Lessons on love in collaboration: Black and Brown ruminations on global whiteness

Abstract

This article illuminates our spiritual journey, as Black and Brown scholars, to globalize and further temporalize the discussion of whiteness in the field of higher education. By employing the spiritual ontoepistemologies of communities of color, we recount our journey in developing a critical race temporal heuristic, Whiteness as Futurity (Shahjahan & Edwards, 2022). We illuminate the three lessons we learned on this path: (1) trust in multiple ways of knowing, (2) spiritual healing in collaboration, and (3) community within interdependence. Our lessons highlight the complexities and potential of collaboration on conceptual research for Black and Brown people. We argue that spiritually and communally-informed scholarly practice creates the necessary psychic space to locate nuanced analyses of whiteness not readily available with traditional analytics while also supporting humanized ways of being for scholars.

Keywords:

• Scholars of color
• collaboration
• spirituality
• conceptual research
• whiteness

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 To clarify, by “whiteness” we don’t just mean white people or white collectivities but instead the “narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes, and habits of perception” (Dyer, 1997, p. 12) that stand in for the normal.

2 By “national container” we refer to the methodological nationalism that assumes social processes (such as race and racism), are restricted within national boundaries, as society is conflated with the idea of nation-state (see Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013). We suggest transcending such national container accounts of race, as doing so simply accepts the nation-state as a taken-for granted entity, and illuminating how race has always been a social process that crosses, shape-shifts, and traverses national boundaries (see Quijano, 2000; Said, 1979). We also refer to “transnational” to signify processes that are unbound to national containers.

3 “Blanqueamiento” refers to the idea of “race improvement” via racial whitening. The concept is often evoked in discussions related to the postcolonial Americas, particularly Latin and Central America, and the ongoing legacy of European colonialism and white supremacy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirsten T. Edwards

Kirsten T. Edwards is an associate professor in the department of Educational Policy Studies, as well as affiliate faculty for African & African Diaspora Studies, and the Center for Women's & Gender Studies at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. Her research merges philosophy, college curriculum, and pedagogy. More specifically, Dr. Edwards is interested in the curricular and pedagogical fugitivities of Black educators with respect to the globalization of higher education's perpetuation of racial asymmetries and antiBlackness.

Riyad A. Shahjahan

Riyad A. Shahjahan is an Associate Professor of Higher, Adult and Life Long Education (HALE) at Michigan State University. He is also a core faculty member of Muslim Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, Asian Studies, and Center for Advanced Study of International Development. His areas of research interests are in globalization of higher education, decolonizing curriculum/pedagogy, temporality and embodiment in higher education, and cultural studies.