Continuing a Politic of Disruption: Race(ing) Intercultural Communication

In the brief period since we wrote the introduction to the first special issue, we lament the deaths of more young Black men at the hands of law enforcement in the U.S.; the shootings of two police officers in New York, the massacre of women and children by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria that fails to garner media attention¹; and the terrorist attacks in Paris. Likely the list of events implicating and tied to race across the globe is longer. Even so, we offer such examples as a reminder that race is and remains salient in the new year. Race is salient in the stories reported (or neglected) by international and domestic media outlets to global publics. Despite public discourse that suggest racism is over, a recent poll reveals that 58% of whites and 63% of Blacks each view race relations as “very bad.”² These statistics are noteworthy as they serve as additional evidence of, if not play a role in disrupting, the farcical nature of a post-racial society.

Complementing the above are the five essays closing this second special issue on race. Before delving into those essays, we refresh readers’ understandings of what we mean by a politic of disruption. “Politic” underscores scholars’ balance of politics and shrewdness necessary to apprehend the connections between race and intercultural communication whereas “disruption” points to a disturbance in the norm(al) (Moon & Holling, 2015). The final set of essays continue the work of race(ing) intercultural communication—an impetus behind a politic of disruption. The essays enact a politic of disruption by revealing the subtle (and, perhaps not so subtle) ways that race and racism inflect various discourses that permeate websites, web based campaigns, social media sites such as Twitter, popular films, and classroom spaces. What unites these five essays is how they expose the presence of post-racialism and colorblindness in discourses that ultimately shape, preclude or inhibit intercultural possibilities. For instance, some authors identify the machinations of racial logics and ideology (e.g., “new racism,” “Birther logics,” and “multicultural/multiracial Obama-ism”). Other authors expose the ways that whiteness surfaces in narratives produced by dispossessed and excluded subjects that undercut prospects for cross racial-ethnic identifications and conversely, in the processes by which film facilitates social desires for a post-racial society even as whiteness is valorized. Taken together, the essays race intercultural communication through their interrogation of the inter/cultural operations of race(ing) and a post-racial society in innovative ways.

As in the prior issue, we organize the essays deliberately and thoughtfully in order to bring to the fore a particular progression that we did not expect when finalizing the second issue. Opening the issue are two essays that take to task discursive questioning of the nation through its national figures that begins first and foremost with the President of the United States to another socially coveted role of Miss America (i.e., Pham, and Cisneros and Nakayama, respectively). The work of these scholars critiques Birther and social media discourses that racialize treasured figures subsequently indicating desires for a nostalgic return to a clean white past or a “better time.” Of course, we know that although such a past has never existed, despite acts of violence, conquest, colonization, etc., our nation's history implicates an idolized notion of citizenship premised on being white (as in the President or Miss America) and/or whiteness. Gaining access to citizenship relies upon expressing one's desire for national belonging such as what surfaces in Morrissey's essay. Her essay demonstrates how migrant Others access whiteness as invaluable through their espousal of a value system (e.g., ownership or paying dues) arguably based on a system of white domination. Amongst these scholars’ analyses, an implicit narrative of progress politically, socially, and economically begins to surface—whether attributable to the election of the first Black president or the crowning of the first Indian American—albeit one rife with ruptures, which the authors named deftly unpack. When turning to the realm of popular culture, a similar narrative of progress surfaces, but this one requires refashioning white supremacy in the Jim Crow south. Griffin's essay adroitly unpacks the ways in which a popular film represents racial consciousness and white–Black female friendships as a means of transcending racism that come at the expense and de-valuation of Black women. The public pedagogy of film examined by Griffin segues into the narrative pedagogy produced by students, who write about their own cultural identities, examined by Chen, Simmons and Kang. Their analysis provocatively identifies a perception among students who narrativize progress as “multicultural/multiracial Obama-ism.” Interestingly, the final essay circles back to the first essay that implicated President Obama. To illustrate the ordering discussed, we offer brief comments about the individual essays.

In “Our Foreign President,” Pham examines birther discourse especially in its questioning of the citizenship of President Barack Obama and thus the legitimacy of his presidency. En route, he unpacks the racial logics of how Birther constructions of the “natural born citizen” positions President Obama as an inscrutable foreigner without legitimacy and activates xenophobic fears regarding an increasingly multi-racial and global society. Articulated with longstanding (white) racial logics around anti-Blackness and Yellow Peril, Birther discourse activates other racial logics around leader acceptability regarding all non-white groups.

Next, in “New Media, Old Racism,” Cisneros and Nakayama argue that rather than seeing old racism and “new” (colorblind racism) as oppositional, the relationship between them is one of coexistence, continuity, and complementarity. Taking the win of Davuluri's crowning as the first Indian American Miss America in 2014 as a case study, the authors show that the emergence of racist tweets in response to her victory provided an opportunity for the re-assertion of colorblind and race-neutral ideologies.

