Whiteness in transit: the racialized geographies of international volunteering

ABSTRACT

Studying the ways whiteness contorts across geographies is important to understanding the weaknesses of racial paradigms that enable domination and dispossession. This paper analyzes how whiteness is discursively revised and re-affirmed in contemporary spaces of transit by studying the online personal blogs of white Americans who volunteered as classroom teachers in Namibia. It reviews how the racialized realities of Namibia breach the volunteers’ white epistemologies, but ultimately result in the retrenching of white supremacy. The volunteers ignore the implications of racism even as they deploy racialized terminology and equate whiteness with celebrity, simplifying the complex ways whiteness is read in post-colonial Africa.

RESUMEN

Estudiar las formas en que la blancura se contorsiona a través de las geografías es importante para comprender las debilidades de los paradigmas raciales que permiten la dominación y el despojo. Este artículo analiza cómo la blancura se revisa y reafirma discursivamente en los espacios de tránsito contemporáneos mediante el estudio de los blogs personales de estadounidenses blancos que participaron como maestros de escuela voluntarios en Namibia. Revisa cómo las realidades racializadas de Namibia violan las epistemologías blancas de los voluntarios, pero en última instancia resultan en la reducción de la supremacía blanca. Los voluntarios ignoran las implicaciones del racismo incluso cuando emplean terminología racializada e identifican la blancura con la celebridad, simplificando las formas complejas en que se lee la blancura en el África poscolonial.

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• estudios críticos de blancura
• ignorancia blanca
• turismo voluntario
• daltonismo
• Namibia
• oshilumbu

KEYWORDS:

• Critical whiteness studies
• white ignorance
• volunteer tourism
• colorblindness
• Namibia
• oshilumbu

Acknowledgments

Ayanna Brown first encouraged me to consider the central themes presented here. Mary Mostafanezhad helped spatialize my thinking. The paper also benefited from many discussions with Mutaleni Amutoko and critical readings by Stephanie Sang, Foley Pfalzgraf, and the three reviewers. A previous draft was presented at the 2018 AAG and recognized by the Recreation, Tourism, and Sport group.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As I write this paper, large protests against racialized police violence led by the Movement for Black Lives have broken out all over the world. Polling of Americans suggests that almost 3 in 4 whites believe racism to be ‘a big problem’ (Russonello, 2020). Colorblindness has long been an antiquated ideology (Doane, 2017), so it would not be too surprising if it has finally reached its limits. On the other hand, as I argue in this paper, white ignorance is a powerful beast that finds ways to hang on even if colorblindness must be discarded as a liability to overall project of white supremacy.

2. These are general rules. As with any language, Oshiwambo is played with and not uniformly agreed upon by all speakers. Additionally, there may be urban-rural as well as dialectal divergence when trying to delineate specific identity definitions. Light-skinned Black Namibians may sometimes be called ‘oshilumbu’ in jest. Oshilumbu is sometimes used in popular music to describe beautiful, typically light-skinned Owambo women, evidencing the intersection of whiteness, power, and gender. Oshilumbu is also the politically correct term for Black Namibians with albinism, which evidences its phenotypic – more than foreign-marking – character