A Politic of Disruption: Race(ing) Intercultural Communication

They would like to extend their deepest appreciation to the reviewers who committed to this special issue and worked tirelessly to assist authors in enhancing their manuscripts, to the authors themselves for the timely and important work they have done, and to the Editor-in-Chief, Rona Halualani and her editorial team, Michaela Weeks and Victoria Arafa, who were always available and helpful when needed.

Attention to the absences in the development of the field [of intercultural communication] can be disruptive. (Nakayama & Martin, 2007, p. 113)

We must examine and attend to the specifics of race, as it emerges in concrete conflicts and practices, communities and cultures if we are to uncover the mechanisms that sustain its logic. (Flores, Moon, & Nakayama, 2006, p. 184)

The insights of the scholars quoted above give us pause as we think about this special issue on race. Following Flores et al., we note that to commit to identifying mechanisms that sustain racial logics requires drawing attention to the absences that enable inequities and inequalities to persist in society and in our scholarship. In contemplating racial logics, two recent examples call attention to absences that surface not only in intercultural communication but also in global and domestic contexts. Concomitantly, the conflicts and practices examined by the examples we discuss, along with the essays composing this special issue, underscore the continuing importance of studying race and the diverse “mechanisms” that maintain racial logics.

Our first example harkens back to the call for this special issue wherein we referenced the United Nations' World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in 2001, citing the following passage from the Durban Declaration:

racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, where they amount to racism and racial discrimination, constitute serious violations of and obstacles to the full enjoyment of all human rights and deny the self-evident truth that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, are an obstacle to friendly and peaceful relations among peoples and nations, and are among the root causes of many internal and international conflicts.

Clearly, the Declaration established in no uncertain language that global racism, as a major threat to human rights, peace, and dignity, is foundational in terms of intercultural and intracultural conflicts around the world and, as such, needs to be addressed. We failed to mention the unfortunate reality that WCAR has not enjoyed strong support from many Western nations including the United States. Western countries have opposed a number of the proposed agenda discussion items including the construction of slavery as a “crime against humanity,” the lingering effects of the transatlantic slave trade, reparations, prohibition of hate speech, and critiques of Zionism. Unable to dictate the conference agenda, the United States and its European allies—those who have benefitted greatly from racism (and continue to do so)—have either walked out of or boycotted the conference, and when some have deigned to attend, they have sent low-level dignities (another way of signaling a lack of serious engagement with racism, xenophobia, and related intolerances). Accusing the conference organizers of permitting “hateful language” against Israel and opposing the term “reparations,” the West, who has been the greatest beneficiary of global racism, has offered little support to WCAR and, in these important conversations, Western voices have been primarily absent.

Looking inward to the U.S., shortly after the shooting of yet another unarmed black youth, Michael Brown, six black children of Ferguson, Missouri participated in the making of a video entitled, “Hey White People: A Kinda Awkward Note to America by #Ferguson Kids.” The objective was to educate those who do not or will not “get” the racial reality in the United States for people of color and by association, for themselves. Blogs posted in response to the video call into question the success of that educational attempt given the vitriolic tone of some of the posts by self-identified white people. Rather than use the video as an opportunity to gain insight into peoples of color's realities, some positioned the video as “racist” pointing to the title (“hey white people”), referring to the children in the video as “haters” and to the video itself as “raceterbation” (injecting racism where it does not exist) (http://vimeo.com/105147740).

These two seemingly disjointed events led us to reflect upon the contours that race and racism—in global or domestic contexts—assume in political and social landscapes. Evident to us are the ways in which those in power are accustomed to setting the terms of the debate, deciding what gets discussed, if and how issues gets discussed, and so forth. On this point, we are reminded of the stalled conversations on race instigated by former President Clinton that represented a bold undertaking to centralizing race in the U.S. imaginary. The examples mentioned thus far were opportune moments to have radically different kinds of conversations about race and the practice of racism; inevitably and regrettably, those opportunities escaped and continue to escape a collective “us.” A danger inherent in disengaging, opting out of, and/or faltering in such significant conversations is the surfacing of an insidiousness belief that individuals, internationally or domestically, live in a post-racist era that an ideology of colorblindness backs.¹ Of concern are the varied repercussions stemming from such beliefs that recent scholarship examines (i.e., Milazzo in this issue; Holling et al., 2014).

