Whiteness and blogging
October 21, 2007 at 10:42 am (academia, blogosphere, feminism, learning, race and racism, theory, thesis, whiteness)
I know I’ve neglected this blog lately, and I’m sorry. I wish I had the energy to get over that last hurdle of inhibition about posting. But I’ve been throwing myself into activism and essays, which hasn’t left much mental space for blogging.
I do have some big plans for this place, though, so keep watching! (Please!)
Today I’m just re-posting a comment I left at Feministe about a study of whiteness and the feminist blogosphere. I think that post encompasses many of the problems I have with critical whiteness studies as a field. Go have a read of the original post and the responses. My comment will be in the moderation queue for a while yet, so get the scoop right here at She who stumbles!
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Dear Katie,
Let me make this very clear before I begin:
I appreciate that you are taking the time to examine whiteness critically. I really do.
But I have many grave reservations of your rationale/methodology for your project.
First of all, I’m pretty familiar with the field of critical whiteness studies. I recently completed a year-long thesis project on whiteness and the Cronulla riots, in which I interviewed people. I am a woman of colour, an on-the-ground anti-racist activist, and a blogger. I’m from Australia, but I’m pretty familiar with the U.S. work in critical whiteness studies, having spent a good portion of the past year reading and thinking critically about it.
I originally only wanted white participants for my study as well. I took to heart Ruth Frankenberg’s lessons about trying to solicit interviews with white women for White Women, Race Matters, and I imagined I could get around the taboos of race talk by framing my questions in a certain way. In my case, my ethics committee made the final choice for me — they didn’t want me explicitly mentioning whiteness in my participant information statement.
But when one of my respondents turned out to be a person of colour, I continued with the interview and used it in my project. That’s because of a lot of work I did in reading for my thesis, most of which led back to the conclusion that not only did people of colour invent critical whiteness studies — the widely-cited Souls of White Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, is considered the first canonical work of whiteness studies — but the perspectives of people of colour are integral to its development as a discipline.
That’s because whiteness only takes on significance in relation to the racial subordination of people of colour. The privileges of whiteness are the things that people of colour don’t have, or can only get access to at great cost. So reading white testimonials against the perspectives, priorities and positions of people of colour is integral to critical whiteness studies as a discipline. And most of the better work in critical whiteness studies does this by actively including the voices of people of colour.
As such, your comment that “creating race-based safe spaces” where white people can “talk about racism without feeling so worried that folks of color will judge them” is seriously questionable on many grounds.
Firstly, because critical whiteness studies has demonstrated that white race consciousness is deeply shaped by colourblindness and aversive gestures towards racism that limit white accountability for the oppression of people of colour. While white people can acknowledge racism and talk about it, this gesture can equally be turned into an opportunistic and solipsistic pursuit of virtue, or a generalisation about people of colour (which is also something critical whiteness studies focuses on). Part of the project of critical whiteness studies is to unpack the discursive manoeuvres that do limit white race consciousness, based on what they obscure. I.e. the lives and experiences of people of colour are obscured by white race consciousness and the operation of whiteness. This is a critical aspect of racial domination. This is why the many criticisms of race-matching in qualitative research apply doubly to the study of whiteness.
Moreover, the project of critical whiteness studies is to understand the effects of this discursive closure. This cannot happen without recourse to the perspectives of people of colour.
I’m sure you’re aware that the feminist blogosphere is replete with conflict over race. I won’t go into the specific conflicts, but there are a number of issues which women of colour bloggers have with white feminist bloggers. Yours is (one of?) the first formal study (AFAIK) of race in the feminist blogosphere. That means, methodologically, there’s very little material for you to draw on in contextualising a critique of whiteness. The blogosphere conflicts are specific to this arena. Understanding them is necessary to contextualise how whiteness operates in it. Ignoring women of colour in this study means that you’ll get an incomplete picture of the field. As such, I have many doubts about how critical your study will be.
