#TheorizingWhileBlack: Whitesplaining and its Enduring Tragedies for Contemporary Black Thought
Imagine this — you work hard, mentor generations of students, and contribute to important interventions in your field. You get that promotion, then tenure and become the first tenured black social scientist promoted with tenure in your institution’s 300-year history. Your work progresses and you achieve various academic and policy successes as a senior scholar. You do all that is expected of you — — win teaching awards, are appointed to various international bodies, win grants and carry out significant research. Upon the publication of your research however, your colleague critiques not your substantive findings, but critiques who you are, dismisses what you know, and accuses you of particular political positions that undermine your painstaking attempts to highlight complexities of the human condition.
Now imagine yourself as a senior white male scholar. Would you expect that your senior white colleague would overlook the content of your work and dismiss your scholarship by insisting that you don’t understand your topic of specialization? As a white academic in a top mainstream institution, is it likely that your colleague would disregard your contribution by dismissing the knowledge you have accumulated over years of research and teaching, and on which you have built your career? Would they question whether you deserve to be there, or on whose side are you, whether you can you be neutral, or were you an equal opportunity hire with the requisite authority to write about your chosen topic?
If you are a black female academic, you likely don’t have to try too hard to imagine this. If you are a senior black woman in academia, it’s likely that you have the scars of a lifetime — from student racism, to invisibility, to colleagues threatened by your ability to make a claim to knowledge production, theory building unhinged from personal identity politics. In this political climate we not only have to worry about the existential threats — from driving while black, jogging while black, or breathing while black — but we must also worry about efforts to dismiss or control the production of knowledge when theorizing while black. The contest over knowledge production is not mundane. It takes various forms in academic life, the most incipient being those moments when there is a misrecognition of it as actual engagement.
One of the ways that this misrecognition takes shape is through the speech act known as whitesplaining.Whitesplaining has emerged in popular culture to depict the ways that some white men and women engage in speech acts that seek to explain racial complexity and injustice to people of color. In social sciences, such as in anthropology, these acts can be embedded in the very fabric of subaltern representation. When exercised with an air of dismissal of black theoretical contributions, we should look no further than its roots in histories of racism and white academic dominance and its consequences for contemporary black thought.
In this moment of the COVID19 global pandemic when black people and other people of color are more likely to provide essential services making them less likely to be able to work from home and suffer from differential access to health care and medicine, the politics of race and inequality have come front and center. In the midst of police brutality where more and more black men are experiencing violence at the hands of police officers, academia might be believed to be a place of privilege free of such overt racism. Indeed, many of us would like to see academia as a space free of racism and full of intellectual freedoms. The reality is that academia continues to be a space in which the knowledge that is revered and intelligible has been occupied historically by older white men, men who have jealously guarded those privileges without recognizing how and when they do so. Those who do not fit into their explanatory frameworks are often expected to sit on the sidelines — or worse, to be questioned about the integrity of their work, their motives, or, at times, the value of their contribution.
The story of knowledge production in the US and Canada demonstrates this point. Despite the founding of the first university in the United States in 1636, black student admission and later teaching have been bleak, with the first black female professor not being hired until 1866. According to a study published in 2001, by 1993 black women accounted for 6.43% of full-time faculty and half of these women worked in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and community colleges (Gregory, 2002). Of the 6.43%, only 1% taught in four-year research institutions and less than 1% at Tier 1 research universities (Gregory, 2002). Between 1981 to 1991 black women pursing university promotion and tenure dropped by two percent from 58% to 56% (ACE, 1993). And by the 2000s, a study by The Almanac of Higher Education (2009) noted that among faculty of color at the assistant professor level, black women represented 17.3% (5,438) second to Asian males at 28.49% and Asian females at 19.3% (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2007). However, when compared to these same constituencies, black women’s promotion and tenure record dropped between seven and nine percent (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2009). The numbers are no better in Canada where Black academics make up only 2.0% of all university professors, experience the highest rates of unemployment at 10.7%, and make 11.7% less than the average earnings of all university teachers.
Today, while small numbers of black women occupy senior faculty positions in institutions of higher learning, the ongoing politics of engagement and scholarly evaluation of black women’s contribution to theory building in predominantly white circles remain fraught. It is against this backdrop that Richard Wilson, a white male professor of law and anthropology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs felt compelled to publicly ‘educate’ and reprimand a black, female peer on topics represented in her newly released book.
