Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness 1138304611, 9781138304611

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Foreword: Troubling Whiteness and Its Neoliberalist Impulse
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Introducing Twenty-first Century Whiteness or “Everything Old Is New Again”
PART I: Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color
2 Asian American Performance in White Supremacist Representation
3 Queerness as Strategic Whiteness: A Queer Asian American Critique of Peter Le
4 Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories: Performances with and against Whiteness
PART II: Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through White Bodies
5 Black Women’s Intellectualism and Deconstructing Donald Trump’s Toxic White Masculinity
6 From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas: (Re)Locating the Performances of White Femininity
7 Digging In: White Trash, Trailer Trash, and the (Im)Mobility of Whiteness
8 A Forgotten History of Eugenics: Reimagining Whiteness and Disability in the Case of Carrie Buck
PART III: Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Discursive Strategies
9 Monstrous Authenticity: Trump’s Whiteness
10 Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror in Twenty-first Century Counterterrorist Rhetorics
11 Nightmares of Whiteness: Dreams and Deportability in the Age of Trump
12 “The Colonial Jesus”: Deconstructing White Christianity
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness

This book brings the study of whiteness up to the post-Obama era. It is essential reading for scholars who want to understand how whiteness operates as it moves through other categories such as gender, class, sexuality, and nationality. With writing by top scholars in the field, it gives us the tools to understand how power operates even when it seems to be invisible. —LeiLani Nishime, University of Washington, USA

The field of communication offers the study of whiteness a focus on discourse that directs its attention to the everyday experiences of whiteness through regimes of truth, embodied acts, and the deconstruction of mediated texts. This book takes an intersectional approach to whiteness studies, researching whiteness through rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, performance studies, and interpretive research. More specifically, the chapters deconstruct the communicative power of whiteness in the context of the United States, but with discussion of the implications of this power internationally, by taking on relevant and current topics such as terrorism, postcolonial challenges, White fragility at the national level, the emergence of colorblind discourse as a proWhite discursive strategy, the relationship of people of color with and through whiteness, as well as multifaceted identities that intersect with whiteness, including religion, masculinity and femininity, social class, ability, and sexuality. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh is an Independent Scholar located in Colorado, USA. Dreama G. Moon is a Professor of Communication at California State University, San Marcos, USA. Thomas K. Nakayama is a Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, USA.

Routledge Research in Communication Studies Populist Political Communication in Europe

Edited by Toril Aalberg, Frank Esser, Carsten Reinemann, Jesper Strömbäck, and Claes H. de Vreese

Setting Agendas in Cultural Markets Organizations, Creators, Experiences Philemon Bantimaroudis Communication, Advocacy, and Work/Family Balance Jenny Dixon Integrative Framing Analysis Framing Health through Words and Visuals Viorela Dan The Discourse of Special Populations Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy and Practice Edited by Ahmet Atay and Diana Trebing Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness Edited by Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama

Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness Edited by Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-30461-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-73000-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Foreword: Troubling Whiteness and Its Neoliberalist Impulse

vii

Rona l d L . J ac k son I I

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Introducing Twenty-first Century Whiteness or “Everything Old Is New Again”

xiii

1

Daw n M ari e D. M c I ntos h , D r e ama G . M oon , and   T h omas K . N a k ayama

Part I

Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color

13

2 Asian American Performance in White Supremacist Representation

15

K e nt A . O no and A l ison Y e h C h e u ng

3 Queerness as Strategic Whiteness: A Queer Asian American Critique of Peter Le

29

S h ins u k e Eg u c h i

4 Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories: Performances with and against Whiteness C h ar l e s L u L e v itt and B e rnad e tt e M ari e C a l af e l l

46

vi Contents Part II

Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through White Bodies

67

5 Black Women’s Intellectualism and Deconstructing Donald Trump’s Toxic White Masculinity

69

R ac h e l A l icia G riffin

6 From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas: (Re)Locating the Performances of White Femininity

94

Daw n M ari e D. M c I ntos h

7 Digging In: White Trash, Trailer Trash, and the (Im)Mobility of Whiteness

117

Tas h a R . D u nn

8 A Forgotten History of Eugenics: Reimagining Whiteness and Disability in the Case of Carrie Buck

133

Kat h ryn Hobson and S op h ia B . M arg u l i e s

Part III

Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Discursive Strategies

153

9 Monstrous Authenticity: Trump’s Whiteness

155

R ac h e l E . D u brofs k y

10 Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror in Twenty-first Century Counterterrorist Rhetorics

176

M aro u f Hasian and S . M ar e k M u l l e r

11 Nightmares of Whiteness: Dreams and Deportability in the Age of Trump

198

Lisa A . F l or e s and Logan R a e G om e z

12 “The Colonial Jesus”: Deconstructing White Christianity

218

G l oria N z iba P indi and A ntonio T omas D e La G ar z a

List of Contributors Index

239 245

Foreword Troubling Whiteness and Its Neoliberalist Impulse Ronald L. Jackson II The conversation about race in America is rarely at a faint whisper, but as of late it is clearly at fever pitch. The U.S. Electoral College combined with the popular vote led to a 2016 presidential election outcome that lots of liberal leaning Americans did not see coming. On November 9, 2016, when the forty-fifth U.S. president Donald J. Trump took the stand to accept victory, he exclaimed, “… I say it is time for us to come together as one united people … Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream” (Federal News Services, 2016). Less than one year later on L ­ abor Day ­September  5, 2017, after failed attempts to end the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare), President Trump dashed many ­A mericans hopes about “renewing the American dream” when he announced he would seek to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood ­A rrivals (DACA), an Obama-era legislation that ensured that young children of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States would be offered safe asylum. The shock of deporting “Dreamers” reverberated throughout the United States, a country that has often proudly stated it is a nation of immigrants where dreams of success are made possible for everyone. American citizens have watched President Trump vehemently pursue, like no other president ever has, the dismantling of every major success his predecessor President Barack Obama had. He has done it with disdain. Some choose to chalk it up to usual partisan banter, but clearly there is something more to it than that. There is also more to Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again” than meets the eye. The implied subtext is confounded by what we Americans know about whiteness. Often when we speak of whiteness, we talk about it as though it is the synecdoche for power and privilege, and as if it does not refer to people but rather a way of being. That is the peculiar racial crisis our society has manufactured. It has created a very dangerous I-Other dialectic that has designated whiteness as the ever-dominant subject or “I,” while the “Other” is treated ineludibly strange. As one think tank after another reports that our nation is moving toward a predominantly minority country, there is a real palpable fear,

viii Foreword fragility, and anxiety emerging around individuals and groups who sense a slippage of White privilege in these forecasts and would rather see our country continue being dominated by whiteness. The frail reasoning behind “blue lives matter” and “all lives matter” kneejerk responses to the Black Lives Matter movement exposes this anxiety. It mindlessly ignores the unyielding historical and contemporary subjugation of dark skinned peoples in America. It conveniently forgets or misremembers why Cornel West (1999) proclaims, “The notion that Black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery of the West” (p. 70). It sidesteps the raison d’être of Black Lives Matter, which was to hold the government responsible for upholding justice and equality in the wake of senseless deadly violence against countless Black people in the United States at the hands of police and xenophobic citizens. President Trump’s comparability of the alt-right with what he named the “alt-left” also speaks to this concern about the slippage of White privilege. A deadly race riot erupted in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, after the Ku Klux Klan arrived with a city permit to protest the removal of a confederate monument. That same evening, Americans were glued to their televisions, radios, and social media to hear their President confidently speak words of solace and unity. He gave an eloquent speech on August 14 in which he condemned bigotry and named racism as evil and racists as thugs and criminals. Two days later, after President Trump received widespread backlash on traditional and social media for his chastisement of conservatives, the New York Times reported that he reversed course and stated, “There’s blame on all sides” (Merica, 2017) and went so far as to say that the subsequent removal of confederate statutes is altering U.S. history and culture. His sympathy for those who would love to keep the confederate statutes in place is mind-boggling, given these pieces of architecture are emblematic of the symbolic and very real violence experienced by marginalized groups in the United States every day. But it is not entirely shocking, since he is speaking from a position of privilege reserved for White people in this country who do not have to think about the Other. Maybe this would be easier to justify if it did not occur against the backdrop of a quickly intensifying race conflict in our country, one where as www.thedemands. org (The Demands, 2015) demonstrates, over 100 university campuses saw racial protests within the previous 18 months. The crucible of race and racism in the United States continues to plague our society, and the sheer force of hegemonic whiteness is at the epicenter. The sociopolitical machinery that has erected the race-based I-Other dialectic has actually worked itself into a bit of dysfunction. By naming the Other as perversely odd and abnormal, the dominant “I” in this racialized I-Other dialectic has become disfigured itself. Whiteness is no longer recognizable as simply a descriptor of White people. Instead, as the confederate statute debacle illustrates, it has become an obscenely narcissistic public scaffold that everyone must confront in America. Either

Foreword  ix marginalized bodies honor and conform to it as it morphs or they suffer the indignities of being perceived as perpetually and inescapably abnormal. Of course, on the other hand, it leaves the dilemma Roediger (1994), Mills (1997), and McLaren (2000) talk about when they contend that there are some Whites who do not want to claim hegemonic privilege and its responsibility for social misery, but they cannot opt out of whiteness. They are entangled in this intricate web of social dominance that portends democratic collapse at the very moment whiteness maneuvers to subjugate and classify socially marked differences. While there is perhaps no way out, many Whites have found that coalition building has helped them atone for the destruction that unchecked whiteness facilitates. Decision makers within American institutions such as media, corporate C-suites, universities, congress, etc., have publicly proclaimed again and again that discourses about White people are to be anointed and honored as normal and that discourses about non-White people are to be treated as aberrations of normality. When it is not a public proclamation, our collective complicity with the dominance of whiteness survives in our often racially homogenous media, curricula, institutional leadership, legislation, etc. For those whose legacies get left behind or are simply marginalized daily in the United States as whiteness takes center stage, we experience battle fatigue from fighting to be acknowledged, and yet we persist because our lives and our children’s lives depend on it. Our continued twenty-first century focus on defining what is normal by paying attention to the particularity of racial, gender, and class differences is astounding. Its prejudicial influence in our contemporary society is responsible for the parochial circuitry of xenophobia, patriarchy, and state repression, all of which serve to center whiteness. This becomes especially intricate when we examine the intersectionality inherent within whiteness. As several chapters within this book Theorizing the Communicative Power of Whiteness argue, the binary logic of race that renders whiteness as normal is problematized when we explore whiteness vis a vis the subaltern lens of communities that are poor, LGBT, women, and/or disabled. As a result, to keep the oppressive logic of whiteness consistent, we are hard-pressed to find constitutive discourses in media, for example, that depict LGBT people as normal, non-White racial groups as normal, or poor people as normal rather than strange. We are taught that they all have issues. This intentional distinguishing of the center from the margins permits an opaque contrast that is readily recognizable because of how it consistently pathologizes difference. Tim Wise (2008), in his book White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, perhaps says it best when he intimates. Although whiteness may mean different things in different places and at different times, one thing I feel confident saying up front, without fear of contradiction, is that to be White in the United

x Foreword States … is to have certain common experiences based on race … We are, unlike people of color, born to belonging, and have rarely had to prove ourselves deserving of our presence here. (p. 3) Wise’s (2008) perspective reminds us that whiteness, or perhaps more accurately White privilege, does not have to prove itself. How else do we make sense of the divided set of elected city, state, and federal officials who cannot figure out whether to remove confederate statutes? Also, how are we to reconcile other legislation that, on the one hand, seeks to dismiss gender nonconforming LGBT bodies (through gender neutral bathroom bills) and destabilize immigrant families (by rescinding protections of immigrant children through DACA) and, on the other hand, uses taxpayer dollars to pay for and administer Narcan to assist a population of predominately White heroin addicts? With the fear of sounding cliché, this clearly points out whose lives matter. We see similar differences in access and treatment in virtually every sector of our society including education, housing, environment, health care, etc. The trouble with whiteness is that it is a slippery adjectival signifier of what it means to be an average American (Nakayama, 2017). It is only slippery in the sense that when it is held up as a template for what it is to be normal, and by that I mean an exemplar of pull-yourself-up-by-yourbootstrap American capitalist success, it is heralded as a clear example of what we are all capable of, despite structural barriers that may inhibit that same success for marginalized group members. Yet, when it is decried for its insistence on attempting to represent modern normalcy, for its unquestioned embrace of unearned White privilege, or for its terrorizing of marginalized groups, many Whites deny or denounce it as though it has nothing to do with them (Castle Bell, 2017). The American evacuation of democracy as a public declaration and space for fairness, equity, and social justice is troubling, if for no other reason than its yield to a sociopolitical habitat that offers safe refuge for xenophobic acts of violence. This violence is not just physical; it is also discursive, psychological, and emotional; and it happens in classrooms and boardrooms, in public spaces, and in private domains. It has very real material consequences for the groups of people who sit on the margins in this country every single day. This violence is guided by a neoliberalist instinct that presupposes economics is the catalyst for all human relationships and that money is the driver for all decision-making pertaining to the public; and yet this instinct is irrespective of the structural inequalities that have led to the rupturing of our society. Perhaps the only suitable explanation for how the preponderance of inequalities persists without the masses holding this neoliberalist regime in contempt is that we have come to know and value capitalism as being amoral, and therefore we understand it has no regard for morality. That

Foreword  xi means it is by definition bereft of any ethical considerations that might indeed promote the social well-being of the masses; and so we cannot hold it responsible for the carnage it leaves. Additionally, it is by nature susceptible to waves of volatility and destruction for those who are the least competitive. The argument is that if we are to accept capitalism and its proven track record for producing sustainable markets, then we must also accept its shortcomings. We must accept a power matrix whereby some people are at the top (dominant) at the expense of other people being at the bottom (subjugated). Capitalism is viable because of its prioritization of markets and its insistence on rabid individualism. Capitalists would have us believe that if we abandon capitalism as a socioeconomic system, then it will severely alter our relatively comfortable way of life. If this preoccupation with greed, competition, and division amply captures the zeitgeist, then we are left with nonmarket values like love, caring, service, empathy, and equity that consistently remain out of focus. When the transfer of public wealth to private bank accounts and the daily commoditizing of self-interested bodies define the public sphere, then it is time for critical reflections on how we must work to socially reconstitute what it is to be human. We must fight to preserve our humanity, to restore our ethical sensibilities, and to redefine democratic citizenship. This requires sustained effort on the part of citizens who believe in the promise of democracy for everyone. So, where do we go from here? What does it take to enable radical progressive transformation? What does that even look like? That is the pulp of possibility that Theorizing the Communicative Power of ­Whiteness provides. McIntosh, Moon, and Nakayama boldly seek to explore whiteness as a way to interrogate spaces that hold the possibilities for a restorative hope. This is a bit of a reconnaissance mission because, as they admit, whiteness frequently shape-shifts as to avoid scrutiny. In seeking to define what whiteness is, to map where it lives, and to examine how it functions, the authors of the various chapters here do the incredibly difficult labor of deconstructing, decentering, and exposing whiteness. This book energetically deploys a critical consciousness that illuminates some of the most probing civic issues affecting our society. What must not be lost on the reader is the care taken to situate the analyses in a way that balances our presumptions of whiteness with what it is actually doing. Theorizing the Communicative Power of Whiteness sharply focuses on race at one of the most significant times in recent history. McIntosh, Moon, and Nakayama lucidly approach the topic of race via the lens of whiteness and do so with uncommon audacity. It is easy to point out the deficiencies of whiteness when one sits on the margins. It is more challenging to pinpoint whiteness in situ and to do some perspective taking around how it arrived there in the first place and the contours of discursive meaning it emplaces. When explored this way, the critiques are arguably a bit more nuanced, because they recognize

xii Foreword the complexity of the social positioning that Whites find themselves in, then the scholar-critics work to unravel what Whites do with that privileged positioning. The sociopolitical habitat of whiteness is power. That is the space in which it lives. That is how its privilege is activated. The answer is not colorblindness. I believe enough scholars have proven over the last several decades that metaphorical blindness in any form only renders those on the margins invisible as those in power pretend to not see differences that have led to debilitating consequences. The answer is in centering Others so that the “I” and the “Other” get to share the same space as co-subjects rather than one as a subject and the other as an object. The answer is in recognizing, valuing, and respecting cultural and co-­ cultural discourses, legacies, traditions, and differences. This facilitates the kind of social agency that progressively builds democracy. This is what I had hoped President Trump was talking about in his election victory speech when he stated, “Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream.” There is much work to be done in this regard. We should all be grateful that Theorizing the Communicative Power of Whiteness is available as a resource to help us on our path.

References Castle Bell, G. (2017). Talking Black and White: An intercultural exploration of twenty-first century racism, prejudice, and perception. New York, NY: Lexington. Federal News Services (2016). Transcript: Donald Trump’s Victory Speech. New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/ trump-speech-transcript.html?mcubz=1 McLaren, P. (2000). Whiteness is…the struggle for postcolonial hybridity. In J.  Kincheloe, S. Steinberg, N. Rodriguez, and R. Chennault (Eds.), White reign: Deploying whiteness in America. New York, NY: St. Martins Griffin. Merica, D. (2017). Trump Says Both Sides to Blame Amid Charlottesville Backlash. CNN, August 16. Retrieved September 8, 2017 from www.cnn. com/2017/08/15/politics/trump-charlottesville-delay/index.html. Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nakayama, T. (2017). What’s next for whiteness and the Internet? Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34(1), 68–72. Roediger, D. (1994). Towards the abolition of whiteness. New York, NY: Verso. The Demands (2015). [Weblog compiled by WeTheProtesters]. Retrieved September 8, 2017 from www.thedemands.org/ West, C. (1999). Race and modernity. In C. West (Ed.), The cornel west reader. (pp. 55–86). New York, NY: Basic Books Civitas. Wise, T. (2008). White like me: Reflections on race from a privileged son. New York, NY: Soft Skull Press.

Acknowledgments

We as an Editor Collective would like to thank the contributors to this book. Without your brilliance, commitment, and conviction to whiteness research, this book would not be possible. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh thanks Charleze, Macklon, and Kennedy Critton, when I was busy with this book I was not with each of you. We will never get that time back. I acknowledge your sacrifices. Thank you also to Jason, Bernadette, and Shinsuke for your listening ears and loving support. I also credit all my mentors who continue to teach me in informal and formal ways the workings of whiteness in my life. Finally, I dedicate my efforts on this project to all those who struggle against racism in their daily lives. Dreama G. Moon thanks Betty Jo Dowler and Michelle Holling for their patience and support. Thomas K. Nakayama thanks David L. Karbonski for his patience and understanding during this process.

1 Introduction Introducing Twenty-first Century Whiteness or “Everything Old Is New Again” Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama Since, and even prior to, the founding of the United States, whiteness has been a persistent part of the lives of those residing within its borders ­(Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Fleming, 2017; Lacy, 2008; Lipsitz, 1998; Moon, 2016). In reality, there was no United States prior to White ­supremacy as the country and the ideology evolved together (Allen,  2012; ­Fleming,  2017). Historically, whiteness has been painstakingly developed and a­ rticulated by Whites, and meticulously enshrined in laws (e.g., ­marriage, citizenship), social policies (e.g., voting rights, immigration, housing, education), religious discourse (especially Christianity), and the social and physical sciences (Lipsitz, 1998). For hundreds of years, White people knew that they were White and were quite clear on the social, political, and material benefits implicated in that subject position and often were willing to kill (and did so) to protect those benefits. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended legal segregation in ­public places and attempted to introduce a “color-blind” standard into hiring and college admission practices, whiteness apparently “disappeared” only to be reborn as “color-blind discourse,” which asserted that race was no longer a “thing” and that people are now to be judged based on their character rather than on the color of their skin. In the ­color-blind era, whiteness went “underground” so to speak and became less overt and more coded. Moon (1999) refers to this code as “Whitespeak,” wherein racially loaded euphemisms (i.e., welfare, crime, ­affirmative action, reverse racism, immigration) and platitudes (i.e., “Make America Great Again”) are used in place of overt racist speech, but to accomplish the same goals. Color-blind discourse had no intention of challenging White supremacist ideology on which whiteness is built, nor did it, thus racial life remained relatively unchanged. With the 2016 Presidential race and the rise of Donald Trump, whiteness once again took a turn. Some see the current era as just plain “old school white supremacy”— more of the same—while others are confused, shocked, and paralyzed by recent events such as Charlottesville. Fleming (2017) notes that, “it

2  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh et al. is clear that our nation is in the midst of a very public—and painful— reckoning with the memory (and ongoing realities) of white supremacy” (para. 1). The twists and turns of whiteness are strategic (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) and related to the long-term overall aims and interests of White hegemony and the continual development of the means to achieve these aims and interests. To say that whiteness is strategic and dynamic is, on the one hand, nothing revolutionary or groundbreaking. Since its legal establishment in the first Naturalization law of the United States which said that only “free, white persons” were eligible for citizenship, whiteness and who counted as “white” has never been stable. The legal advantages of being classified as “white” led to hundreds of court cases in which people from all over the world petitioned the courts to be classified as “white” (Haney-Lopez, 1996). At the same time, many laws were also passed in which racial restrictions became a part of everyday life, including ­anti-miscegenation laws, Jim Crow laws, alien land laws, Indian removal acts, and more. On the other hand, whiteness also has a stability and a coherency to it. Whiteness does not simply change in random ways; it maneuvers based on past communicative patterns and, in response, to changing social conditions. As detailed earlier, throughout our history, whiteness has redefined and repositioned itself repeatedly to a static position of power and privilege. The category of “white” has expanded and contracted as needed. For example, the definition of “white” was expanded to include Irish and Irish Americans (Ignatiev, 1995). Not only were initially racially questionable European groups strategically incorporated into the “white” racial category as the need arose (Jacobson, 1999), but in the 1980s, the creation of the “white Hispanic” census category opened up whiteness (at least in name) to many Latinx peoples (Yancey, 2003). It is in this dialectical tension between the dynamic nature of whiteness and its static character that we are walking as we watch the terrain of whiteness shifting tremendously in the twenty-first century. In the postWorld War II era, social change was on the horizon at the same time that a return to “normal” was planned. The rise of the civil rights ­movement, the gay liberation movement, the women’s liberation ­movement, and many other racial, sexual, and gender movements pushed remarkable change across the social scene in the latter half of the twentieth century. As we enter the twenty-first century, whiteness is responding and ­reconfiguring the social scene yet again. In the current climate, there are a number of forces that are pushing the repositioning of whiteness. Among these are the U.S. Census Bureau’s projection that Whites will become a minority in about 2044 and the Pew Research Center’s estimates that this will happen in 2055 (Horowitz, 2016). We note these statistics to point to the future of White racial anxiety fueled by racial uncertainty. With the loss of majority

Introduction  3 status, Whites are situated in new spaces of race relations that create a perception of losing power. In turn this results in a backlash of White racism among Whites. One major repercussion of these White racial anxieties is already present with the number of hate groups growing from 602 in 2000 to 930 today (Berman, 2014). The backlash of Whites losing norms of power are also present in the extreme growth of anti-­government groups that were as low as 149 groups in 2008 and increased to over 1,000 after the election of President Obama ­(Berman, 2014). Of course, given that Latinx are now counted as White, whiteness could maintain its majority position and position of power through the ­incorporation of this particular ethnic group. Despite this strategic possibility, President Trump continues to push building a wall with Mexico, deporting Dreamers and other undocumented people, as well as claiming that, not just Mexicans, but “people that are from all over, that are killers and rapists and they’re coming to this country” (Edelman, 2016). This points to a return to older forms of whiteness as a twenty-first century strategy to resecure its position. This return to older communicative patterns of whiteness became more visible under President Obama’s administration. For example, when President Obama opened his T ­ witter account in May 2015, he received many tweets back containing the N-word, with the first racist tweet coming 10 minutes after President Obama sent out his first tweet (Capehart, 2015). The communicative power of the N-word—widely banished or removed from public discourse in the late twentieth century—makes a forceful and public return in the twenty-first century. Given these major shifts (or poignant returns) in the communicative power of whiteness, we felt it is important to offer some scholarly insights into the contemporary terrain of whiteness. So, in this edited collection, we focus on the communicative nature of power underlined in and through whiteness by focusing on the shifting strategic moves of whiteness as manifested in the current cultural climate. While we do not claim there is a “new” movement in whiteness, we do see whiteness reclaiming itself overtly through discursive tactics such as fragility, civility, authenticity, intersecting identities, embodiments of people of color, as well as material ones such as various forms of overt and covert violence toward peoples of color. Whiteness as a theoretical principle is not a new concept, and although theoretical articulations of whiteness have evolved over the last thirty plus years, the primary premise of whiteness is its relation to White raciality and racism. Many whiteness scholars articulate whiteness from an ideological perspective of racial dominance through tactical embodiments, strategic rhetorics, and social/historical constructions (Alcoff, 2015; Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Carrillo Rowe & Malhortra, 2007; Crenshaw C., 1997; Frankenberg 1993, 1997, 2001; Moon, 2016; Moon & Flores, 2000; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Shome, 2000, 2014). Here, whiteness

4  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh et al. serves as a theoretical lens to unmask the cultural workings of ideological scripts of racial dominance and racial marginalization on both micro and macro levels while attending to its material manifestations. These scripts are not “new” but are clearly making problematic r­ eturns, reimagined in important ways, and compelling us to deconstruct the communicative power of whiteness. Taken together, this edited collection offers an analysis of some (re)new(ed) aspects of whiteness.

