Enchantment in the Volunteer Abroad Encounter: How Antiblack Racism Is Used to Make "Good" Citizens

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-1 - Producing Disciplined State Subjects: Intersectional Analyses of Race and Citizenship

Abstract

This paper engages the quotidian workings of white supremacy for the making of young, white/Northern subjects and model citizens. I think with and respond to Wynter’s (1994) call to interrogate, “what we, as educators, had to do, and still have to do, with the creation and maintenance of the classifying logic” of the colour line where to be Black is to be outside of the category of the human and subject to the deadly violence of white jurors and policemen (p. 13). Extending how white jurors and policeman come to live this classifying logic to how white judges, lawyers, and politicians come to live it, the objectives of this paper are to: (1) illuminate how young, elite girls (white and of colour) engage with the quotidian end of the spectrum of anti-black violence through volunteer abroad to constitute themselves as empowered, feminine subjects and good citizens; (2) rupture claims to innocence that these activities, articulated through social justice, love, and partnership, are in opposition to violence; and (3) call for educators to end elite school volunteer abroad programs and create “otherwise” (Crawley, 2015) educative moments that bring Black life into the frame.

To accomplish these objectives, this paper thinks with Hartman (1997) and Razack (2007) to propose white enchantment as a theoretical concept. White enchantment describes a process of double transmutation that helps reveal the nuanced moves of white supremacy in the making of subjects and citizens. In the particular racialized encounter analyzed here, Black people, obscured through the matrix of liberal humanism, become objects against which young, non-Black people, both white and of colour, can know themselves as morally superior through various moves to proximity (love and indignation, for example). These moves to moral superiority are experienced as pleasure. These good feelings hide the violence of extraction for the making of white/Northern girl-subjects and good, Canadian and global citizens. In addition to critical race theory, this approach is rooted in critical development studies (Heron, 2007), critical humanitarian studies (Fassin, 2012; Mahrouse, 2014; Ticktin, 2011), transnational feminism (Grewal, 1996; Mohanty, 2002) and decolonial theory (Rodney, 1982).

I analyze how white enchantment works through the particular encounter between white and racialized elite school students and the children in a South African township that they visited for the purpose of volunteering and doing social justice work as “partners.” This paper uses the encounter as methodology (Ahmed, 2000; Fanon, 1986; Mahrouse, 2014). The ethnographic data comprises participant observation in South Africa and interviews conducted with Canadian elite school students and administrators.

Following from this analysis I conclude that the violence of anti-black racism is useful for the making of white and non-white girl-subjects and model citizens, and that the collusion between anti-black racism and good citizenship is obscured through good feelings. The significance of this paper is that it charts a reading practice to decode institutionalized forms of white supremacy that make claims to social justice, love, and partnership while upholding a deadly, differentiated citizenship.

Author

• Leila Angod, Bielefeld University