White anti-racists and belonging

Abstract

Grounded in critical whiteness studies and informed by the practices and goals of autoethnography, this article narrates and analyses two stories for what they might teach us about problems of belonging for white anti-racists. In the first story, I recount a verbal attack by a white person against another white person during a conference. I interpret the attack as a scapegoating ritual meant to secure the attacker’s identity and belonging as an anti-racist, and then explore how this attack is a repetition of the kinds of scapegoating engaged in by white people against people of colour. In the second story, I narrate a heated argument I had with my mother during George W. Bush’s second term as president of the U.S. I use the story to consider white people’s fears of abandonment and how these fears might undermine anti-racist pedagogies.

Keywords:

• Race
• whiteness
• anti-racist
• scapegoating
• belonging

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Erratum

Notes

1. Ladson-Billings (1996) made this point two decades ago – even as she examined the use of silence by her white students as ‘weapon’ or ‘resistance’, she also asked college instructors to interrogate their own power and methods, to better understand ‘what complicity [teachers] have in creating student silences’ (85).

2. Despite what I share here, Ellison did not think that it was poor white Americans who were the ‘real’ racists, in contrast to enlightened white people of higher classes. Instead, he thought that the Founding Fathers were the original scapegoaters (see Ellison 1986, 330–335; Lensmire 2014).

3. Woods (2015) reads the murder of Trayvon Martin thusly – that George Zimmerman, a ‘half-White Latino’ confronted with an ‘intolerant national climate’ and exposed to ‘national anti-Latin sentiment,’ killed Martin to prove his loyalty to mainstream, white America (114).

4. There is a larger critique of ‘white privilege pedagogy’ lurking here that I do not have space to develop (see Casey 2016; Lensmire et al. 2013; Levine-Rasky 2000). For helpful reflections on difficulties in maintaining caring relationships with white people in antiracist work (and responsibilities to do so, nonetheless), see Conklin (2008) and Utt (2015). As Utt put it:

Far too much of what I have justified as ‘calling someone out on their privilege’ was little more than a dismissive slight aimed at boosting my ego and making me look like the ‘best anti-racist White person.’ How does that actually help anything? (n.p.)