Mapping the Communicative Power of Whiteness Carey (2009) returned communication scholars to a ritual view of communication that posits communication serves to mold the ideological views of the world. Communication, then, is not only a tool to transmit knowledge but more so serves as the tool in which culture is formed. Martin and Nakayama (2006) add “communication is an intensely racialized practice” (p. 76). It follows that whiteness forms and operates communicatively. It is through communication that whiteness adapts, strategically locates its power, tactically (re)centers its universality, ­constructs its embodiments, and culturally performs. Along these lines, it is through the practice of communication that the material reality of the harms, marginalizations, and empowerments of whiteness are enacted. Thus, the communicative power of whiteness is divergent as serving both to enculturate and enact the formations of power. Over a decade ago, Nakayama and Martin (1999) made the argument that “whiteness … is productively understood as a communication phenomenon” (p. viii). If communication serves as a primary tool for the formation of the workings of whiteness, then the study of the communicative power of whiteness holds a key to deconstructing its power. Communication research offers the larger field of whiteness studies a contextual and tangible analysis of whiteness’ operations. F ­ urthermore, the field of communication offers the study of whiteness a focus on the everyday experiences of whiteness and/or specificities of whiteness through regimes of truth, embodied acts, and deconstruction of mediated texts. The power of whiteness is located through the study of the symbols (words, texts, images, bodies, embodiments/performances, practices, etc.) of whiteness. It is our intention for this collection to ­highlight the ways in which whiteness as communication propels White epistemologies/supremacist logic through our multiple identities and matrix of “isms,” in hopes that deeper cultural understandings of whiteness form possibilities for dismantling its communicative power. Alcoff (2015) challenges us that “Whiteness should not be reduced to racism or even racial privilege, even though these have been central aspects of what it means to be white” (p. 9). Her argument grows from a ­ foundational investment in intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991, 1997; May, 2014) and Black feminist thought (Hill Collins, 2000; H ­ urtado, 1999)

Introduction  5 that directs scholars to acknowledge race is comprised of many social locations that collide and combine to drastically influence our cultural experiences. Along these lines, Black feminist thought presses this theoretical thinking further to recognize that oppression cannot be approached from a hierarchical framework and furthermore identities are contextually grounded in such ways that “even white identity constitutes a social disadvantage in some situations” (Alcoff, 2015, p. 9). May (2014) adds Black feminist thought requires both thinking about sameness and difference, which drastically disrupts dominant binary thinking. Discrimination is formed through a matrix of power, not a linear construction. From this standpoint, whiteness functions through multiple workings of marginalization. Sexism, cisgenderism, transphobia, heteronormativity, and homonormativity depend on whiteness and racism to maintain hegemonic constructs. Classism, ableism, xenophobia, body size, ageism, likewise, rely on whiteness and racism for their workings of power to function. The limitations of this page conform these “isms” to seem linear, challenging us to emphasize the ­significance of context to inform how the multiplicities of power work simultaneously. As a prominent point of culture, whiteness functions fluidly/ strategically through our multiple positionalities while simultaneously whiteness maneuvers in and through multiple oppressions/empowerments contextually via our colliding social locations. Clearly, the communicative power of whiteness must be mapped from an intersectional reading of it. Moon (2010) explains intersectionality affords scholars the ability to better understand “how issues of power and privilege may play out” (p.  41). Thus, acknowledging whiteness intersectionally is certainly ­imperative in an era of color-blind racism and overt White nationalist hate. Over 20 years ago, Nakayama and Krizek (1995) emphasized the importance of studying whiteness in context and in dialectical relation with other identity systems to develop more precise and nuanced perspectives on how whiteness as a materialized ideology operates. More recently, Steyn and Conway (2010) reiterated this call, asserting that an intersectional whiteness should be the future moment of a discipline that has now matured beyond initial notions of invisibility and pervasiveness. Chávez (2012) contends that the field of communication continues to gravely lack in intersectional scholarship. This book responds by taking an intersectional theoretical stance to whiteness studies.

Organization of the Book One primary argument we intend for this compilation to demonstrate is how whiteness functions through intersectional capacities and is culturally maintained through its importance in maintaining the social order. The chapters, then, expose the communicative power of whiteness

6  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh et al. through examinations of the intersectional workings of whiteness. Scholars of this collection employ diverse methodological approaches through rhetorical analysis, qualitative research, performance studies, and interpretive research. They expose the communicative moves of whiteness in and through terrorism, social and traditional media, legal documentations, postcolonial challenges, White fragility at the national level, the relationship of people of color with and through whiteness, as well as multifaceted identities that intersect with whiteness (including religion, White masculinity and femininity, social class, ability, ­sexuality, and nationality). To do this, we structured the book into three sections: (1) Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color; (2) Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through White Bodies; and (3) ­Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Discursive Strategies. To clarify the framework of these sections, a preview of the chapters is provided here. Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color In their chapter, Kent Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung analyze Ken Jeong’s performances in a GQ photo spread, to lend insight into the broader question of how Asian Americans have negotiated their relationships with whiteness. In this specific case, Jeong’s performance, they argue, plays with pre-existing notions of Asianness that fulfill the ­expectations of whiteness, and this lends itself to White supremacy. In this case, whiteness is recentered through the performance of Asianness and the Asian body. It’s meaning does not stand alone but is negotiated in relation to whiteness. By focusing on the gay Asian American porn star/producer, “Peter Le,” Shinsuke Eguchi explores the centrality of whiteness in gay culture. By pulling on local, national, and transnational discourses about queer liberalism, whiteness, and queerness, Eguchi uncovers the ways that whiteness is key to gay culture while occupying a queer transnational Japanese body. In this chapter, he demonstrates how sexuality and race must be understood in the context of whiteness; there is no place beyond that in understanding how bodies are read. Pointing to the importance for whiteness scholarship to ground whiteness in the everyday and the body, Charles LuLevitt and ­B ernadette Calafell utilize a critical performative method to explore their relationships to whiteness as people of color. Their chapter explores their historical familial ties to whiteness as influential to their current and future engagements and disidentifications with whiteness. Lulevitt and Calafell’s chapter expands the current work on affective norms of whiteness by noting the intersectional affective consequences of bodies (Chicana and Asian American man) that do not produce White affect. Furthermore, their chapter fills the need for communication studies

Introduction  7 scholarship to explore how people of color perform with and against whiteness. LuLevitt and Calafell provide a powerful intersectional interrogation of how their multiplex identities in relationship to the matrix of cultural hegemony function to allow and not allow their bodies to work within and against whiteness. Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through White Bodies Rachel Alicia Griffin’s chapter utilizes Black feminist thought as a methodological lens to deconstruct the performative enactment of toxic White masculinity by focusing on President Trump’s 2017 Boy Scout Jamboree speech. Her analysis poignantly demonstrates how Trump’s rhetoric signifies an intersectional materiality of Whiteness that situates White men as righteously privileged, egomaniacal, and predatory. Griffin’s work demonstrates how the intersectional workings of toxic White masculinity function through the employment of dominant strategies and how these discursive displays of power work to secure and embolden toxic White masculinity and White supremacist ideals. Dawn Marie McIntosh’s chapter uses performance theory to expose whiteness as an embodied act through White feminine embodiments. McIntosh provides an intersectional reading of White femininity to ­provide a framework for six White feminine performances (White ­Virgin, Good White Female Employee, White Pin-Up, White S­ upermom, White Trash Mama, and White Lady). Her chapter challenges the normalcy of whiteness by pointing to the variable visibility of whiteness by and through White womanhood’s embodiments of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and classism. Working with a non-monolithic notion of whiteness, Tasha Dunn’s essay takes as its subject matter the “white Other,” focusing on how social class contributes to the functionality and lived experiences of whiteness. Noting the ways in which the White working-class population has become a central subject of U.S. political and cultural discourse since the rise of Trump, she argues that we must attend to intersections of whiteness and class in more complex ways for what this investigation might tell us about the functionalities of whiteness. At the heart of her argument is the claim that the immobility of White working-class ­people, which is discursively constructed, functions to mobilize whiteness. Kathryn Hobson and Sophia Margulies explore the intersections of whiteness and ableism through their analysis of Carrie Buck, a 17-year-old, lower-class, White woman, who was the first woman to be legally sterilized in Virginia. Their chapter demonstrates the necessity for i­ntersectional analysis in whiteness research by exposing how whiteness, class, gender, and sexuality impact the constructions of Buck as cognitively disabled. They add to the work on whiteness and ability research by noting how mental illness is reworked through norms of race, gender, and class from

8  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh et al. an invisible disability to a visible and measurably marked norm. Hobson and Margulies provide a complex reading of White bodies that occupy a liminal space betwixt and between idealized and marginalized, revealing how disability challenges whiteness as working as a monolithic entity. Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Discursive Strategies Rachel Dubrofsky examines what she calls “monstrous whiteness” as exemplified in the discourse and performance of President Trump. In her chapter, she focused on how a number of mainstream media news articles covered President Trump. She examines how he performs “monstrous whiteness” as his presidential style. This performance of presidential leadership is gendered, raced, and classed, as it defies normative performances of middle-class White masculinity. This “monstrous whiteness” of Trump gives permission for other White men who feel disenfranchised to perform whiteness in this way. She ties this kind of crassness to reality TV as a different way of performing whiteness that can only happen in the context of White privilege. In their focus on national security and the construction of “terrorism” and “terrorist” violence, Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller uncover the racialized character of “terrorism” underneath the racial blind policies on terrorism and terrorists. They explore how some acts and people get labeled or not labeled as terrorism and terrorists, as racialized ­patterns. They focus, in particular, on the Breivik attacks in ­Norway, the “Boston bombers,” and President Trump’s executive orders on ­restrictive immigration. In the context of whiteness and White normativity, violent acts by Whites are not seen as the same as acts by “others” from whom we need to be protected. Focusing on the repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and representations of Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants, Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez trace how whiteness works as a racialization rhetoric in constructed “good and deserving” immigrants from the criminal, problematic, and dangerous. They argue that in the constitutive rhetoric of deportability, support for the ­DACAmented function in dialectical tensions with discourses of pawnability and stoppage. Drawing on whiteness as a strategic rhetoric that has historically been articulated with (White) Christianity, Gloria N. Pindi and Antonio T. De La Garza connect the colonial project of Christianity with current day manifestations of White nationalist discourse. Whether “then” or “now,” they illustrate how Christianity continues to operate as a racialized code for whiteness in othering and oppressing bodies of color in the United States through a case study of the racial politics present in the discourse surrounding the 2017 White supremacist riot in Charlottesville, VA.

Introduction  9

Closing Thoughts and Future Challenges The chapters in this book, along with the many studies on whiteness, demonstrate the ways that whiteness is not monolithic. Whiteness is expressed in a myriad of ways, in many different contexts, at different times. On the one hand, whiteness is continually striving for ways to maintain its dominance, whether through public policies that restrict immigration from non-Whites to promoting particular ways of viewing ‘Others’ as different and threatening to the social order. On the other hand, it is constantly shifting strategies to maintain the social order, as conditions, contexts, and challenges change. Whiteness is multifaceted and can be violent and murderous, as well as seemingly neutral and normative. We also need to be attentive to ways that whiteness is changing as the social scene is changing. The U.S. Census Bureau’s (Colby & ­Ortman, 2015) estimate that the White U.S. population will become a minority in 2044 has been seen by some as an ominous threat. People can respond in very different ways to this perceived threat. Some turn to White supremacy ideologies fueled by easy access on the internet. Others may embrace racial policies promoted by various politicians, while others find solace in covert manners of racist ideologies that maintain White supremacy. Some may strive to move to White enclaves and other perceived safe spaces. There is no comprehensive list of how people may respond, but we must remain attentive to these shifting discourses as we navigate our common future. As communication scholars, we must also be focused on the ways that new communication technologies change the ways that whiteness is communicated, constructed, and deployed. While we cannot know what will happen with new communication technologies and social media, we know that the emergence of social media has changed how whiteness functions to various audiences. The importance of user produced content and interactivity along with perceived anonymity, vilification, resistance, and its global connections that fuel whiteness beyond national borders reflect the changing ways of whiteness in the new media context (Nakayama, 2017). No one knows what changes will happen with existing social media, e.g., Facebook, nor what future communication technologies may emerge, but it is imperative to remain vigilant to the ways that these communication technologies work with and against whiteness. We began this project with the conviction that these present transformations of whiteness manifest an exigence for whiteness research. The contributors of this collection undertake the daunting task of unearthing how whiteness intersects with whitewashed social spaces, bodies, and histories. We know the toll this labor takes but in the end this book jesters to a space of hope in a growing “whitened” time. We desire for

10  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh et al. this book to be read as a call, an open letter if you will, to many different people to challenge how we understand, negotiate, and r­ ecenter the workings of whiteness. The escalation of whiteness is daunting. What we can do as scholars/activists/partners/parents/friends/siblings/ daughters/sons is support each other by remaining committed to always ­challenging the communicative power of whiteness.

References Alcoff, L. (2015). The future of whitenesss. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Allen, T. W. (2012). The invention of the white race (2 vols.). New York, NY: Verso. Berman, M. (2014, December 30). The current state of white supremacist groups in the U.S. The Washington Post. Retrieved June 18, 2018 from: www. washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/12/30/the-current-state-ofwhite-supremacist-groups-in-the-u-s/?utm_term=.fb8f02675612 Bonilla-Silva, E. (2017). Racism without racists: Colorblind racism and the continuing significance of racial inequality in the United States (5th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Carey, J. W. (2009). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society, rev. ed. New York: Routledge. Capehart, J. (2015, May 19). Obama joins Twitter. Racism quickly follows. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-­ partisan/wp/2015/05/19/obama-joins-twitter-racism-quickly-follows/?utm_ term=.e3cacc0d48e3 Carrillo Rowe, A., & Malhortra, S. (2007). (Un)hinging whiteness. In L. M. Cooks & J. S. Simpson (Eds.), Displacing race: Whitenesss, pedagogy, performance (pp. 271–298). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Chávez, K. R. (2012). Doing intersectionality: Power, privilege, and identities in political activist communities. In N. Bardhan & M. Orbe (Eds.), Identity research and communication: Intercultural reflections and future directions. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Colby, S. L. & Ortman, J. M. (2015, March). Projections of the size and composition of the U.S. population: 2014–2060. Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, Department of Commerce. Retrieved from www.census.gov/content/ dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241–1299. Crenshaw, K. (1997). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidescrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. In K. Maschke (Ed.), Feminist legal theories. Edelman, A. (2016, August 31). A look at Trump’s most outrageous comments about Mexicans as he attempts damage control by visiting with the country’s president. New York Daily News. Retrieved from www.nydailynews.com/ news/politics/trump-outrageous-comments-mexicans-article-1.2773214 Fleming, C. M. (2017, August 19). To be clear, white supremacy is the foundation of our country. It won’t be destroyed by toppling statues. Retrieved from

Introduction  11 www.theroot.com/to-be-clear-white-supremacy-is-the-foundation-of-ourc-1797990783?utm_content=buffered1bf&utm_medium=social&utm_ source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Frankenberg, R. (1997). Introduction: Local whiteness, localizing whiteness. In R. Frankenberg (Ed.), Displacing whiteness: Essays in social and cultural criticism (pp. 1–33). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Frankenberg, R. (2001). The mirage of an unmarked whiteness. In B. R ­ asmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica & M. Wray (Eds.), The making and unmaking of whiteness (pp. 72–96). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haney-Lopez, I. (1996). White by law. New York NY: New York University Press. Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). London, UK: HarperCollins Academic. Horowitz, E. (2016, February 26). When will minorities be the majority? The Boston Globe. Retrieved from www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/02/26/when-will-minorities-majority/9v5m1Jj8hdGcXvpXtbQT5I/ story.html Hurtado, A. (1999). The color of privilege. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. New York, NY: Routledge. Jacobson, M. F. (1999). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacy, M. L. (2008). Exposing the spectrum of whiteness: Rhetorical conceptions of white absolutism (pp. 277–311). In C. S. Beck (Ed.), Communication Yearbook (Vol. 32). New York, NY: Routledge. Lipsitz, G. (1998). Possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2006). Communication as raced. In G. J. Shepherd, J. St. John & T. Striphas (Eds.), Communication as … perspectives on theory (pp. 75–83). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. May, V. M. (2014). ‘Speaking into the void’? Intersectionality critiques and epistemic backlash. Hypatia, 29, 94–112. Moon, D. G. (1999). White enculturation and bourgeois ideology: The discursive production of ‘good (white) girls’. In T. K. Nakayama & J. N. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The communication of social identity (pp. 77–97). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Moon, D. G. (2010). Critical reflections on culture and critical intercultural communication. In T. K. Nakayama & R. T. Halualani (Eds.), The handbook of critical intercultural communication (pp. 34–52). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Moon, D. G. (2016). Be/coming white and the myth of white ignorance. ­Western Journal of Communication, 80(3), 282–303. Moon, D. G., & Flores, L. A. (2000). Antiracism and the abolition of whiteness: Rhetorical strategies of domination among “Race Traitors”. Communication Studies, 51, 97–115. Nakayama, T. K. (2017). What’s next for whiteness and the internet. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34(1), 68–72.

12  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh et al. Nakayama, T. K., & Krizek, R. L. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 291–309. Nakayama, T. K. & Martin, J. N. (Eds.). (1999). Whiteness: The communication of social identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shome, R. (2000). Outing whiteness. Critical Studies in Media C ­ ommunication, 17(3), 366–371. Shome, R. (2014). Diana and beyond: White femininity, national identity, and contemporary media culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Steyn, M. & Conway, D. (2010). Introduction: Intersecting whiteness, ­interdisciplinary debates. Ethnicities, 10(3), 283–291. Yancey, G. (2003). Who is white?: Latinos, Asians, and the new Black/nonblack divide. Boulder, CO: Rienner.

