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ABSTRACT
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election underscored the role of “Truth” and how it functions in an epistemological relationship with conservative identity. Drawing upon Cheryl Harris’s notion of “whiteness as property,” this article forwards a theoretical framework of “Truth as White property” whereby Truth functions as an extension of whiteness and as a possession of whiteness. Using Fox News’ treatment of the 1619 Project as a case study, the author argues that White ownership of Truth relies on the rhetorical strategies of discrediting, dismissing, and redirecting.
Acknowledgement
Vincent N. Pham is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University and affiliate faculty in the American Ethnic Studies program. He is the co-author of Asian Americans and the Media (Polity Press, 2009, with Kent A. Ono) and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media (2017 with Lori K. Lopez). Thank you to Dr. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Dr. Alyssa Samek, Dr. Peter Campbell, Dr. Yaejoon Kwon, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions.
Notes
1 Issie Lapowsky, “Millions of People Checked Out Clinton’s Debate Fact-Check Site,” Wired, accessed November 16, 2020, https://www.wired.com/2016/09/millions-people-fact-checked-debate-clintons-website/.
2 Dara Lind, “Donald Trump Lies. All the Time,” Vox, September 26, 2016, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/26/13016146/donald-trump-liar-media.
3 Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” The White House, September 22, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-combating-race-sex-stereotyping/
4 Ibid.
5 Janai Nelson, “LDF Statement on Revocation of Trump Administration’s Anti-Diversity Executive Order,” January 21, 2021, https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Biden-Repeals-Trump-Diversity-EO-1.20.21-FINAL.pdf. Trump’s executive order was overturned by President Joseph Biden on his first day in office, January 20, 2021.
6 I use the capital T in quotations of “Truth” to refer to the notion that there is a singular objective “truth” that can be known versus lowercase “truth,” which refers to the reality of multiple “truths” held in subjective concert with other “truths.” Additionally, danah boyd questioned whether media literacy’s individualization of evaluating information set the foundation for the public susceptibility to conspiracy theories in an algorithmically driven information environment. See danah boyd, “Did Media Literacy Backfire?,” Medium, March 16, 2018, https://points.datasociety.net/did-media-literacy-backfire-7418c084d88d.
7 I follow Nell Irvin Painter’s call to capitalize “White” so as to name its constructed racialized aspect. See Nell Irvin Painter, “Why ‘White’ Should Be Capitalized, Too,” Washington Post, July 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/22/why-white-should-be-capitalized/.
8 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18
9 Charles W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 16. Dreama G. Moon also engages with white ignorance, arguing that whiteness is not ignorant about race. Instead, people “become” white through enculturation practices. See Dreama G. Moon, “‘Be/Coming’ White and the Myth of Whiteness: Identity Projects in White Communities,” Western Journal of Communication 80, no. 3 (June 2016): 282–303, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2016.1143562.
10 Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Philosophy and Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 3
11 Moon-Kie Jung, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present, Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 143.
12 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1709–1791.
13 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1714.
14 Ibid, 1731–1741.
15 Ibid, 1741
16 Ibid, 1721. Another approach to propertied knowledge production is through legal notions of intellectual property. I’m interested in the informal and cultural ways in which knowledge is “owned.” For more critical race and rhetorical approaches to intellectual property law, see Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).
17 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1766.
18 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 291–309.
19 Satoshi Toyosaki, “Praxis-Oriented Whiteness Research,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 11, no. 3 (2016): 243–261, https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2015.1073735, 244.
20 Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama, Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, Routledge Research in Communication Studies (New York: Routledge, 2019), 4. Additionally, #RhetoricSoWhite and #CommSoWhite turned these analyses inward to examine how communication studies reproduces white supremacy through the knowledge it promotes in the “abundance and marginalization of race,” as eloquently stated by Lisa Flores. See Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871; Paula Chakravartty et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–266, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/Ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–476, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068; Vincent N. Pham, “The Threat of #RhetoricNotSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 489–494, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669894; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano et al., “Rhetoric’s ‘Distinguished’ Pitfalls: A Plática,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 502–507, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669901.
