The Pain of Racial Treason: A White Antiracist’s Psychosocial Battles

• In Event: Feeling Race: The Significance of Emotionality in Antiracist Education

Abstract

Neo-abolitionists Ignatiev and Garvey (1996) once said, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity” (p. 10). So, what does white treason in the academy feel like? How is one made to feel treasonous? For antiracist whites striving to love humanity, feeling pain is inevitable. The question is how to interpret this pain because it can either be a source of anguish or strength. Furthermore, if whites are to play a role in undoing structural white supremacy, then it behooves us to consider how they emotionally experience their psychosocial situatedness.

In this narrative essay, I critically reflect on my own experience as a white CRT and whiteness studies professor in a department that focuses on language, literacy, and educational studies. Drawing from CRT, critical whiteness studies, and critical psychoanalysis, I structurally interpret the emotionality of my racial battles in higher education using hermeneutical phenomenology (Leonardo, 2003). Mainly, I look at how others have responded to my race, emotionality, and ideological commitments and how these responses have affected my internal thoughts and feelings about myself as a white person doing this work.

Although I work in a “majority minority” state (New Mexico) and have many colleagues and students of color, whiteness nevertheless dominates through colorism, featurism, and racial hierarchy (Allen & Howard, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2009; Nieto-Phillips, 2004). Consistent with Latin American racial ideology (see Graham, 1990), many skin-privileged New Mexicans reject racial analysis. Some even say that “we don’t have race in New Mexico” because it was (allegedly) dissolved into the mestizaje (Rénique, 2003). This creates many problems and is not solely exploited by Anglo whites.

Playing on fears of aloneness is one major way that whiteness operates psychosocially (Matias & Allen, forthcoming) to create racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004). Agents of whiteness surveil whites suspected of racial treason, forcing them to consider whether to continue and risk being shunned or cease and fall back into line. These more externally-focused battles occur in the form of public attacks in classes or meetings, “mad dogging” me in hallways, students being advised away from my Critical Race Theory and Whiteness Studies courses, and the solicitation of false student complaints. Ideologically speaking, most of my department is committed to a form of socioculturalism that argues that racism is cultural (i.e., about “cultural mismatch”) not racial (i.e., about racial conflict). This position isolates me because I am often the only person in the department making the case for race-based analysis.

My battle is also internal. Although on some level I know I am taking a just position, the lack of support from my colleagues triggers my self-doubt, white guilt and shame, and anxiety—all things I did not feel before starting this work 15 years ago. These external and internal struggles will be detailed and critically interpreted, and suggestions for transformative emotional pedagogy will be articulated.

Author

• Ricky Lee Allen, University of New Mexico