Part I

Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Bodies of Color

2 Asian American Performance in White Supremacist Representation Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung

Whiteness studies have made many theoretical advancements that help us understand identity, power, relationships, and the construction of White racial identities better. Nevertheless, historically, whiteness studies have focused primarily on White racial performance, White representation, and White self-identity construction and self-recognition. While this scholarship does find that whiteness affects people of color, it typically does not investigate the role of people and bodies of color in the dramatic racial scene. However, as the late Ruth Frankenberg (1993) wrote, “Whiteness is in this sense fundamentally a relational category” (p. 231), which means that it is incumbent on us as scholars of whiteness to explore the performance and representation of people of color within White racialized performance and representation. In this chapter, we explore the performance of Asian Americans within the representational context of White supremacy. Specifically, we examine Ken Jeong’s performance of the Asian American buffoon in a photo shoot that appeared in GQ magazine on July 18, 2014. The question we ask of the photos in this quadtych is how Asian Americans, within a very constrained cultural space, perform identities both in relation to White characters but also in relation to unspoken but nevertheless constraining pressures associated with White supremacy. For the purposes of this chapter, we understand White supremacy as a context in which either White superiority or the inferiority of people of color is either assumed or in need of bolstering. The field of White supremacy is a highly constrained space in which hierarchy, access to privilege, access to things like citizenship, to resources, and to power, require certain kinds of performances and certain kinds of actions by people. Our investigation of whiteness falls within the field of communication studies, specifically media and rhetorical studies, and our explicit focus is on race, gender, sexuality, nation, and ability, or what may refer to as “cultural studies.” Whiteness studies do not tend to think about whiteness as a relational performance circumscribed by the active pressures of White supremacy. Therefore, we argue and then assume as a context for this chapter that whiteness is a discourse and a performance operationalized within a White supremacist cultural context and that it must be

16  Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung performed and reperformed to access, gain, and maintain White racial privilege, access, and power to bolster processes that enable relational inequities with people of color. To support this argument, we examine Asian American performances, specifically photos of Ken Jeong, in a GQ magazine advertisement. Within White supremacy, the possibilities for Asian Americans have changed over time. Many scholars refer to the current racial context as “post-racial.”1 In order to understand post-raciality, one has to understand that this “condition” exists within White supremacy, not outside of it. That is, post-raciality is a “strategy” (De Certeau, 1988; Nakayama & Krizek, 2009) within White supremacy. It is not a replacement for White supremacy, or even an alternative to it, rather, it was produced by and takes place within White supremacy. Visual culture within post-raciality entails an ironic relationship between viewers and visual media. As Ono and Pham (2009) have suggested, because Asian Americans were not producers of media, for the most part throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, their images and narratives were created by non-Asians and non–Asian Americans, which accounts for why so many images and narratives about Asians and Asian Americans are so bizarre. Yet, within post-­raciality, which emerges within a cultural memory familiar with civil rights and civil rights activism, non-Asian and non–Asian ­American viewers may have been conditioned by at least tacit awareness, if not knowledge about, historical racism. Because of that cultural education, viewers may be self-consciously aware of stereotypical and racist racial representation and understand that such representations are problematic or at least are offensive to some people. This situation, then, goes beyond what Eduardo Bonilla Silva describes as “color-blind racism.” That is, within postracism, enlightened, race conscious viewers may already be aware of and self-­conscious about the pitfalls of racist performances and representations. That is, viewers may be highly active and agentic consumers of images and prosumers of culture. They are consuming members who “get” that some kinds of racial representations and performances are unwanted and/or inappropriate. Thus, within post-racial visual culture, at least to some extent, representations of Asians and Asian A ­ mericans are “always-­ already” being scrutinized broadly for their potentially racist, stereotyping content. Therefore, because there is an assumption that viewers are conditioned to have at least some amount of racial ­consciousness—that is, a dialectical knowledge and awareness of race, racism, and race ­relations— and therefore that any performance of whiteness is in relationship to that already-known set of expectations of how people may be represented and may perform racially, visual scholars of race must come up with new ways to examine and discuss such representations. Some have referred to self-knowing, racially conscious racism as “hipster racism” (Dubrofsky & Wood, 2014; Lim, 2012; West, 2012). A part of hipster racism is an ironic positioning of the non-racialized audience

Asian American Performance  17 member to the racialized representation. Thus, irony is part of post-racial logics. Because there is an assumption that viewers are already aware of historical racist representations and what makes them offensive to some people, and of what a racist performance is, and, therefore, that if there is to be a performance that that performance has to be self-­reflective enough to challenge and transform problematic ideas surrounding racism, perhaps in a humorous and ironic way, producers of post-racist representations may present images and narratives in such a way so that knowing audiences can wink and laugh along with the performer. The audience, then, can see that the performer knows that we live in a racialized world, that they are performing within that racialized culture with that self-­knowledge, that the audience is aware of racism and the history of racial performance and representation, and that audiences will allow the performer to embellish on racialized performance, because (after all) that performance is done for consumption and pleasure, with full knowledge of what constitutes racist performance, which they must be trusted to sidestep. We are not looking at what one might call “white face” performances, because (for the most part) Asians and Asian Americans have habitually been prohibited from playing such roles publicly. Instead, we examine Ken Jeong’s performances in a GQ photo spread. We could have chosen a variety of other figures and objects to study, such as Henry Cho’s country Western-style comedy routines, Sandra Oh’s cross-­racial romantic and robotic medical show performances, and Ming-Na Wen’s performance of Americanness, qua whiteness, to understand how Asian ­A mericans perform within White supremacist representation. ­However, we focus on Ken Jeong because he helps us illustrate the two arguments that we want to center in this chapter related to the specific representation of Asianness in this photo spread: (1) Asian Americans perform Asianness in ways that conform to normative and racialized White expectations and (2) Asian Americans participate in a relational performance that allows for White supremacy. We begin this chapter by tracing Asian American Studies work on whiteness as an identity and as a framework, then discuss the role of juxtaposition and contrast in images, and finally, we will examine Jeong in the GQ photo spread.

Whiteness in Asian American Studies Asian American Studies work on whiteness has focused primarily on three early legal cases: Gong Lum v. Rice (275 U.S. 78, 79 [1927]), Ozawa v. United States (260 U.S. 178, 186 [1922]), and United States v. Thind (261 U.S. 204, 205 [1923]) (Koshy, 2001; Tehranian, 2000). Such work tends to study how Asian Americans have struggled to be accepted as citizens, even going so far as to claim whiteness as an identity. Additionally, within Asian American Studies, scholarship on Asian ­A merican whiteness has focused on “internalized racism” (Pyke & Dang, 2003); Asian Americanness as a triangulated identity between

18  Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung Black and White (Kim, 1999); “honorary whiteness” (Tuan, 1998); and upper middle-class status and privileged culture as Asian Americans’ entree into whiteness (Zhou, 2004). Some have even suggested that Asian Americans now, functionally, are part of White society (Wong, 2014). As Carrie Wong (2014) puts it, Being Asian and being white are becoming less and less mutually exclusive and the boundary between them (particularly in arenas such as work and education) increasingly porous…whiteness has never been defined by a person’s country of origin or genetic makeup. It’s simply a tool, one that can continue to operate even with the inclusion of certain minority groups. This argument, thus, reads Asian Americans as the next assimilable minority, like ethnic Whites before them. Whiteness has also been examined by Asian American scholars as a framework. For instance, Koshy (2001) argues that “Asian A ­ mericans produced, and were in turn produced by, whiteness frameworks of the U.S. legal system” (p. 154). Because racial politics of the 1960s were based on parallel instead of stratified minoritization, relationships among racial minorities who were not considered in this framework challenged White and non-White positionality. Koshy explains that minority interests were seized by conservatives and that whiteness, rearticulated as color blindness, enabled White-minority alliances around divergent interests. Asian Americans came to associate “themselves with the forms and claims of whiteness, while stressing that these affiliations were produced by a dominant group with the power to frame life conditions and changes in terms of racial choices” (Koshy, 2001, p. 156). In the modern-day Hollywood cinema and post-network television, Asian and Asian American entertainers appear to have more opportunities for representation. Though such opportunities allow for some agency in terms of participation, these roles nevertheless are often highly restricted to dominant portrayals of Asianness as defined by whiteness.

Juxtaposition and Contrast in Images Racial identities are often categorized and determined according to physical attributes. Visible differences determined by observing physical attributes are still used to classify human types (Alcoff, 2006). ­A lcoff (2006) explains that “visible difference naturalizes racial ­meanings … [by producing] the experience that racial identity is immutable” (p. 191–192). Racial distinctions are established by the emphasis of visible, physical markers. There exists a visual registry that works “through the shapes and shades of human morphology, the size and shape of the nose, the design of the eye, the breadth of the cheekbones, the texture of hair,

Asian American Performance  19 and the intensity of pigment” (Alcoff, 2006, p. 191). Comparing and contrasting phenotypical attributes inscribed on the body creates social boundaries determined by race. One way these differences are made apparent is through contrast. In her analysis of Kip Fulbeck’s photographic book project, Part Asian 100% Hapa, Rabin (2012) explains that Fulbeck’s work subverts the use of body as a signifier of racial identity and forces viewers to confront physical ambiguity in the image through the representation of mixed-race subjects. She argues that the mixed-race body is recognized when it is juxtaposed against whiteness. This is problematic because the juxtaposition relies on a relationship in which “whiteness is dependent upon the production of an other (blackness) and maintains the existing racial order of white supremacy” (Rabin, 2012, p. 395). In this sense, through triangulation, Asian and Asian American images are produced in contrast to blackness and whiteness. Rabin (2012) argues that the photos re-racialize the multiracial body by inviting a form of voyeurism in which the body becomes a titillating object of consumption for viewers to recognize “hapaness.” Similarly, by inviting audience members to view Asian and Asian American performances in a racialized manner, such representations adhere to White expectations of “Asianness” for viewers to recognize Asian and Asian American characters. While some scholarship has focused on representations involving Asian Americans performing race (Eguchi & Starosta, 2012; Lee, 1997, 2011; Lim, 2013; Nguyen, 2007; Patel, 2005; Shimakawa, 2002; Wong, 2010), scholars have not specifically focused as much on performances in deference to the pressures of White supremacy. That is, how have Asian Americans performed identity as a response to the intense pressures of assimilation that bear down on them?2 In an effort to begin to answer this question, this chapter looks at two kinds of White performances: (1) how Asian Americans perform as a result of the pressures of White supremacy that indicate only certain kinds of Asian American performances will be validated and (2) how Asian Americans are figured in relation to White bodies within the White supremacist scene. In the next section, we examine Jeong’s public persona through his work and examine GQ’s photo spread titled “Just the Two of Us” by photographer Peggy Sirota.

Ken Jeong: From “Genuinely Insane” to Family Man Ken Jeong pursued entertainment after becoming a physician with a degree from University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine. He began performing at places like Goodnight’s Comedy Club during school. In 1995, Jeong won the Big Easy Laff Off competition, which was judged by Budd Friedman, the founder of Hollywood Improv, and Brandon Tartikoff, a past president of NBC (Scott, 2015). Jeong made appearances on shows like MADtv and The Office but gained recognition

20  Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung through his role as Señor Ben Chang on Community. In an interview with Time magazine, Jeong explains that he cultivated his comedic persona by playing Señor Chang on the sitcom, who has been described as “genuinely insane” by the show’s creator, Dan Harmon (Adalian, 2011; Feeney, 2015). While he developed a fanbase as a “zany comedic actor,” critics refer to Señor Chang as “leering and creeping like a modern-day Fu Manchu, only weird and less smart” (Haruch, 2014; Nahas, 2015). Throughout his career, he has taken on a number of medical related roles for television, such as a gynecologist (Significant Others), a male nurse (Two and a Half Men), a coroner (Boston Legal), and even animated shows as a psychologist (American Dad!) and dentist (Bob’s Burgers). Jeong made his film debut as Dr. Kuni in Knocked Up when director Judd Apatow “was looking for an Asian actor with medical experience” and cast him for the part of Dr. Kuni, the “over-anxious, nerve-rattling doctor” in Knocked Up (Martin, 2014; Monfette, 2009). His break­ eslie out role led to his being cast as the flamboyant Chinese gangster, L Chow, in The Hangover Trilogy, who has been described as “utterly disgusting and terrifyingly weird … wild and dangerous, psychotic but alluring” (Barnes, 2013). The Hangover and The Hangover II gained such success that the movies became the fifth and sixth highest grossing R-rated film in the United States, respectively (Box Office Mojo, 2017). For The Hangover, Jeong also received the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain. The Washington Post writer Jen Chaney (2011) explains that it was this role that “cemented his status as America’s go-to wild and crazy Asian.” In 2015, the sitcom Dr. Ken aired on ABC with Jeong as the lead character. The show is based on his experiences as a physician and was the third sitcom to feature an Asian American family (the first two being All-American Girl and Fresh Off the Boat). In an interview, Jeong acknowledged this role as a departure from his previous characters, stating, “It’s a nice departure from crazy” (Feeney, 2015). While a departure from crazy, Jeong nevertheless maintained a subject position performing comedy. The Huffington Post referred to his departure from playing crazy characters to playing a father and a medical professional in a family sitcom as “The Reinvention of Ken Jeong” (Lulling, 2016). Dr. Ken was renewed for a second season, then ultimately cancelled in May 2017.

GQ: “Just the Two of Us (and Ken Jeong)” GQ’s July 18th, 2014, spread, “Just the Two of Us,” illustrates the visual performance of Asian American buffoonery staged in relationship to normative heteronormative White romance. The photo spread consists of four photos of three photo subjects: entertainer Ken Jeong, model Kate Upton, and a relatively unknown model Joshua Kloss (The ­Fashion Model Directory, n.d.). Deemed “America’s Favorite Bombshell” by Vogue magazine, Upton is regarded as a sex symbol within popular culture (Widdicombe, 2013). She appears frequently on lists for the “sexiest”

Asian American Performance  21 or “hottest” women and has been ranked eighth on Maxim’s Hot 100 list in 2012, fifth sexiest models by Models.com in that same year, and third by AskMen’s Top 99 Women in 2013 among others (AskMen, 2013; Brukman, 2013; Models.com, 2012). Appealing to Jeong and Upton’s respective popularity and status, the feature begins with this caption: When you and your bodacious girlfriend (who, if you’re lucky, looks like Kate Upton) jet off for a summer romp, pack a bag full of slimmed-down cords- and not much else. You’ll look sexy, and she’ll keep those starry eyes locked on you- even if you get photo-bombed by funnyman Ken Jeong. (The Editors of GQ, 2014) Accompanying the text is a list of the costs of the clothing the three actors are wearing -after all, this is a kind of sales for the clothing, specifically, for corduroy pants (The Editors of GQ, 2014). Moving from a photo titled “jacket” to “bed” to “beach” to “window,” we titled the four pictures in that way, various instances of Asian American buffoonery are on display. We refer to the first image in the series as “Jacket.” In the foreground of the image, Kate Upton is atop an unnamed model on a diving board. Prominent color contrasts: Upton’s grey bikini, the White man model’s yellow pants and steel blue shirt, and Jeong’s yellow swim shorts, grey jacket, and white formal shoes, as well as the green and red foliage in the background, and the blue and white pool into which Jeong is jumping help to amplify and disarticulate the products for sale in the image. The brand and price of items featured in the photo are provided under the image.3 Disarticulating the products for sale is key to being able to reveal a picture of the clothing. The eyes of the viewers might shuttle back and forth between the romantic scene taking up more than one half of the image on the left, and the action scene on the right of the image where Jeong is caught mid-air with legs akimbo and belly and chest fully exposed. In our analysis of the quadtych, we emphasize juxtaposition and contrast. Our study of these images reveals sharp distinctions between images—a common strategy in advertising, marketing, and promotional culture. Jarmo Valkola argues in his book Thoughts on Images: A Philosophical Evaluation that “the juxtaposition of two strong image compositions can create a shock, a collision, and a sensation of optical clash, or contradiction, and a kind of kinetic dynamism” (220). In further describing the specificity of the role of juxtaposition, he argues that This might mean looseness in that sense, that the eye can prioritise the change of an image, and concentrate instead upon the elements that link two images. Thus one can recognize a second shape as the same thing from another angle, and prioritise the continuity. ­According to this study, the juxtaposition of images is only a prelude

22  Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung to the semantic interaction between them. For example in cinematic narration, the editing practice is dominated by the dialectics of contrast and continuity, and difference and similarity. Furthermore, the spectator’s mind must handle all of this very fast, usually relating different images and shots and overlooking the cut. (220)4 In examining the first photo, we can see that the image works via contrasts: Upton’s hands on yellow pants near the man model’s groin, and Jeong’s yellow shorts; Kate Upton’s bikini-clad breasts and Jeong’s exposed breasts; both Upton’s and the model’s carefully coiffed hair and Jeong’s tousled and windblown hair; even the green, lush, and appealing foliage on the left and the low-growing green and red weed-like foliage on the right. In the image we label “Bed,” the models’ faces are at the top of the shot, and in the background, Jeong is in the middle to the bottom of the shot and in the foreground. Again, the image emphasizes contrasts: Jeong is almost upside down to the viewer, while the models are rightside up. Upton is without a bra or a top, but her left arm shields her breasts, in contrast with Jeong, wearing her bra but with both nipples plainly exposed. The model embracing Upton’s head with his hand versus Jeong embracing the bed with his hands. And this looks like a kind of classical nude painting of a woman languorously posed exposed with her eyes closed on the bed. A well-known example of this is Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” in which the nude female appears lying on her back, propped up by red velour-like pillows, resting on what appear to be silken bedsheets, with left hand covering, but resting on, her vagina, and her body (pictured outdoors) set against a largely green pastoral nature seen. These contrasts not only stage and perform transvestitism, but also Jeong is in a supplicant position similar to Upton as if he could be or imagine himself to be the one being kissed by the man. Once again, information for featured items are provided under the photo, but also two captions: “You just got bombed” and “Ken Jeong is a real-life physician, but you know him as the coked-out guy in The Hangover Part II.” The third image, we titled “Beach,” has the model couple again in the foreground, but on the right, taking up just more than one half of the shot. On the left and in the near-background is Jeong and on the right center in the far background are rocks and the ocean. This time, the main contrast is between the men. Both are standing, both are facing the same direction, to the right of the shot. And in this image, it is their physiques that are contrasted, with Jeong’s un-muscled and flabby pale body set against the model’s tan muscled arms and six-pack abs—or eight pack, whatever. Upton is lying on the ground passive with her feet propped up against the model’s thighs, again, close to his groin, looking off to her and our left vacantly. Notably, Jeong holds a pink swimming

Asian American Performance  23 noodle. One of the only overt racialized props in the four pictures, the angle the noodle is pointing is parallel to the angle of the rocks, while the model is in the process of taking off his shirt, hence exposing his breast and pecs, Jeong’s flabby and pale breasts and one nipple are exposed. This time, the caption brings attention to Upton: “Who’s the Girl? Model Kate Upton, 19, is known as the face of Guess Jeans - and a YouTube video in which she teaches you how to Dougie.” The final image of the quadtych we label “Window” and the image is dissected in half, similar to the way the other images are, with a foreground image of a Yosemite paddleboard separating the left of the shot where we see Upton and the other model, and the right of the shot where we see Jeong, all three of them facing us. Here, Upton is against the window with the model behind her leaning against her and the window, and his nipple is exposed and the outline of her nipple is visible through the white top. Jeong’s pelvis is extended forward, not thrust, and he is wearing a tiara. His T-shirt reads “may contain partial nudity” even though ironically this is the only shot that does not show his nipples. His portion of the shot is cramped—you can see it’s a tight shot—and he is pressing his lips open-mouthed against the glass with all three of the people having their eyes closed. Even in this last image, the man model is not mentioned. One of the subjects of this four-photo series is eroticism—what is erotic and what is not. The primary strategy of humor appears to be the juxtaposition of Jeong, who is not erotic but appears to think he is, against Upton and her masculine counterpart, who absolutely are. The series pokes fun at the Asian American man’s masculinity, implies authentic erotics are reserved only for whiteness, and plays on the historical themes of Asian American men’s psychologically traumatized sexuality. Being available for heterosexual or gay romantic coupling, but obviously not able to compete with either the White woman or the White superior manly counterpart. More specifically about performance, the Asian American man’s performance as buffoon, as eunuch, given the history of critique of such imagery, suggests continuing pressure under White supremacist logics to participate in an Asian American identity that reproduces aspects of dominant Asian American–White relations. Response/Web Feedback In a behind-the-scenes video posted by GQ on YouTube, two of the most liked comments on the video mentioned Jeong’s background as a doctor. Bibek Gautam’s (2016) comment with 748 likes states, “and that’s coming from a man with a Medical Doctorate,” while Kearney Truong (2014) states, “This nigga has an M.D.” The video is also posted on Facebook, with the top comment with 969 likes by Julio De Jesus VZ (2015) stating, “This is even funnier once you stop to think that this man is also a licensed doctor.” Other comments on YouTube mention Asian

24  Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung ethnicity: Kyle Le Dot Net (2015) comments with 306 likes states, “he’s living my dream of being Asian,” and Lizard Queen (2015) responded to the comment with “Being ignored by the chicks and misrepresenting Asians? have fun with that” that received 34 likes. On a subreddit dedicated to Asian Americans, hastnoodle (2016) posts, “Why haven’t we recognized that Ken Jeong’s GQ photoshoot is the modern version of Mr. Yunioshi from Breakfast at Tiffany’s? This racist crap hit the front page again.” The post has received 75 comments to date. While viewers commented on Jeong’s past experiences as a doctor and on his ethnicity, online news coverage focused on the contrast between Jeong and “sexy.” Comedy news website Splitside covers Jeong’s photoshoot by posing the question, “How do you do a sexy photoshoot with a subject like Ken Jeong, who isn’t exactly a sex symbol?” while online magazine Resource asks, “Does he really wear a pink speedo?” ­(Corkins, 2013; Frucci, 2011). While a speedo often functions to render visual models’ bodies sexy, Jeong is made out to be the antithesis of a sex symbol. Reporting on Jeong’s interview on the photoshoot, Buckner (2013) from Laughspin comments critically on Jeong’s career: Well, for better or worse, Community was renewed for a fifth season, and although Ken Jeong had a lazy and somewhat forgotten storyline in the fourth season, he has a lot to look forward to in the future: mainly the release of the taking over the world, bound to lead to douchey catch phrases, mega hit comedy The Hangover Park III. The writer suggests that while Jeong’s career seems to be on a positive trajectory, Jeong’s characters are only recognized for their obnoxious nature. Through his performances, Jeong is recognized for his characters as the object of laughter. While whiteness studies has considered the performance of whiteness, it has not recognized the way in which people of color participate in the construction of relational whiteness. Asians and Asian ­A mericans have been restricted from playing roles representing themselves, yet have also been understood to be necessary for whiteness to exist. In line with ­Carrie Wong’s (2014) conceptualization of whiteness as a tool and Koshy’s (2001) discussion of 1960s parallel minoritization, we see that Jeong performs an Asian American-ness that is in relation to whiteness in this GQ photo shoot. We focus on this performance conducted alongside the well-known Kate Upton and a beautiful White male model as a production of Asianness that is produced in a White supremacist context. Jeong is contrasted to the romance between the White man and the White woman, and he conforms to the performances of Asianness that are familiar to viewers. Stereotypical images such as the emasculated Asian male are evoked as Jeong poses as if he is the female in the intimate moment, and as Jeong holds a swimming noodle to his groin in a way that draws attention to his physique as a racialized, and inferior, character. In social media discourse about the GQ photoshoot, Jeong’s representation is also understood to be coded by his role as a doctor in his performance

Asian American Performance  25 as Dr. Ken on television. While Upton is paired heterosexually with an attractive Kloss to perform sexual intimacy, Jeong is clearly more famous than the relatively unknown model but participates in a post-racial performance that acknowledges the White supremacist logic that a heterosexual romantic relationship between Upton and Jeong is absurd, if not unthinkable, and that, as a result, he is fine playing the comic relief both for Upton and the male model’s and the magazine reader’s consumption and pleasure. As an object of pleasurable humor, Jeong performs a type of whiteness that relies on stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans and conforms to White expectations and racialization of minority characters. As Asian Americans participate in performances such as these, the pressures of White society continue to inform the performances of Asianness as stereotype and whiteness as a racial power relation.

