The Tipping Point and the Discursive Construction of Contested White Students

• In Event: Critical Whiteness Studies as a Framework for Inquiry in Higher Education

Abstract

The binary discourse, also known as “the one drop rule,” is a powerful racial discourse extant in U.S. society. It is closely related to essentialist anti-Black racism, and quickly orders ambiguously raced bodies into a dualistic Black-White divide. Contested white students are composed of three related groups of ambiguously raced individuals: Those who identify as white, but are appraised by others as people of color; those who identify as people of color, but are appraised by others as white; and those whose racial self-identification and reflected appraisals (Khanna, 2004, 2010) are fluid and occasionally shift between whiteness and non-whiteness.

In this paper, I use critical narrative analysis to examine three stories narrated and linked together by Jenelle, a contested white student. Across these accounts, Janelle presented a four-level matrix outlining increasingly dangerous enactments of the binary discourse and identifying a “tipping point” where the contested white body is shifted from ambiguity into Blackness. Furthermore, these accounts illustrate that the binary discourse produces a Protector subjectivity, which can be taken up by either contested whites or whites, although in different ways and motivated differently. For contested whites, the Protector subjectivity entails management of the pain of racial contestation and racial displacement. For whites, the Protector subjectivity is largely informed by white supremacist enactments of the white gaze.

Author

• Orkideh Mohajeri, West Chester University of Pennsylvania