report the results of a randomized controlled experiment that examines how exposure to information about a global pandemic from Asia affects white Americans’ prosocial behavior towards white, black, and Asian Americans. We find that when exposed to a new disease threat from Asia, (1) white Americans donate significantly less money to Asian American recipients than to white or black American recipients, (2) liberals and conservatives are equally likely to discriminate, and (3) a significant spike in media attention about violence against Asians inhibited this discriminatory behavior—at least temporarily. Our experiment allows us to rule out alternative explanations for the unequal treatment of Asian Americans, providing evidence of a causal link between the COVID-19 pandemic and racial discrimination. The study contributes to knowledge about the spillover effects of external threats on race relations and has implications for public health and science communication.
While race and racism have never stopped being urgent issues for many communities of color, talk about race, racism, and racial justice have once again become a central part of mainstream social and political discourse in America. But while critical phenomenologists have offered many accounts of what it is like to live in a world shaped by racism—particularly in terms of embodiment—they have not drawn attention to questions about what it is like to live in a world increasingly shaped by anti-racist sentiment and action, the kind of world in which the question of critical phenomenology’s contribution to projects of racial justice can itself arise. In this paper, I argue that one avenue to approach the silence in critical phenomenology around the experiences and habits of anti-racism as they circulate in our discourse is to draw attention to how critical phenomenology, as it turns to questions of race, tends to turn away from explorations of language. Interrogating how critical phenomenologists approaching racial issues have managed to escape explicitly thematizing language, I argue that this occlusion of language by critical phenomenology consequently leaves behind resources through which to ask ourselves what is happening as we articulate increasingly taken-for-granted ways of speaking and living out an opposition to racism.
Following the brutal murder of George Floyd by police office Derek Chauvin in summer 2020, interest in so-called “diversity” initiatives in schools of music across the U.S. and Canada has exploded. In this article, I put forward Derrick Bell’s (1995) principle of interest convergence—a key tenet of critical race theory (CRT)— in order to explore a possible convergence of interests in “diversity work” between white and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups in higher education music institutions. I examine music institutions’ performances of “wokeness” at this time and then consider what Sara Ahmed (2012) calls the “nonperformative” to interrogate the convergence of white interests with the interests of BIPOC communities. To conclude, I put forward ways to capitalize on this interest convergence through curricular and policy change in higher education music institutions.
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