Your comments about why you’d rather avoid the perspectives of people of colour seem to indicate that you are unfamiliar with the work of women of colour bloggers and the specific criticisms and claims we make. While it is tiresome for people of colour to always be considered the authoritative voices on racism, that is mostly a response to white people not listening to us, and having to repeat ourselves. As such, I don’t see how your methodology will address your professed concern for the feelings of people of colour. Offering white people a “safe space” to talk about racism will only mean that the dynamic of exclusion and ignorance is reinforced.
Moreover, the idea that:
Within the poc group, I might have folks who are South Asian, East Asian, Latin@, Black, Native American, etc. That doesn’t make for a very good sample because different groups likely have different relationships to whiteness within the feminist blogosphere.
presumes that people of colour in the blogosphere do not interact as poc, or recognise these differences for ourselves. In fact, the opposite is true — bloggers of colour have led the way in analysis of how different groups of poc relate to whiteness, and to one another. This is accomplished through the dense and lively multi-racial blog networks we’ve formed. Ignoring the internal structure of that, and its relation to the white blogosphere (for indeed, many of the networks we’ve formed arose from conflict over race with white bloggers), means that you’re missing a vital aspect of the race politics of the feminist blogosphere.
Finally, I have huge issues with the claims that critical whiteness studies makes to “de-centring the white subject” and putting “an explicit and critical focus on whiteness”. In my experience, critical whiteness studies has limited anti-racist effects, and my experience has been borne out in the work of (white) critical whiteness scholars. In order to assert the claims to virtue of critical whiteness studies, the voices of people of colour are often drowned out. For instance, I have read pieces where white academics told people of colour that it was more important for white people to teach critical whiteness studies than for the critiques that people of colour made of whiteness to be heard. I’ve also had a teacher dismiss my concerns about my own interview project because she experienced “reverse racism” when trying to do research on Aboriginal people.
All in all, I find that the project of critical whiteness studies is undermined by its own academic practices and its elitist epistemology. Many criticisms of the claims of critical whiteness studies are discussed at length by Sara Ahmed in this article from borderlands e-journal (it’s a peer-reviewed academic journal, so you can reference it in your thesis). I strongly recommend that you read over the article, and others from the same issue.
In order to avoid many of those criticisms, it’s necessary that you examine how your own whiteness is operating in the context of the blogosphere, and your project. It might be outside the scope of your project, but I can tell you that including those concerns in a smaller, year-long project is not difficult (I included them in the literature review and methodology). Moreover, responsibility to the racial justice context which shaped critical whiteness studies fairly demands some attention to the concerns of people of colour, and a critical whiteness project is incomplete without it.
If you’d like, I can refer you to a number of readings which will elaborate many of the points I made above, and I’m happy to elaborate on anything you’d like clarified.
Good luck with your project.
sassywho said,
October 21, 2007 at 10:48 am
brilliant. i hope you don’t mind if i link?
Fire Fly said,
October 21, 2007 at 11:06 am
Oh! Go ahead!
skywardprodigal said,
October 21, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Beautifully done. Thanks for sharing!
Kai said,
October 21, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Outstanding stuff, Fire Fly. I have limited exposure to this field, but this kind of analysis helps me get up to speed on perspectives and critiques. Thanks.
Katie said,
October 22, 2007 at 5:11 am
Hey Fire Fly, just thought I’d cross-post my reply from Feministe. Thanks again for all your insights.
—-
Hi Firefly,
Okay, your call. I don’t think that the conversation would have been “ghettoized” by moving it to your blog — using what I’ve learned from reading bloggers of color, I was hoping to shift the center of focus away from the super-big-time blog and onto a smaller (infrequent posts, probably less traffic) but quality site, that’s actually more “your turf.” I’ve heard the frustration expressed by many woc bloggers that they’re expected to join white feminist bloggers on their sites, on their own terms, rather than attempting to spread readership to woc-led blogs.
