Woke White Supremacy: White Consciousness as Conformist Resistance

• In Event: What Now? Dismantling Whiteness in the Next Era of White Supremacy

Abstract

Context and Purpose:
The presidency of 45 and the summer of 2020 supposedly awakened many white people to racial injustice. Those of us in the field had to swallow some of our cynicism to embrace the possible opportunity of finally reaching people we had been trying to reach for years. As whiteness and white supremacy morph into new iterations at every turn (Nishi et al., 2016; Tatum, 2019), it is an important time to take stock of the true consequences of performative consciousness and the impact it has on antiracist people attempting the real work of dismantling white supremacy in our schools. This paper examines how “wokeness” has actually become a barrier to white consciousness and how whites manipulate and take over this discourse with little or no knowledge of history, current systems, and modes of resistance, believing that everyone around them is in the same state of knowledge (Parker, 2020).

Organizations are capitalizing on these calls for change by providing trainings instead of consequences for discrimination or deeper understandings. Mass market books such White Fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) and How to be an Antiracist (Kendi, 2019) have been widely read, and so race scholars are hitting new barriers with progressive whites who believe they already understand it (Parker, 2020). It also leads to the dangers of white administrators and educators being openly curious about race, but not wanting to face the institutional and personal racism they have perpetuated, seducing antiracist teachers into educating them while knowing they can issue consequences for being offended (Parker, 2020). Concepts like “implicit bias” and “unconscious bias” work to sustain race evasiveness (Annamma et al., 2017; Kendi, 2019; Parker, 2020). rendering even more silencing as whites double down on their investment in the myth of white ignorance (Mills, 2007). In this paper, the authors will examine how these new tactics fall under conformist resistance (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2000).

Theoretical Framing:
In this paper, we draw on the concept of White Hoarding (Nishi, 2021), which incorporates theories and approaches, including Whiteness as Property (Harris, 1993), Settler Colonialism (Saito, 2015), Hegemonic Whiteness (Cabrera, 2018), and Whiteness-at-Work (Yoon, 2012). We look at how white hoarding extends beyond white people’s refusal to acknowledge property and intellect owned by BIPOC to even the hoarding of knowledge, in this case ‘wokeness’ from other white people in addition to that of BIPOC.

We also analyze these new iterations of white “resistance” using Solorzano & Delgado Bernal (2001) foundational work on transformational resistance. We see that whites are participating in conformist resistance, much like white feminism (Parker, 2020), as they strive to somehow challenge white supremacy at the same time they are upholding it.

Scholarly Significance:
In order for whites to truly be part of transforming themselves and society they must develop a self-implicating praxis (Parker, 2020). Woke white supremacy (Parker, 2020) has made whites impenetrable and new curriculum and approaches are needed to continue to push progressive whites who now seem to know everything. This paper will detail the tactics, consequences, and possibilities for reaching whites.

Author

• Amanda Parker, University of New Mexico