White Tundra: Exploring the Emotionally Frozen Terrain of Whiteness

• In Event: 60.055 - Unhooking From Whiteness: Autoethnographic Approaches Toward Education as Freedom Dreams Through the Abolition of Liberalism, Meritocracy, and Color Blindness in U.S. Teacher Education

Abstract

The third paper, White Tundra: Exploring the Emotionally Frozen Terrain of Whiteness, goes beyond the litany of literature on whiteness that explores dimensions in economics (Lipsitz, 2006; Oliver & Shapiro, 1997), sociology (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Frankenberg, 1993), psychoanalytics (Fanon, 1967; Thandeka, 1999), history (Roediger, 2005), education (Leonardo, 2009) and literature (Morrison, 1993). Rather, this paper focuses on how whiteness is maintained through emotionality. That is, what are the emotions and how do these emotions sustain enactments of whiteness that, through its enactment, perpetuate a system of white supremacy. If, as Ahmed (2004) suggests, there is a cultural politic of emotions, then the study of how the emotionality of whiteness is cultivated, maintained, and expressed in relation to hegemonic power of white supremacy is thus warranted. Employing a critical hermeneutical approach to theorizing the root causes of white emotionality via a psychoanalytic interpretation of white racialization, this autoethnographic and theoretical paper will present a case of how the power of emotions get hegemonically produces to ensure race oppression. Drawing on the intersectionality of critical whiteness studies, critical race theory, and feminism of color, this paper offers a psychoanalytic-emotional frame to identify and deconstruct the emotionality of whiteness. Specifically, the paper will use critical race theory’s counterstorytelling to illuminate how the emotionality of whiteness is enacted and what impact it has on both people of color and antiracism in general.

Author

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver