Whiteness as Technology of Affect: Implications for Educational Praxis

Abstract

This article explores the embodiment and affectivity of whiteness, particularly as it implicates educational praxis and social justice in education, focusing on the following questions: In what ways are affect and whiteness constitutive of each other in race dialogue? How does emotion intersect with racial practices and white privilege, and what are the educational implications of this entanglement? In theorizing whiteness as a technology of affect, the authors hope to capture the mental, emotional, and bodily dimensions of whiteness in the context of racial dialogue. In particular, the authors introduce the idea of “white intellectual alibis,” or Whites’ attempt to project a non-racist alibi rather than aligning themselves with anti-racism. Finally, the authors discuss how whiteness as a kind of technology of affect has implications for pedagogical efforts to engage in equitable and anti-racist education. It is suggested that unless educational scholars engage with a theoretical analysis of how whiteness is manifest as affective technology in educational praxis, we will fail to appreciate the important implications of this idea for educational theory and praxis.

Notes

1. For a distinction between Whites and whiteness, see Leonardo, 2002.

2. It helps here to make a crude distinction between affect and emotion. Following Massumi (1996) (who grounds his analysis in Deleuze), emotion may be understood as more discursive, more aligned to semantic and semiotic signification (i.e., codifiable, something which may be put in words); affect, by contrast, may be understood as less discursive, less available to signification, and more pertaining to the body.

3. Here we are not using “veil” in Du Bois’ sense of it as imposition from an outside force. Rather, the white veil is a self-imposed obstruction in order to prevent Whites’ true self-understanding, which is central to the reproduction of their dominance.

4. Again, by “post” we mean a spatial representation not a temporal one of “after”-white.

5. Rose (1998) discusses what Foucault termed “technologies of the self” to emphasize the ways in which individuals conduct themselves. “Technologies of power” are also technologies that are internalized and self-steering, but their emphasis is more on the mechanisms with which power/knowledge regimes establish normalization.