JAC Volume 17 Issue 2

Some time ago I was engaged in a discussion about language, race relations, and composition instruction on an electronic listserv dedicated primarily to issues of composition theory and pedagogy. As soon as someone mentioned their frustration in dealing with what they considered to be a racist student, someone else mentioned Mark Fuhrman; he soon became the subject of conversation, the representative racist in this case. Some participants then expressed distress that there were people like Fuhrman occupying positions as police detectives. Others asked: "How do those of us who are committed to challenging social structures of domination deal with racist attitudes and language in the classroom? Do we need to?" In short, people on the list articulated some impassioned and cogent ethical concerns about the current climate of race relations in the United States and what that means for us as composition instructors. Yet, at a certain point I began to feel slightly uneasy. There was something about the tone of the discussion, about the academic distance, the lack of personal stakes that was somehow inversely proportional to the fervor with which people were attempting to distance themselves from racists like Fuhrman. The academic distance and the lack of personal stakes, the way of talking about "black people" and "racists" that left our own subject positions in the scheme of race relations perilously unexamined and pristine, left me at once anxious and hesitant to voice my opinions. It was as if "they"—both "racists" and "blacks"—lived on another planet: we could see them, recognize and identify them, but "they" were not among us, and "we" were not them.

By the time I did add my voice, the discussion was hotly underway. I said that I tended to agree with bell hooks: that since we live in a racist culture, we are all in a sense racists, and so, we all have to be continually on the lookout for manifestations of racist thinking in ourselves. I claimed we could not talk productively about race by continually exteriorizing our critiques, by simply pointing to "Mark Fuhrmans" and declaring ourselves committed to ending racist practices. I stated that I, for example, couldn't engage in such a discussion without also attemping to come to terms with the fact that I am (and was raised) a Southern white male, until I examined my own position in relation to racist social structures. I said that I realized we all come from different cultural backgrounds that inform our attitudes about race and race relations, so I invited others to honestly examine their positions in racist culture. But my comments were met with silence. Nothing. I was astonished and not a little alarmed. I had silenced an entire multi-voiced, engaged discussion that had had a good amount of momentum behind it. I had taken a risk and didn't expect everybody to join me. What I expected, at the very least, was heightened engagement: voices claiming that their ways of talking about race were relevant and productive. I expected someone to target such methods of disclosure as inappropriate or too subjective. I even expected some agreement and elaboration. I was equally distressed by the lack of dissent as I was by the lack of agreement. Perhaps, in this case, silence was not such a bad thing. Perhaps this silence was only a pause indicating reflection, introspection, contemplation. Perhaps. At least I would like to think so.

But my concerns remain: Why is it that so many compositionists insist on the rhetorically complex composition of "selves" until it involves critical and emotional issues like racism? And why the reluctance in these cases to explore the internal contradictions that living in a racist culture may create within us? In his essay, "`Rhetoric is Politics,' Said the Ancient. `How Much So,' I Wonder," Victor Villanueva talks about the need for composition instructors to better theorize how competing and contradictory ideologies are contained within the self. To help make his point, he describes how the influences of racism and other systemic forces come back to him in the form of images and pictures. Reflecting on his professional entrance into the academy, he writes,

In the listserv scenario I have described above, there is no contact between academics and the disenfranchised of which Villanueva speaks. There is no reflection on how hegemonic forces intersect with our selves as examining subjects. And, most importantly, there is a lot of good intention. What this illustrates to me is the reluctance (not unwillingness) of academics to discuss and engage how hegemonic forces such as racism intersect in contradictory ways with individual wills and desires. Such a reluctance can lead to what bell hooks identifies as "fundamental gaps between professed political commitments to eradicating racism and the participation in the construction of a discourse on race that perpetuates racial domination" (Yearning 54). Villaneuva goes on to ask: "How do nice people abide by and maintain not nice things. . . ?" And I ask: Where do we begin?

Simply (and not so simply), as Villanueva and hooks suggest, we begin with ourselves. Writing this essay, for example, has forced me to engage my own "experiential ignorances," has enabled me to begin to identify and resist the racist rhetoric I have internalized. I have wanted to retrench, to deny; I have wanted to succumb to the paralysis of guilt. I have wanted, above all else, to remain silent. But such moves do not allow me to begin any kind of useful examination of racism. So, I theorize—not to indict my colleagues, or myself for that matter, but to rhetoricize particularly how strategies of the indictment of others work to deflect analyses of the ways in which systemic forces intersect and inform individual wills and desires and create contradictory ideologies within us. I want to look to where the private and the public mix in messy uncertainties, below the smooth surfaces of appearances, down to essential meanings which are, we find, only comforting stories. I want to look at the disjunctures which in part compose the self, the tensions between what we have internalized and what we want.