21 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2018).
22 Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 38.
23 Vincent N. Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama: The Racial Logics of Birther Discourses,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, no. 2 (2015): 86–107, https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2015.1025327.
24 Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama.” For racial scripts, see Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, American Crossroads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
25 Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 21.
26 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018).
27 Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist (New York: One World, 2019), 9.
28 Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 2013).
29 Emily Walton, “Trump and Stephen Miller Capitalize on White America’s Fear Its Racial Identity Is Losing Value,” December 16, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-stephen-miller-capitalize-white- america-s-fear-its-racial-ncna1102081.
30 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no 2 (2004): 120.
31 Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 119.
32 Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness, Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
33 Ioanide describes these emotions as part of socially shared economies. See Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism.
34 Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
35 Casey Ryan Kelly, “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of Ressentiment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 2–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1698756.
36 Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, White Logic, White Methods.
37 Dana Cloud, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in US Political Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018).
38 Bauer and Nadler highlight that conservative news has influential meaning-making power for its viewers. See A.J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler, “Taking Conservative News Seriously,” in News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 2.
39 Websites like Breitbart, Infowars, One America News Network (OANN), and right-wing YouTube influencers like Ben Shapiro also are places of conservative media. Matthew Yglesias argues that the “banal cable channel” might be one of the most influential political actors. See Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for Fox News Studies,” Political Communication 35, no. 4 (2018): 681–683, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2018.1477532. Additionally, sources within Fox News recognize that their viewers are loyal to Trump and conclude that the network should be loyal to Trump since its commitment is to viewers and their perspectives. See Gabriel Sherman, “‘It’s Management Bedlam’: Madness at Fox News as Trump Faces Impeachment,” Vanity Fair, September 26, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/madness-at-fox-news-as-trump-faces-impeachment-lachlan-murdoch.
40 Nellie Andreeva and Ted Johnson, “Cable Ratings 2019: Fox News Tops Total Viewers, ESPN Wins 18–49 Demo as Entertainment Networks Slide,” Deadline (blog), December 27, 2019, https://deadline.com/2019/12/cable-ratings-2019-list-fox-news-total-viewers-espn-18-49-demo-1202817561/.
41 Greg Price, “Fox News’s Audience Almost Exclusively White as Network Faces Backlash Over Immigration Coverage,” August 10, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-white-audience-immigration-1067807.
42 “The 1619 Project (Published 2019),” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html; Tom Mackaman and David
North, “The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones Abandon Key Claims of the 1619 Project,” World Socialist Web Site, September 22, 2020, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html.
43 J. Brian Charles, “Why Conservatives are Bothered by the New York Times’ Project on Slavery,” Vox, August 19, 2019, https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/19/20812238/1619-project-slavery-conservatives.
44 Jeff Barrus, “Nikole Hannah-Jones Wins Pulitzer Prize for 1619 Project,” Pulitzer Center, May 4, 2020, https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/nikole-hannah-jones-wins-pulitzer-prize-1619-project.
45 Richard W. Rahn, “A Reality Check of the 1619 Project,” Washington Times, August 26, 2019, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/26/reality-check-1619-project/.
46 Ashley Feinberg, “Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage?” Slate, August 19, 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/the-conservative-backlash-against-the-new-york-times-1619-project.html.
47 Inae Oh, “Conservatives Stage Meltdown Over New York Times’ 1619 Slavery Series,” Mother Jones, August 19, 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/08/conservatives-new-york-times-1619-slavery- project/.
48 Guy Benson, “Byron York and Guy Discuss the New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’ and How They Plan to Rewrite the Founding of America,” Guy Benson Show (Fox News Radio, August 20, 2019), https://radio.foxnews.com/2019/08/20/byron-york-and-guy-discuss-the-new-york-times-1619-project-and-how-they-plan-to-rewrite-the-founding-of-america/.
