Brokenheartedness and accountability

ABSTRACT

In this article, I reflect on relationship and movement building across power lines that I have experienced or witnessed in and outside of academia. I argue that the “anesthetic aesthetic” of whiteness, as illuminated by Mab Segrest, compels those like myself who are trained to be white to distance ourselves from the pain and suffering of others (as well as our own) in order to accept and assimilate into the hegemonic normative systems of power. I offer stories from my experience of feminist and queer organizing that demonstrate how this distancing looks and feels, and places of where it might be transformed. Then, I turn to healing justice as a praxis that creates communal spaces for naming, recognizing, and healing from violence, spaces to share our brokenheartedness, and to serve as a way of breaking up the gravitational pulls of white supremacist patriarchy.     

Widening the gap: White ignorance,race relations and the consequences for Aboriginal people in Australia

White ignorance has a critical impact on race relations and is implicated in the maintenance of Aboriginal disadvantage. Addressing this ignorance is a largely overlooked capacity-building opportunity within Australia's non-Aboriginal population. It warrants consideration as a key component of strategies targeting Aboriginal disadvantage. Despite the established links between race relations and Aboriginal well-being, Aboriginal perspectives on non-Aboriginal people rarely feature in public discourse on “Aboriginal problems.” This paper draws on data from 180 in-depth interviews with 44 Aboriginal people in Darwin on the topic of White Australian people, culture and race relations. It reports Aboriginal perceptions of White Australian ignorance across areas of great symbolic and practical significance to Aboriginal people's lives. Their experience is that most White Australians are ignorant of the history of colonisation and the complexities of its aftermath. They are ignorant of Aboriginal law, cultures and languages, and of the extent of their own ignorance. The call to address White ignorance subverts assumptions about whose ignorance and capacity must be dealt with in order to progress national goals of reconciliation, address Aboriginal disadvantage and achieve justice and equality for Aboriginal people.     

Honorary whiteness

‘The fantasy of the exception’ is a seductive trope. More penetrating than any explicit legal codes or political structures, the fantasy is embedded in a constellation of politics and psychology and is linked to both colonial and neocolonial logics. In her book Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, Anne Norton presents the ‘fantasy of the exception’ as luring individuals to repress or magnify parts of their identities in exchange for increased access to political and economic privilege. This study argues that the fantasy of exception is intrinsically intertwined in constructs of ‘honorary whiteness’ as exemplified in the contemporary academy, as well as in colonial and neocolonial constructs of identity. Building on Norton's definition of this fantasy, I examine its colonial roots and contemporary manifestations in the broader neoliberal agenda. In doing so, I will show how the fantasy is exemplified by individuals' aspirations for ‘honorary white’ status, and how their drive to achieve power comes at the expense of the splitting of their selves. By examining the narratives of ‘non-white’ individuals and their struggle for power and identity in the face of colonial and neoliberal orders, the fantasy of exception is revealed as reinforcing inequality and oppression, and ultimately, sustains fabricated differences that fuel the legacy of colonial racism.     

The veil of professionalism: An autoethnographic critique of white positional identities in the figured worlds of white research performance

Two white researchers critique the professional veil of silence they created as they reflected on a qualitative study they performed 12 years earlier. Autoethnography and performance ethnography are utilized to examine the ways in which whiteness can remain unexamined throughout the research process due to the construction of white positional identities within the figured world of research. White privilege and white talk, specifically white silence and hyperpoliteness as they relate to white researchers conducting research, are used critique the research purpose and process. The researchers conclude that white researchers should attend to questions of privilege and white racial identity as they plan, conduct, and disseminate their research.     

Whitened rainbows: how white college students protect whiteness through diversity discourses

This qualitative study investigates white students’ attitudes toward campus diversity at a large, multiracial public university. Drawing upon focus group data gathered from a larger campus climate study, we identified four themes: participants voiced that: (1) racial diversity fosters campus tolerance; (2) diversity fragments into de facto racial segregation; (3) institutional support of diversity undermines and excludes whites; and (4) the university should avoid acknowledging white identity. Employing critical multiculturalism as a theoretical lens, we argue that these discourses maintain white dominance within a framework that promotes inclusion. These findings suggest that without more direct institutional guidance, white students will protect white supremacy even as they celebrate diversity in multiracial spaces.     

A kinder,gentler gentrification: racial identity,social mix and multiculturalism in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood

This paper intervenes on the contemporary Canadian discourse that equates bourgeois self-making practices of progressive urban subjects with moves towards genuine spatial justice. Emerging from a three-year project assessing gentrification Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood, the author probes the dissonance between the triumphalist rhetoric circulated by an anti-gentrification elite and the lived realities of displacement and violence in poor, racialized and mad communities. Using ethnographic observation and analysis of extensive interview data, this paper suggests that the ideas of inclusive urban development often rely on the ejection of intolerable bodies from the sphere of urban life and the simultaneous exaltation of ‘enlightened’ middle-class subjects as the authors and protagonists of social change. Yearning for a better future, this paper functions as a cautionary tale, a warning that so long as race and gender remain secondary sites of investigation and action, work for urban emancipation will reinforce those systems of domination it hopes to oppose.     

The (em)bodiment of blackness in a visceral anti-black racism and ableism context

Over the years, many scholarly publications have extensively discussed disability ‘diagnoses’ and placement practices in special education programs in the United States and the United Kingdom. These publications argue that racism and classism rather than clinically predetermined factors appear to influence the disability diagnosis and placement practices in special education. The present essay is contributing to the debate by critically exploring the relationship(s) between race, class, and disability ‘diagnoses’ and placement practices in special education programs in Toronto, Canada. The core ideas noted in the essay are drawn from a personal story of an African-Canadian parent – a story of a daughter with a diagnosed disability and her mother’s struggle to resist the disability ‘diagnosis’ as well as her battle rejecting her daughter’s placement in the special education program in a Toronto public school. Using this personal account, other literature, and anti-black racism theory, I argue that special education programming in Toronto, Canada helps white middle/upper class Canadians achieve a de facto race/class-based segregation in the Toronto public school system. Whereas the Supreme Courts’ rulings on Brown vs. the Board of Education in the United States and Washington vs. the Trustees of Charlottesville in Canada have insisted that whites and non-whites attend the same school, special education identification practices ensure that whites and non-whites do not have to belong to the same classroom. I conclude that when educational practices move into spaces of pathologization, blacks and working-class students are continually at risk of facing exclusionary practices. One thing is clear: the significance of skin color in the mind of the racist cannot easily be dismissed.     

Whiteness and national identity: teacher discourses in Australian primary schools

The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that fostered different levels of critique among students, teachers often communicated Australian national identity as commensurate to white racial and Anglo-Australian cultural identity. We identified three main approaches teachers used to talk about national identity and cultural diversity: cultural essentialism, race elision and a quasi-critical approach. We conclude that the wider education system needs to develop a more formal curriculum structure that guides teachers in developing a better awareness of the power of white normativity, and to critically and explicitly counter discourse and practice that centres whiteness as foundational to dominant conceptualisations of national identity.     

“That Power and Privilege Thing”: Securing Whiteness in Community Work

In this article, I draw upon written texts and discussions with white community organizers so as to explore how the discourse of community work secure whiteness not as an act of maintaining privilege but as an accepted, unnoticed, and even helpful way of seeing and acting in the world. This is problematic because it creates a space in which there can be ethical white subjects who are able to understand themselves as outside of relations of racism. I suggest that it would be more useful to understand practices in which white people advocate with racialized communities as acts of ambivalence.