Notes 1 See Joseph (2018), Joseph (2009), Lacy & Ono (2011), Ono (1010), and Squires (2014). 2 See de la Garza and Ono on the cultural politics surrounding the definition of assimilation. 3 GQ made a video to accompany the photo shoot available on YouTube titled, “Ken Jeong Photobombs Kate Upton’s GQ PHoto Shoot”—The Women of GQ (May 15, 2013). At the time of our viewing, the video had been viewed 3,774,347 times. In the comment stream to the video, one critical commenter of the video writes, This guy is a tool for predominant white male media. They’re only using him to emasculate and feminize asian men, and he is too much of a fool and greedy to realized how pathetic he is to allowed media to continue stereotyping his own ethnicity. (Trolololol)   Another writes, “It’s amazing how often Hollywood portrays Asian guys as sexless beta male losers for comedic effect. Any Asian dudes pissed off by this Jewish portrayal of you?” (James Orlando). 4 For additional reading on dialectics and juxtaposition specifically in advertising, see John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Stuart Ewen’s Consuming ­Images. For historical references for discussions of dialectics and juxtaposition of im­ echanical ages, return to Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of M Reproduction” and Mikael Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination.

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28  Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung (Eds.), Alien encounters: Popular culture in Asian America (pp. 271–304). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ono, K. A. (2010). Postracism: A theory of the “post” as political strategy. Journal of Communication Inquiry,34(3), 227–233. Ono, K. A. & Pham, V. N. (2009). Asian Americans and the Media. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Patel, S. (2005). Performative aspects of race: Arab, Muslim, and South Asian racial formation after September 11. UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal, 10(1), 61–87. Pyke, K. & Dang, T. (2003). “FOB” and “whitewashed”: Identity and internalized racism among second generation Asian Americans. Qualitative Sociology, 26(2), 147–172. Rabin, N. M. (2012). Picturing the mix: Visual and linguistic representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian-100% Hapa. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 29(5), 387–402. Scott, M. (2015). ‘Hangover’ actor saw his career start in New Orleans – at Ochsner. Retrieved from http://blog.nola.com/mikescott/2009/06/ken_jeong_ is_a_real.html Shimakawa, K. (2002). National abjection: The Asian American body onstage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Squires, C. R. (2014). The post-racial mystique: Media and race in the twenty-­ first century. New York, NY: New York University Press. Tehranian, J. (2000). Performing whiteness: Naturalization litigation and the construction of racial identity in America. The Yale Law Journal, 109(4), 817–848. The Editors of GQ. (2014, July 18). Just the two of us (and Ken Jeong). Retrieved from www.gq.com/gallery/ken-jeong-kate-upton-mens-slim-corduroy-pants The Fashion Model Directory. (n.d.). Just the two of us (and Ken Jeong). Retrieved from www.fashionmodeldirectory.com/magazines/gq-usa/editorials/ august-2011/just-the-two-of-us-and-ken-jeong-6677/ Truong, K. (2014). Re: Ken Jeong photobombs Kate Upton’s GQ photo shoot - The women of GQ. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hLYXqqgfAY Tuan, M. (1998). Forever foreigners or honorary whites: The Asian ethnic experience today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Valkola, J. (2012). Thoughts on images: A philosophical evaluation. Bucharest, Romania: Zeta Books. West, L. (2012, April 26). A complete guide to ‘hipster racism.’ Retrieved from www.jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism Widdicombe, L. (2013, May 9). The Kate Upon effect: America’s favorite bombshell. Retrieved from www.vogue.com/article/the-kate-effect-kate-uptonsfirst-vogue-cover Wong, J. C. (2014). The complicity cost of racial inclusion. Retrieved from www. america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/asian-americans-racecomplicity modelminority.html Wong, Y. (2010). Choreographing Asian America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Zhou, M. (2004). Are Asian Americans becoming white? Contexts, 3(1), 29–37.

3 Queerness as Strategic Whiteness A Queer Asian American Critique of Peter Le Shinsuke Eguchi ‘Queer’ was once understood as the name for a political movement and an extensive critique of a wide range of social normalizations and exclusions. However, in our putatively post-identity age, the term has become increasingly unmoored from its theoretical potentials and possibilities. (Eng, 2010, p. xi)

Sometime in July of 2015, I surfed the U.S.-based men’s underwear/­ swimwear/sportswear company called Andrew Christian. This brand targets gay sexual cultures. Their website features a large number of racially diverse cis-gendered male models who show off their larger-sized bodies with a greater proportion of muscle to fat and upper-body strength. Here, I am exposed to the mediated displays of Peter Le. I say, “Wow, I haven’t seen such a macho Asian guy for quite a long time. Who is he? What does he do?” In this moment, as I gaze at his large upper body, I am drawn to displays of Peter Le. I rarely see hypermasculinized Asian American male images because they are underrepresented in the U.S. American gay sexual cultures. Eng (2001) suggests, “the Asian ­A merican male is both materially and psychically feminized within the context of a larger U.S. cultural imagery” (p. 2). Consequently, I find that such hypermasculine images of Peter Le should not be wasted. ­Morris and Sloop (2006) maintain that “the politics of visibility are always a matter of great concern as marginalized and disciplined subjectivities gain representation through mass mediated texts and, as a result, larger access to a culture’s dominant exchange of symbols” (p. 9). Thus, I search about him further online. I learn that Peter Le is a sexually unidentified Asian American cis-­ gendered male model, gay porn adult entertainer/producer, and personal trainer/body builder. He manages a number of adult websites and blogs including www.peterfever.com. I also locate an article about ­Peter Le in Queerty—an online magazine and newspaper featuring gay and lesbian news and entertainment. Gremore (2014) problematizes Asian American male stereotypes by quoting that Peter Le “wants to r­ edefine the Asian male as a dominant sexual force and unleash him on the world.” He rejects

30  Shinsuke Eguchi performing a stereotypical soft, passive, and feminine Asian bottom, that is, a receptive partner in anal sex. Gremore continues to introduce Peter Le’s comment that “I always felt that Asian models had to push themselves harder … I was told that I wouldn’t go far because I was Asian. So I wanted to break the Asian stereotypes—and there are a lot out there.” At first, I embrace the intertextual connection with Peter Le. The historical feminization of Asian American men unites us both. Then I immediately feel the need to critique such a connection with Peter Le. I struggle to view whether visibility of Peter Le is necessarily politically progressive. As Booth (2011) reinforces, “visibility is a risky ­prospect, particularly with respect to groups that are easily exploited for ­commercial purposes” (p. 191). So, I pose a question: “Why do we have to be like white men to break free of Asian stereotypes?” To take a first step to answer this question, I critique the performative rhetoric of ­Peter Le as a queer Asian American spectator-performer, informing the essential dichotomies between visibility and invisibility, marked wand unmarked, and affirmative and regressive. More precisely, I am interested in examining Peter Le as the embodied text of queerness in which the aesthetic of whiteness—“a normative identity, discourse, ideology, and structure operating to preserve and magnify its dominant status” (Griffin, 2015, p. 149)—is reconfigured as the norm of gay sexual cultures. By queerness, I mean a process of racialization that informs the logic of color-blindness rooted in individualism and freedom (e.g., Eng, 2010; Johnson, 2016; Pérez, 2015). Puar (2007) suggests, “Race, ethnicity, nation, gender, class, and sexuality disaggregate gay, homosexual, and queer national subjects who align themselves with U.S. imperial interests from forms of illegitimate ­queerness that name and ultimately propel the population into extinction” (pp. xi–xii). Queerness is a White/Western/U.S. American production of knowledge (e.g., Alexander, 2008; Johnson, 2001; Lee, 2003). Decades ago Anzaldúa (1991) critiqued that multiple differences are essentially wrapped all together into the term queer. There are different kinds of material realities for queers who come from raced, gendered, sexed, and classed backgrounds (e.g., Chávez, 2013; Eguchi & Asante, 2016; McCune, 2014; Moreman & McIntosh, 2010; Yep, 2013). In view of that, I assert that the complex and nuanced realities of Asian American queerness cannot be easily visualized in the current ­climate historically informed by whiteness, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism. The Asian American label is also a historical product of U.S. American politics of identity rooted in whiteness. While the political importance of the Asian American label serves as a coalition against the racial hegemony, the definition of Asian American includes different genders, sexualities, ethnicities, nationalities, skin colors, cultures, languages, educations, generational gaps, citizenships, and so forth. There are economic hierarchies, political rivalries, and historical

Queerness as Strategic Whiteness  31 tensions within the group (e.g., Chen & Collier, 2012; Sekimoto, 2014). Thus, the intersections of Asian American and queer are highly political, complex, multiple, and fluid. Therefore, Asian American queerness is a messy one that cannot be neatly visualized. For these reasons, this essay addresses and challenges the textual ­visibility of queerness as strategic whiteness surrounding Peter Le’s Asian American cis-gendered male body. Projansky and Ono (1999) ­assert, “The ­ odifications history of whiteness in the United States entails a history of m to renegotiate the centrality of white power and ­authority—that is what we call strategic whiteness” (p. 152). The discursive adjustments of whiteness erase, ignore, and limit the complexity, multiplicity, and fluidity of queerness as “both the condition of possibility for all agency and that which can never be expressed through form” (Rand, 2014, p. 164). By examining the embodied text of Peter Le’s queerness, I am committed to trouble the overpowering cultural productions of queerness as strategic whiteness that “resecure the center” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 295) at the expense of queer people of color in general and queer Asian ­A mericans in particular. In so doing, I demonstrate that invisibility of Asian American queerness is a possibility for the future. To accomplish this task, I engage in a queer Asian American critique. Eng and Hom (1998) suggest a queer Asian American critique “demands more than a deviant swerving from the narrow confines of normativity and normative heterosexuality; it demands subjecting the notion of Asian American identity itself to vigorous interrogation” (p. 9). ­Accordingly, I situate my embodied knowledge as a central site of this critique. To do so, I integrate elements of performative writing to my queer Asian ­A merican critique. Calafell (2012) and Corey (2002) have shown that performative writing is an intertextual movement of aesthetic engagement that challenges the traditional productions of heteronormative ­knowledge rooted in whiteness intersecting with patriarchy and capitalism. To attend to the sociohistorical formation of racialized, gendered, and classed ­experiences and epistemologies, I unapologetically operate from my standpoint to critique the mediated ­displays of Peter Le. I am concerned with theorizing from my personal to the sociocultural, ­political, and historical and from the sociocultural, political, and historical to my personal. This methodological move is “bi-directional: it theorizes from bottom to top and from top to bottom” (Johnson, 2001, p. 19). Reed (2016) ­reinforces that “we must listen to theorists/­ practitioners operating in contestation of master narratives of being and ­nation that evade histories and realities of racial injustice – constructing alternative archives that refuse to separate theory and ­literature, un­ riginal). Thus, I derstanding literature as theory” (p. 61, emphasis in o ground the racialized, gendered, and classed circumstances producing particular experiences and epistemologies to showcase and critique the ways queerness operates as strategic whiteness.

32  Shinsuke Eguchi In the following sections, I first contextualize the concept of whiteness in the age of queer liberalism. Then, I showcase my critique, consisting of three specific themes: colorblindness, impossibility, and disruption. Finally, I conclude this essay by reconsidering the broader implications for Asian American queerness that Peter Le temporarily offers.

Whiteness and Queer Liberalism Queer liberalism is known to characterize today’s gay and lesbian politics of assimilation. Eng (2010) defines that “queer liberalism marks a particular confluence of the political and economic conditions that form the basis of liberal inclusion, rights, and recognitions for particular gay and lesbian citizen-subjects willing and able to comply with its normative mandates” (p. 24). More precisely, queer liberalism ideologically restores conventional arrangements of hetero-patriarchal family and kinship rooted in whiteness “if held ‘naturally’ as a transparent, colorless term, marks a race-free world from a world occupied by people of color” (Lee, 1999, p. 279). The discursive and material effects of queer liberalism mirror the U.S. American’s legacy of whiteness as property and privilege (Muñoz, 2009). Shome (1999) reminds, “Whiteness is not just about bodies and skin color, but rather more about the discursive practices that, because of colonialism and neocolonialism and privilege, sustain the global dominance of white imperial subjects and ­Eurocentric worldviews” (p. 108, emphasis in original). The institution of same-sex marriage affirms and signals the color-blind politics of assimilation that gays and lesbians are welcome into the mainstream as long as they ­duplicate heteronormative, patriarchal, and capitalistic protocols of whiteness (Eng, 2010; Puar, 2007). Such social, political, and economic imitations require the epistemology of coming out that promotes an imaginary and essentialized division between heterosexuality and homosexuality (McCune, 2014; ­Snorton  2014). This logic of a hetero–homo binary assumes that ­sexuality is singular, fixed, and stable (Sedgwick, 1990). Such discursive adjustments become homonormative locations that comply with whiteness as a ­referring point of property, ownership, and consumption (Ross, 2005). For instance, gays and lesbians are now ideologically and ­materially pressured to consume the American dream by coming out, finding a partner, getting married, buying a house, and having kids similar to the heterosexuals. Ferguson (2005) reinforces that “sociological arguments about the socially constructed nature of (homo)sexuality index the ­contemporary entrance of white gays and lesbians into the rights and privileges of American citizenship” (p. 53). In this institutional context, the needs and concerns of non-White, Western, and/or U.S. ­A merican genders and sexualities remain marginalized from the center. Puar (2007) asserts, “For the homonormative, whiteness is mandated by

Queerness as Strategic Whiteness  33 the state but negotiable through the market, again both for labor and consumption” (p. 28). Consequently, queer liberalism serves “the new neoliberal multiculturalism of our current times” (Eng, 2010, p. 49). It is the White liberals’ excuse that re-centers individualism, personal merit, and competition as primary logics of contemporary life. These logics of color-blindness as whiteness are embedded in the ­material realities of the gay male sexual cultures. The participants are subjected to the liberal idea that they should be able to be who they want to be and date whoever they want. However, a number of queer Asian and Asian American critics (e.g., Eguchi, 2014, 2015; Eng, 2001; Han, 2015; Hoang, 2014; Lim, 2014) reject such liberal idealism regarding male same-sex sexual and intimate relations. In the case of Asian and Asian American men, gay media outlets often racialize them as hyperfeminized and submissive others (e.g., Ayres, 1999; Eguchi, 2015). Asian and Asian American men are foreign, effeminate, sexual bottom, and wifey. Fung (2005) reinforces, “The ‘house boy’ is one of the most persistent white fantasies about Asian men” (p. 344). This narrative explicates the feminized and subordinated locations of Asia in the White imagination. As Nakayama (2002) has shown, Asian and Asian ­A merican men are almost always desexualized as not (White) men enough according to the U.S. American thought of race and racism. This framing is a material consequence of the long history of immigration and racial exclusionary policies during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Eng, 2001). Han (2015) reasons, “not being able to vote, work in masculine occupations, and marry women of any race contributed to the formation of a gendered Asian male in the white mind” (p. 28). Because of such perception that images of Asian and Asian American men do not conform to the White gay male aesthetic, Asian and Asian ­A merican men are often framed as unattractive and undesirable (e.g., Eguchi, 2015; Han, 2015; Hoang, 2014). The contemporary gay sexual cultural representations of Asian and Asian American men continue to be the subcultural category signaling the racialized fetishes under the White masculine ideal at play (Lim, 2014). Hence, I remain concerned with ongoing structural problems of race and racism. The gay sexual cultural aesthetic of White masculine ideal is locally, nationally, and transnationally circulated. Moon (1999) maintains, “The articulation of white inter/cultural practices is an important and necessary step in the move to demystify ‘whiteness’ and to disrupt its power to deceive and terrify” (p. 196). The U.S. American homonormative formation of whiteness is a referencing point of queerness through which everyday sexual cultural performances of queer ethnics are evaluated (Muñoz, 1999). The queer ethnics become a marker of the homophobia (and the claim that homosexuality reflects the taint of the West) of his or her racial/ethnic/immigrant

34  Shinsuke Eguchi community while in homonormative spaces, perhaps more so than a marker of the racism of homonormative communities while in one’s home country. (Puar, 2007, p. 28) Accordingly, such discursive adjustments of queerness as strategic whiteness require interrogation. Pérez (2015) emphasizes, “Queer critique must investigate the circulation of homosexual desire within the erotic economics of both capitalism and the nation in order to guard against its cooptation into neoliberal and colonial projects” (p. 3). Next, I showcase my queer Asian American critique of Peter Le.

A Queer Asian American Critique of Peter Le Now, my thoughts return to the moment when I searched further for mediated displays of Peter Le on the Andrew Christian website. I locate one of the short commercial videos titled, “Behind the scenes with Pablo Hernandez and Peter Le,” sponsored by Australia’s best-­selling gay male magazine DNA (posted on October 2, 2014). In this less than two-minute video, a tanned, attractive, cis-gendered Latino male, Pablo ­Hernadez, interviews Peter Le. This interview begins as Peter Le introduces his pornography website (www.peterfever.com) and fitness ­website (www.petephysique.com) that he produces. Subsequently, Pablo asks Peter, “Tell us a little bit about you and your relationship with DNA magazine.” Peter responses, “Oh, I love DNA magazine.” He shares his first photo shooting experience with DNA. Then Peter says, “Again, I think I was like maybe the first one or two Asian guy(s) in DNA magazine. So, it was very memorable to people outside of the U.S.” Pablo cuts him off and says, “Beauty is pain. Beauty is pain.” Peter immediately smiles. Next, Pablo asks Peter a question about his relationship with Andrew Christian. Colorblindness Here, I argue that strategic whiteness, being “drained of its history and its social status” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 300), is imposed onto Peter Le’s body. Peter Le’s narrative about being “the first one or two Asian guy(s) on DNA magazine” reproduces the neoliberal logic of colorblindness that centers around individualism, merit, responsibility, and choice. The viewers are led to believe that today an Asian American man like Peter Le who is physically attractive and fit can break through the White gay sexual cultural marketplace. By saying, “Beauty is pain. Beauty is pain,” Pablo affirms and validates an individual’s responsibility, merit, and choice to work hard at physical attractiveness even when doing so can be painful. Such self-disciplined attitude is one of

Queerness as Strategic Whiteness  35 U.S. American cultural expectations for a man to become and be masculine. However, this emphasis on individual competition and success erases the historical and contemporary realities of race and racism where Peter Le is structurally positioned. Under the effects of individualism, Peter Le is expected to pass as if he is “the contemporary white gay male clone, the type that is popular in certain neighborhoods in major U.S. cities, such as New York’s Chelsea or Los Angeles’s West ­Hollywood” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 60). At the same time, race still matters. The physical image Peter Le intends to embody could be easily discounted as a material consequence of his Asian body. As Han (2015) reinforces, some Asian American men like Peter Le work hard at physical exercises to achieve muscleman images on to their bodies. However, “the assessment, or ‘review’ of the program is met with disapproval by gay white men and is therefore i­nvalidated” (p. 143). There continue to be the m ­ aterial realities of historically inescapable feminization for Asian American men (e.g., Hoang, 2014; Lim, 2014). Such racialized constraints for Asian American men help protect the superiority of White masculine ideal particularly in the gay sexual cultures. The Andrew Christian display of Peter Le clearly coincides with the discursive and material phenomenon of queer liberalism. The capitalist production and consumption of physical fitness serves as a symbolic and material site of queer liberalism. Such discursive practice misrepresents the idea that everyone can be what they want to be and can be with whomever they desire. In a postfeminist context of CrossFit (CF), ­Washington and Economides (2016) argue: Once these women are hailed into being a CF participant, the most popular and successful ones are highlighted via the official publicity mechanisms, which then reproduces the discourse that both rewards and reifies them for who they are. The discourse of CF traffics in ideologies, particularly postfeminist ideologies, of liberalism and meritocracy coupled with an intense focus on the body. So not only can anyone do CF, but once in, we are each individually responsible for our own success in the program. (pp. 155–156) To expand their lines of argument, I assert that Asian American men participating in the White gay sexual cultures do not have equal access to such consumption requiring capital. Those men are subjected to regimes of healthism and aesthetics of attractiveness that are historically rooted in whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. However, the failure to meet such racialized, gendered, and classed expectation is translated as an individual responsibility and choice. Such individualism and merit ignore how the complex and nuanced intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and xenophobia historically disempower

36  Shinsuke Eguchi the Asian American male program of hypermasculinity. Consequently, the gay jock stud expectation rooted in whiteness is resecured at the expense of Asian American men through consuming and participating in physical fitness. Now, I watch another online Andrew Christian video titled “Let the games begin” (posted on July 6, 2015) featuring Peter Le. This 3.5-­minute-long video begins while the viewers are subjected to the collective representation of eight male models meeting the White gay jock stud expectation. They are divided into two teams. They immediately take off their sportswear so the viewers can see that one team wears ­A ndrew Christian’s signature black briefs, while another one wears blue ones. Wearing briefs and shoes only allows them to show off their perfect ­bodies. With such a display, these models are scripted to play ball and again work out. At first, I struggle to discern Peter Le. The entire male models are White, Latino, Asian, and/or Persian. They have similar tanned skin and dark hair. Their racial and physical differences seem to be strategically minimized here. At the 52-second mark of this video, however, Peter Le is given his solo scene working out. The camera ­focuses on his built, light-skinned, almost pale body. His large shoulders, back, and six-pack abs are being sold here. However, his face is not really shown, so some viewers may not instantly realize that this gay jock stud is Asian American. At 58 seconds, Peter Le’s smiling face is finally shown for a very brief moment. Here, I am concerned with this particular display of Peter Le’s queerness. The brief exposure of Peter Le’s face insinuates that Asian ­American men are almost White as long as they mask their racially marked faces. By following Kray (1993) and Dubrofsky (2013), Eguchi and Ding (2017) argue that almost White is a metaphor for “an ambiguous domain for non-whites in which the economic and cultural capital enables them to visualize their proximity to the center maintained by whiteness” (p. 300). Such rhetoric signals what Nakayama (2012) has previously suggested that Asian Americans are historically forever foreign in the mainstream. Their physical characteristics are always already marked as foreign. Eng (2001) asserts that “in the contemporary context a similar logic [of the visual management of race and racism] endures in the mainstream ordering of race that largely characterizes African and Asian Americans as problem and model minorities, respectively, in the public sphere” (p. 109). In opposition to non-Hispanic and Hispanic Whites, physically distinguishable Otherness collectively represents both African and Asian Americans. However, contemporary polarized racializations of African Americans as the problem and Asian Americans as the model minority diminish uncertain possibilities for political coalition among them. Kawai (2005) reinforces that “depicting Asian Americans as the model minority simultaneously serves downgrading other racial minorities as ‘problem’ minorities” (p. 114). So, the territory of whiteness as “normative, general, and

Queerness as Strategic Whiteness  37 pervasive” (Moon, 1999, p. 179) is strategically protected. Accordingly, Kim (1999) points out, “Asian Americans have been racially triangulated vis-à-vis blacks and whites, or located in the field of racial positions with reference to these two other points” (p. 107). At the same time, there is no Black/African American male model in this particular Andrew ­Christian video. So, the model minority stereotype at play insinuates that the major difference between Peter Le and other models is his foreign or un-­ American face, which can be read as unattractive and undesirable. With such a rhetorical move, Peter Le is symbolically reoriented as almost White at the expense of ­African Americans, who are not present here. This line of racialization is further visualized in this video. The next cut moves to racially ambiguous Persian professional body builder and underwear model Arad Winwin working out. Apparently, he is neither visualized as African nor Asian American. At the same time, Arad ­Winwin’s face is entirely shown for his solo scene, in contrast to Peter Le. Here, I read the multilayered and complex significations of his cis-­ gendered brown male body. On the one hand, Arad Winwin’s physical and facial features are much closer to those of White men than Peter Le. On the other hand, Arad Winwin subscribes the colonial and transnational logic of homoerotic fantasy about the brown onto his body. Brown men are historically hypersexualized, exoticized, and fetishized. Pérez (2015) reinforces, “‘Brown’ designates a kind of constitutive ­ambiguity within U.S. racial formations—an identity that both complicates and preserves the binary opposition white/other” (p. 103). Because of such racial ambiguity and fluidity, Arad Winwin becomes less threatening to White male supremacy than Peter Le. But also, he serves as a colonialized object of desire for the White homonormative gaze. This is what “white gay capital may in fact clear a path in service to white heterosexual capital” (Pérez, 2015, p. 14, emphasis in original). Such discursive adjustment allows Arad Winwin to become the contemporary gay male clone. Unlike Peter Le, Arad Winwin easily represents Andrew ­Christian’s branding onto his body. Consequently, the Andrew Christian display of Peter Le’s queerness does not necessarily shift discursive and material effects of orientalism historically feminizing and subordinating Asian American men. Of course, I recognize that Peter Le’s face is visible in most of Andrew ­Christian’s photo images and videos. At the same time, I find this particular Andrew Christian video worthwhile. His relation to other male models performing in this particular video signals the premise that an Asian American man like Peter Le may need to hide his racially marked face to neutralize his “Asianness.” In so doing, a queer Asian American performance of becoming and being the gay jock stud is rhetorically completed or authenticated as almost White. Such imitation perpetuates the ­color-blinded logic of strategic whiteness, that is, “to renegotiate the centrality of white power and authority” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 152).