But how can we begin to examine the effects that hegemonic forces such as racism have on us while we are looking at others and constructing them in unified and noncontradictory ways—as, say, racists? Why do we feel such indictment is oftentimes necessary to then construct ourselves in much the same, albeit opposite, way as nonracists? In order to answer these questions, we must engage and examine how the internalization of hegemonic forces creates contradictions in us that need not lead to paralysis, silence, retrenchment, or guilt but to renewed efforts to counter oppressive behaviors, renewed efforts which nonetheless recognize tensions between self-interests and common commitments.

Rhetoricizing White, Nonracist Positions¹

Where do we begin? When investigating how larger ideological forces intersect with individual wills, it seems futile to seek answers to questions such as, "What comes first, rhetoric or intention?" Such investigations work backwards, much like quests for origins and sacred sites which when found are invested with meanings and answers. We might instead begin investigations with what is already considered to be sacred, privileged, and unmarked. Again, we need to start where we don't usually look—which is, in this case, white, nonracist subject positions.

For the past several years, theorists in cultural and literary studies (Henry Louis Gates, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, for example) have been examining how what we call white subjectivities are generally built around silences about the cultural signification of whiteness. Also, in a recent College English article entitled, "Interrogating `Whiteness,' (De)Constructing Race," AnnLouise Keating examines whiteness as "a constantly changing sociohistorical concept" which maintains cultural power and legitimacy by "the dominant culture's inability or reluctance to see it as such" (902, 905). These theorists argue that whiteness is generally regarded not as a sociohistorical—or better, political—concept but as a natural, singular racial identity. Because whiteness is not regarded—is unseen, unspoken, and unheard—it becomes the unrecognized and unacknowledged norm by which the cultural validity of "others" is measured. That is, how whiteness is culturally and ideologically constructed and maintained and how it in turn affects the production of categories such as "minority" and "other" in the first place are rarely interrogated.

But in order to begin the kinds of engaged interrogations that would rhetoricize the cultural signification of whiteness, it is necessary to identify and examine strategies of indictment and demonization which work against such interrogations. For example, in the scenario which opens this essay, whiteness is not really invisible: there is talk about racists and Mark Fuhrman. The discussion faltered, however, when the interrogation got, we might say, a bit too close to home. I want to caution against exteriorizing critiques of racial oppression by assuming that we as examining subjects are somehow above the ideological effects of a culture that generally devalues difference and legitimates racial oppression. Because we all, students and instructors alike, live in a world where we are exposed to increasingly complex experiences and representations concerning cultural differences, we need to push for increasingly subtle, complex, and honest ways of talking about these representations and experiences. If we as instructors dedicated to fighting racism are to do this, then we need to insist—through our theories and our pedagogies—that racial and cultural identities are more complex than the descriptions "racist" and "nonracist" suggest. We need theories and pedagogies which account for how we might unintentionally internalize and intentionally counter hegemonic forces at the same time, theories and pedagogies which account for the internal tensions which are created when hegemonic forces intersect individual wills and desires. Only then can we begin to rhetoricize and counter what Villanueva calls our "experiential ignorances," those ways of acting and thinking which may be reinforcing racist social structures without our knowing.

Challenging "Experiential Ignorance"

Part of the problem when talking and writing about race—and when theorizing whiteness—is that the term "racist" has become inadequate to describe the increasingly subtle and complex forms of agency concerning racial oppression in the United States today. Identifying others as "racists" has become little more than a noisy strategy of name-calling that stirs up self-righteous emotions and really does little or nothing to counter oppressive behavior. As academics committed to fighting racism, we sometimes make ourselves feel good about fighting racial oppression by pointing to and talking about "easy targets" such as Fuhrman. Such strategies of indictment do much to keep oppressive practices in place since they deflect attention from the fact that, as hooks continually reminds us, racial oppression is legitimated systematically and enacted everyday; it has not been eradicated but has simply taken new forms, forms based not only on overt power and coercive control but on having the power to control cultural representations of the other—or produce the other. Viewing racial oppression as a discrete "-ism" which can be embodied in a discrete "self," someone we call a "racist," is a perilous assumption since it leads us to think that "the oppression and exploitation of [`others' is] the result of a few bad people or institutions that can be distinguished from `society'" and not a part of larger ideological forces (Fitts and France 17).

