Race(ing) Intercultural Communication

Racial Logics in a Colorblind Era

Dreama Moon, Michelle Holling, Dreama Moon, Michelle Holling, Dreama G. Moon, Michelle A. Holling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138921764
• eBook ISBN: 9781317414285
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Race(ing) Intercultural Communication signals a crucial intervention in the field, as well as in wider society, where social and political events are calling for new ways of making sense of race in the 21st century. Contributors to this book work at multiple intersections, theoretically and methodologically, in order to highlight relational (im)possibilities for intercultural communication. Chapters underscore the continuing importance of studying race, and the diverse mechanisms that maintain racial logics both in the U. S. and globally. In the so-called 'post-racial' era in which we live, not only are disrupting notions of colour-blindness crucially important, but so too are imagining new ways of thinking through racial matters.

Ranging from discussions of new media, popular culture, and political discourse, to resistance literature, gay culture, and academia, contributors produce incisive analyses of the operations of race and white domination, including the myriad ways in which these discourses are reproduced and disrupted. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.

The Rhetorics of Racial Power: Enforcing Colorblindness in Post-Apartheid Scholarship on Race

Marzia Milazzo

This article examines the reproduction of colorblindness discourse in selected post-1994 South African studies in economics, education, literature, philosophy, and sociology. It argues that the presence of dominant racial ideologies in this scholarship is emblematic of an active investment in maintaining racialized privileges. As it illustrates some of the rhetorical mechanisms that inform the articulation of colorblindness discourse at large, it shows that unpacking colorblind rhetoric is itself necessary if we are to make sense of the research emphases, arguments, logics, and findings of a significant body of South African scholarship on race published since the advent of democratic rule.

Testifying to the ongoing killability of the Black person in post-apartheid South Africa, in August 2012 police opened fire on a group of striking workers who were demanding living wages, killing 34 and injuring at least 78.¹ The event at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana starkly resembled the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, which also occurred in Gauteng after a protest that challenged the status quo, and speaks to striking continuities between the apartheid past and the democratic present. That the police force carrying out the executions today is multiracial rather than predominantly white does not make this incident disconnected from institutional racism, but it does give ammunition to colorblind arguments that deny the central role that racial power played in the tragedy and the demonstrations preceding it.²

Twenty years after the official end of apartheid, racial inequality remains rampant in South Africa. White people, less than 10 percent of the population, own approximately 85 percent of the land, 85 percent of the entire economy, and over 90 percent of the largest companies.³ Undeniably, whites “still act as gatekeepers for the majority group who are in power politically but certainly not economically” (Steyn in Grant, 2007, p. 94). The differential life expectancy of less than 50 years for Blacks and over 70 years for whites also speaks to a ghastly politics that does not value Black life. Yet, despite these noticeable realities, as Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2008) show, not unlike in the United States, the “declining significance of race” myth also permeates South African sociology.

A significant body of scholarship on race produced in post-apartheid South Africa demonizes the employment of racial categories, underemphasizes or silences white advantage, and vilifies policies that attempt to redress racial inequality. It is crucial that we give close attention to these studies because, as Howard Winant (2001) explains, “The rearticulation of (in)equality in an ostensibly colorblind framework emphasizing individualism and meritocracy, it turns out, preserves the legacy of racial hierarchy far more effectively than its explicit defense” (p. 35). Of course, this is not only relevant in the South African context. Colorblindness is a transnational discourse deployed also in Europe and in other former European settler colonies—from Australia to Brazil and from Cuba to the United States, places in which racial inequality remains pervasive.

In South Africa, during the anti-apartheid struggle, the nonracialism promoted by the African National Congress (ANC) represented a practical antiracist strategy aimed at fostering unity across racial lines while still privileging the interests of Black people (see Motlanthe & Jordan, 2010). However, as Achille Mbembe (2014) writes, “Reactionary and conservative forces have co-opted nonracialism, which they now equate with colour-blindness. They use nonracialism as a weapon to discredit any attempt to deracialise property, institutions, and structures inherited from an odious past” (n.p.). Although nonracialism is rooted in a history of decolonial resistance, today it represents a regressive tool that supports white privilege. The terms “nonracialism,” mainly used in the South African context, and “colorblindness,” used more frequently in the United States, have become de facto interchangeable.

