The Secret Hurt: Exposing the Visceral Nature of Whiteness in the Academy

Abstract

This article presents an autoethnographic reflection from three education scholars—a white man, a Latinx woman, and a Black woman—on the institutional presence of whiteness in the academy. We started developing this reflection when jointly conducting a study of faculty and students of color in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Ongoing discussion of that study’s interviews and themes led us to write about how that work affected us personally. As our reflection progressed and we continued to analyze what we wrote, what started as a reflection on conducting race research became a set of narratives about our experiences with whiteness in the academy more broadly. We share those narratives to highlight the visceral nature of whiteness, i.e., the emotional weight and harm of whiteness’ looming presence in the academy. We also explore how the research act—when conducted as critical, collaborative autoethnography—can serve as a form of antiracist community building and help carve out space for speaking back to the othering and silencing white narratives of white racial spaces like PWIs.

Notes

1 All participant names are pseudonyms.

2 We follow Dumas’ (2016) practice of capitalizing Black and keeping white in lower case (except in cases of direct quotes from outside sources). We also capitalize other racial terms for people of color (Brown, Latinx, etc.).

3 Since then, two of us remain at the university, but in different positions, and one has moved to a new institution.

4 To share the chance to be first author across the group, we decided Ben would be first author on this piece and Syntia and Christy would take that role on other pieces (under review). Ben has had experience with performance ethnography and conducting CRT research on race and whiteness. We recognize that scholarship does make him more knowledgeable than Syntia and Christy about race and racism. The knowledge and perspectives Syntia and Christy brought to the study were important to more fully exposing the white institutional presence in the academy, and we acknowledge the unique perspective that people of color have to understand racism and whiteness (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). For this piece, however, Ben spent the most time on organizing the writing, on gathering the literature for the theoretical framing and methods, and in initiating the driving questions and analysis. In addition, including dominant narratives in research on race can give fuller context for how racism functions (Milner, 2007). In this case, comparing all three of our responses helps give a fuller account of our experiences with whiteness. We also point out the instances where Ben narratives are sometimes more closely connected to the dominant, white narratives (especially in the earlier narrative sections) and, in contrast, were Syntia and Christy’s narratives expose the fuller potential for harm of white institutional presence. Furthermore, even with Ben’s role as lead author, we all use this piece as an intentional act of committing (Noblit, 1999) both to each other and to our collective goal of calling out whiteness in white racial space.

5 Here and again below, instead of using Latinx as we do in the rest of the piece, Syntia uses Latina as it was the word used in the interview Syntia is discussing and in her own notes on this specific question.