In her essay, “(Net)roots of Belonging,” Morrissey argues that in an era of post-racism, raced migrants in the United States must prove their value to the nation in order to be integrated or accepted by the dominant culture. Analyzing the We Are American campaign, migrant testimonials perform desire for national belonging and de-valuing of U.S. minorities, thus demonstrating their (in)valuability to/for whiteness. Morrissey argues that in their efforts to establish credibility, migrants must manage their intersectional subjectivities in ways that service (U.S. national) whiteness and reproduce the value of the category.

Next, in “Problematic Representations,” Griffin performs a critical reading of the popular film The Help as a way of unpacking the public pedagogical impetus of popular culture. She illustrates the ways in which the centralization of whiteness and the redemption of white racists are manifestations of a strategic whiteness that operates at the expense of Black women. In so doing, she argues that the film functions as a site of racial apologia for whites and provides momentum of post-racial ideology.

Finally, Chen, Simmons, and Kang in “My Family Isn’t Racist” analyze undergraduate data on cultural identity in order to unpack the challenges of teaching race to millennials reared in a “post-racial” period. They identify the emergence of an ideology they coin, “multicultural/multiracial Obama-ism” (MMO) that is supported by three frames of individualism, meritocracy, and universalism. They conclude their essay by offering pedagogical suggestions useful for unpacking MMO in terms of classroom interaction and self-reflexivity about their identities.

The two special issues on race(ing) intercultural communication foreground several threads that unite the nine essays but that also indicate points of consideration for other scholars who wish to carry out similar work. One thread is that racism is a global problem that merits, if not urgently demands, scholars’ attention. We believe that inter/cultural scholars are uniquely situated to provide insight and analysis in this area and failure to do so would seem an abdication of our responsibilities as organic intellectuals (see Milazzo, 2015; Pham, this issue). Related to the examination of racism is to account for one's subjectivity, or self-positioning, in the work and in relation to what we do (see Eguchi, 2015; Griffin, this issue; Milazzo, 2015; Nelson, 2015). In so doing, self-positioning is a critical move that gestures toward the embodied nature of scholarship but also showcases how such embodiment filters what and how we proceed in the study of race. Toward that end, any act of self-positioning must consider the aspects of reflexivity that orient scholars to remain attentive to silences, social and academic structures, and the production of knowledge (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995). A third theme regards particular values such as individualism, meritocracy, or ownership that endure despite their pernicious ramifications for addressing social relations (see, in this issue, Chen, Simmons and Kang; Cisneros and Nakayama; Morrissey). A final theme is the central role that whiteness plays in race(ing) intercultural communication. For example, various essays (in)directly attend to whiteness in order to expose its functioning in discourse (Cisneros & Nakayama; Griffin; Pham, all in this issue; Nelson, 2015) or challenge a white–Black binary (Eguchi, 2015; Mudambi, 2015). Even though whiteness was not the focus of our call for contributions to the special issues, we find that invariably whiteness and its various supportive discourses such as neoliberalism and colorblindness suffuse the study of and undergirds the race(ing) of intercultural communication. The dialectical relationship between white hegemony(ies) and global racisms is one that intercultural scholars doing race work will need to consider further.

Based on the nine essays published, we endeavored to (and, have) set in motion a politic of disruption, and it needs to remain so. That is, the field of intercultural communication requires scholars who will continue to disrupt the study of intercultural communication via close analyses of race (and its intersection with other identity categories) and through critique of postracial discourses in order to unveil what enables such beliefs to persist and to develop tactics of intervention. From where we stand, (critical) intercultural scholars appear to be in a transitional moment where old ways of thinking about and studying race surface in the discourses analyzed, yet new theorizations and ways into the racial conversation are emerging. Intercultural scholars are poised to be on the cutting edge of such shifts.

As we look ahead, we offer three directions for race(ing) intercultural communication: to broaden our attention to tensions between macro and micro forces, to conduct comparative work, and to attend to intersectionality. Of the institutions or macro structures explored by the nine authors, most often is media (e.g., film, social media, the Internet such as web campaigns or discourse), but also explored is academe, education, and vernacular discourse. What institutions do we neglect and, why? How might we tease out more clearly tensions between macro and micro forces? Second, comparative work is needed. Here, we are reminded of Milazzo's (2015) essay that helps us understand how discourses permeate globally both similarly and differently. If racism is indeed global, we need to understand both how it operates both within and among nations and cultural groups. Finally, scholarship that attends to intersectionality continues to be much needed. This is difficult work as it is challenging to write linearly about interconnected identities and processes. How might intercultural scholars imagine new ways of thinking through these difficult relationships? And at the end of the day, a relentless hope for doing better as peoples on the planet and an abiding desire for the full recognition of all peoples’ human rights must guide our work. Are we as intercultural scholars up to this momentous challenge? Our answer to this question is an unequivocal yes.

Notes

[1] Patrick Chappatte's (2015) editorial cartoon, quips, “How many massacres does it take to be in the news around here?”

[2] Wall Street Journal and NBC news conducted the poll of 1,000 adults, 74% of whom are white (Hook & Ballhaus, n.d.).