As we think about intercultural communication as a field, it has had its own historical experience with the privilege to set the agenda. Given the context in which the field emerged, for much of its history intercultural communication has served dominant interests (Moon, 1996). While Moon notes that briefly in the 1960s and 1970s, intercultural scholarship evidenced more heterogeneous notions of culture including race, by 1980 race-related scholarship in the field had all but disappeared. What began to surface is the “white problem” in intercultural communication. Nakayama and Martin (2007) observe that much of what we have come to understand as “intercultural knowledge” has been driven, implicitly and explicitly, by a white, Western agenda (albeit often unconscious) in which the experiences of the dominant are centered. While this agenda-setting function may not have been driven by a conscious effort to exclude, regardless of intent, the intellectual agenda has been framed in very particular and limited ways for most of our history. For instance, take the notion of race. Intercultural communication scholars have been notoriously silent on issues of race. Even during historical moments such as the Civil Rights era, few intercultural scholars took up what was certainly the most important issue of the day. When we explore the field's history, we note that there has not been a special issue in any NCA journal exploring the nexus of intercultural communication and race. Given the importance of race as a social and political marker, we are troubled that no journal has attended to the intersection of race and intercultural communication across the 70+ years since its inception. We thank the current editor of JIIC, Rona Halualani for allowing us to fill that gap.

To engage in a serious discussion of race in America, we must begin not with the problems of black [sic] people but with the flaws of American society—flaws rooted in historic inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes. How we set up the terms for discussing racial issues shapes our perception and response to these issues (Cornel West, 1994, p. 6).

How have we, the guest editors, “set up the terms for discussing racial issues?” As detailed in the call for submissions, we sought

submissions that investigate or examine issues of race, racism, nativism and xenophobia that aim to intervene in post-racism rhetoric and show the variety of ways that race continues to matter both in the United States and abroad…. The contributions to be garnered from this special issue on race are to challenge the myth of post-racial societies, domestically or internationally, and to reaffirm the saliency of race within intercultural and international relations.

Quite explicitly then, we desired essays that interrogated “the flaws” of any society in hopes that authors would be able to conceive of hopeful communicative possibilities and of ways through and out of global racial denial systems. More broadly, we committed to and envisioned this special issue on race as a politic of disruption. “Politic” highlights the delicate balance of politics that come with pursuing race and the shrewdness of a scholar needed to apprehend the connection between race and intercultural communication. “Disruption” offered an enticing means to underscore a need to interrupt an event, activity or process by causing a disturbance or problem in order to destroy the normal continuance or unity of a process. Combined, a politic of disruption is about calling for the race(ing) of intercultural communication. Through a double special issue on race, a politic of disruption begins to manifest in the field, in intellectual work on race, and in intercultural communication. As guest editors our intentions were certainly to challenge the field's neglect of race but moreover we wished to push the intellectual boundaries of theorizing race. In the so-called “post-racial” era not only are disrupting notions of colorblindness crucially important, but also are imagining new ways of thinking through racial matters. The first set of essays composing one of two special issues² sets us, readers, and the field afoot on a politic of disruption.

In this set of papers, we observe authors enacting a politic of disruption as they levy a host of challenges to the study of “race as usual” in the context of intercultural communication. For example, several authors centralize marginality and/or marginal identities that is a noteworthy intervention in the study of the norm(al) populations evident in much intercultural scholarship. Authors' scholarship also draws from robust and complex methodological and theoretical frameworks that showcase the creativity required to disrupt traditional approaches to the study of race in the field and racially oppressive practices and ideological systems. Next, the topics and racial subjects pursued by the four scholars gesture toward a rhetoric of dispensation, which “counters hegemonic positionings and/or narratives of a subjugated citizenry in an effort to secure rights …” (Holling, 2012, p. 66). Phrased differently, the work undertaken by the four authors herein implicitly calls for “dispens[ing] with dominant narratives” (such as the notions that society exists in a post-racial era or that colorblind ideology can address structural racism) so that “dispensing of political rights” (Holling, p. 72) might ensue. Moreover, in different ways, these papers speak to the ways in which white dominance communicates (dis)belonging through positioning people as “forever foreign,” “enemy of the State,” or “Asian=bottom” and through resurgence of colorblind discourse that disingenuously suggests that race is no longer of importance despite many examples to the contrary. Finally, the papers illustrate how targeted groups negotiate a space of belonging within white supremacy via resistance and/or vernacular discourse, eschewal of white desire, talking back to colorblindness, and construction of potential coalitional spaces.

