Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness

Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, Thomas K. Nakayama, Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, Thomas K. Nakayama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351396745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The field of communication offers the study of whiteness a focus on discourse which directs its attention to the everyday experiences of whiteness through regimes of truth, embodied acts, and the deconstruction of mediated texts. This book takes an intersectional approach to whiteness studies, researching whiteness through rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, performance studies, and interpretive research.

More specifically the chapters deconstruct the communicative power of whiteness in the context of the United States, but with discussion of the implications of this power internationally, by taking on relevant and current topics such as terrorism, post-colonial challenges, white fragility at the national level, the emergence of colorblind discourse as a pro-white discursive strategy, the relationship of people of color with and through whiteness, as well as multifaceted identities that intersect with whiteness, including religion, masculinity and femininity, social class, ability, and sexuality.

1 Introduction

Introducing Twenty-first Century Whiteness or “Everything Old Is New Again”

Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon and Thomas K. Nakayama

Since, and even prior to, the founding of the United States, whiteness has been a persistent part of the lives of those residing within its borders (Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Fleming, 2017; Lacy, 2008; Lipsitz, 1998; Moon, 2016). In reality, there was no United States prior to White supremacy as the country and the ideology evolved together (Allen, 2012; Fleming, 2017). Historically, whiteness has been painstakingly developed and articulated by Whites, and meticulously enshrined in laws (e.g., marriage, citizenship), social policies (e.g., voting rights, immigration, housing, education), religious discourse (especially Christianity), and the social and physical sciences (Lipsitz, 1998). For hundreds of years, White people knew that they were White and were quite clear on the social, political, and material benefits implicated in that subject position and often were willing to kill (and did so) to protect those benefits.

With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended legal segregation in public places and attempted to introduce a “color-blind” standard into hiring and college admission practices, whiteness apparently “disappeared” only to be reborn as “color-blind discourse,” which asserted that race was no longer a “thing” and that people are now to be judged based on their character rather than on the color of their skin. In the color-blind era, whiteness went “underground” so to speak and became less overt and more coded. Moon (1999) refers to this code as “Whitespeak,” wherein racially loaded euphemisms (i.e., welfare, crime, affirmative action, reverse racism, immigration) and platitudes (i.e., “Make America Great Again”) are used in place of overt racist speech, but to accomplish the same goals. Color-blind discourse had no intention of challenging White supremacist ideology on which whiteness is built, nor did it, thus racial life remained relatively unchanged. With the 2016 Presidential race and the rise of Donald Trump, whiteness once again took a turn. Some see the current era as just plain “old school white supremacy”—more of the same—while others are confused, shocked, and paralyzed by recent events such as Charlottesville. Fleming (2017) notes that, “it is clear that our nation is in the midst of a very public—and painful—reckoning with the memory (and ongoing realities) of white supremacy” (para. 1). The twists and turns of whiteness are strategic (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) and related to the long-term overall aims and interests of White hegemony and the continual development of the means to achieve these aims and interests.

To say that whiteness is strategic and dynamic is, on the one hand, nothing revolutionary or groundbreaking. Since its legal establishment in the first Naturalization law of the United States which said that only “free, white persons” were eligible for citizenship, whiteness and who counted as “white” has never been stable. The legal advantages of being classified as “white” led to hundreds of court cases in which people from all over the world petitioned the courts to be classified as “white” (Haney-Lopez, 1996). At the same time, many laws were also passed in which racial restrictions became a part of everyday life, including anti-miscegenation laws, Jim Crow laws, alien land laws, Indian removal acts, and more.

On the other hand, whiteness also has a stability and a coherency to it. Whiteness does not simply change in random ways; it maneuvers based on past communicative patterns and, in response, to changing social conditions. As detailed earlier, throughout our history, whiteness has redefined and repositioned itself repeatedly to a static position of power and privilege. The category of “white” has expanded and contracted as needed. For example, the definition of “white” was expanded to include Irish and Irish Americans (Ignatiev, 1995). Not only were initially racially questionable European groups strategically incorporated into the “white” racial category as the need arose (Jacobson, 1999), but in the 1980s, the creation of the “white Hispanic” census category opened up whiteness (at least in name) to many Latinx peoples (Yancey, 2003).

It is in this dialectical tension between the dynamic nature of whiteness and its static character that we are walking as we watch the terrain of whiteness shifting tremendously in the twenty-first century. In the post-World War II era, social change was on the horizon at the same time that a return to “normal” was planned. The rise of the civil rights movement, the gay liberation movement, the women’s liberation movement, and many other racial, sexual, and gender movements pushed remarkable change across the social scene in the latter half of the twentieth century. As we enter the twenty-first century, whiteness is responding and reconfiguring the social scene yet again.

