I Pledge Allegiance to White Supremacy: Counterstories of a Black Ph.D. Student

• In Event: The Writing Was on the Wall: Dismantling the White Hegemonic Alliance in the Trump Era

Abstract

This paper explores how social justice classes serve as a site for the reinforcement of the White Hegemonic Alliance. Allen (2008) describes, the White Hegemonic Alliance as the essential backbone in maintaining white supremacy by creating a classist hierarchy within the white community that primarily benefits wealthy white men and serves to maintain their power. Several discourses support the Alliance, especially those that feed poor whites messages like, “immigrants are a drain on our tax dollars” therefore deliberately shifting the focus from wealthy whites to people of color as the culprits for their oppression and using poor whites as scapegoats and as the figureheads [rednecks] of white supremacy to maintain the classist hierarchy within.

Although we do see poor whites or white women fight against their own oppression within classism or sexism, it does not take long before they are called to heel by white supremacism. This is illustrated within the semantic moves that whites use to assert colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2013) or intellectual alibis (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013) where whites will jump from one argument to the next, weaving an elaborate (though nonsensical) supportive rhetorical structure for white supremacy.

In this paper, I offer my own counterstories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) as the only Black, woman, PhD student in a largely white doctoral class focused on dismantling oppressive systems while ironically reinforcing the White Hegemonic Alliance. Using my counterstories, I present how mostly white EdD students (who have never met prior) quickly align to reinforce the White Hegemonic Alliance to protect their white fragility (DiAngelo, 2011) using scripted semantics moves. Bonilla-Silva (2013) discuss many scripts used by white people to deflect accusations of racism (real or perceived) while still sustaining and promoting whiteness.

Just like children are taught to walk into the classroom, place their hands on their hearts, and utter the script: “I pledge allegiance to the flag…,” so too are whites taught to enter any space where race may be discussed and, using a variety of scripts, pledge allegiance to white supremacism. This violent reinforcement of the alliance also scripts me as the angry Black woman to dismiss my jarring reflections of racism. In these counterstories, I particularly reflect on my experiences with white women ignoring or dismissing sexism (going against their own interests) to support racist remarks made by white men, lending these men their white tears, and even likening me to the KKK when I am not moved by their scripts or their tears.

Ultimately, these counterstories serve as a decoder of white supremacist scripting that work to dismantle the rhetoric of the White Hegemonic Alliance (Allen, 2008). Leonardo (2002) states that to dismantle white supremacy, we must learn these codes. We must not only know how racism works at the individual, institutional, and systematic level but how white supremacist ideology is embedded in all these levels in hopes that people will commit to eradicating white supremacy by any means necessary.

Author

• Danielle Walker, University of Colorado - Denver