The ordering of the essays is intentional; order is another way of carrying out a politic of disruption. Paralleling the introduction that begins with an international focus to a U.S.-based domestic focus to the subfield of intercultural communication are the four essays that mirror such an order. In so doing, our hope is that readers read across and between the essays to discern how each informs the other and to identify overlapping points where race is concerned regardless of the context or locale of its situatedness.

In “Rhetorics of Racial Power,” Milazzo takes on post-Apartheid academic scholarship in South Africa, tracing the reproduction of colorblind discourse in economics, education, literature, philosophy, and sociology. Although outside the scope of her essay, she acknowledges a similar move within communication. Reading colorblindness as a global discourse and disrupting the often assumed “objectivity” of the academy, she demonstrates how academe often participates in the reproduction of racialized privilege. She demonstrates how post-colonial societies all too quickly move from a goal of racial reconciliation to colorblind rhetoric where horrendous racial pasts get buried under class analysis—this move aided by its (usually white) intellectuals. In the post-colonial era, the push back from whiteness in the form of colorblind discourse threatens racial reconciliation and recovery.

In “Queer Intercultural Relationality,” Eguchi works at the intersection of race and desire, demonstrating the complexities of intercultural contact in gay communities. He interrogates his queer intercultural production of desire through an examination on intraqueer Asian/black (dis) connections that call into question white (homo)normative constructions of a straight/gay binary. Showing how imperialist relations inform desire, he notes that a form of empowerment can be located in Western obsession with Orientalism and the “other's” rejection of white desire. At the same time, he highlights how desiring black bodies is both a means of disrupting whiteness and a potential problematic political strategy.

Next, Mudambi in “The Construction of Brownness” breaks apart the black/white binary showing how brownness poses challenges to Arizona's SB 1070. She examines how “brownness” emerges as a highly contextualized racial formation that is aligned with constructions of “illegal” immigrants that does not fit neatly into a traditional black/white racial structure. Her work illustrates how shared experiences of discrimination among Latina/os and South Asian constitute them as a racialized group that experiences unique forms of racism. Disrupting the black/white racial binary enables of potential cross coalitions of people of color around brownness and develops brownness as a racial project in its own right.

Lastly, Nelson in “Resisting Whiteness” offers a critique of whiteness discourse involved in criticisms of Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District in Tucson, Arizona through the political lens of Santino Rivera's collection of Chicana/o literature. His paper demonstrates how racial discourse threatens spaces of liberation demonstrated in resistance rhetoric as Chicana/os define themselves against Arizona's construction of Mexican American studies.

These first four essays play critical roles in race(ing) intercultural communication by bringing to our attention international discourses and domestic voices and communities not often, or consistently, heard in social or scholarly arenas. Thus, we thank the authors for the meaningful work they undertook. For now, we delay offering concluding comments about these essays until we publish the second special issue on race. Then, our intention will be to unite the essays through a series of themes, questions, and directions for the continued race(ing) of intercultural communication. Until then, we invite readers to mull the arguments, contemplate the implications stemming from the essays, and participate in a politic of disruption.

Notes

[1] As we argue elsewhere, “colorblindness is conceived of as an ideology that denies that white privilege or contemporary institutionalized racial discrimination exist thus facilitating the belief that the U.S. is post-racial (Risman & Benejee, 2013). As such, we do not view the terms—colorblindness and post-racial—as interchangeable. However, we do see that colorblind ideology supports the claim of post-racialism as conceived as an era in which race does not matter in any methodical or socially significant manner (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Holling, Moon, & Jackson Nevis, 2014, p. 22, fn 1).

[2] Following this first special issue, the second one will be published in May 2015.