Written by professor Kamari Maxine Clarke, Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (Duke University Press, 2019) theorizes the importance of understanding the relationship between embodied affects, emotional regimes and biopolitics. The goal is to understand the Pan-African-driven elite engaged in the refusal of the International Criminal Court in African countries. Clarke, who in 2008 was the first Black female social science professor to receive tenure and work at Yale University, spent the last 20 years researching the complexities of international justice institutions, theories of culture, power and justice and their transnational circulation. Yet, from May 25–29, 2020 I have been following the Opinio Juris symposium and am dismayed, though not surprised, by Richard Wilson’s response to Kamari Clarke book. I am surprised not because the whitesplaining at play hardly reflects the first time that a white male academic has sought to discredit the work a racialized academic. I am surprised because of the public nature of Wilson’s dismissal of a black woman’s theorizing and attempt to explain to her what he sees as the realities of international justice. Where often such actions are typically done in private, behind a veil of denial or academic secrecy, Wilson asserts his dismissal overtly and without regard for the actual complexities that Clarke’s analysis holds in tension, especially in relation to the ICC and Pan-African pushback. Instead, he refers to Clarke’s analysis as “an impassioned critique” — a familiar dismissal of black thought as being driven by emotions rather than logic attempts to theorize the social condition. The implicit message is that Clarke’s identity as a black scholar prevents her from being able to engage with her subject matter with academic integrity.
That the subject matter involves Africa and Africans makes this reference all the more problematic. His critique seems to betray an assumption that a black academic cannot as effectively engage with African topics as can a white peer. This is further highlighted by his attempt to educate Clarke on her areas of research — areas that she has spent countless time and resources engaging, research with which he is actually less familiar. It begs the question: why does a senior, white, male academic believe that he knows more than a senior, black, female academic about areas of her research? And why use a public symposium as an opportunity to dismiss rather than engage her? By embarking on whitesplaining, he then proceeded to clarify what he saw as the authorial interpretation to customary international law.
Wilson’s response misses the opportunity to engage in Affective Justice’s theoretical contributions to the field. Rather, in a familiar mode of disregard he took an established scholar’s ethnographic findings and dismissed the work as representing a “relentlessly pro-immunity platform” that “searches for a legal basis to absolve heads of state for committing mass crimes when no such basis exists.” This dismissal of a black legal scholar and anthropologist’s work was preceded by his claim that Clarke’s transnational ethnography represents a “wholesale erasure of pro-ICC African voices” as well as his earlier claim that she has misunderstood “key elements of international criminal law,” elements on which he felt responsible for educating her.
Interestingly, the very tenets of international law that Wilson claims that Clarke doesn’t understand are at the heart of ongoing political debate in which it is clear that there is no right or wrong position. The judicial field around how to interpret the Rome Statute’s Articles 27 and 98 are deeply contested in international legal circles and my reading of Clarke’s work is that she highlights these domains of contestation, aspiration and nuance.
Wilson then ends by discrediting Clarke’s moral authority by suggesting that she supports “the destruction of the ICC and the dismissal of accountability for political leaders provides succor to these global anti-democratic currents.” How he came to this conclusion is unclear. Perhaps for Wilson, the position of someone willing to research the controversial and complex positions of Pan-Africanists engaged in African Union justice equates to the destruction of an institution that she seeks to understand. He also seems to presume that if one studies and writes about something, then one must represent that thing. This flattening of the intellectual labor of Affective Justice is unfortunate and its debasement of a world of African complexities is replaced with a set of binary oppositions that distorts more than it illuminates.
Rather than critiquing the book from that project’s objectives and ambitions, Wilson takes it upon himself to instruct a colleague that she should have undertaken a different project. This form of whitesplaining and willing distortion of Clarke’s work seems driven by an incipient white liberal racial superiority and an assumption that it is fine to dismiss black women’s theorizing in a field dominated by white male gatekeepers. To personalize and impute political motive on her work rather than engaging with the book’s theoretical and ethnographic contribution is not what one would expect of 21st century anthropology. Instead, it highlights the work of whitesplaining in contemporary academia and the histories of dismissal of black intellectual production, of black theorizing.
#TheorizingWhileBlack
