“Dead honky”—against technologies of (white) violence

Abstract

In 1975, Saturday Night Live, a long-running sketch comedy television series, aired a sketch featuring Richard Pryor, a Black man, and Chevy Chase, a white man. During the sketch, several racial epithets were used for both Black people and white people, including the n-word. In this paper, I parallel the emotionalities displayed in that sketch to assert that as whiteness pretends to be innocent, flustered, and terrified, it nonetheless creates terror and violence. Critical whiteness studies (CWS) in the field of higher education fails to account for these technologies of violence that characterize whiteness and which whiteness employs. I bring a Black consciousness lens that asserts a critical narrative grounded in my own and in the intellectual, cultural, and psychic experiences of Blackness. From that space, I theorize technologies of (white) violence as enactments of: (1) malicious white terror; (2) rhetorical white innocence, mobilized through white contempt and white transmission; and, (3) pacifying white concession. Ultimately, I call for CWS to take up an analysis of technologies of (white) violence in its interrogation of the ways that whiteness operates in postsecondary education, but more so to commit to realizing the death of whiteness, taking up Pryor’s verbal effigy “dead honky.”

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• critical whiteness studies
• Black consciousness

Disclosure statement

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

Author’s note

Many thanks to Drs. Natasha Croom, Z Nicolazzo, Heather Shotton, and the editor and reviewers for their insights in the development of this work.

Notes

1 Intentional language choices are made throughout this piece and will be noted as they come up. Here, in recognition that the United States is only one occupant of the land colonized and renamed for Amerigo Vespucci as the “Americas,” I choose to not make those lands fungible with the United States. In so doing, I make one small move to reject “Manifest Destiny,” the ideology that the entirety of two continents is the purview of one nation, the USA.

2 Readers may wonder why specific citations to these authors’ works are not listed. Doing so would presume there is a singular or even dyad of published work that could dare to be equated with their influence during this period when their work extends far beyond this timeframe. Moreover, such a move would erase and dismiss the profundity of their thinking that is not captured within the pages of a bound book or other printed volume. I encourage the reader to do their own labor so to become familiar with the bodies of these authors’ brilliance in both written and oral forms.

3 As of 13 January 2022, an uncensored clip of this sketch, uncaptioned, can be found on YouTube at https://youtu.be/yuEBBwJdjhQ.

4 I have chosen to use the actual words from the skit—with the exception of the n-word—to maintain the integrity of the skit and its relevance to later arguments in this paper. Writing and (re)presenting these words also serves the point of making clear the intimidation embedded in these anti-Black slurs—words used to demarcate where Black people could sit, stand, and exist; words used to keep Black folks in line. These words were still part and parcel of daily life for Black people in the 1970s, microaggressions as Chester Pierce (1974) would later define them. I use the racial slurs for white people as well to show the exchange, but these terms are not commensurate with the former. White racial slurs were developed by Black people as tools for warning of the approach of embodied white danger (“ofay” which is Pig Latin for “foe”) and as means of giving back what was got (honky possibly originated by some seeking a rebuttal to the n-word [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honky]). I do not use the n-word because of the specific, particular, and egregious violence associated with that term. Silence followed the n-word. Death followed the n-word. The n-word, coined and weaponized by white people, even as a quote from its original context in the pages of an academic journal, is an ever-present wound for many Black people, including me. I could find no justification for including its vulgarity and violence in this piece.

5 By this point, “Negro” had fallen out of use among African Americans as a social group referent in favor of “Black” or “African American.”

6 I have chosen to not correct the grammar Pryor used. It is reflective of commonly used African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Luu (2020) effectively and succinctly discussed the ways that AAVE has been unfairly maligned by users of Standard American English. There is a specific force in “What you say?” that simply does not exist in “What did you say?” whereas the latter sounds like a polite white lady who did not quite hear what you said versus someone who absolutely heard what you said and wants to let you know that they did.

7 To even call it a skit obscures the violence that was on display before a live, national audience.

8 Although Dery coined the term Afrofuturism in the 1990s, as Womack (2017) articulates, the tenets are much older.

9 Interestingly, Oliver (2013) goes to the dictionary to discuss the denotative meaning of the word “vulnerability.”

10 Over the last 2 years, I have seen this said with a specificity and clarity by Black people on Twitter in a way I have not so readily seen in academia.

11 And yet it seems he was unable to persuade the NYT to publish his essay with the n-word written out.

12 I am speaking here of literature that actually cites CWS as its theoretical framework. Everything about whiteness from a critical perspective is not CWS. This co-optation of Black scholars/hip about whiteness under the CWS umbrella must stop.

13 There has been and still are higher education scholars who “critically study whiteness” as Matias (2022) describes herself. Doing that and doing CWS are not inherently the same thing so should not be conflated.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

D-L Stewart

D-L Stewart is professor and chair of the higher education department in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver.