The Narcissism of Whiteness: Digging Deep for a More Racially Democratic Education

• In Event: Emotions as Radical and Racially Just Pedagogy: Reasserting Our Hearts During Times of Undemocratic Educational Duress

Abstract

Emotions, as Boler (1999), so cogently argues, is a web of complex political relations dependent on the social hierarchies of the expressant, the receiver, the surrounding structures, and the power relations within that structure. For example, Fanon (1967) details how a simple phrase, “Look, a Negro,” spoken by a white boy is in of itself an interpellation between whiteness and Blackness. Ahmed (2004) corroborates this by stating that the emotion of fear that is embedded in such a phrase “allows the white body to be constructed as a part of the black body” (p. 63). Thus, emotionalities are also interpellations of white supremacist racial hierarchy and are thus worthy of deconstruction, especially in a field like education whereby most educators are still overwhelming white (NCES, 2012) and the production of whiteness continues to emotionally inoculate curricula (Ladson-Billings, 1998), teacher education (Sleeter, 2001), educational policy (Gillborn, 2005), and educational thought (Allen, 2004; Leonardo, 2009). Needless to say, deconstructing the emotionality of whiteness and its interpellation to that of the many students of color, teachers of color, and people of color, writ large, is a necessary component for education to move its pontifications for antiracist education into full-scale embodiment of racial justice. Meaning, instead of “claiming” to be about antiracist education, perhaps, educators, many of whom are white, must “do the emotional work” of deconstructing their discomfort with whiteness which in turn, leads to better possibilities of whole-hearted engagements of racially just educational projects. Plainly, one cannot expect to withstand a prolonged commitment to racially just projects in education if their whole heart is not in it. Thus, an emotional fortitude must be cultivated with respects to racial studies.

Yet, to develop an emotional fortitude to withstand the emotional unfetteredness experienced in White Fragility (see DiAngelo, 2011)--so often experienced in racially just projects--interrogations as to why the emotionality of whiteness persist must first be explored. Since Bell (1980) argues that racism is intimately tied to narcissistic personality disorder and Fanon (1967) corroborates by claiming that the narcissism of white men sustains colonial racism, these considerations begs the paper to entertain to what extent does narcissism play a role in the maintenance of the emotionality of whiteness in education and how does it impact the interpellations between teacher and students? Ultimately, how does narcissism curtail the pedagogical futurity for racial justice?

To conceptualize an answer this paper draws from Fanonian (1967) and Cheng’s (2001) psychoanalytics to theorize the latent or repressed sentiments of narcissism and how it plays a role in the emotional stronghold of whiteness. An understanding of narcissism is necessary to understand how emotional interpellations can impart false sentimentalization (Author, 2008) and inadvertently, reinforces a white supremacist racial hierarchy. In the ever pursuit of racial justice, this paper posits new ways to think about racialized emotionality that dig deep into the core of emotional discomfort for the sake of withstanding racially-just projects.

Author

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver