The Power of a Comfortable White Body: Race and Habitual Emotion

Abstract

This article explores the role of white comfort in sustaining white hegemony in institutional culture and classroom dynamics. The presumption of comfort and security in established social norms enacts an embodied commitment to white supremacy that operates concurrently with conscious, articulated desires to pursue equity, as it delimits how white people imagine what authentically equitable institutions might look and feel like. The article draws on theological uses of phenomenology and developmental psychology to describe how the white self develops within a hegemonic social milieu and how an embodied sense of agency and comfort within unjust social structures facilitates white normativity.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Hauge is currently a doctoral candidate in Practical Theology at Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts. His research interests include critical whiteness studies, developmental and social psychology, affect theory, and liberation theology.

Notes

1 Korie Edwards describes white normativity as “the normalization of whites’ cultural practices, ideologies, and location within the racial hierarchy such that how whites do things; their understandings about life, society, and the world; and their dominant social location over other racial groups are accepted as ‘just how things are.’” The Elusive Dream: The Power of Race in Interracial Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10.

2 My choice to use the generalization “people of color” admittedly erases and collapses many different responses and co-constitutions based on specific race, ethnicity, and gender expression. My focus in this article is the contrast between white embodiment and that of racially marginalized people under white hegemony, which regrettably lends itself to some oversimplification.