Justice-in-the-doing: an epilogue on whiteness-at-work in higher education

Abstract

In this epilogue, I use a variety of forms to synthesize several contributions that vibrated through the articles in this special issue on “whiteness-at-work in higher education,” which expanded on my paper offering the “whiteness-at-work” concept in 2012. I synthesize with my thinking and experience as a Korean American, disabled, cishet woman of color and all the in-betweens that these and more parts of my body and myself entail. I use stylistic play and variety to respond to and advance one of the central contributions in the special issue, which is understanding the challenges and strategies of theorizing how it feels to be structured – that is, the affective residues of gridlocking individuals and institutions – by whiteness-at-work in higher education institutions. I also mention genuine, unresolvable dilemmas about studying whiteness that these papers helped me articulate. I leave with some love to fuel this labor we have chosen.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• whiteness-at-work
• entanglement
• haunting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is my ritual footnote to explain that whiteness and white supremacy are not the same as talking about white people. When stating that whiteness is not humanness, I also maintain the understanding that individual white persons are human, complicated, and not monolithic. I do not believe white identity needs to be founded on guilt or self-disparagement, though white people may feel guilt or self-dislike upon beginning to understand white supremacy. This footnote is written for the benefit of readers (often white) who may be working through how to make sense of whiteness (and whiteness-at-work) in relation to their identities as racialized people.

2 My article has been cited enough in this special issue, and you can find my dissertation and later writings on the internet. Please do contact me if you have trouble accessing them. I don’t need to cite myself for the points.

3 Can you shout out to people like Paulo Freire? If so, shout out to Freire, M.M. Bakhtin, and to Dorothy Holland and colleagues.

4 “What is non-material is not immaterial” (Yoon & Chen, in press). This assertion refers to my work on haunting, which is in conversation with feminist and queer new materialisms, entanglement, animacies, and relationality.

5 This is a traditional African American idiom that reflects connectedness and ubuntu, the Bantu concept of the connectedness and recognition of humanity in the Zulu language. There are other similar words and concepts in other Bantu languages and in other regions of Africa. In one of my academic home communities, the Barbara L. Jackson Scholar Network of the University Council for Educational Administration, we gather annually in a circle to cherish each other with this affirmation of our beingness. Though the saying is directed toward human connection, I believe it also includes spirit and non-human, non-material but still mattering forces.

6 I think of body, mind, and spirit as one and inseparable, though positioned in different relations to each other at different times. This, again, is not a unique idea. I use the arrangement of words and punctuation to illustrate these relations: e.g., “bodymindspirit,” “bodymind/spirit,” “body/mind/spirit,” and “bodyspiritmind” and “mindspirit/body.”

7 Writers and leaders who exemplify the ethos and aesthetic of Black abundance include Kiese Laymon (2020), Fannie Lou Hamer (see Blain, 2021), Saidiya Hartman (2019), and Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2018).

8 I dare us to be like Toni Morrison and Fannie Lou Hamer and Octavia Butler and Grace Lee Boggs and Cherie Dimaline and Akwaeke Emezi; like K-Ming Chang and Maxine Hong Kingston and Julia Alvarez.

9 People have begun to discuss the appropriateness of appropriation of “closet” metaphors for disability and disclosure. Among the questions are the push and pull of privilege and exclusion or erasure between disabled people who can “hide” their disabilities and those who cannot, those whose disabilities are evident to others. In addition, the appropriateness of the metaphor, of drawing comparisons between disability and queerness, is up for debate, often related to dynamics of choice, exposure to harm, race, and survival.

10 People who pretend to be Black, mixed race, Indigenous, disabled, or queer, I am looking at you. Our open arms for people to identify with us despite years, maybe decades, of stigma, erasure, and violence are misused for a white (so often ciswoman) person’s gain, to satisfy their desiring “culture” and credibility as “marginalized”—“I’ve experienced trauma too,” they say. Appreciation and credit to my colleagues and friends Z Nicolazzo and Karen Tao, who have helped me acknowledge and articulate this pattern over the years with respect to trans*ness and race, respectively.

11 K. Tao, 2021, personal communication

12 In social justice education circles, there is a lot of getting trapped in having “conversations” and “dialogues.” These are essential, as are explicit “institutional commitments” and “strategic plans,” but what on earth do those do for us if that is where they stay?

13 Sometimes I doubt whether I really believe in these dreams. Whiteness-at-work is inseparable from gender and class and disability and sexuality and queerness. It's inseparable from productivity, speed, evidence, ratings, funding models, and the state. It is inseparable from being fundamentally and existentially cast aside, disregarded, dehumanized. Whiteness at-work in higher education produces (by) destruction and despair. Nicely. Politely. The ultimate violent, fatal paradox.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irene h. Yoon

irene h. yoon, ph.d., is associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Utah. Her work centers dignity and belonging in multi-dimensional complexities of instructional and schoolwide improvement in professional learning and leadership practice, including the construction of middle-class white womanhood; cognitive and emotional tolls of “turnaround” leadership; haunted inclusion across race, disability, and transgenerational trauma; and conceptualizing qualitative methodologies. She thanks the editors of this special issue, the authors of the articles, and the educators who have been thoughtful partners in research for justice-in-the-doing.