38  Shinsuke Eguchi Impossibility As I think of Peter Le in this particular Andrew Christian video, I, as a transnational queer Asian male subject, must recognize my impossibility. My same-sex desire for and attraction to the heterosexualization of queerness, rooted in whiteness, clearly informs my curiosity about Peter Le to begin with. Muñoz (2009) writes, “Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality” (p. 1). As I participate in the White gay sexual cultures, I acknowledge that I am repeatedly seen as “femme,” “FOB” (Fresh off the Boat [meaning foreign-born]), and “Asian.” I am not a gay male clone like Peter Le. From this contested space, I experience what Muñoz (2009) argued is that “those who break the gay-clone edict to act like a man are de-eroticized and demoted to second-class citizenship” (p.  77). Consequently, I am structurally subjected to counter-identify with stigmatized labels to capitalize my sexual and intimate marketability in the White gay sexual cultural marketplace. As Han (2015) asserts, some Asian American men must “use an emphasized feminine ­presentation to trade a more stigmatized status for one that is less stigmatizing. These men actively manipulate and negotiate stereotypes about gay Asian men to successfully make these transitions” (p. 135). At the same time, as a “femme,” “FOB,” and Asian subject, I continue to be almost always attracted to gay jock stud spectators-performers who are not Asian/American males (See Eguchi, 2014, 2015). I desire toward material and psychical characteristics of the White masculine ideal that subjugates social and performative aspects of who I am. Bailey (2016) reminds, “FOR MANY PEOPLE, sexual pleasure is experienced through our apparent contradictions” (p. 239, emphasis in original). My samesex desire ironically reconstitutes the prejudice against Asian American men. However, I am curious about Peter Le. He is one of a kind, almost meeting the White gay jock stud expectation. The strategic workings of hetero-patriarchal masculinity privileging whiteness continue to inform my value orientation toward the White gay masculinist logics of desire and attraction. While thinking of impossibility around my desire, I locate one of Peter Le’s fitness videos titled “Body Weight Exercises at Park,” which can be accessed through YouTube. This 4 minute and 16 second video features another Andrew Christian model and male adult entertainer, Eric East, from China. It begins with the scene in which Peter Le introduces Eric East. Both Peter Le and Eric East wear gym shorts only to emphasize their naked upper bodies. Eric East introduces himself in English with a foreign/Mandarin accent. Here, the viewers are subjected to the linguistic, social, and political productions of difference between Peter Le as native and Eric East as foreign. Naficy (2001) asserts, “all accents are not of equal value socially and politically” (p. 63). Eric’s embodied performance of foreignness

Queerness as Strategic Whiteness  39 allows Peter Le to be the White U.S. American national who happens to look Asian. Peter Le’s speech sounds like a typical SoCal guy1 performing whiteness. He is clearly an assimilated Asian. However, as Peter and Eric physically demonstrate to the viewers how to work out upper bodies at the park’s benches, the video color-blinds such a hierarchy. The difference between native and foreign is strategically neutralized. During the demonstration, both do not speak anything. The viewers are no longer temporarily subjected to Eric East’s foreign accent in contrast to Peter Le’s SoCal accent. Instead, the video focuses on their Asian b ­ odies that are professionally exercised and shaped. Here, Eric East is not definitely framed as a typical skinny foreign-born gay Asian male, that is, “the role of the mythologized geisha or the ‘good wife’ in the white gay sexual cultural marketplace” (Fung, 2005, p. 344). This atypical image visualizes Eric East as the good kind of foreign subject desiring to perform the White gay masculinist logics of agency and sexual freedom onto his body. As a result, he is represented to play along as a model minority subject. I critique what discursively takes place behind the stage is the U.S. American nationalist propaganda of assimilation. This particular ­Peter Le fitness video suggests the “proper” way in which queer Asian/­ American men are ideologically incorporated into the gay masculinist logics of the White gay sexual cultural marketplace. That is, Asian/ American queer spectators-performers are expected to neutralize their foreignness. At the same time, such neutralization reconstitutes the normalization of gay jock studs’ performances that devalue any queer forms of femininity. E.P. Johnson (2003) asserts, “Because femininity is always already devalued in patriarchal societies, those associated with the feminine are also viewed as inferior” (p. 227). The aesthetics of Peter Le and Eric East’s (re)masculinized Asian bodies performing in the video do not move away from the discourse of racial castration. That is, a historically feminized condition of Asian American male subjectivity that falls short of the norm rooted in whiteness (Eng, 2001). Instead, the logics of racial castration blame on Asian American men as the problem of their racial inferiority. Consequently, Asian/American men like Peter Le and Eric East are positioned to be responsible of laboring toward the White masculine ideal to seek change. Remasculinization visualized through Peter Le and Eric East’s bodies and performances resecures the centrality of White masculine ideal that marginalizes Asian American men. Disruption As I search for more images of Peter Le online, I begin to think that his body aesthetic is quite boring. His photo shoot for Andrew Christian is all about his hypermasculine physique. There are no moments of transgression challenging the patriarchal and heteronormative definitions of White men and masculinities. In addition, Peter Le’s porn website

40  Shinsuke Eguchi features a number of his solo videos in which he performs masturbation by himself. These videos focus on the upper and lower body movements of his muscles while he touches his penis, so the audience can consume his hypermasculine physique. Simultaneously, I notice that he almost always works on his sexual scenes by himself. Such a choice leaves me with an impression that Peter Le is possibly straight because the White gay sexual cultures largely center on anal penetration as the norm. However, I critique that my impression ironically reproduces the heteronormative and patriarchal power and privilege of straight identified masculine men as the ideal center. For example, I remember the moment I met a same-sex couple involving two feminine-looking Asian American men who were similar to my body size and appearance in New York in July 2013. I immediately thought, “What the hell?” My ignorant reaction was an internalized product of White gay normativity because “the obsession with white [or U.S. American mainstream normative] beauty leads some gay Asian American men to reject all aspects of themselves as Asian” (Han, 2015, p. 124). I thought that the Asian American couple was very sisterly or like lesbians, neither looked like Peter Le. At the same time, such reaction reminded me that I avoided socializing with someone who acts and looks like me. Because I saw my fem Asian body in them, I wanted to be with somebody I am not and they are not. So, I thought I should be seeking the social capital that ideologically ­disassociates me from the Asian bottom crowd (see Eguchi, 2014, 2015). Consequently, I forgot to appreciate the hyperfeminized visibility of gay Asian American bottomhood that “complicates the links between the bottom position and Oriental passivity” (Hoang, 2014, p. 2). More precisely, I critique my operation of same-sex sexual interracial desire within the logic of anti-femininity intersecting with racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. In fact, I am a part of the problem. My reading of the couple reconstitutes a gay phallic economy of desire t­ oward the heterosexualization of queerness working around illusive binaries such as masculinity and femininity, top and bottom, and White and nonWhite others. Hoang (2014) points out the gay sexual cultural narrative that “sex between two Asian men (read two effeminate gay men, two bottoms) does not quite count as properly homosexual” (p. 155). Consequently, for a long time, my aspiration toward the heterosexualization of queerness as strategic whiteness has ideologically driven how I position myself within the orientalist logics of foreign Asian bottom. I perform what I thought would be liked by the U.S. American audience marked by masculine, top, and/or White. Simultaneously, recognizing my own shortcomings, I begin to see the political and intellectual possibility to reframe the feminized visibility of gay Asian American bottomhood. Such visibility could explicate holes of structural oppression that potentially create a path toward a queer pedagogy of disruption against the gay sexual cultural problems of race

Queerness as Strategic Whiteness  41 and racism. On Friday, January 13, 2017, for example, I went to the GAMeBoi night event 2 at a gay club called Rage in West Hollywood, California. I was excited to return to the supposedly Asian-centered cultural space since I had not been there since 2003. As soon as I entered the club, however, I noticed numerous Asian men who mirrored Peter Le. Asian go-go dancers also imitated the gay male jock stud aesthetic, which is often visualized and commodified by Andrew Christian. I felt like I was in any other regular gay club. A few minutes later, however, I recognized a group of feminine-looking Asian men gathering at the corner. They were checking out other gay jock spectators-performers. When I looked at the other side, I saw an Asian drag queen walking by. In that moment, I instantly became aware of their politically progressive presences in such homonormative space. The aesthetics of ­emphasized femininity performed across different kinds of Asian men could pedagogically serve as the collective potentiality of queerness. That is, “a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of new futurity” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 16). Here, I call to the complex multiplicity of emphasized Asian queer femininity as a pedagogical point of political coalition. For instance, ­Shimizu (2012) asserts, “I want Asian American men to acknowledge their privilege as men … may Asian American men recognize the boundless dramas and pleasures of making new manhoods of service to self and others” (p. 243). To expand this line of thinking, I argue that it is time for Asian American men participating in the White gay sexual cultures to own up to their privileges. Unearned incentives provided by patriarchy and phallic economy of desire shape their sexual, intimate, and romantic experiences. Accordingly, I reject that the discourse of victimization surrounding the historical feminization of Asian American men frames Peter Le’s effort to remake the Asian male as a gay sex-dominant symbol. Instead, I advocate that we actively recycle such historical feminization to amend, rework, and shift what Asian American men desire to our advantages. Such shared remaking process creates a path toward disrupting the patriarchal reproduction of the White gay male clone among Asian and Asian American subjects. In so doing, we may ultimately help articulate queer relationality, destabilizing the heterosexualization of queerness as strategic whiteness. That is “a precursor of a modality of queer ontology that has not yet arrived” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 160).

Conclusion: Temporality I began this essay by situating my initial encounter with the mediated displays of Peter Le. On the one hand, I value that Peter Le as a ­spectator-performer not only offers a potential path to redirect our attention to the castration of Asian American men that impacts the gay

42  Shinsuke Eguchi racial phallic economy of desire, but more significantly, he pedagogically explicates discursive adjustments of queerness as strategic whiteness that rearticulate the material facts of Asian American male bodies. On the other hand, I critique that the mediated displays of Peter Le rhetorically mirror the reproduction of anti-femininity intersecting with racism, homophobia, and xenophobia ingrained in the White gay sexual cultures. The discourse of debasement surrounding around gay Asian American bottomhood has not been marginalized, erased, or diminished yet. Still, I appreciate that Peter Le as a spectator-performer has some ­disruptive potential to break through the White gay sexual cultures where Asian American men are always already feminized. The aesthetic of Peter Le’s hypermasculinity may appeal to and challenge non-Asian consumers who regularly reject Asians in online gay dating websites and social interactions. Peter Le may also serve as a role model for Asian American men who seek to empower themselves in the White gay sexual cultures. Thus, I posit that Peter Le is a rhetorical method of queer temporality, “a thing that is not linearity that many of us have been calling straight time” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 186). Therefore, I end this essay by re-politicizing Peter Le as a spectator-­ performer of queer temporality. That allows us to repeatedly rearticulate how to work and rework with the past to recreate a new temporality for the future (Halberstam, 2007; Muñoz, 2009). Such efforts to rewrite and remake the media displays of Asian American queerness require a careful unpacking of a larger globalized sociocultural, political, economic, and historical context. Consequently, I continue to question the following: What is queer? What is Asian American? What are possible ways for Asian Americans to undo the racialization of queerness as strategic whiteness? What is the future for queer Asian Americans? With queer Asian American critique can we start decentering queerness as strategic whiteness.

Notes 1 SoCal is a short abbreviation for Southern California, including two major cities, Los Angeles and San Diego. 2 The gay Asian night club event has been taking place every Friday at Rage, one of the famous gay clubs on Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood, since 2003. The event is called GAMeBoi night.

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Queerness as Strategic Whiteness  45 Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York: New York University Press. Naficy, H. (2001). An accented cinema: Exilic and diasporic filmmaking. ­Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nakayama, T. K. (2002). Framing Asian Americans. In C. R. Mann, & M. S. Zatz (Eds.), Images of color: Images of crime (pp. 92–99). Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. Nakayama, T. K. (2012). Dis/orienting identities: Asian Americans, history, and intercultural communication. In A. Gonzalez, M. Houston, & V. Chen (Eds.), Our voices: Essays in culture, essay, and communication (5th ed., pp. 20–25). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nakayama, T. K., & Krizek, R. L. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81(3), 291–309. Pérez, H. (2015). A taste for brown bodies: Gay modernity and cosmopolitan desire. New York: New York University Press. Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Projansky, S., & Ono, K. (1999). Strategic whiteness as cinematic racial politics. In T. K. Nakayama, & J. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The communication of social identity (pp. 149–176). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rand, E. J. (2014). Reclaiming queer: Activist & academic rhetorics of resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Reed, A. (2016). The whiter the bread, the quicker you’re dead: Spectacular ­absence and post racialized blackness in (white) queer theory. In E. P. J­ ohnson (Ed.), No tea no shade: New writings in black queer studies (pp. 48–64). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ross, M. B. (2005). Beyond the closet as a raceless paradigm. In E. P. J­ ohnson & M.  G.  Henderson (Eds.), Black queer studies: A critical anthology (pp. 161–189). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sekimoto, S. (2014). Transnational Asia: Dis/orienting identity in the globalized world. Communication Quarterly, 62 (4), 381–398. Shimizu, C. P. (2012). Straight sexualities: Unbinding Asian American ­m anhoods in the movies. Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press. Shome, R. (1999). Whiteness and the politics of location: Postcolonial ­reflections. In T. K. Nakayama, & J. Martin (Eds.), Whiteness: The communication of social identity (pp. 107–128). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Snorton, C. R. (2014). Nobody is supposed to know: Black sexuality on the down low. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Washington, M., & Economides, M. (2016). Strong is the new sexy: Women, CrossFit, and the postfeminist ideal. Journal of Sports and Social Issues, 40(2), 143–161. Yep, G. A. (2013). Queering/quaring/kauering/crippin’/transing “other bodies” in intercultural communication. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 6(2), 118–126.

4 Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories Performances with and against Whiteness Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell If race is a myth, whiteness is, some argue, the driving plotline. (Alcoff, 2015, p. 94)

Nakayama and Krizek’s (1995) essay, “Whiteness: A Strategic ­R hetoric,” marks an important starting point in critical investigations of whiteness in communication studies. Scholars argue that whiteness maintains its power by being everything and nothing simultaneously (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Wander, Martin & Nakayama, 1999). Thus, many studies of whiteness investigate the ways it remains invisible. For example, ­Zingsheim and Goltz (2011) found non-White students rarely recognize their performances of whiteness. Bérubé (2001) notes that whiteness writes nonracialized identities (e.g., teachers, mothers, and U.S. ­A mericans) as White, privileging the status of Whites within different social categories. Similarly, Dyer (2012) discusses how whiteness is universal and constructed as normal. hooks (2012) suggests that race remains ­invisible to Whites because whiteness strategically names racialized identities as non-White (so White is never seen as a race). Extending this work, Warren (2003) explores the everyday performances of whiteness through the lens of performativity, which further demonstrates the instability of race and what is at stake in its various iterations. More recently, through shifting political and cultural discourses in the United States, we have seen the emergence of a “post-­ racial” era in the popular imaginary and resulting scholarship on this discourse (Griffin, 2015; Squires et al., 2010). This “post-racial” era sought to gloss over racism and White privilege casting them as things of the past. Concurrently, or in close proximity, temporally, is the highly visible, and increasingly supported, resurgence of White (masculine) anger based in a fear of losing power in a country that is becoming increasingly ­non-White (Alcoff, 2015; Calafell, 2015; Johnson, 2017). As the United States becomes more and more dangerous every day for people of color, we turn toward to our familial and cultural histories to

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  47 unpack the ways we perform both with and against current and historical iterations of whiteness. Alcoff (2015) argues that we have to understand how whiteness is lived, and not just how it is ideologically represented or manipulated. It is especially important to consider how it is lived today by those who are coming to repudiate the ideology of white supremacy. (p. 1) Building on previous scholarship that examines how people of color ­ erform with and against whiteness (Amaya, 2007; Asante, 2016; p Calafell, 2007, 2008; Pande & Drzewiecka, 2017; Piper, 1996), we ­reflect on the ways history informs or guides the choices we make as well as the cultural performances that are expected of us as a Chicana and Asian American man. In this volatile cultural and political moment, we look to our pasts to unpack and guide our current and future engagements and disidentifications with whiteness. In doing this, we turn to critical performative methods. Methods are not neutral. Our theoretical and methodological choices have histories and ideological consequences. As scholars invested in women of color feminisms and queer of color theories, we are ­committed to not just theoretically disrupting whiteness, but also methodologically doing so. One powerful way whiteness remains invisible is through its abstractness, that is, whiteness is abstract, but non-White is grounded (Zingsheim & Goltz, 2011). Abstract means most people are unable to see whiteness in specific moments, forms, and logics. For example, ­Zingsheim and Goltz (2011) found college students of all races were able to perform representations people of color, but not of Whites. Nakayama and Krizek (1995) states: “in U.S. cultures, whiteness has assumed the position of uninterrogated space … we do not know what ‘whiteness’ means.” Whiteness is a vague notion that informs us of the world we live in. Muñoz (2006, p. 680) argues: whiteness in my analysis is also very specific: I read it as a cultural logic that prescribes and regulates national feelings and comportment. White is thus an affective gauge that helps us understand some modes of emotional countenance and comportment as good or bad. Thus, we can think of whiteness as an ideology that underwrites our social values—what is appropriate, correct, better, ethical, and reasonable. It is the standard by which our society judges a person/group’s ­presentation, image, actions, choices, and creations. Those that produce affect that align with whiteness are deemed normal, valuable, and proper; those that do not are marked as “other” and abnormal.

48  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell Whiteness moves to discipline and to secure itself against bodies that do not produce White affect. McIntosh (2014) argues: “Those that do not perform within this whiteness gauge, even if their bodies match it, are stigmatized and disciplined accordingly” (p. 155). Producing White affect allows someone to fit into White culture. It is to become invisible, to not stand out, to be unmarked. However, Whites and many others who produce White affect are not aware of their affect and its harmful impact non-White bodies, as McIntosh (2014) further argues: “Those that perform whiteness correctly have no emotive understanding of these performances and/or the affective consequences these performances displace on Others” (p. 155). We can think of whiteness as affect poverty: Those who produce White affect fail to recognize they are producing affect. This affect poverty means that Whites fail to themselves as a racial group, for they only recognize the affect of other groups. In other words, Whites see themselves as just humans, while everyone else who is recognized as producing affect is raced. This has a terrible consequence for non-White individuals, as Dyer (1997) noted: “there is no more ­powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claims to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” (p. 19). Whites are seen as representative of all peoples, and whiteness becomes the normal culture of all humans. People who are raced or who recognize race become parochial and marginalized. Whiteness is seen as universally applicable, while non-White is only specific and has value to non-White communities. Consequently, whiteness takes on a universal meaning, and Whites become synonymous with people and non-Whites are seen as something else (Dyer, 2012). What is needed is a method that will ground whiteness in the everyday and the body. Thus, in this chapter, we turn to personal narrative to explore our relationships to whiteness as people of color in a White supremacist capitalist patriarchal society, the United States of America. Women of color have long argued for the importance of privileging lived experience (Collins, 2008) and the narrative voice in talking back to hegemony and whiteness (hooks, 1989). Collins (2008) argues that historically the academy, and post-positivist methods, in particular, have robbed African American women of the opportunity to be experts about their own experiences due to allegations of bias and a false assumption that research can be conducted objectively. From our own positions as academics of color who study race, we too have consistently dealt with situations in which our observations, based both on our academic knowledge and lived experience, are negated even by “critical” scholars (White, U.S. minority, and international). They deem us, and our turn to narrative, suspect. Corrigan (2016) identifies these types of r­ eactions in rhetorical criticism as performances of what DiAngelo (2011) terms “white fragility.” The move outside “white” normative rhetorical zones of comfort causes anxiety (Corrigan, 2016). This reaction makes its way

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  49 into professional practices including discussions of what counts as “legitimate” research and methods, not only by White scholars ­(Corrigan, ­ omestic, 2016, p. 87), but also scholars of color, both international and d who seek to situate themselves within White academic traditions. Therefore, we actively resist these discourses and performances of White ­fragility by embracing the personal voice or what Moraga and ­A nzaldua (1981) term the theory in the flesh to explore our negotiations of whiteness. As scholars located at the nexus of rhetoric and performance, we further experience backlash to critical reflexivity, subjectivity, and narrative within a rhetorical field that deems itself critical and attentive to subjectivity, yet recoils at the possibility of the I. As Corrigan (2016) notes, For scholars writing from or about the margins of the field, the ‘I’ is ever-present, hovering as it does over the text, tying lived experience to all of the performative decisions we make about what to study, how to study it, how to frame those studies for normative auditors, and to navigate a field openly hostile to studies of the margins. (p. 88) We believe that a performance approach holds rhetoric accountable to the body (Calafell, 2014). We are not alone. Flores (2014) argues that critical race rhetoricians must make a turn toward performance as it allows scholars the ability to “undo the realness of the raced body while they also claim and proclaim its possibilities” (p. 95). Furthermore, Ono (2011) suggests that we consider what a critical performance project might offer. bell hooks (1989), like Corey (1998), argues that one way to talk back to hegemony is through personal narrative, which has the power to resist and potentially rewrite master narratives. Calafell (2013) draws upon work by Jones (2010) and Jones and Calafell (2012) to argue that personal narrative should reflect an intersectional ­reflexivity that is attentive to privilege and marginalization by connecting to larger cultural, political, and social discourses to reflect instantiations of power. Our approach to intersectionality is informed by scholarship by Scott (2013), and Dubrofsky and Ryalls (2014), to critically reflect upon how performances sustain whiteness. Furthermore, ­Zingsheim and Goltz (2011) argue that people of color rarely recognize their own performances of whiteness. Thus, our chapter includes narratives that speak to not only our experiences, family, and personal histories but also the larger social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in  which our narratives are situated. This layering serves to reveal power structures that we are implicated in, resist, and at times, complicit with.