That said, I appreciate where you’re coming from. My concern about my sample, which I didn’t explain very well, comes from the fact that while there’s no ‘pure, authentic’ pool, like you said, there are some people I’ve blabbed to before interviewing them, and some people I haven’t. This will likely make a difference in what people say to me, because it’ll influence what they expect I want to hear. So far, this Feministe experiment of posting a request for readers is the first time I’ve opened my mouth so much about whiteness before an interview, so, as you can imagine, I’m nervous. So I think you’re right — this fetishism of objectivity and empiricism in the social sciences is pretty bogus, and to me it’s more important to have the thesis be a meaningful process of engagement than a “precise” depiction of this slice of the blogosphere. Still, I’m aiming for imperfectly similar conditions in all my interviews as much as possible.
Okay, on to the real ish.
Part of the project of critical whiteness studies is to unpack the discursive manoeuvres that do limit white race consciousness, based on what they obscure . . . Moreover, the project of critical whiteness studies is to understand the effects of this discursive closure. This cannot happen without recourse to the perspectives of people of colour.
I think this assessment is right on a large scale, but impractical on a small scale, based on the (evolving) stated aims of my particular thesis. First of all, the way I see it, just because the voices of people of color are essential in painting a full picture of the operations of whiteness, doesn’t mean that white people can’t do any work among themselves. Again, while I would love to read the academic work that does meaningfully incorporate both poc and white voices, I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem that I’m trying to do something different. I think it’s possible for white people to recognize destructive or oppressive patterns in their own behavior, too. This may not be a “total” view of the U.S. feminist blogs I’m looking at, but then, what is a “total” view?
Secondly, just because I’m not conducting formal interviews with folks of color doesn’t mean their perspectives are going to be completely absent from my thesis. Since part of my research and data collection is reading the (white) bloggers’ work itself, seeing what happens in threads, and retelling a rough history based on what I see, folks of color are going to be present in those observations. It seems like you feel I have an added responsibility (ethical, academic) to avoid “silencing” poc by actively including interviews with them, especially because not much work has been done on this topic. It was certainly a tough choice I had to make. But my project doesn’t need (or aspire) to accomplish everything. I really hope that one of its functions can be to gesture toward a need for more scholarship in this area — particularly, comprehensive work on how, as you say, “bloggers of colour have led the way in analysis of how different groups of poc relate to whiteness, and to one another.” (Happily, these kinds of studies are slowly beginning to appear.) Still, I approach my thesis with the view that, given my limited time, and given that in matters of racism, white folks have a lot of shit to work on in themselves, I’m interested in taking a look at how white feminist bloggers and white readers are conceptualizing whiteness in their online activities.
I don’t mistake my thesis for anti-racist activism. At most, I hope it can be a tool for white people (and me) to think about how to do feminist blogging better. I hope this understanding addresses your concern, articulated through Ahmed’s stellar piece, that critical whiteness studies often falsely presents itself as performative, functioning as a hyper-articulate substitute for real action. (It reminded me of Catherine Jones’s wonderful article on a similar subject, called “The Work Is Not The Workshop.”) There are a lot of traps that I see, and continue to learn about, inherent in academic pursuits. Maybe amplified when it comes to a place like Harvard — I don’t have a whole lot of bases for comparison. So I don’t conceive of this thesis as an anti-racist accomplishment in itself, so much as a useful starting point to get folks thinking, talking, and — yes — listening to folks of color about what can be done to improve blogging practices, making them more effectively anti-racist. And although Ahmed advocates for whites to “turn away from themselves and toward others,” this doesn’t mean we need to give up on our critical response to whiteness entirely.
In some ways, quitting the critical whiteness thing is tempting. I can relate to your negative experiences with whiteness studies: a lot of what I’ve read on the subject I really disagree with (”race traitors?” oy vey), although I’m fortunate to have a great academic advisor, a radical South Asian woman who’s studied whiteness in South African and U.S. contexts. I’ve also encountered a lot of encouraging stuff — organizations like European Dissent, incredible white anti-racist organizers like Sharon Martinas, and some pretty exciting scholarship, too. I absolutely agree that there’s a danger of reinscribing the superiority of whiteness in critical whiteness studies by deferring to white voices all the time. But I’m not talking about “all the time” here — just my senior thesis.