In the current climate, there are a number of forces that are pushing the repositioning of whiteness. Among these are the U.S. Census Bureau’s projection that Whites will become a minority in about 2044 and the Pew Research Center’s estimates that this will happen in 2055 (Horowitz, 2016). We note these statistics to point to the future of White racial anxiety fueled by racial uncertainty. With the loss of majority status, Whites are situated in new spaces of race relations that create a perception of losing power. In turn this results in a backlash of White racism among Whites. One major repercussion of these White racial anxieties is already present with the number of hate groups growing from 602 in 2000 to 930 today (Berman, 2014). The backlash of Whites losing norms of power are also present in the extreme growth of anti-government groups that were as low as 149 groups in 2008 and increased to over 1,000 after the election of President Obama (Berman, 2014). Of course, given that Latinx are now counted as White, whiteness could maintain its majority position and position of power through the incorporation of this particular ethnic group. Despite this strategic possibility, President Trump continues to push building a wall with Mexico, deporting Dreamers and other undocumented people, as well as claiming that, not just Mexicans, but “people that are from all over, that are killers and rapists and they’re coming to this country” (Edelman, 2016). This points to a return to older forms of whiteness as a twenty-first century strategy to resecure its position. This return to older communicative patterns of whiteness became more visible under President Obama’s administration. For example, when President Obama opened his Twitter account in May 2015, he received many tweets back containing the N-word, with the first racist tweet coming 10 minutes after President Obama sent out his first tweet (Capehart, 2015). The communicative power of the N-word—widely banished or removed from public discourse in the late twentieth century—makes a forceful and public return in the twenty-first century.

Given these major shifts (or poignant returns) in the communicative power of whiteness, we felt it is important to offer some scholarly insights into the contemporary terrain of whiteness. So, in this edited collection, we focus on the communicative nature of power underlined in and through whiteness by focusing on the shifting strategic moves of whiteness as manifested in the current cultural climate. While we do not claim there is a “new” movement in whiteness, we do see whiteness reclaiming itself overtly through discursive tactics such as fragility, civility, authenticity, intersecting identities, embodiments of people of color, as well as material ones such as various forms of overt and covert violence toward peoples of color.

Whiteness as a theoretical principle is not a new concept, and although theoretical articulations of whiteness have evolved over the last thirty plus years, the primary premise of whiteness is its relation to White raciality and racism. Many whiteness scholars articulate whiteness from an ideological perspective of racial dominance through tactical embodiments, strategic rhetorics, and social/historical constructions (Alcoff, 2015; Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Carrillo Rowe & Malhortra, 2007; Crenshaw C., 1997; Frankenberg 1993, 1997, 2001; Moon, 2016; Moon & Flores, 2000; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Shome, 2000, 2014). Here, whiteness serves as a theoretical lens to unmask the cultural workings of ideological scripts of racial dominance and racial marginalization on both micro and macro levels while attending to its material manifestations. These scripts are not “new” but are clearly making problematic returns, reimagined in important ways, and compelling us to deconstruct the communicative power of whiteness. Taken together, this edited collection offers an analysis of some (re)new(ed) aspects of whiteness.

Mapping the Communicative Power of Whiteness

Carey (2009) returned communication scholars to a ritual view of communication that posits communication serves to mold the ideological views of the world. Communication, then, is not only a tool to transmit knowledge but more so serves as the tool in which culture is formed. Martin and Nakayama (2006) add “communication is an intensely racialized practice” (p. 76). It follows that whiteness forms and operates communicatively. It is through communication that whiteness adapts, strategically locates its power, tactically (re)centers its universality, constructs its embodiments, and culturally performs. Along these lines, it is through the practice of communication that the material reality of the harms, marginalizations, and empowerments of whiteness are enacted. Thus, the communicative power of whiteness is divergent as serving both to enculturate and enact the formations of power.

Over a decade ago, Nakayama and Martin (1999) made the argument that “whiteness … is productively understood as a communication phenomenon” (p. viii). If communication serves as a primary tool for the formation of the workings of whiteness, then the study of the communicative power of whiteness holds a key to deconstructing its power. Communication research offers the larger field of whiteness studies a contextual and tangible analysis of whiteness’ operations. Furthermore, the field of communication offers the study of whiteness a focus on the everyday experiences of whiteness and/or specificities of whiteness through regimes of truth, embodied acts, and deconstruction of mediated texts. The power of whiteness is located through the study of the symbols (words, texts, images, bodies, embodiments/performances, practices, etc.) of whiteness. It is our intention for this collection to highlight the ways in which whiteness as communication propels White epistemologies/supremacist logic through our multiple identities and matrix of “isms,” in hopes that deeper cultural understandings of whiteness form possibilities for dismantling its communicative power.