50  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell

Hypervisibility and the Performance of Whiteness: La Guera y El Indio I know what White skin privilege feels like in a White supremacist society. My understanding of my White skin privilege came early, and it came from my family. Growing up in Phoenix, the proximity of the U.S.– Mexico border loomed large even if it was a few hours away, e­ specially for us as Mexican Americans. Raised in south Phoenix (before gentrification) in a primarily Chicanx and African American neighborhood, my ethnic identity was my primary means of identification. I earned the nickname, guera, from my nana (grandmother), a nickname used to mark my whiteness as a blue-eyed, white-skinned Mexican. I often assumed that I took after my tata’s (grandfather’s) side of the family, and maybe even my father’s, though I had never met him or any of them. As mestizxs, born of colonialism in Mexico, we are not defined by a race, rather we are defined by our racial hybridity (Calafell & Moreman, 2010). Members of my family had various skin colors and phenotypes, but we were all Mexican. I had heard whispers about “Spanish” relatives on my father’s side of my family. I also heard about my nana Severiana, my tata’s mother, and how white she was. These stories of “Spanish” relatives and the discussions of skin color based on an idealization of whiteness were (are) remnants of Spanish colonialism, its ensuing skin color caste systems, and larger pulls toward assimilation. The pull toward whiteness remains and is still supported as part of the global project of White supremacy and imperialism. I understood my White skin privilege in a world driven by economies of whiteness though my performance of Chicana often disrupted expectations and meanings placed upon my body. Thus, while I felt the hypervisibility of my whiteness at home, outside of the home my body may have been read as White by some, meaning I “fit” in; however, my affect was “off.” Muñoz (2000) argues that “‘official’ national affect, a mode of being in the world primarily associated with White middle-class subjectivity,” which “reads most ethnic affect as inappropriate,” governs the United States (p. 69). Thus, “From the vantage point of this national affect code, Latina/o affect appears over the top and excessive” (Muñoz, 2000, p. 69). My performance of identities and its resulting affect was certainly no different. All of the conversations and stories I heard about whiteness served as early memorable messages to me that whiteness was desired and powerful. But the question remained, at what cost? In the past I have drawn on family history as a means to reflect on contemporary iterations of racism, discourses of citizenship, and whiteness (see Calafell, 2008, 2012). I employ a similar strategy in this chapter. Growing up I heard passing references to Uncle Didi. He was my great uncle Robert’s brother. Mentions of Uncle Didi seemed to be shrouded in whispers, quick statements, or things that we knew we were dangerous to say aloud. It was

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  51 like listening to conversations I wasn’t supposed to. Though I don’t remember meeting Uncle Didi because I was so young when he died, he was made present through everyday conversations. All I knew about him was that he had some kind of government job, and there was a veil of secrecy to it. DAVID S. MORALES SFC US ARMY WORLD WAR II KOREA 1925–1978 It’s as if even in his death the CIA has continued its charade of deniability, diminishing the status of one of its highest ranking, most daring, effective, and, perhaps, most deadly clandestine agents. ­Little is known outside the inner circle of top operative, David Sanchez ­ gency’s Morales played major roles in the deepest schemes of the A covert activities, from Cuba to Vietnam. Moving undercover or behind the scenes, he was always the action man. (Fonzi, 1993, p. 366) I haven’t been back to Phoenix in years. I can’t really call it home anymore. Sometimes it feels too painful to go back. This trip is motivated by familial guilt. As I spend time with my nina (aunt), nana, and cousin, George, before I leave for the airport, the topic of Uncle Didi comes up. George provides me with more detail about his life, telling me there are conspiracy theories about him. They say Uncle Didi was connected to the death of John F. Kennedy (JFK), Robert F. Kennedy, and even Che Guevara. People on the internet suggest he was directed by the U.S. government to often travel to Latin America to overthrow local governments and aid in putting new regimes in power. I’m intrigued not just because it is part of my family history, but because as a scholar who studies power and Otherness, I wonder about the choices Didi made. They seem a lot more consequential than any of the choices I am expected to make. A Mexican American man in the 1950s became a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, who supposedly traveled to other countries populated by people of color to aid in the project of U.S. imperialism. George points me to some books that reference Didi’s role in the aforementioned controversies. On the plane ride home, I can’t get Uncle Didi out of my mind. Curiosity gets the best of me when I return to Denver as I scour the internet for information. It’s overwhelming. I find pictures of Didi in Vietnam and Cuba, or in groups of men huddled together, mostly White, wearing suits. But I am most drawn to YouTube videos of Uncle Didi near JFK’s shooting or in other suspicious places. I come to find out that Uncle Didi was referred to in government circles as “El Indio” or “Pancho” (Fonzi, 1993, p. 367). Descriptions of him from multiple people are focused on his skin color or phenotype. For example,

52  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell Gaeton Fonzi (1993) writes, “Morales came to my ­attention initially as a result of a vague description - husky, dark bronze skin, Latin-­looking but maybe part Mexican” (p. 367). David Altee Phillips, a former CIA officer, described Didi as “a massive American of ­Mexican and Indian extraction” (quoted in Fonzi, 1993, p. 368), while Bob Dorff, author of 22 Days Hath November, a book about JFK called him “the big New Mexican Indian” (Fonzi, 1993, p. 369). Looking at public government documents connected to his work with the CIA, I learn that Didi was only 5′ 10″ and weighed 220 pounds (Auden, 1961). Certainly, not a “big” man. His otherness almost seems to make him monstrous or larger than life (Calafell, 2015). It gets amplified with monstrous effects that make him more myth than man. Ironically enough, a similar thing has happened to me when instructors who share my work with their predominantly White students find them reading my work aloud as if I am screamingly angry. They don’t hear the vulnerability, hesitation, and quietness that guides my vocalization of anger. However, what strikes me is his racial identifier on government documents. In a document dated December 11, 1961, he lists his race as “White (Indian)” (Auden, 1961). The hypervisibility of my whiteness and the hypervisibility of his brownness weigh heavily as I read through various descriptions of him, La Guera y El Indio. For many Mexican Americans, the path to assimilation into whiteness in the United States in the wake of increasing racial animosity and violence was the military (Rosales, 1997). The military symbolized a potential space not only to enter the national fabric of whiteness, but also middle class “respectability.” Groups, like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the G.I. Forum, were formed to advocate for the rights of Latinxs in the United States, with in many cases, the goal of assimilation (Rosales, 1997). Didi attended colleges in Arizona, California, and Maryland; however, like many others of his generation, Uncle Didi enlisted in the Army in 1946. It was there that he started working in intelligence. In 1951, after his time in the Army, Didi joined the CIA. What challenges did he face in that place or in that time? Was he ever really accepted? Was he like me, always on the periphery? Superficially valued for what I might bring into an organization, but better seen rather than heard. The normalization of whiteness and its imperialist project in government circles certainly seeps through the descriptions of Didi by his contemporaries. Muñoz (1999) reminds us that people of color are subject to the ­burden of liveness that is “a particular hegemonic mandate that calls the minoritarian subject to ‘be live’ for the purpose of entertaining elites” (p. 182). This burden of liveness is an apt way to describe the constant surveillance that bodies of color experience every moment of our lives as we are expected to perform in relation to whiteness. What were the expectations of liveness associated with Didi’s performances? Did he have

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  53 to overperform patriotism or perform in excess of whiteness to fit in? Could he ever really fit in? As I read, it strikes me that perhaps he did not perform in ways that were expected of him as a man of color in a White space. For, example, did he refuse to perform subservience? Was he not deferential enough? Years later, I don’t perform deference, and I don’t perform respectability. However, the gaze and the burden of liveness remains. As he rose through the ranks, it was said that Didi was in charge of the Miami JMWAVE office, a covert intelligence program (Fonzi, 1993). Bradley Earl Ayers, a former Army officer referred to Didi as, “the big New Mexican Indian” who “was the only branch chief who treated us less than respectfully. He ran all the station’s activities with a heavy hand and was famous for his temper” (quoted in Fonzi, 1993, p. 369). Whether Ayers’ description of Didi is correct, I don’t know. But I often wonder about the choices Didi made. The choices that certainly affect the possibilities I have now as I am comfortably middle class with a PhD. What must it have been like for him to join the CIA in 1951 amidst the fight for civil rights? What did it mean for him as a Mexican American man surely experiencing racism to travel to third world countries sowing the seeds of discontent through discourses of U.S. American exceptionalism? Were these things he even considered? Was this his connection or pull to White masculinity? His performance must have been acceptable, because it garnered him a recommendation for an Intelligence Medal of Merit (Sampson, 1976). He was described by a friend as “one of the most patriotic men I ever knew in my life” (Fonzi, 1993, p. 385). Soon after leaving the CIA, Didi returned to Arizona, moving to Willcox. Looking through documents I come across a form titled ­“Request for Personnel Action” (Central Intelligence Agency, 1975). The form serves to mark Didi’s transition from active service to retirement ­(Central ­I ntelligence Agency, 1975). His official title on the document is Operations Officer who reports to the Deputy Director for Operations/Latin American Division/Development Complement (Central Intelligence Agency, 1975). Didi’s retirement is marked as “involuntary” (Central Intelligence Agency, 1975). According to friends, at the end of his career he had “a festering disillusionment and resentment towards the Agency” (Fonzi, 1993, p. 386). They suggest that Didi told them of his former employer, “they are the most ruthless motherfuckers there is and if they want to get somebody they will. They will do it their own people up” (sic) (Fonzi, 1993, p. 387). When people asked Didi if he was nervous about crime because he had moved closer to the U.S.–Mexico border, he responded, “‘I’m not worried about those people, I’m worried about my own.’ … ‘I know too much’” (Fonzi, 1993, p. 389). It’s an interesting negotiation that discursively positions Mexicans and the border, and the CIA, simultaneously as communities that Didi was a part of and separate from. His words reflect his ambiguous or middle space, a

54  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell borderland. His fear came not from Mexicans and Mexican Americans but from the reach of the government. As an agent of imperialist violence for the government, he knew the force of whiteness intimately. Fonzi (1993) writes that one of Didi’s closest friends shared that after his final trip to Washington DC, Didi fell ill, suffering “a supposed heart attack” (p. 386). Furthermore, “Even today he thinks there is something suspicious about his friend’s death. ‘His brother Robert, who grabbed a plane from Phoenix and flew right there” (Fonzi, 1993, p. 386). Didi was taken to a hospital in Tucson, about sixty miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, where he died. Didi was weeks away from testifying before the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (O’Sullivan, 2006). The irony of Didi’s story and my own is not lost on me. Separated only by a few generations, I consider how much has or has not changed. El Indio Assimilation into whiteness, came at a cost. What was your benefit? Perhaps the cost of your soul and emotional and physical distance from your family? The everyday reminders that you don’t really belong. I feel them too. El indio always proves his worth, targeting other brown people in the name of U.S. exceptionalism. Hypervisibility in a white space. I know a different kind of loneliness (Calafell, 2017). Academia is not a hospitable place for Others. Especially if you are Chicana, Queer, of working class origins, and a failure in the performance of desired femininity. I’ve performed middle class, white civility for access so that in many cases I can have the luxury of doing work that my family doesn’t always understand, all in the name of our “empowerment.” But my affect is always off.

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  55 The distance from family remains the further I get into it. And you an agent of U.S. imperialism and violence, spreading the doctrine of red, white, and blue across the world. Through any means necessary. Post 9/11 the color of fear is brown (Bloodsworth-Lugo & Lugo-Lugo, 2008; Rivera, 2014). Decades later I critique the very things you fought so hard to represent. The very things that separated you from family. And perhaps led to an early death. Social violence morphs into social justice. Building bridges rather than destroying legacies, the “privilege” of my white skin allows me to. As does the occasional performance of white middle class civility. I don’t take it for granted. I engage in performances that disrupt the meanings placed on my skin. Voicing disconnect and resistance. Your patriotism becomes my activism. La guera.

Performing Designer Asian American Male Identity Under the blazing sun stands an Asian man. He rests his hands on the barbed wire, no longer concerned with the rusted steel thorns. His is a lonely face with wind-whipped black hair and dull, sunken brown eyes looking out into the desert. His whole life suddenly taken from him, and he is forced out of the United States, into a prison. Throughout my entire life, I have been told that I should be proud of being Asian American, that we have done much for America, and so on. But, that is what other people think and know of being Asian American. For me, being Asian American is looking out from the internment camps. Growing up in the United States, I was always told that I should be proud to be Asian because we built the railroads. It seems to be a constant reminder. But why should that make me proud? Should I be proud that those same railroads decimated Native American populations and cultures? Should I rejoice that those railroads would forcefully take ­Japanese Americans into prison camps?

56  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell Spread across the Western United States, west of the Mississippi River, are the remains of internment camps where from 1942 to 1946, 120,700 Japanese Americans were imprisoned (History.com, 2009). Little remains of the camps, like memory being washed away. But, the camps still remain within me and live on in our politics. I am far removed from the camps. I was born in 1974, long after the camps closed, in a faraway island called Taiwan. I am half Chinese and half Japanese, but I am not related to those who were imprisoned. Yet, the camps live on in me. Calafell (2008) writes: “The body remembers and the body feels the pain and trauma inflicted upon our people” (p. 85). To be Asian American is to feel the pain and trauma inflicted upon us. To be Asian America is not a railroad, it is the roundups, discriminations, hate, and violence inflicted upon us. It is the way whiteness disciplines us and the ways I resist it and redefine who I am. The camps are more than just prisons. The barbed wires and guard towers are actually borders. They are a boundary between what is U.S. American and what is foreign. As Anzaldúa (1999) notes, Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. (p. 25) It is no surprise then that in the post 9–11 world, the camps have been brought back into discourse as a “solution” to Muslim-Americans. The camps exist and will continue to exist as a means to identifying, punishing, and segregating those deemed as threats, those who are seen as not belonging to U.S. America. The camps quarantine those deemed to be on the wrong side of the border. I am, much like the camps, a borderland. This borderland is marked by the places I have traveled, from Taiwan to the United States and the different places in the United States. This borderland is my desire to fit into U.S. culture, the shame and guilt of knowing the pain that desire inflicts on others, the fear of losing friends and families as I change, and a counter desire to act ethically and justly toward all people. The camps are alien landscape, barren and hot; it is a forced deportation. It reminds me constantly that I live in a borderland, not just because I am a foreigner who has come to adopt this country as home, or that I am living on a piece of land with a history of conquests, massacres, and hope, but within me is a borderland. If whiteness functions as a gauge of a person’s performance, then within me is a constant reminder

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  57 of the privileges gained from performing whiteness and the discipline and punishment received from not performing whiteness. It is not wrong that the borders are within the United States. As ­A nzaldúa (1999) alluded to, a borderland is not just some designated physical space, like the physical line between Mexico and the United States. A borderland exists wherever people feel the boundaries between us and them, between who is and who is not U.S. American (p. 25). Being Asian American is recognizing that border exists and that failure to perform in ways appropriate for whiteness means being deported into camps. Borders cut across my body in the ways I perform my Asian American masculinity, navigating whiteness, and interrogating my own complicity with sustaining the dominance of whiteness. In borderland, I am always proving my worth to stay in the United States. From my green card and citizenship interviews to job interviews, conversation with friends and strangers, to interaction with different institutions and their representatives, I am constantly asked to prove my ability to perform whiteness. Yet, because I am Asian, I can never perform whiteness correctly enough to be safe. A border is designed to keep what belongs in and what does not belong out. In 1941, over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans, through no fault of their own, failed their interrogation. I am, like those souls, living on a borderland, where my rights and life is always at the edge of being deported into an alien word of barren rocks, rickety shacks, and barbed wires. The borderland is a harsh place to be. But, I have learned that rather than rejecting the borderland, I shall embrace it, because that is where social change lies, and where I will find the agency to change my identity as an Asian American male and the subjectivity of those who interact with me. I Am Always Being Interrogated I am always Mr. Anderson, but never Neo. In the movie The Matrix, Thomas Anderson, before he awoke to being Neo, was interrogated by Agent Smith. Being an Asian American is not building railroads or ­helping to build the United States; it is always being interrogated. In the movie, agents capture Thomas Anderson and transport him to a secure interrogation room. I can hear the voice of Agent Smith speaking to me: It seems that you have been living two lives. One life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you help your neighbor shovel snow. The other life you are Asian. One of these lives has a future. One of them does not.

58  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell I pay taxes, obey the law, speak English, and eat “American” food. And, still I am not safe. I am always being interrogated. I have been living in the United States since the age of six and have been practicing for my interrogation every day. If I pass my interrogation, I am seen as safe, and I can enjoy the privileges of being a U.S. American. I get interrogated quite often. Some things I can practice for, like when I am asked, “No, I mean, where did you come from originally?” Some things I cannot practice for, but can still get by. One day my retired, White woman neighbor and I argued over my dog. When I refused to accept her argument, she demands to know: “Where are you from originally?” I am interrogated when someone yells: “Go back to China!” I am interrogated in the first day of class when my students are uncomfortable because they never had an Asian teacher before, or if some of them think they are in the wrong class because they were expecting a White teacher. I am being interrogated even as I write for this chapter. There are, however, questions that no one can ever prepare for and can never slip by. How does one prepare when soldiers come to your house to deport you to a concentration camp? How could Japanese Americans prepare for that? How can Muslim-Americans and Muslims in the United States prepare for the possibility of soldiers coming to deport them? When confronted with that possibility, I go to sleep some nights praying that one of my White friends will be willing to hide me. You may not know this, but I came into this country armed and ­dangerous. I am armed with black hair, brown eyes, and yellow skin. In me is the blood of contagion. Whiteness seeks to un-race me. Ross (2005) argues that anyone can perform whiteness as long as the person purges their non-White affects. For example, he writes: “To become a homosexual, the African would have to leave behind any traditional notions of intragender sexuality. In other words, he would have to become like his European counterpart” (Ross, 2005, p. 201). To be a good scholar, I have to erase that I am Asian. To be a good teacher, I have to erase that I am Asian. To be a good American, I have to erase that I am Asian. An Asian is a danger, a threat to White America. If I am Japanese, I am responsible for Pearl Harbor, for Toyotas and Hondas, for White factory workers losing their jobs, for Yakuzas and the yellow terror. I am Chinese, I am a chicomm (Chinese Communist), I am White people’s ridicule of Chinese language and accent, I need to go back to China, I am a railroad worker. When I successfully pass my interrogation, I am seen as U.S. ­American. I am e-raced. I perform authentic whiteness, when performing White ­appears natural, normal, and lacking affect (Dubrofsky & Ryalls, 2014). I ­ eople believe am U.S. American when I can perform in a way that makes p that my whiteness is who I am, that my whiteness is not betrayed by affects of difference—ethnic, gender, sexual, class, and ability. Authentic whiteness is an idealized performance, as one can be too White (e.g., a redneck). This performance is often the one that is privileged in media, re-centering it as the proper behavior that society rewards (Dubrofsky & Ryalls, 2014).