49 Slate received the leaked recording and provided a transcript. See Ashley Feinberg. “The New York Times Unites vs. Twitter,” Slate, August 15, 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-meeting-transcript.html.
50 Gingrich served as a history professor at West Georgia College in the 1970s.
51 Ashley Jardina, White Identity Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
52 Newt Gingrinch, “Did Slavery Really Define America For All Time?” Newsweek, August 27, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/newt-gingirch-1619-project-slavery-america-1456307.
53 This statement ignores that the founding ideals were based on a natural law understanding of white racial freedom that concomitantly justified Black enslavement. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
54 See Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 12, no. 1 (2000): 89–116.
55 For example, Chinese Americans’ support for affirmative action is lowest among Asian Americans, illustrating a commitment to notions of meritocracy that relies on an interpersonal understanding of racism and a lack of US structural racism. See Kimmy Yam, “Behind the Vocal Asian American Minority Railing against Affirmative Action,” NBC News, November 1, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/vocal-asian-american-minority-railing-affirmative-action-rcna55082. However, for conservative legal strategist Edward Blum’s fight to overturn consideration of race as part of a holistic college admissions process, he stated that he “needed Asian plaintiffs” after failing in the Fisher v. The University of Texas case. Thus, his deployment of Chinese Americans and their desire for a race-neutral meritocracy works in the service of whiteness. See “Edward Blum: ‘I Needed Asian Plaintiffs’,” 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiBvo-05JRg; Sarah Hinger, “Meet Edward Blum, the Man Who Wants to Kill Affirmative Action in Higher Education,” American Civil Liberties Union (blog), October 17, 2018, https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/meet-edward-blum-man-who-wants-kill-affirmative-action-higher.
56 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 5th ed (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
57 Shereen Marisol Meraji, “50 Years Ago Students Shut Down This College to Demand Ethnic Studies Courses,” NPR.org, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/21/705594577/50-years-ago-students-shut-down-this-college-to-demand-ethnic-studies-courses.
58 Christine E. Sleeter and Miguel Zavala, “What the Research Says about Ethnic Studies,” National Education Association and the Center for Enterprise Strategy, https://www.nea.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/What%20the%20Research%20Says%20About%20Ethnic%20Studies.pdf.
59 “Precious Knowledge,” Independent Lens (blog), PBS.org, https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/precious-knowledge/.
60 Hank Stephenson, “What Arizona’s 2010 Ban on Ethnic Studies Could Mean for the Fight Over Critical Race Theory,” POLITICO, July 11, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/11/tucson-unified-school-districts-mexican-american-studies-program-498926.
61 “Arizona Judge Says Ban on Ethnic Studies Is Unconstitutional,” NBC News, December 28, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/arizona-judge-declares-ban-ethnic-studies-unconstitutional-n833126.
62 David Folkenflik, “UNC Journalism School Tried To Give Nikole Hannah-Jones Tenure: A Top Donor Objected,” NPR, June 21, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/06/21/1007778651/journalism-race-and-the-fight-over-nikole-hannah-jones-tenure-at-unc.
63 David Folkenflik, “After Contentious Debate, UNC Grants Tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones,” NPR.org, June 30, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/06/30/1011880598/after-contentious-debate-unc-grants-tenure-to-nikole-hannah- jones.
64 Legal Defense Fund, “Critical Race Theory FAQ,” https://www.naacpldf.org/critical-race-theory-faq/. CRT had been mentioned at least 1860 times on Fox News by June 24, 2021. See Jeremy Barr, “Critical Race Theory Is the Hottest Topic on Fox News: And It’s Only Getting Hotter,” Washington Post, June 24, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/06/24/critical-race-theory-fox-news/.
65 Audie Cornish, “How Critical Race Theory Went from Harvard Law to Fox News,” NPR.org, July 6, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1012696188/how-critical-race-theory-went-from-harvard-law-to-fox-news.
66 “Journalist Calls on Trump to ‘Abolish’ Critical Race Theory Training from Federal Agencies” (Fox News, 2020), https://www.foxnews.com/video/6186766165001.