This study identifies the discursive presence of colorblind ideology in selected post-1994 South African studies on race in economics, education, literature, philosophy, and sociology. In the process, it makes visible some of the rhetorical mechanisms that inform the repertoire of colorblindness at large and shows that the discourse permeates both social sciences and humanities. Precisely because colorblind strategies traverse disciplinary and even national boundaries, it would be impossible to proceed analytically by ascribing each one to a specific discipline, topic, or scholar. In fact, I aim to illustrate precisely the malleability of colorblind rhetoric. Understanding the rhetorics of colorblindness is itself necessary if we are to make sense of the research emphases, arguments, logics, and findings of a considerable body of South African scholarship on race produced in the last two decades.

I interrogate South African scholarship in light of the interdisciplinary tools provided by critical race studies and the works of Black radical thinkers. So far, most research on colorblindness has focused on U.S. cases (Ansell, 2006, p. 335). Given the transnational dimensions of colorblindness, some U.S. scholarship provides a useful lens for understanding the discourse elsewhere. Still, it is necessary to remain attentive to national particularities. The primary methodology I employ for unpacking colorblind rhetoric is close reading. In doing so, I build upon Critical Race Theory, which has long established the desirability of using literary methods to interpret legal texts (see Lawrence, 1995, p. 347). Scholars in other fields have also recognized the importance of “looking at whiteness as critical readers” (Ratele & Laubscher, 2010, p. 86). While this study is grounded in an extensive engagement with post-apartheid scholarship on race, performing close rather than distant readings requires privileging depth over breadth and therefore presenting only a limited number of studies.

The studies examined herein have three fundamental things in common: (a) they advance arguments about racial relations, racial inequality and/or racial discourse in post-apartheid South Africa, (b) their interventions are not obviously racist but are framed as antiracist or concerned with racial justice, and (c) they are often widely cited and written by scholars who are influential voices in their fields. However, I do not intend to generalize and suggest that most South African academics who work on racism are committed to the same agenda, for this is certainly not the case. Instead, I hope to call attention to the urgent reality of racial domination, a reality that is too often mystified in academia. While I contend that works in the specific disciplines I examine—in particular sociology and education—have become central venues for the reproduction of colorblind doctrines in South African universities, I acknowledge that no field is immune to the phenomenon and hope that this study will pave the way for analyses that tackle colorblind logics within alternative studies and disciplines.⁴

Recognizing that the production of knowledge is a key site for the protection of racial power across national boundaries, this article thus turns the lens to academic scholarship itself. In doing so, it is indebted and contributes to a substantial body of interdisciplinary scholarship (for example, Conway, 2008b; Lipsitz, 2006; Mills, 1997; Morrison, 1992; Shome & Hedge, 2002; Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008) that shows how whiteness “is built into our disciplines, our institutions, our professions … and in our methods as researchers” (Steyn & Conway, 2010, p. 286). Originally monopolized by the United States (Steyn & Conway, 2010, p. 285), whiteness studies have gained traction in the South African context (see Steyn & Conway 2010; West & Schmidt, 2010). For example, significant studies on white identity (Distiller & Steyn, 2004; Drzewiecka & Steyn, 2012; Steyn, 1998, 2001, 2005), white advantage (Ratele & Laubscher, 2010; Steyn, 2007), or antiracist whiteness (Conway, 2008a; Matthews, 2012) show that the field is wide-ranging and growing.

This study has benefited in particular from Melissa Steyn’s work on “White Talk” (Steyn, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2010), which Steyn and Foster (2008) define as a set of discursive practices that “attempt to manage the positionality of white South Africans to their (perceived) greatest competitive advantage, within an Africanizing context” (p. 26). The authors contend that, although not all white people resort to “White Talk,” its repertoire is nevertheless characteristic of white South African discursive approaches to race (p. 26). There is much overlap between “White Talk” and “colorblind talk” (Kim, 2000, p. 17). Although I am interested primarily in texts rather than authors, it seems relevant to disclose that most of the works examined in this study are written by white scholars and that I myself am one. Only a few studies examined herein are authored by scholars of color. Mentioning this is not an attempt to “share the blame” (Steyn & Foster, 2008, p. 32) and deflect attention from white people’s primary responsibility for the perpetuation of racial inequality. It means noticing that, for example, in South Africa and beyond, a commitment to colorblindness can signify a larger chance to succeed in white-dominated academia, which tends to reward scholars who embrace colorblind doctrines (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008, p. 281). It also implies recognizing that everyone, especially people in positions of power, can have an interest in maintaining the status quo.

