On the Discursive Orientation toward Whiteness

ABSTRACT

There is a discursive tendency when examining questions of race and racism to address a reader who is implicitly white. This discursive orientation limits the range and rigour of our research questions and proposals. In addressing a white reader who is potentially hostile, or suffers from ‘white ignorance’, we find ourselves beginning our analyses, not from a historiographic survey of the question, but from a pre-emptive justification that we should continue to pose it at all. Drawing on literary theory and Africana philosophy, I conclude that in order to redress the racist, epistemological strictures of a discursive orientation toward whiteness, we need to explicitly reorient our discursive voice toward a non-white reader.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• racism
• race
• reader
• literary theory
• Africana philosophy
• epistemology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Amir Jaima, Born in the archipelago nation of Antigua and Barbuda, Dr Amir Jaima is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University (TAMU). He comes to TAMU after receiving his Ph.D. in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook in 2014. He did his undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College. His primary research interests are in Aesthetics and Africana Philosophy. His doctoral research examined the relationship between philosophy and literature. Additionally, he is interested in Gender/Genre Theory (specifically Black Male Studies) and Continental Philosophy. Finally, Amir is a creative writer and has a number of working ‘literary’ projects that both inform and are inspired by his philosophical work.

ORCID

Amir Jaima http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9757-6513

Notes

1 Charles Mills explains:

white supremacy is (1) a particular kind of oppressive social system, sub-national or national or international, coming into existence (2) in a time period in which race has emerged as a significant social category and social reality, and (3) whiteness and nonwhiteness are recognized racial identities, and (4) whites have and exert differential power in creating and controlling the evolution of the social system in question, and/or in blocking changes to it that would substantially reduce their domination, whose end is originally (5) the systemic, significant, and illicit differential advantaging of all or most whites as a group with respect to nonwhites as a group in various important social spheres. (2017, 475–456)

2 See, Wynter 1995 ‘1492: A New World View,’ and Wynter 2006, ‘On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, or Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.’

3 See Holbrook et al. 2016, ‘Looming large in others’ eyes: racial stereotypes illuminate dual adaptations for representing threat versus prestige as physical size’; and Livingston and Pearce 2009, ‘The Teddy-Bear Effect: Does Having a Baby Face Benefit Black Chief Executive Officers?’

4 see J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (1975)

5 See Faegin 2006, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression.

6 Racial prejudice, which is an institutionally sustained psychological phenomenon, is only one manifestation of racism. Two other examples of well-documented manifestations of racism are the racially disparate incarceration rates in the US (see Alexander 2012, The New Jim Crow) and the racially correlated wealth disparities (see Chetty et al., 2018, ‘Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective’).

7 On ‘stereotype threat,’ see Claude Steele's Whisteling Vivaldi (2011); on racial battle fatigue, see Smith et al. 2011, 2016.

8 See Jacoby Carter 2017, ‘Race-ing the Canon: American Icons from Thomas Jefferson to Alaine Locke,’ for a critical analysis of the limits of the white American philosophical canon.