It's Best to Be Seen and Not Heard: Dismantling Whiteness in Diversity Ph.D. Classes

• In Event: 45.092 - MTCC Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 45.092-5 - "Where Do I Fit In?" Disrupting "Diversity" and "Inclusion" Efforts in Predominantly White Spaces

Abstract

Purpose of Paper:
This paper will illustrate through counternarratives the hypocritical nature of "diversity and inclusion" as embodied by most predominantly white institutions. While PWI’s want to count "racially diverse" bodies on their campus, they continue to dis-count how white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1994) negatively impacts students of color. When unacknowledged and untroubled, it leads to the social conditions of student uprisings such as University of Missouri in 2015. This paper explores how failing to disrupt whiteness in the classroom leads to predictable outcomes: silencing of people of color’s experiences and maintaining white supremacy. As such, "diversity" initiatives act as a façade of inclusion, to preserve white fragility (DiAngelo, 2011). Thus, people of color are ostensibly best "seen and not heard". By using counternarratives, we can begin to expose how higher education bends over backwards to protect and preserve white supremacy (Cabrera et al, 2016), questioning if students of color even want to "fit in," and showing instead that perhaps wha they want is their liberation.
Framework & Methods:
Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) will be used will be used to theorize the responses to the problem of white supremacy in "diversity" programs. CRT addresses the necessity of examining and exposing how white supremacy and white privilege work together in the marginalization of people of color (Ladson-Billings, 1998). CWS, additionally, is used to explain how whiteness reacts to racialized bodies in the classroom. Matias (2016) states that in the classroom whites enact a servant/served paradigm where people of color continue to serve the needs of whites--i.e. to cuddle their white fragility by engaging in “civil” discourse. Conversely, counterstory is the methodology used to legitimize the narratives of the oppressed. It is important to establish that counterstories are not used to prove to good whites that racism is real but expose the lies of whiteness (Hayes & Juarez, 2009).

Findings:
This paper will reveal how white people and institutions of higher education are comfortable with idea of diversity as a dog and pony show for inclusion but are not invested in the dismantlement of systems of oppression. Thus, an assessment of the emotionalities of whiteness supports the superficial commitment to diversity, showing how racial incidents are addressed in and out of the classroom. Counterstories are used to disrupt this dog and pony show by indicting professors, students, and the entire institution, as it is guilty of upholding white supremacy ideology that students of color were never meant to “fit in”. Finally, the counterstory will trouble the notion that students of color even want to “fit in” and what whiteness implications could come from an inherent desire to belong.

Scholarly Significance:
Scholars continue to explore theoretical and empirical solutions to eradicate systems of oppression in higher education. Yet, a prominent form of oppression for people of color is not being able to fully engage in classrooms experiences because the emotionality of whiteness blocks students of color ability to be validated (Matias et al., 2017).

Author

• Danielle Walker, University of Colorado - Denver