In contesting the idea that any emancipatory vision for a New South Africa can be undertaken without speaking of race and making racial inequality visible, I acknowledge that, as Toni Morrison (1992) writes, “The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness … is itself a racial act” (p. 46). Beyond raising uncomfortable questions about the meaning of justice in the post-apartheid present, the location of colorblindness ideology in South African scholarship reveals the impact of racial consciousness onto the production of racialized meaning. Established theories of racial epistemology argue that white ways of knowing, and privileged positionalities in general, are primarily defined by ignorance (see Mills, 1997, 2007; Steyn, 2012), as exemplified by the statement “lack of insight into its own privilege … is the trademark of privilege” (Steyn & Foster, 2008, p. 30). Yet, racialized knowledge, agency, and intentionality are central to the reproduction of colorblindness discourse in South Africa and beyond. I argue that the presence of colorblind rhetoric in the studies analyzed herein is neither the product of ignorance nor coincidence, but is indicative of what George Lipsitz (2006) calls a possessive investment in whiteness; that is, an active interest in reinscribing white privilege. In the pages that follow, I aim to show that the investment in silencing race within scholarship about race, particularly racial inequality, is a paradox of great significance.

Reading Racial Power

In October 2010, a number of leading South African scholars gathered at Wits University for a colloquium titled Revisiting Apartheid’s Race Categories, which was inspired by a debate about admission criteria and affirmative action that had taken place at the University of Cape Town in 2007 (Erasmus, 2012, p. 1). Co-hosted by the School of Human and Community Development, the Transformation Office, the Faculty of Humanities at Wits University, and the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the colloquium featured many papers that critiqued the employment of racial categories. Ongoing academic efforts to revise and silence apartheid categories beg the question that Harry Garuba (2012) posed in the closing remarks of the colloquium: “What are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a particular problematic concerned with bureaucratic and administrative classification and not another, say, one concerned with the material and discursive production of race?” (p. 174). While more empirical research on institutional racism is sorely needed, numerous South African studies focus on racial categories per se. This emphasis is not accidental.

The institutionalization of colorblindness in South African academia becomes evident if we consider that the theoretical deconstruction of racial categories frequently goes hand in hand with the explicit demonization of race-based affirmative action policies. Several studies brand measures which are meant to redress racial inequality as “new policies of racial discrimination” (Seekings, 2007, p. 1) or as “pro-African racial discrimination” (Seekings, 2007, p. 26), while the racial categories needed to implement these policies are vilified as having “negative effects” (Ruggunan & Maré, 2012, p. 56), causing “separation” (Maré, 2003, p. 23) or “entrenching racial prejudice” (Alexander, 2007, p. 94). Jonathan Jansen (2009a) goes as far as attacking affirmative action as follows: “Black nationalists are doing after apartheid exactly what Afrikaner nationalists did under apartheid: promoting people on the crude basis of colour, this time to meet employment equity pressures and through a misguided sense of parity with white academics” (p. 149).⁵ This statement compares white supremacist policies with measures intended to compensate for them. It also suggests that white academics are somehow superior to Black scholars. In a noteworthy body of South African scholarship on race—especially scholarship produced in disciplines with a direct impact on public policy such as sociology and education—racial categories themselves, and not institu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction—A Politic of Disruption: Race(ing) Intercultural Communication
• 1. The Rhetorics of Racial Power: Enforcing Colorblindness in Post-Apartheid Scholarship on Race
• 2. Queer Intercultural Relationality: An Autoethnography of Asian–Black (Dis)Connections in White Gay America
• 3. The Construction of Brownness: Latino/a and South Asian Bloggers’ Responses to SB 1070
• 4. Resisting Whiteness: Mexican American Studies and Rhetorical Struggles for Visibility
• 5. Our Foreign President Barack Obama: The Racial Logics of Birther Discourses
• 6. New Media, Old Racisms: Twitter, Miss America, and Cultural Logics of Race
• 7. (Net)roots of Belonging: Contemporary Discourses of (In)valuability and Post-Racial Citizenship in the United States
• 8. Problematic Representations of Strategic Whiteness and “Post-racial” Pedagogy: A Critical Intercultural Reading of The Help
• 9. “My Family Isn’t Racist—However….”: Multiracial/Multicultural Obama-ism as an Ideological Barrier to Teaching Intercultural Communication
• Conclusion—Continuing a Politic of Disruption: Race(ing) Intercultural Communication
• Index