Using Perspective by Incongruity to Crack Invisible Whiteness

Abstract

Courses

Critical Methods, Intercultural Communication, Rhetorical Criticism

Objectives

Students will investigate commonly held assumptions about whiteness and consider a common communication practice that other nonwhite people.

Notes

³ For McIntosh (2004), being white means one can misbehave “without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race” (p. 190).

⁴ Dyer (1997) argues that whiteness emerged in the American colonial era as a means of uniting European immigrants “over and against the indigenous reds and the imported blacks, and … over and above the particularities of the different European nations from which they had come” (p. 19).

⁵ The concept of the “Other” has been deployed in the theorization of consciousness and identity. Present in Hegel and Husserl, the term rose to greater visibility on the basis of works by de Beauvoir (2010) and Said (1979). To justify domination and exploitation, colonizers define themselves over and against an imagined opposite and inferior “Other.” By binary logic, for the powerful to be normal and good, the “Other” must take on each reciprocal quality. For women, this has meant being the moody, conniving, weak, and fickle foil to stoic, loyal, strong, and dedicated hegemonic masculinity. People of color have been cast as playful, sneaky, lazy, hypersexualized, and ignorant in order that whites might imagine themselves to be serious, honest, hardworking, pure, and enlightened.

⁶ SB-1070 amends Sec. 2. Title 11, chapter 7, Arizona Revised Statutes by adding an 8th chapter entitled “Enforcement of Immigration Laws.” Significant passages are excerpted here. “No official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may limit or restrict the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law”; the detaining agent “may not solely consider race, color, or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona constitution”; and “a legal resident of this state may bring an action in superior court to challenge any official or agency of this state or a county, city, town, or other political subdivision of this state that adopts or implements a policy or practice that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws, including 8 United States Code Sections 1373 and 1644, to less than the full extent permitted by federal law” (words struck-through have been redacted by House Bill 2162). The full text of SB-1070 including revisions is available at http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/summary/h.sb1070_asamendedbyhb2162.doc.htm

⁷ Governor Brewer claimed that officers would be trained to enforce the law without resorting to racial profiling, though she declined to disclose how (CNN, 2010, April 24).