Finally, I think it’s interesting — and understandable — that you advise me to “examine how your own whiteness is operating in the context of the blogosphere, and your project.” It probably wouldn’t change much for you if I told you I’m not white. (Though that disidentification/disavowal isn’t 100% true, either: I’m biracial [black dad, white mom], racially ambiguous on sight to most U.S. people, was raised with a lot of complicated white privilege, and am somewhat skeptical of the neat-n-tidy white/poc binary itself.) So yes, to me reflexivity is really one of the most important features of the thesis, and it has already been a great learning experience to see how people respond to me, race-wise. And my own experience as a woc blogger at Harvard was what got me interested in this topic in the first place.
It sounds cheesy, but I really do thank you for calling me out like this, and pushing me to question the methodological protocol my professors expect, versus what I actually want to do with my time and energy. And I’ll certainly be using the Ahmed piece for my writing! I know it might seem unhelpful for me to minimize the import of my work when you point out its flaws and dangers, but I think the scope of this project really is an important determining factor. Maybe for my dissertation I’ll talk only to folks of color — who knows. If you’d like to talk more about your undergrad thesis, and how you avoided tokenizing or lumping together interviews with folks of color, I’d be happy and grateful to hear.
So I would love to keep talking about this, even aside from my thesis. (Harvard survivalist mantra: “I am more than my academic pursuits.”) Publicly, privately, whatever. Thanks for your patience.
–katie
bronislava said,
October 22, 2007 at 10:26 am
fire fly!! you rock
i was also inspired by the way that your thesis has obviously helped you to have really coherent and well thought-through and insightful things to say on something you’re passionate about. i feel like i’m in the middle of a great big mess - so hoping that i’ll come out the end as smart as you 
hehe.
i just stumbled across this discussion over where it began and came here. i’ve been trying to find interesting australian blogs, most of the ones i read are from the US (i live in sydney).
anyway, just wanted to say that i thought your comments were really interesting, articulate and… good. i’ve been interested in the ‘whiteness’ stuff, but hadn’t seen too much about it. so thanks for sharing your insights.
as someone who’s about half way through my honours thesis (on a different topic, australian catholic nuns & sexuality
anyway, thanks. i look forward to reading more of your blog…
Fire Fly said,
October 22, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Hi Bronislava,
I’m really a bit disengaged from the Australian blogosphere, but I can point you to some good Aussie blogs if you like.
How is whiteness figuring in your thesis topic?
And thanks for the vote of confidence.
(Hint: blogging helps you practice sounding erudite. 
)
Yvette said,
October 24, 2007 at 4:31 am
Fire Fly, I was going to quote passages from your comments that I particularly agreed with and related to. However, I ended up almost reposting the entirety of your comments! Thank you so much for articulating what you did so honestly and completely.
Fire Fly said,
October 24, 2007 at 10:56 am
Hi Yvette,
Where did you quote my comments? Just curious!
Yvette said,
October 25, 2007 at 3:29 am
I was going to quote them here in your comment box, along with my further comments of assent. Like I said, though, I had so many points that struck a chord that the comment was getting too long winded. I am considering writing a post about this issue of being a woman of color who has often felt uneasy in (White) feminist on-line spaces. That post would join about 6 other drafts of different posts that I have not yet gotten around to! But if I do, I have your post here (and over on the other site) bookmarked so that I can link.
Thanks again!
Fire Fly said,
October 25, 2007 at 10:16 am
Ah!
Well, there are plenty of other posts like it about how women of colour experience white feminist spaces… Recent ones include Bitter Laughter by Donna at The Silence of Our Friends, and “Don’t include me” by Blackamazon of Having Read The Fine Print.
I guess I’m just lucky I had the right “tone”.
bronislava said,
October 29, 2007 at 5:24 pm
hmmm, i wrote back to you but it seems to have got lost in the mysterious internet somehow. bum…
in short i was saying that my thesis isn’t about ‘whiteness’. i am trying to be aware of how ‘race’ plays out in the sources i’m using and so on, but that’s not the focus of my thesis…
and i would love your aussie blog suggestions!