Hysteria, Hullabaloo, and Hypermania: How the Emotionalities of Whiteness Undergird the Anti–Critical Race Theory Bans

• In Event: Against Mundane White Supremacy: Revealing the Affective, Relational, and Spatial Dynamics of Everyday Racism

Abstract

Overview and Significance
In the past year the US bore witness to headlines decrying the use of critical race theory (CRT) in K-12 classrooms. Some claimed CRT was “abusing” students (Stabile, 2021) others argued that teaching CRT was a civil rights violation (Leach, 2021). Regardless of the rationale, zealous lawmakers quickly responded by proposing numerous local and state bills, some that have passed, to legislatively ban any discussion of race inside American classrooms. Yet, in these proposed bills or within the rationales behind the proposed bans, there was never any substantive debate about what is CRT and if they are, indeed, taught in K12 schools. Instead, the rhetoric was based on white racial anxieties, hysteria, and hypermania in ways that created a hullabaloo when there was no boogeyman in the first place. Essentially, as Matias (2016) asserts, white emotionalities were not only present, they were strategically employed to purport white emotional stability to protected status. It is, for lack of a better word, white narcissistic vanity and if left intact will continue to harm people of color and reify white supremacy on the basis of white emotional comfort alone. Meaning, overlooking how white emotionalities operate, will ultimately set the legal and political precedence that protect, cater, and feed white emotionalities. This paper answers how white emotionalities undergird white supremacy in society and education, particular to the current emotional context of anti-CRT bans.

Method and Theoretical Framework
This theoretical essay methodologically draws from critical race hermeneutics (Allen, 2021) to interpret how white emotionalities are weaponized against the interest and humanity of people of color. Then employing a critical study of whiteness this paper shows from where white anxieties stem, how they operate to engage in harm, and ultimately how all this relates back to the anti-CRT bans. Although white emotions, particularly white fragility, have become popularized (see DiAngelo, 2018), it nonetheless needs deeper theoretical investigations because its stronghold has the potential to propose and enforce law that ultimately surveils people of color and maintains systemic white supremacy. Clearly, white hysteria, hullabaloo, and hypermania are vital to understand if racially just educators are to navigate projects of racial justice under white supremacy.

Author

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of San Diego
  Presenting Author