Not only are the ways in which race is often talked about—the words used and the connotations they carry—inadequate to reflect the complexity of cultural and ethnic relations in the United States today, but they are also inadequate to describe racial identities in postmodern culture. Despite increasing insistence that materialities and concepts such as selves, identities, and ethnicities are indiscrete and rhetorically complex, being "racist" and being "nonracist" is still often categorized in popular and academic discourse dualistically as discrete states. Compositionists (and students, for that matter) who identify themselves as those who challenge oppressive behaviors often approach discussions of race as if there are essentially two groups of people: those who are racists and those who are not. Of course, the assumption goes, those who are not racist are just as easy to identify as the racists. The nonracists are the ones talking about race in classes, writing about race in journals, and giving papers at conferences. But such simplistic ways of seeing race relations imply that someone can be identified as nonracist—a position which typically does not see itself as racialized—solely through their intentions toward "racialized" "others." And although there is much good academic work being done on race, it might be helpful to distinguish between when we are merely calling for surface remedies and enacting easy appearances and when we are honestly engaging and admitting to internal contradictions brought on by the wrangle between larger ideological forces and individual intentions. Hooks believes that the failure of white theorists to critically address the "assumption that the decision to write about race and difference necessarily certifies antiracist behavior" forecloses truly productive work that they might engage in about racial oppression (Yearning 55). She thinks that white scholars' simply stating their subject position at the beginning of a piece of writing does not necessarily mean that they are doing the best possible work in interrogating their positions in racist culture (Yearning 54).² Instead, such simplistic and uncritical declarations of white subject positions can hinder productive talk about race since they often hide the fact that white subjectivities are then rarely reflected on in-depth.

Hooks writes in "Whiteness in the Black Imagination" that black thinkers and scholars are wary of the presence of white academics in discussions of race because white thinkers do not realize how representations of whiteness emerge in black cultural imagination—for example, as responses to "the traumatic pain and anguish that remains a consequence of white racist domination, a psychic state that informs and shapes the way black folks `see' whiteness" (Killing Rage 37, 38). Although white theorists might be working and writing in good faith and with laudable intentions, it is important to recognize—because of atrocities such as genocide and slavery which are a part of the history of the United States and because of current forms of oppression—that "whiteness in the black imagination is often a representation of terror" (Killing Rage 41). In short, hooks is suspicious of the burgeoning talk by white academics about race and difference. As she sees it, because white academics tend to deny their historical connections to racial supremacy, they often exhibit colonialist impulses when writing about race without even knowing it. Such impulses, she writes, take the form of a kind of tourism, a "form of constructing African-American culture as though it exists solely to suggest new aesthetic and political directions white folks might move in" (Yearning 21).³

Those of us who are white academics dedicated to fighting racial oppression, then, need to show our good faith by refusing to keep whiteness—white subjectivities, fears, desires, motivations—invisible behind uncomplicated declarations of our subject positions. We need to begin to examine exactly how we as white academics talk and write about race and difference and how this talk might be reinforcing and perpetuating cultural practices of domination by not really examining how we may have internalized logics of oppression. We might also begin to identify ourselves in ways other than by setting ourselves against overt forms of discrimination; we might begin to form identities which do not rely on pointing out and indicting the obvious, the racist. In short, we might advance theories which not only account for the contradictory composition of our own selves but which also recognize the possibility of individual agency when working within larger hegemonic forces. I stress again the need to confront Villanueva's question: "How do nice people abide by and maintain not nice things, like a system in which certain groups are consistently relegated to the bottom of the structure in disproportionate numbers?" (332)

In discussions about race, it is imperative that we acknowledge what we theorize in so many of our other professional discussions about writing and writing instruction: that identities are not fixed and stable but constantly negotiated and produced through dialogue and reflection. Oftentimes, though, keeping comfortable dualisms intact (believing that people are either racists or nonracists) helps assuage the feelings of guilt whites sometimes hold about connections to larger ideological forces of oppression in the United States. But denying implication in structures of domination because we feel guilty puts those we would hope to help resist discriminatory practices in great peril. As we have seen repeatedly—and this is really the crux of the matter here—speaking from a perspective that imagines itself outside of critique ultimately perpetuates oppressive practices since the critical perspective itself often remains unexamined. And this is exactly what happens when we consider ourselves nonracist: we keep our subject positions out of discussions of race, and in doing so, we place them outside of society, outside of ideology, outside of rhetoric, outside of responsibility and accountability. We all negotiate internal contradictions—albeit, in very different ways from one another—because we are part of a culture of rich heterogeneity, a culture which nonetheless legitimates racial oppression. But those of us who enjoy cultural privilege because of ethnic identity and affiliation must especially continue to guard against colonizing impulses and assumptions which can come to us so easily—so easily as to seem invisible and, therefore, "natural." Clearly, we all need to continually guard against trafficking in hurtful assumptions about others, assumptions that circulate everyday in the media, in the workplace, in our cultural imaginations, and even, perhaps, in our homes. We should also realize that working against racial oppression in productive ways is a project that can only be enacted "from the inside"—"from the belly of the monster," as Donna Haraway says.⁴ That is to say, if we are to take responsibility for restructuring our social institutions into systems of nondomination, we must realize that we cannot get outside of racist culture and comment "objectively" on it. Villanueva writes, "We are even partly responsible for the dominant hegemony, since hegemony consists, in part, of the ideologies that the various classes and cultures hold in common, though these varied ideologies tend to be used to the dominant classes' ultimate advantage" (333). By continually exteriorizing critiques of race relations, we foreclose questions about how we might be connected to and positioned in social structures of oppression and domination before we can even ask them. If we are to effectively combat racism and other oppressive forces, we should first rigorously examine and honestly challenge how we may have internalized (and may continue to internalize) their logics and practices. How can we ever know how we are complicitous with structures of domination if we never have the courage to ask ourselves?