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  59 Designer Asian American Male Identity Do I look designer Asian enough to you? (Scott, 2013). Scott (2013) notes that she benefits from a designer disability, which is just the right amount of disability: enough to benefit dominant culture and not too much to inconvenience or challenge it. That is to say, it triggers enough affect to gain support, but not so much as to turn people off. My performance of authentic whiteness is a designer Asian American male identity. It is just the right amount of Asian to pass as a straight, U.S. American male. I am just enough Asian that my White friends benefit from my presence as being diverse and socially just. If I was more Asian, I would not be able to hang out with them. I am just enough Asian that my Asian-ness can be erased, so that I can perform the ideal White student, the ideal White instructor, the ideal White athlete, and so on. This is how I am able to pass my interrogations and continue to live in the United States. This is how I disarm my Asian affects enough to be considered safe and U.S. American. Hello Afong Moy “Can you be our teacher?” I was all smiles when I heard that. “You’re so much better than our teacher.” Yup, just another confirmation of how good I am. Once when I was a graduate student in political science, I had to substitute for a fellow graduate student instructor. She was a Chinese student who was in the United States to get her doctorate degree. She spoke with a heavier accent than mine and wasn’t as fluent with cool U.S. American mannerisms as I was. My designer Asian American identity is a performance of White masculine affect, giving me confidence to teach. An authentic performance is a natural performance (Dubrofsky & ­Ryalls, 2014) and I am most comfortable wearing a plain T-shirt with jeans. I prepare thoroughly for each class, anticipating the question I can be asked and the answers to give. I am funny, lively, and fun when I teach. I am confident, speak loudly, and pronounce words accurately. I personify the cool White, male teacher. I did not do this on purpose to hurt anyone, but my authentic performance means that I am the ­knowledgeable, easy going, laid back, and fun teacher who students can talk to. Yet, my privilege came at a cost to her, for she could not perform ­authentic White femininity. Calafell (2012) writes that women of color in academia experience public shaming, where they must be tamed for the good of whiteness: I understand now that my presence in this space is conditional. I must pass and tame my Otherness, showing only the side of my nature that they see themselves in. I must perfect a performance of obedience and become a model representative of my Otherness. (p. 118)

60  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell Women of color are expected in academia to perform whiteness, as if they are White, to look and feel like their White colleagues, even though they hold none of their power. Calafell (2012) continues: “My Otherness makes for pretty pictures for brochures and the webpage, but that is only when my monstrosity is controlled and at the service of those. Yet another form of being put on display” (p. 118). Women of color experience being displayed—public shaming for discipline, promotional display for exploitation. I see Calafell’s experiences when I remember how much the students wanted to be in my class, how much they did not like her. Despite her brilliance and knowledge, she could not correctly perform whiteness. Her display could not please her White students. I reinforced the idea that White masculinity is synonymous with good teaching and other performance pale in comparison. What is critical about my story is that my ability to perform designer Asian American male is not benign. It depends on the constant production of Asians who are others, who are not U.S. American, and not safe. I am able to pass in White society only because there are many others who cannot, and my privileges come at their expense. Julia Foochee ching-chang king, daughter of Hong wang tzang tzee king (Haddad, 2011, p. 6). According to the New York Daily Advertiser in 1834, this was the supposed name of the first Chinese woman brought to the United States by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, traders looking for opportunity in China (p. 6). They shortened her name to Afong Moy and did their best to highlight how exotic she was—as an example of the mystical, never-before-seen Chinese princess (pp. 6–9). She was the bound feet display meant to generate a desire for Chinese goods and products. Much was made of how different she was, from her shock at seeing a left-handed person, to making her try walking around for the audience to see her bound feet in action (pp. 9–10). Her fate was tragic: she became a part of P.T. Barnum’s exhibits and was eventually replaced by a younger, more “reputable” Chinese woman when she grew too old (p. 16). Discarded, no more records of her was found (p. 16). My designer Asian American male identity made it possible for students to appreciate my teaching skills. Yet, this identity was only possible because I reduced a female Chinese graduate student instructor into Afong Moy. I did nothing and said nothing about her to the students. And, ­ erform my that is the point. Discipline means I did not have to. When I p ­designer Asian American male identity, the students can tell that I conform to the affect of whiteness. This automatically contrasts to how her affect is ­foreign and thus wrong. My performance spoke for me, no words necessary. Through my designer Asian American male performance, I simultaneously elevated myself to the status of cool, straight, U.S. American man by reducing the Chinese student-instructor into a foreign object. Like the crowd that came to see Afong Moy, the students only saw the differences between us and rejected her for them. I am the third Carne brother.

Reverberations of Familial and Cultural Histories  61 She is not the only person I reduce to a foreign alien, which is often seen as a threat to the sanctity of whiteness. I do that to many who cannot perform in ways that reaffirm the centrality of ideal White bodies whenever I accept the praises and privileges for performing my authentic White masculinity and my designer Asian American male identity. I am able to pass my interrogations, to remain on the U.S. American side of the border, to avoid deportation and internment camps because there are many who fail that interrogation. When I take comfort in what my students say, when I do not correct their judgments, when I gain from an Other colleague’s race and gender I play into the dominant binary of foreign versus U.S. American. For some to feel safe and welcome to stay in the United States, there must also be those who can be marked as dangerous and need be deported. My ability to perform whiteness, to be able to be a part of this society is only possible because, through my actions, I participate in the production of foreigner who do not fit with whiteness. My authentic performance requires there to be Others to contrast with, to use as a way of marking myself as fitting in with the dominant White culture. I can only perform White masculinity when there is someone who cannot. But, being Asian means I can never be White or masculine enough. My weapons can never be fully concealed, and so I remain constantly interrogated. I continue to find safety by performing my designer Asian American male identity.

Conclusion Our stories provide a glimpse into the complexities, difficulties, and hardships of navigating whiteness for non-White people. We underscore the need to investigate whiteness performatively—first as a method of difference, creating ways that resist and challenge its powers and ­producing identities open and caring for the needs of non-White peoples, and, second, as the choices people of color make in navigating whiteness and their meanings. Performance scholarship in critical whiteness studies have embraced the need for Whites to be reflexive and challenge their privileges (McIntosh & Hobson, 2013; Warren, 2003; Warren & Kilgard, 2001), but in need of further development in Communication Studies is performance scholarship that explores how people of color perform with and against whiteness. Non-White people, in the United States and internationally, are shaped by the power of White supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. As we have aimed to demonstrate, for non-White individuals, whiteness cannot be understood simply through disembodied research. Instead, echoing Conquergood’s (2013) rejection of a textual only paradigm, whiteness for us is always an embodied performance—we feel the pain of whiteness through its disciplining forces. We feel the pain of knowing that we may be participating in institutions, like academia, that harm

62  Charles LuLevitt and Bernadette Marie Calafell people of color and anyone who cannot perform ideal images of heteronormative White middle class masculinity and femininity. We feel frustration and joy from trying to create spaces free from the oppressive powers of whiteness. As Calafell (2013) reminds us: “These spaces, in their complexity and multiplicity, call us to be accountable to others and to ourselves in marking the workings of power” (p. 7). Studying whiteness is, ultimately, about making ourselves accountable to the people who are hurt and oppressed by it. Zingsheim and Goltz (2011) reminds us: “engaging whiteness through the isolated lens of race—rather than from an intersectional grounding perpetuates the invisibility, elusiveness, and self-sustaining durability of whiteness” (p. 216). That is why our stories intersect gender, race, and institutions. Bernadette’s performative move from a reflection on her uncle Didi to her own complex navigation of whiteness and privilege highlights the ways in which we cannot consider one without the other. Similarly, Charles’ narrative points how his performance of masculinity makes it possible for him to perform whiteness. It is also not enough to know whiteness; we need to consider whiteness in relation to others, particularly women of color and other more vulnerable social groups. The difference between Bernadette’s performance and Charles’ narrative points to the need to see the nuanced ways whiteness operates in the lives and bodies of different people of color. The force of whiteness in our individual, familial, and cultural histories manifests in varied ways in our contemporary moment as people of color. These differences also call us to practice reflexivity differently. Whiteness can be changed when we are willing to perform it differently.

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Part II

Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through White Bodies

5 Black Women’s Intellectualism and Deconstructing Donald Trump’s Toxic White Masculinity Rachel Alicia Griffin “[B]lack women are employed, if not sacrificed, to humanize their white superordinates, to teach them something about the content of their own subject positions” (Smith, 2000, p. 369–384)

Introduction Exegesis: ek-sə-ˈjē-(ˌ)sēz exposition, explanation; especially: an explanation or critical interpretation of a text (Merriam-Webster, 2017) Exegesis is new to my vocabulary; it sounds serious and summons the cerebral dexterity required to respond to our current U.S. American reality moored at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Our political landscape, in what Maya Angelou long ago poetically termed “These Yet to Be United States” (2015, p. 234), necessitates new means of expression. As an occasion to closely engage with President Donald Trump’s rhetoric—much of which contests the value of my humanity as a biracial Black and White Black feminist scholar-activist partnered with a transgender man—this chapter demands a broadened lexicon to repel my speechlessness in response to his embodiment of toxic White masculinity. In Critical/Cultural Communication, “interpretation” and “analysis” are far more common than “exegesis.” Yet when “exegesis” rolls off my tongue, it tastes like the aggrieved tears that commonly fill my eyes and fall when I listen to Trump speak. It was not always like this, my embodied reaction to him is not automatic because he opposed and won against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (e.g., I too struggled with aspects of Clinton’s bid for the U.S. presidency), nor is it generic because he is a Republican (e.g., I too align with Republican fiscal ­ideology) or essentialist because he is White (e.g., I too identify with Whiteness). Rather, Trump earns my disdain with his words and

70  Rachel Alicia Griffin actions. Thus, “exegesis” signifies the visceral instinct to disengage and the pooling of guttural dread overcome in order for my academic self to personally/politically/intellectually contend with the implications of the societal ruination Trump’s rhetoric beckons. The first time I academically critiqued Trump was motivated by the 2016 release of the 2005 Access Hollywood audio and visual recording of him bragging about his acts of sexual violence (“Transcript: ­Donald Trump’s Taped Comments about Women,” 2016). Initially, most ­pollsters and voters alike predicted that the leaked tape would ­annihilate Trump’s ­ egrettably, presidential campaign (Burns, Haberman, & Martin, 2016). R these predictions were proven wrong when Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States (POTUS) 33 days after the tape went ­viral. To deconstruct Trump’s use of anti-intellectualism and post-truth logics to discredit survivors’ allegations of sexual ­violence, I wrote “The “Morning/Mourning” After: When Becoming President Trumps Being a Sexual Predator” (Griffin, 2017). Deconstructing Trump’s rhetoric for a second time is motivated by yet another instance in which his prejudicial and discriminatory interaction with a woman—a Black woman named April Ryan—went viral in 2017. As an act of scholarly opposition, in this chapter I couple the conceptualization of “toxic masculinity” (Karner, 1996, p. 66) with “black ­feminist spectatorship” (hooks, 1992; Madison, 1995, p. 225) to ­leverage Black women’s intellectualism as a “unique angle of vision” (Collins, 2009, p. 39) from which the intersectional interworkings of White male dominance can be distinctively theorized from dissident positionalities. I begin by positioning the news conference interaction between Trump and journalist April Ryan as a foreshadowing of Trump’s opprobrious embodiment of toxic White masculinity as POTUS. Their interaction—a live broadcast just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration—is key for two reasons. First, Ryan discursively functions as the miner’s canary forecasting danger (Guinier & Torres, 2002) and second, Ryan discursively functions as a mirror that publicly reflects Trump’s disregard for issues of diversity and marginalization. As such, a critical interpretation of their interaction sets the stage for theorizing Trump’s toxic White masculinity as an intersectional materiality of Whiteness that he leverages at the expense of Others. Next, I define the methodological utility of Black feminist spectatorship to exposing how Trump capitalizes upon identity politics to repeatedly (re)secure himself as “a citizen of the center” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 293). Then, primarily focusing on Trump’s 2017 Boy Scout Jamboree speech, I analyze how he embeds toxic White masculinity in his presidential rhetoric and dangerously emboldens others—in this instance boys and young men—to emulate his performance of White male domination. More specifically, I argue that Trump’s presidential rhetoric exudes the tricks and trades that White men have historically depended upon to (re)secure their position at the top of raced and gendered societal

Black Women’s Intellectualism  71 hierarchies. Deconstructing the particularities of Trump’s rhetoric, he (re)substantiates hegemonic and toxic White masculine ideals by territorializing the center as righteously privileged, egomaniacal, and predatory. ­Finally, amid Trump’s determination to use his amassed presidential power in service to domination, I conclude with an articulation of the importance of critical/cultural exegeses of presidential rhetoric.

April Ryan, Donald Trump, and Déjà Vu On February 16, 2017, I experienced flabbergasting déjà vu and was transfixed by the exchange between Trump and April Ryan, a veteran Black female journalist with more than 20 years of experience in ­Washington DC. Their exchange, couched in the Trump Administration’s combative relationship with media, began outwardly calm yet cynically. As soon as Trump selects Ryan to speak among the gaggle of journalists and before she says a word, he says “This is going to be a bad question, but that’s okay” (Krieg & Killough, 2017). Barely on the mic, Ryan replies, “No it’s not going to be bad question” before asking a ­t wo-pronged question about Trump’s intentions to “fix” the inner cities and his pending Historically Black Colleges and Universities executive order (Krieg & Killough, 2017). In response, Trump deems her question “very professional and very good” (Krieg & Killough, 2017) and then recounts his campaign trail stomp that inner cities have “evolved very badly” and people are “living in hell” (Krieg & Killough, 2017). Next, Ryan asks whether Trump intends to include the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in his inner-city agenda. Then, their voices overlap in a rapid exchange as follows: ryan:  Are you going to include the CBC Mr. President …? trump:  Am I going to include who? ryan:  Are you going to include the Congressional Black Caucus? trump:  Well, I would … I’ll tell you what, do you want to set up the

meeting?… Are they friends of yours? ryan:  No, no, no. I am just a reporter … trump:  Let’s go, set up a meeting. I would love to meet with the Black

caucus. I think it’s great. The Congressional Black Caucus. (Krieg & Killough, 2017) Upset by Trump’s maltreatment of Ryan, soon after their televised exchange Democratic congresswoman Gwen Moore, also a Black woman, tweeted “Hey @realDonaldTrump: @AprilDRyan is a honest & professional reporter. She’s not your secretary. @Reince knows @­RepRichmond’s number. Use it” (Krieg & Killough, 2017). Shortly afterwards, Ryan tweeted, “I am a journalist not a convener! But thank you for answering my questions” (Krieg & Killough, 2017).

72  Rachel Alicia Griffin My jaw dropped as I watched their interaction—not because I was shocked by Trump’s raced and gendered malevolent ignorance. Rather, because there were remarkable similarities to an experience I had a month earlier in January 2017 on a university campus in Ontario, ­Canada. Picture this: me in a wood paneled room with 19 predominantly White administrators including three college and university presidents. I had been hired as a consultant to make anti-sexual violence recommendations and everyone was taking their seats on the mocha brown leather couches arranged into a large square. Just before we all sat down so I could present my recommendations, the White male President to my immediate right looked around the square, chuckled, and quipped, “This is going to be just like Oprah!” Momentarily dumbfounded, I quickly chose not to confront the racist and sexist implications of his essentialist “quip” for fear of derailing the important conversation we were there to have. Instead, when it was my turn to speak, I introduced myself, clarified my purpose in my own words, centered our group’s attention on sexual violence, and swallowed his insult and my rage. Watching the Trump/Ryan exchange, I recognized parallels between Ryan’s reaction and my own. She too corrected a powerful White man’s assumptions about her role and purpose. She too sacrificed a personal response in exchange for normative professional decorum that redirected attention to the issues immediately at hand—despite having been maltreated. She too chose not to confront, but rather to plow forward and use the event for its intended purpose. Perhaps like me, she too swallowed his insult and her rage. Similar to Ryan and those who came to her defense, I was offended for several reasons linked to essentialism as a strategy that White men use to put Black women “back where we belong,” i.e., in a subordinate and deferential position. First, essentialism is generically assumptive (e.g., Just because we are Black does not mean that all Black people know each other; not all Black women perceive being compared to Oprah as a compliment). Second, essentialism magnifies stereotypes and caricatures (e.g., Black women are not at the behest of White men to “help”; Black women are not present to “fix” problems akin to a mammy engrossed in self-sacrificial service to White people). Third, essentialism lacks specificity (e.g., Ryan is not a “secretary” or “convener,” she is an established journalist; I am not a media mogul or a talk show host, I am a college professor with a PhD). Finally, essentialism is redundant and antiquated (e.g., Black women’s professional acumen is diverse and storied opposed to homogenous and static; Black women’s expertise—including Oprah’s—entails much more than “helping” and “fixing”). Surely Ryan, myself, and any/every Black woman can do without the essentialist assumptions of powerful White men. Yet, given the essentialist grip of domination on Black womanhood, assumptive discourses should be leveraged as intellectual opportunities for Black women to

Black Women’s Intellectualism  73 theorize how White men utilize power and privilege to preserve and protect traditional White masculinity. Modeling this approach, Trump’s micro maltreatment of Ryan on a macro stage, during the nascence of his presidency, foreshadowed his holistic commitment to toxic White masculinity. In the aftermath of Trump’s derisive campaign, the acrimonious dynamic between Trump and Clinton, and calls for unity and healing when the 2016 election was over, Trump could have chosen to forefront respect and a dignified attempt to be culturally responsive. Instead, as demonstrated by his racist and sexist maltreatment of Ryan, early on in his presidency Trump chose to lead with disrespectful ignorance and arrogant entitlement—calling cards of toxicity.

Toxic White Masculinity Situated in close proximity to hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987), toxic masculinity reflects the worst of what dominant ideologies offer to constructions of masculinity and manhood. Meaningfully d ­ istinguishing between the two concepts, Kupers says: Toxic masculinity is constructed of those aspects of hegemonic masculinity that foster domination of others and are, thus, socially destructive. Unfortunate male proclivities associated with toxic masculinity include extreme competition and greed, insensitivity to or lack of consideration of the experiences and feelings of others, a strong need to dominate and control others, an incapacity to nurture, a dread of dependency, a readiness to resort to violence, and the stigmatization and subjugation of women, gays, and men who exhibit feminine characteristics. (2005, p. 717) Academics and cultural commentary have further mapped the constellation of toxic masculinity in what I interpret as three ­constitutive facets: (1) justifications, (2) characteristics, and (3) enactments (Haider, 2016; Karner, 1996; Kupers, 2005; Newsom, 2017; Sexton, 2016; Tourѐ, 2017). Justifications for toxic masculinity include a­ sserting ­normativity in ­accordance with patriarchal understandings of laws, human rights, traditions, values, roles, and identities. Characteristics of toxic masculinity include ethnocentrism, egocentrism, arrogance, privilege, ­entitlement, superiority, fear, and ignorance. Enactments of toxic masculinity include rage, violence, domination, predation, demagoguery, intimidation, insults, and impulsivity. Taken all together, toxic masculinity is conceptualized as a cultural ailment that is embodied by some men ­(certainly not all men) and buttressed by hierarchical binary o ­ ppositions that privilege some (e.g., U.S. American White middle-to-­upper class cisgender heterosexual men) but not Others (e.g., people of color, women

74  Rachel Alicia Griffin of color, poor people, immigrants, queer people of color, etc.). Paying close attention to justifications, characteristics, and enactments, at the intersections of race and gender, the forthcoming analysis deconstructs Trump’s presidential rhetoric to make distinctive claims about how the embodiment of toxic White masculinity functions. To do so, I mobilize Black feminist spectatorship to expose Trump’s rhetoric as a “constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination” (Kupers, 2005, p. 714).

Black Feminist Spectatorship as Method As a method derived from Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 2009, 2013), Black feminist spectatorship mobilizes Black women’s subjugated ­knowledge to deconstruct, interrogate, and challenge domination (Griffin, 2014a; Madison, 1995; Smith, 2000, Stanley, 2009). Anchored by bell hooks’ operationalization, “Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance … when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking” (1992,  p.  128). Correspondingly, Stanley (2009) says, “Critical black female spectatorship is a conscious creativity that can be co-opted as a weapon of both deconstruction and revision and allows a black woman to read well beyond the composition on the screen” (p. 36). Most publications using Black feminist spectatorship involve deconstructions of oppressive ­representations of Black womanhood to foster self-definition among Black women (e.g., Boylorn, 2008, 2013; Griffin, 2013, 2014a; Stanley, 2009). Conversely, Black feminist spectatorship also exposes how representation and rhetoric hegemonically labor in favor of dominant logics. Such works sacrifice a primary focus on Black womanhood to instead utilize Black women’s intellectualism to pointedly deconstruct how those in power assert superiority, secure privilege, and exclude Others (e.g., Griffin, 2014b; hooks, 2004; Madison, 1995). In these ­instances, as noted in the opening epigraph, Black feminist spectators are teaching those who benefit from systemic privilege “about the content of their own subject positions” (Smith, 2000, p. 375). That Black women’s epistemologies have been overlooked and squandered in favor of dominant epistemologies is exactly why leveraging Black women’s intellectualism to theorize Trump’s embodiment of toxic White masculinity is essential. Thus, “the world looks very different from the edges of power than from its center” (Collins, 2013, p. 67). In the analysis that follows, I employ Black feminist spectatorship as “a lens of ambivalence and outsiderhood” (Madison, 1995, p. 234) to intricately deconstruct how Trump lionizes systemic oppressions to dogmatically advocate for his privileged worldview and abundantly tout his toxic White masculinity. More precisely, I argue that Trump’s narrative about William Levitt allegorically functions as a gateway for POTUS to

Black Women’s Intellectualism  75 affirm, reproduce, and glorify “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2013, p. 143) as the ideological infrastructure of his ­presidential campaign, presidency, and, more personally, his character. That Trump rhetorically fortifies his toxic White masculinity is unsurprising. However, that he does so by hailing young Boy Scouts into his ­worldview while eliciting enthusiastic applause and zealous ­chanting (e.g., “We Love Trump!, We Love Trump!”) necessitates scholarly response.

