Victoria's "Venn Diagram of Fun": The Internal Devastation of Whiteness

• In Event: 31.032 - Conflict, Complexity, and Devastation: Whiteness and White Racial Identities in Education

Abstract

Our purpose in this paper is to examine a document created by an 11th grade female high school student named Victoria. In the document, Victoria theorized whiteness in relation to depression by creating what she called (playfully, caustically) a “Venn Diagram of Fun.” Within the context of our ongoing work to nuance ways of being white (Author 2, 2012; Author 1, 2014), we became curious about what Victoria’s thinking and writing about depression and whiteness could teach us.

Victoria created her document as part of a year-long youth participatory action research (YPAR) project and theatrical production about whiteness, which became known as The Whiteness Project. Video recordings, daily field notes, and student work samples (journals, poems, essays, scripts) were collected and interpreted using constant comparative method in the critical ethnographic study (Carspecken, 1996; Chadderton, 2012; Erickson, 1986; Fram 2013) that Author 1 pursued in relation to the Project.

We ground our theorizing about whiteness and depression in the writings of American literary and social critics and scholars who have explored race, whiteness, and their violences, especially Ralph Ellison (1953/1995), C.W. Mills (1997), The Reverend Thandeka (1999), and Richard Wright (1945/1998). For this paper, Toni Morrison (1992) is of particular importance for her exploration of how “an internal devastation is linked with a socially governed relationship with race” (p. ix). In other words, the racial order of the U.S. is linked to the state of mental health.

Victoria’s “Venn Diagram of Fun” consists of two overlapping circles. The circle on the left is labeled “Depression” and the one on the right, “Whiteness.” Each circle contains a list of seven attributes linked to each other to show their differences (for example, “It is chaos” is the first descriptor of depression and is linked with the first descriptor of whiteness, “It represses chaos”). In the overlapping space of the two circles there is a list of seven ways that depression and whiteness are alike. Each of these similarities has a relationship to the list of seven ways that whiteness and depression are not alike (for example, “It is powerful” is the similarity linked between “chaos” and “represses chaos”).

For us, the main significance of our work lies in exploring the relationships that Victoria noted between whiteness and depression. Victoria struggled with severe depression, so hers was not disinterested theorizing. We also explore how YPAR and playmaking within The Whiteness Project opened a radical space for Victoria to engage critically with depression and whiteness. Finally, we discuss how the academic study of whiteness and white supremacy might alleviate some of the “internal devastation” (Morrison, 1995) of our racial order and what Victoria’s theorizing can teach us about our pedagogy and anti-racist activism.

Authors

• Samuel Jaye Tanner, The Pennsylvania State University - Altoona

• Audrey Lensmire, Augsburg College