The Racist Other and the Composition Classroom

Elsewhere I have talked about the need to complexify our discussions about race and difference especially when talking and writing about them with students in the composition classroom.⁵ But such propositions are not always easy. Keating talks of the difficulties that can occur in classroom interrogations of whiteness, for example. "To begin with," she writes, "`whiteness' often becomes demonized and viewed as almost entirely evil and morally bankrupt, thus creating another binary between the good non-`whites' and the bad `whites'"(909). In my experience, no student wants to be considered "morally bankrupt." So the strategy for many students is to then create yet another binary: good, nonracist whites and bad, racist whites. These kinds of simplistic notions of racial identities lead students to declare themselves "not racist," and they often "prove it" by then enacting critiques of overt forms of racism. Because they do not want to feel, or be perceived as feeling, complicitous with larger ideological forces of domination and oppression, they believe it necessary to set themselves apart from those whom they perceive are responsible for racism. White students, perhaps like their white instructors, often use the indictment of other whites to both ignore their participation in racist culture and deflect tough questions they might ask themselves. Karen Fitts and Alan W. France describe such demonizing as a recurring rhetorical strategy for students, a strategy which they notice working in discussions of gender but which I am using here to inform my discussion of race. They observe that students often contend that the "oppression and exploitation of women are the results of a few bad people or institutions that can be distinguished from `society,'" which in turn leads them to believe that "sexism can be safely ignored as the product of a few reprehensible sociopaths" (17, 21). Often, however, once white students have preempted critiques of themselves as racists, they sometimes then believe that whatever they say next automatically does not comprise racist thinking. Those of us who deal with issues of race and identity in the composition classroom are all too familiar with the ubiquitous "but" following such declarations: I'm not a racist, but. . . . What follows might be any number of reasons why "blacks" or other "minorities" should be held accountable for their, at times, lower cultural and economic status. In the writing classes I teach, I try to begin discussions about racial oppression by asking if there is a way we might talk and write about it by avoiding static concepts of racial identities while at the same time not ignoring real historical and present material consequences.

But questions about pedagogy in this regard should be the same as the ones about our academic discussions: How can we talk and write about race without exteriorizing our critiques and by taking into account the complexity of our identities as racial beings? How can we account for the internal contradictions brought on by living in a racist society? I believe Joseph Harris' idea of "the other reader" indicates an important and productive direction we might move into when theorizing racial identities and discussing race.

In his essay, "The Other Reader," Harris observes that when students exteriorize critiques of popular culture they identify themselves simplistically as critics who are somehow outside of and above the effects of the media culture they are critiquing. He observes that in their critiques of advertisements, for example, students often seem to describe not their own responses to the ads but those of "some other viewer" (28). That is, they might point out how an ad's strategies are effective in getting others to buy the product being advertised, but they, as the ones enacting the critique, are not fooled by such tactics; they are not the dupes. Harris also describes how he looked around his classroom and noticed the uniformity of fashion among students; he then asked them, "How is it . . . that nobody here is taken in by advertising and yet we all dress alike? Can we find a way of talking about the effects ads have not on other people but on ourselves?" (29). And it is exactly these kinds of analytical rigors that I suggest we ourselves enact when discussing racism.⁶

In order to establish discussions of race and ethnicity which do not totally exteriorize critiques, we might begin to ask if we can find a way of talking about the effects racist culture has not on other people but on ourselves. Such ways of examining racism might help emphasize that racial oppression is not something that simply "happens" always "elsewhere," that it is not always manifested in others, in those identified as the racists of the world. Once we consider ourselves nonracist, then we believe that there is no need to give our own position critical attention. Often in interrogations of racism it is the racist's subjectivity which is examined and not that of self-declared nonracist positions. That is, the "racist other"—those "easy-to-identify" racists—are the white subjectivities under question in discussions of racism. In much talk about race by white "nonracists," the racist is often held up for examination; it is the racist who often stands-in for the nonracist's absent subject position. Interrogations of white subjectivities are typically built around white subjectivites that are ususally not percieved—because we like to think of ourselves as nonracist—to be our own. Ultimately, such interrogations based on the lines I have sketched might blur the pristine boundaries between what it means to be considered racist and nonracist.