Alcoff (2015) challenges us that “Whiteness should not be reduced to racism or even racial privilege, even though these have been central aspects of what it means to be white” (p. 9). Her argument grows from a foundational investment in intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991, 1997; May, 2014) and Black feminist thought (Hill Collins, 2000; Hurtado, 1999) that directs scholars to acknowledge race is comprised of many social locations that collide and combine to drastically influence our cultural experiences. Along these lines, Black feminist thought presses this theoretical thinking further to recognize that oppression cannot be approached from a hierarchical framework and furthermore identities are contextually grounded in such ways that “even white identity constitutes a social disadvantage in some situations” (Alcoff, 2015, p. 9).

May (2014) adds Black feminist thought requires both thinking about sameness and difference, which drastically disrupts dominant binary thinking. Discrimination is formed through a matrix of power, not a linear construction. From this standpoint, whiteness functions through multiple workings of marginalization. Sexism, cisgenderism, transphobia, heteronormativity, and homonormativity depend on whiteness and racism to maintain hegemonic constructs. Classism, ableism, xenophobia, body size, ageism, likewise, rely on whiteness and racism for their workings of power to function. The limitations of this page conform these “isms” to seem linear, challenging us to emphasize the significance of context to inform how the multiplicities of power work simultaneously. As a prominent point of culture, whiteness functions fluidly/strategically through our multiple positionalities while simultaneously whiteness maneuvers in and through multiple oppressions/empowerments contextually via our colliding social locations. Clearly, the communicative power of whiteness must be mapped from an intersectional reading of it.

Moon (2010) explains intersectionality affords scholars the ability to better understand “how issues of power and privilege may play out” (p. 41). Thus, acknowledging whiteness intersectionally is certainly imperative in an era of color-blind racism and overt White nationalist hate. Over 20 years ago, Nakayama and Krizek (1995) emphasized the importance of studying whiteness in context and in dialectical relation with other identity systems to develop more precise and nuanced perspectives on how whiteness as a materialized ideology operates. More recently, Steyn and Conway (2010) reiterated this call, asserting that an intersectional whiteness should be the future moment of a discipline that has now matured beyond initial notions of invisibility and pervasiveness. Chávez (2012) contends that the field of communication continues to gravely lack in intersectional scholarship. This book responds by taking an intersectional theoretical stance to whiteness studies.

Organization of the Book

One primary argument we intend for this compilation to demonstrate is how whiteness functions through intersectional capacities and is culturally maintained through its importance in maintaining the social order. The chapters, then, expose the communicative power of whiteness through examinations of the intersectional workings of whiteness. Scholars of this collection employ diverse methodological approaches through rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, performance studies, and interpretive research. They expose the communicative moves of whiteness in and through terrorism, social and traditional media, legal documentations, postcolonial challenges, White fragility at the national level, the relationship of people of color with and through whiteness, as well as multifaceted identities that intersect with whiteness (including religion, White masculinity and femininity, social class, ability, sexuality, and nationality). To do this, we structured the book into three sections: (1) Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color; (2) Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through White Bodies; and (3) Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Discursive Strategies. To clarify the framework of these sections, a preview of the chapters is provided here.

Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color

In their chapter, Kent Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung analyze Ken Jeong’s performances in a GQ photo spread, to lend insight into the broader question of how Asian Americans have negotiated their relationships with whiteness. In this specific case, Jeong’s performance, they argue, plays with pre-existing notions of Asianness that fulfill the expectations of whiteness, and this lends itself to White supremacy. In this case, whiteness is recentered through the performance of Asianness and the Asian body. It’s meaning does not stand alone but is negotiated in relation to whiteness.

By focusing on the gay Asian American porn star/producer, “Peter Le,” Shinsuke Eguchi explores the centrality of whiteness in gay culture. By pulling on local, national, and transnational discourses about queer liberalism, whiteness, and queerness, Eguchi uncovers the ways that whiteness is key to gay culture while occupying a queer transnational Japanese body. In this chapter, he demonstrates how se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: Troubling Whiteness and Its Neoliberalist Impulse
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Introducing Twenty-first Century Whiteness or “Everything Old Is New Again”
• PART I Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color
• PART II Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through White Bodies
• PART III Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Discursive Strategies
• List of Contributors
• Index