Agency and Identification

In order to begin to discuss identity in more complex ways, we might begin to think about identity more in terms of action, as a deliberate political strategy and less as a state of being or condition fixed by terms and labels. For example, Cornel West talks about a

What West advocates is not an ignoring of difference but a radical sense of agency based on the need to identify with others across various cultural and political borders. This kind of identification, unlike older forms of identity politics which often silenced difference in the identified group in order to get things done, does not ask us to ignore difference ("human particularities") or material consequences ("social specificities"). Such a stance calls for identifying across and within these various borders with the realization that our plights and the plights of others are not always informed by shared circumstances while realizing that we still might work together toward ending social inequalities in the face of non-negotiable difference. Identity, then, is based on action, one which, as Harris observes, "rises out of identification": "We define who we are," he says, "by whom we choose to stand with and against" (35). Responsible and accountable identities cannot be constructed simply by declarations of dedication to this or that cause. Identification involves commitment; it involves agency—in the choices we make about the images and commodities we consume, about how we live and teach and do scholarship. Emphasizing that identity rises from the act of identifying moves away from notions of identity as defined and fixed by labels and terms. Such an emphasis also keeps us from identifying ourselves and others in totalized and noncontradictory ways. It is an understanding that accounts not only for contradictions brought on by identifying with many things (people, movements, political positions, and so forth) at the same time but also for changes in affiliation as we grow and age within—and reflect upon—changing social conditions. We form provisional, and often conflicted, political and cultural identities from the intersections of contesting affiliations and positions. Our identifying makes us agents in the ideologies in which we already find ourselves rhetorically embedded and embattled. Thus, our identites as people fighting against racial oppression should be based on identification, affiliation, action, and reflection—not on mere declaration and appearance. In this regard, we are all subjects of ideology and subjects of agency, "neither the old humanist agent[s] of free will and free expression nor the late-Foucauldian conglomerate[s] of totally preconstructed expressives" (Simpson 4).

Exploring exactly how we as white academics fit into racist culture is not an easy task; it oftentimes involves a great deal of courage and discomfort. Such explorations necessarily involve rigorous reflection, insistence on deliberation and dialogue, and a realization that such dialogue concerning oppression and domination of all kinds can at times involve pain, conflict, and contradiction. Talking about race relations in the United States in truly productive ways, as hooks and others point out, should be risky, emotional, and painful exactly because the results of oppression and domination are painful, destructive, sometimes fatal. If we stop thinking of our racial identities in dualistic terms (you are either a "racist" or a "nonracist") then we might begin to set up interrogations and pedagogies which take into account how larger hegemonic forces intersect and inform wills, intentions, and desires. And if we are all to be able to take pleasure in our differences, we need to begin risking engaged, committed, and reflexive dialogue about racism which is not stalled by guilt and/or denial about the connection of white subjectivities to racial oppression.

Racial oppression is not like an illness (as some students would like to believe), like something that can be cured by simple, prescriptive measures, by surface remedies, or by countering the few "racist sociopaths" who dwell somewhere outside of "proper" society. It is important to remember that attitudes forwarding racial oppression circulate around us and through us all the time, everyday, and that racism is a social condition which we must be careful not to reproduce. The challenge is to continually be on the lookout for how these assumptions seep into ideology and get transmitted rhetorically and experientially, to foster, as hooks says, a "fundamental attitude of vigilance rather than denial" (Yearning 55). However, we, white compositionists dedicated to fighting racial oppression, become susceptible to enacting the very practices of domination we wish to eradicate when we believe that we are not involved, however unintentionally, in systems of oppression, when we foster instead easy remedies and surface appearances. We might begin to think and write about our own involvement in white, racist culture in order to realize that our identities as racial beings are not static and simple but mixed and complex, that they are intersected by strong emotions of pain, pleasure, pride, guilt, fear, happiness, and regret. We might also encourage our students to think and write about race in similar ways, encouraging them to question dualistic thinking which allows white identities only two options: racist and nonracist.⁷