The Tricks and Trades of Toxic White Masculinity (Re)Territorializing the Privileged Center To cyclically (re)territorialize the privileged center and assert his embodiment of White masculinity as normative, Trump draws upon multiplicative facets of “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 2013, p. 143). Conceptualized across the corpus of hooks’ work, this term describes “the system [of global domination] in terms of which group has gained the most privilege, highest status, and amassed the most power over others” (Jhally, 1997; Squires, 2013, p. 13). A ­destructive rendition of “traditional masculinity” (Sexton, 2016) and “[t]he old school ideal of manliness” (Tourѐ, 2017), toxic White masculinity calls Trump’s privileged positionality as a wealthy White U.S. A ­ merican cisgender man into play and enables his propagation of caustic traits ranging from superiority to pugnacity to ignorance. In his Boy Scout Jamboree speech to an a­ udience of roughly 40,000 (Boy Scouts of America, 2017), ­approximately 24,000 of whom were 12- to 18-year-old boys and young men (Hartmann, 2017), a chief example of Trump’s commitment to (re) securing the center for himself and others privileged like him is his celebratory yet discourteous narrative about a “once-mighty housing developer” ­(Foderaro, 2017) named William Levitt—also a wealthy White U.S. American cisgender man. Levitt is credited with the post–World War II creation of mass-produced, modern suburban communities that have served as the template for residential development since the construction of “Levittowns” began in the 1940s (Lacayo, 1998; Pace, 1994). ­Describing his innovative business strategy in 1989, Levitt says: What it amounted to was a reversal of the Detroit assembly line … There, the car moved while the workers stayed at their stations. In the case of our houses, it was the workers who moved, doing the same jobs at different locations. (Pace, 1994) After amassing a fortune building, renting, and selling prefabricated houses, in 1968, Levitt sold Levitt & Sons for 92 million (Pace, 1994). Much of Levitt’s wealth was eventually lost to unprofitable business

76  Rachel Alicia Griffin ventures that led to immense debt and accusations of fraud leading up to his death in 1994 at 86 (Kaufman, 1989; Pace, 1994). Recounted somewhat similarly in Trump’s coauthored Trump: How to Get Rich (Trump & McIver, 2004), during the jamboree Trump deftly slims Levitt’s life story to create a narrative opportunity for boasting in favor of capitalist values, juxtaposing his success against Levitt’s eventual failure, and valorizing his interpretation of what constitutes White U.S. American manhood and admirable livelihood. To do so, Trump first compliments Levitt for his “unbelievable success” and for selling his company “for a tremendous amount of money” which allowed him to buy “a big yacht” and sail “in the south of France and other places” (Regan, 2017). Notably absent, Trump fails to mention Levitt’s exploitive and oppressive business sensibilities. For instance, Levitt articulates his profit motive as “Any damn fool can build homes … What counts is how many can you sell for how little” (Pace, 1994). This sentiment undergirded his housing developments despite the sacrifices and economic modesty of postwar veterans and their families as a sizable portion of Levitt & Sons’ target demographic. Due largely to the severity of postwar housing shortages (Sutter, 2011; Rosenbaum, 1983), Levitt & Sons’ were able to quickly shift from offering rentals and sales to sales only and consistently increased their prices as demand accelerated (Pace, 1994). Also absent from Trump’s retelling, Levitt & Sons built and ran their business utilizing racist contracts that prohibited renting or selling houses to people of color, especially African Americans. Levittown residents signed draconian contracts containing strict rules for lawn care, fences, clotheslines, and—typewritten in capital letters to convey its importance—a clause that read “THE TENANT AGREES NOT TO PERMIT THE PREMISES TO BE USED OR OCCUPIED BY ANY PERSON OTHER THAN MEMBERS OF THE CAUCASIAN RACE” (Kushner, 2009, p. 43). When confronted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, civil rights protestors, and even the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court Shelly v. Kraemer ruling that rendered the clause “unenforceable as law and contrary to public policy,” Levitt removed the racist language from the contracts but continued the racist practice of banning people of color, including veterans of color, from his housing developments (Kushner, 2009, p. 43; Lacayo, 1998). The first Black family to move into a Levittown housing development was the Myers in 1957; notably, their arrival was facilitated by a White family secretly selling them the home to integrate the neighborhood rather than the company discontinuing racist housing segregation (Kushner, 2009). Due, in part, to Levitt & Sons iron clad racism, the Myers’ arrival was met with a rock thrown through their living room window, a neighborhood cross-burning, and eventually state police were charged with their protection (Kushner, 2009). Emblematic of Levitt’s White supremacist

Black Women’s Intellectualism  77 ideology, lacking personal and entrepreneurial accountability, he articulated his sentiment as follows: The Negroes in America … are trying to do in four hundred years what the Jews in the world have not wholly accomplished in six thousand. As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But … I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then ninety to ninety-five percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours … As a company, our position is simply this: we can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two. (as quoted in Rosenbaum, 1983, p. 391) Unmotivated by White residents’ incivility, threats to Black residents’ safety, or President Kennedy signing Executive Order 11063 in 19621, it was not until April 10, 1968, that Levitt & Sons explicitly claimed to cease racist discrimination. With a flair of self-grandeur common among wealthy White men lacking reflexivity, after 20+ years of systematically denying people of color opportunities to accumulate equity and achieve economic stability via homeownership (Conley, 1999), the company announced their decision in the Wall Street Journal as a tribute to Dr. R ­ everend Martin Luther King Jr. who had been assassinated  6 days earlier (Kushner, 2009). The 1968 headline read, “Levitt & Sons Starts ‘Open Housing’ Policy as King ‘Memorial,” and according to ­L evitt himself, “Open housing was one of Dr. King’s greatest hopes, our action is a memorial to him” (Kushner, 2009, p. 194). In hindsight, the company’s announcement functioned as a redemptive publicity stunt on behalf of White supremacy barely ahead of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Fair Housing Act on April 11, 1968, which made racist housing practices illegal (Kushner, 2009; Massey & Denton, 1993). Adding capitalistic insult to racist injury, full page ads were taken out in large cities to announce the company’s self-proclaimed memorial and attract new clientele; accompanied by a picture of Dr. King the ads read “ ­ Levitt Pays Tribute to Dr. King in Deed—Not Empty Phrases” ­(Kushner, 2009, p. 195). Encountering Levitt through a Black feminist lens reveals that while he was a valiant pioneer in residential development, he also pioneered suburban racist housing segregation which has adversely impacted ­people of color long before and after Levitt & Sons’ “tribute.” The company’s practices are especially grave because their normalized racist standard of exclusion coincided with the nationwide boom in residential development and provided an exemplar for racist copycat offspring in the housing industry. Thus, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Veterans Administration, banks, and builders were coming together

78  Rachel Alicia Griffin to make homeownership accessible to U.S. Americans, people of color were systematically barred from homeownership. Such practices played a fundamental role in confining African Americans into cyclical debt and poverty over multiple generations to the benefit of White society (Conley, 1999). A testament to the enduring injuriousness of Levitt & Sons’ White supremacy, Polly Dwyer, a White 60+ year Levittown, New York resident “never has had a friend from a racial minority” and 89 percent of her town’s residents identify as White (Sutter, 2011). The narrative depth missing from Trump’s Boy Scout speech confirms how important it is that Black women have mindfully excavated meaning from rhetoric for centuries; the existence and safety of ourselves and loved ones depends on our interpretive skills (Stanley, 2009). Applying our sophisticated techniques to Trump’s storytelling reveals his manipulative propagation of propertied whiteness and its ancillary forms of privilege to an audience of children and young adults who clap and chant in response. Aligning with Harris’ articulation of whiteness as “the quintessential property for personhood” and a valued possession that White people can freely use and enjoy, Trump presumes that his audience is of the center and can and should access “the privileges and benefits produced by white supremacy” (1995, p. 281)—just as he and the people he admires, including Levitt, have. A pronounced example of him doing so is embedded within his advice on vocational aspirations and resilience, he says: “[W]hen you do something that you love, you’ll never fail. What you’re going to do is give it a shot again and again and again. You’re ultimately going to be successful” followed by: [W]hen you do something that you love … it’s not work…You don’t think of it as work. When you’re not doing something that you like or when you’re forced into do something that you really don’t like, that’s called work, and it’s hard work, and tedious work (Regan, 2017) While it is easy to conclude that Trump’s advice is the most age appropriate aspect of his entire speech, this conclusion overlooks the valorization of systemic privilege exemplified by his identities as the rhetor, the way he identifies Levitt, and the assumed identities of his audience. More pointedly, opportunities to nurture passions as career trajectories, shape one’s livelihood into a loved obligation, risk failure, fail multiple times, doggedly pursue success as an eventual but not actualized outcome, and elude “hard” and “tedious” work are opportunities most commonly afforded to those with the utmost access to echelons of privilege that predictably facilitate the assumption of potential, access to formal education, and availability of financial backing, i.e., White cisgender males. Denoting the cultural cliché Do What You Love (DWYL) that Trump’s advice mirrors as paradoxical, Tokumitsu (2014) acknowledges that

Black Women’s Intellectualism  79 DWYL sounds “uplifting” yet, in actuality, “DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as ­noble self-betterment.” From this vantage point, Trump implicitly includes only elite White male Boy Scouts who can access the center and devalues the majority of workers in the United States and global world. Thus, “Elevating certain types of professions to something worthy of love necessarily denigrates the labor of those who do unglamorous work  that keeps society functioning” (Tokumitsu, 2014). Equally elemental to the sustainment of White supremacy, in addition to (re)territorializing the center as privileged Trump’s rhetoric also (re)secures the center as egocentric.

(Re)Territorializing the Egomaniacal Center Listening critically to Trump’s praise for Levitt, absent a holistic account of Levitt’s life story, exposes Trump’s investment in the valorization of what hooks’ terms “dominator culture” (hooks, 2013, p. 36). hooks cautions that “Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others … the ­pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most” (2004, p. 115–116). Rhetorically, Trump ­partners his pursuit of (re)securing the privileged center for wealthy White U.S. American cisgender men as the rightful occupants with egomaniacally installing himself as the consummate occupant. His rhetorical trademarks for doing so include obsessively trumpeting past victories, ­surrounding himself with applauding audiences, commanding praise from his ­Administration, highlighting others’ mistakes and failures, and imposing a rigid binary wherein he is always right/good/truthful/genuine and those who diverge are wrong/bad/deceitful/fake. Revealing the power and agency imbued by White male privilege, such trademarks were an impossibility for Obama as Trump’s predecessor and Clinton as Trump’s opposition. Analyzing the breadth of Trump’s Boy Scout remarks, his privileged egomaniacal proclivities are ever-present. Each egoistic ploy is especially conspicuous at the jamboree because the Boy Scouts aim to be “non-partisian” and their Scout Oath prizes service to others over egocentricity (Boy Scouts of America, 2017). More tellingly, the majority of the audience was underage and therefore unable to partake as voters in the successes Trump takes credit for, political processes he compulsively rails upon, or the election win he thanks them for. Scattered throughout his address, each ploy compels the audience to realize that they are in the presence of Trump’s admirable greatness. Ten seconds into his speech, Trump stokes his contentious relationship with the media over the size of his Inauguration crowds 7 months earlier by saying, “Boy, you have a lot of people here. The press will say it’s about 200 people” (Regan, 2017). Soon after, he says “Tonight we put aside all

80  Rachel Alicia Griffin of the policy fights in Washington DC … the fake news and all of that” followed by “who the hell wants to speak about politics when I’m in front of the Boy Scouts? Right?” (Regan, 2017). Incongruously, and unequivocally undermining Scout Oath and Scout Law, Trump then proceeds to pepper egomaniacal trademarks throughout his address rendering the entirety of his rhetoric overtly political. Modeling his commitment to dominator culture with his young audience invited to partake via cheers and chants, Trump layers justifications, characteristics, and enactments of toxic White masculinity to elevate himself as an exemplar of egocentric superiority. Following his immediate affront toward the press (mentioned again at 5:54 and 12:52), Trump also refers to Washington DC as a “cesspool” (4:01); pressures former Boy Scout and Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Tom Price to get “the votes tomorrow to kill this horrible thing known as Obamacare” (8:47); shames and out shows his predecessor by asking “By the way…did ­President Obama ever come to a jamboree? … The answer is no. But we’ll be back” (15:23); references November 8th as “a beautiful day” and “famous night” and then recounts several state by state examples of his Electoral College wins (25:41); mocks Hillary Rodham Clinton (25:33); and vows that his Administration will return “Merry Christmas” to the U.S. American shopping experience (28:55) (Regan, 2017). Taken altogether, Trump’s uber political demagoguery salutes dominant logics and serves as the foundation upon which he manipulates Levitt’s life story to narcissistically focus on himself even when he is talking about others. Consistent with toxic White masculinity as competitive and domineering, Trump’s storytelling highlights Levitt’s monetary fortune, social status, materialism, and, arguably most importantly to Trump, Levitt’s failure juxtaposed against his own comparable prestige as a businessman who has not (yet) lost his fortune. Utilizing Levitt as an opportunity to self-aggrandize, Trump begins the story about how they met by situating himself as a guest at a party with “the hottest people in New York” ­(Regan, 2017) in attendance when he inimitably recognizes an aged ­Levitt. Recounting their conversation to the Boy Scouts, Trump says in a tone laced with wonder at his own propensity: [S]itting in the corner was a little old man who was all by himself … I immediately recognized that that man was the once great William Levitt, of Levittown, and I immediately went over … and … I said, “Mr. Levitt, how are you doing?” He goes, “Not well, not well at all.” … And I said, “… You’re one of the greats ever in our industry. Why did this happen to you?” (Regan, 2017) According to Trump, Levitt recognized him before he introduced himself and explained his failures by saying “Donald, I lost my momentum”

Black Women’s Intellectualism  81 (Regan, 2017).2 Trump then explains to the audience that Levitt attributing his failure to the loss of momentum is significant because momentum is, A word you never hear when you’re talking about success when some of these guys that never made 10 cents, they’re on television giving you things about how you’re going to be successful, and the only thing they ever did was a book and a tape (Regan, 2017) In effect, Trump arrogantly shames the proverbial “guys that never made 10 cents”—arguably and ironically entrepreneurs who, similar to Trump’s defunct Trump University (Cassidy, 2016; Helderman,  2017), are selling “How To” information on achieving capitalistic success. ­Explicitly linking Trump University to the type of corporate sham Trump schools the Boy Scouts to avoid, in 2013 the Attorney General of New York described Trump University as “a classic bait-and-switch scheme” (The Guardian, 2016) and, within weeks of Trump’s election win, Cassidy (2016) describes him as the “incoming Con-Man-in-Chief.” ­Suturing the aura of toxic White masculinity that Trump exudes at the jamboree to his longstanding practice of centering himself as a paramount exemplar of power via wealth, in an advertisement for Trump University approved by Trump himself and quoted in the A ­ ttorney ­General’s petition, Trump is narrated as: [T]he most celebrated entrepreneur on earth. He’s earned more in a day than most people do in a lifetime. He’s living a life many men and women only dream about. And now he’s ready to share—with Americans like you—the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market. (Cassidy, 2016; Wall Street Journal, 2016) In addition to reflecting hierarchically classist ideals, a Black feminist standpoint is equally attuned to how Trump’s Trump University rhetoric, looped into his Boy Scouts speech by way of his repetitious use of campaign talking points, simultaneously relies upon racist hierarchies. At the intersections of race and nationality, the controversy surrounding Trump’s scholastic scheme served as an opportunity for him to tout White supremacist xenophobia on the 2016 campaign trail. Addressing the pending lawsuits against Trump University, he accused U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of being unable to impartially oversee cases against him because of Curiel’s Mexican heritage and, rudimentarily, because the judge is a “hater” (Totenberg, 2016). Trump also refers to Curiel as “Mexican” rather than “Mexican-American” to evoke ­anti-Mexican racism (Tolentino, 2016), locate Curiel outside of the normative center, and position himself (and subsequently whiteness) as a

82  Rachel Alicia Griffin more reputable source of credible objectivity. Also striking is that Trump personifies dominator culture to discredit Curiel as an Other when he superimposes legal discourse to justify his racist, xenophobic rhetoric; thus, to Trump, his campaign promise to build a U.S./Mexico border wall reflects an “inherent conflict of interest” for the judge (Tolentino, 2016). As such, Trump draws upon his White masculine privilege to establish a privileged boundary that denoted himself as an insider and Curiel as an outsider—despite their shared U.S. American identity. In close proximity to his racialized campaign rhetoric, Trump’s ­jamboree speech exalts the characteristics he associates with himself specifically and, more broadly, those he idealizes for U.S. American society. Less than 5 minutes into his speech, he indoctrinates the audience into his White supremacist campaign, now presidential, rhetoric when he refers to the Boy Scouts as “young patriots” and says, “The Scouts believe in putting America first” (Regan, 2017). Moreover, Trump does so by erroneously essentializing his mostly underage audience as voters who voted for him coupled with invoking his bedrock campaign slogan. He says, “what we did … is an unbelievable tribute to you and all the other millions and millions of people that came out and voted for Make ­A merica Great Again!” (Regan, 2017). Although Trump’s jamboree rhetoric is not overtly racialized, it is overtly racist and patriarchal. Thus, ranging from Trump’s commentary on health care to immigration to trade to crime to law, he makes it obstinately clear that he does not perceive people of color and/or people from countries predominantly populated by people of color as part of “America” or, reflecting j­ustifications of toxic White masculinity, those intended to benefit from the U.S. ­A merican legal rights and protections afforded to citizens and immi­ merican grants on U.S. land. Disturbingly, at each mention of “Make A Great Again,” the audience raucously claps or chants (e.g.,  “USA! USA!”) ­(Regan, 2017) and—intentionally or ­unintentionally—endorses Trump’s exclusionary views. The chants, in particular, make my Black feminist heart pound, their rumbling roar sounds like future generations of boys and men championing the tricks and trades of toxic White masculinity and preparing to strut Trump’s path and stampede the rights of Others for decades to come. Returning to Trump’s remembrance of Levitt and Levitt’s mention of his loss of momentum as the force that unhinged his wealth, after positioning Levitt as someone the Boy Scouts should admire, Trump then egocentrically claims Levitt’s wisdom as his own after narrating the ­former “great” as a failure whose losses made Trump “very sad” (Regan, 2017). Trump does so with the following sentiment nonverbally conveyed as a wise conclusion he came upon after thinking long and hard. He says: I thought about it, and it’s exactly true. He lost his momentum, meaning he took this period of time off, long, years, and then when

Black Women’s Intellectualism  83 he got back, he didn’t have that same momentum. In life, I always tell this to people, you have to know whether or not you continue to have the momentum. (Regan, 2017) Couched in Trump’s pedagogical tenor concerning individuals he castes ­ ormer as disappointments and/or failures (e.g., Levitt, Secretary Price, F President Obama, and Secretary Clinton) is the assertion that he—as a White cisgender man elected to the highest political office in the ­country—is the most illustriously accomplished of them all. As such, he is to be jubilantly applauded and revered despite the stench of arrogant entitlement more so than earned honor beneath his White male ­ resident plumage. That the Boy Scouts have invited the sitting U.S. p to visit the jamboree since 1937 and act as the organization’s honorary president (Boy Scouts of America, 2017) only intensifies Trump’s rhetoric as a trajectory to imbue boys and young men with toxic White masculinity. Albeit by default, he is their leader and, more dangerously, their role model. Oftentimes more nonverbally than verbally, Trump broadens his White patriarchal reach by (re)territorializing the center with predation as a coercive compliment to (re)securing privilege and egocentrism.

(Re)Securing the Predatory Center Less overt than Trump’s labor to etch the normative center with ­privilege and egocentrism is his potent undercurrent of predation as an enactment of toxic White masculinity. Predation rhetorically manifests via targeting those Trump deems less powerful by way of masked threats, subtle insults, pressure to conform, and lures to embolden and consumptively partake in his toxic White masculine milieu. The ­Political Economy of Predation: Manhunting and the Economics of Escape (2015) traces the ecological and economic evolution of predation across thousands of years. Synthesizing the expansive scope of his argument, Vahabi says: [H]umans are undoubtedly the master predators of our planet … humans became master predators not only by virtue of their inventive spirit in fabricating more destructive lethal weapons, but also because of their ability to behave as predator/protector. They thus transformed prey into their property and changed the meaning of predation. In this context, predation does not need to involve killing and feeding … Humans are able to endogenise or reinvent the prey according to their specific needs. Predation is now coercive appropriation of prey so that it could be used in multiple ways as a resource. (2015, p. 89)

84  Rachel Alicia Griffin Predatory behaviors enacted by men are most commonly theorized in scholarly discourses on violence against women and children (Flowers, 2006; McAlinden, 2006) and war, militarism, and military ­recruitment ­(Brownmiller, 1975; Chang, 1997; Hagopian & Barker, 2011). ­Emphasizing ­ ominant logics, the intimate dynamic between predatory behavior and d according to early 19th century economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen, “The pervading norm in the predatory community’s scheme of life is the relation of superior and inferior, noble and base, dominant and subservient classes, master and slave” (as quoted in Vahabi, 2015, p. 77). Extending the literatures on predation to presidential rhetoric, I argue that Trump, a self-proclaimed and voter installed “citizen of the center” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 293), utilizes his jamboree speech to normalize predation as an endemic trait of hegemonic White masculinity that in practice connotes toxic White masculinity. I also situate the Boy Scouts as his prey and have argued previously that Trump is indeed a sexual predator toward women (Griffin, 2017). To be clear about the argument proffered here, I am not contending that Trump is a p ­ edophile or child molester; however, his oratorical style on this particular occasion exemplifies grooming tactics that adults in positions of power often leverage to enact power and control over children (e.g., Craven, Brown, & Gilchrist, 2006; Hagopian & Barker, 2011; Winters & Jeglic, 2017). To further distill how Trump propagates toxic White masculinity as an ideal that boys and young men should emulate, I deconstruct how he employs seduction, browbeating, and deception—all couched in the power of the presidency—to groom the Boy Scouts into his ideological articulation of what Black feminists have long and warily understood as toxic White manhood. Amid the narrative presented to the Boy Scouts and the information left out, there is a sincere difference between the life William Levitt lived, his son James’ memory of his father, and the version of Levitt’s life story Trump appropriates (Foderaro, 2017; Lacayo, 1998; Pace, 1994; Trump & McIver, 2004). The more holistic tellings and retellings of Levitt’s life ­ evitt story reveal that Trump’s version hinges on incompleteness to ready L as his prey to be coerced and consumed on stage. Thus, for the Boy Scouts to fully appreciate Trump’s hyperbolic greatness and for Trump to fully bask in the glory of the audience venerating his White masculine presidential power, he must publicly feed on the insolvency of others. For Levitt, this means being narratively confined to a failure that Trump once admired but now outshines. Employing seduction to hail his audience into his retelling in preparation for an egocentric climax during which Trump establishes himself as the “great” that Levitt once was, soon after the first mention of Levitt as a real-estate tycoon Trump provocatively falters after describing Levitt’s yachting life as “very interesting” ­(Regan, 2017). Then, with a sparse hint of coquettishness, he says, “I won’t go any more than that, because you’re Boy Scouts so I’m not going to tell you what

Black Women’s Intellectualism  85 he did” (Regan, 2017). Effectively beckoned, the audience rumbles with “Boo!” Then, Trump asks “Should I tell you? Should I tell you?” playfully swats at the audience’s roaring “Yes!”, and then turns almost 180 degrees over his right shoulder to metaphorically chest bump with Interior ­Secretary Ryan Zinke and Energy Secretary Rick Perry—both Boy Scouts. ­Chuckling, Zinke and Perry orient toward Trump as he turns around and grin brightly at him just before Trump substitutes the tales of Levitt’s wild escapades that he has tantalized the audience with “Ah, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life” (Regan, 2017). In the seconds before Trump forecloses titillation as to whether he will share the salacious details, all three men exchange knowing glances that provoke misogynistic fantasies about the glory of womanizing. ­Despite Trump’s seductive yet unspoken hints at Levitt’s escapades, this provocation easily resonates with the audience given Trump’s reputation for predatory commentary and womanizing behavior as a White man in a position of power. Spanning his career, Trump has openly, repetitively, and unapologetically ridiculed women with sexist comments and ­injurious actions—ranging from Miss America and Miss Universe pageant contestants to female cast and crew members on The Apprentice to his daughter Ivanka Trump to comedian Rosie O’Donnell to Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to Republican presidential nominee contender Carly Fiorina to journalist Megyn Kelly to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Cohen, 2017; Time Magazine, 2015; ­“Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments about Women,” 2016). The patriarchal onslaught of Trump’s decades long predation imbued with the power and privilege of White masculinity exposes that he, and—­ according to his retelling—Levitt as well, situates women as propertied prey whose value rests in beauty and sex appeal as the resources Trump draws upon to affirm hegemonic White masculinity. With women well established as victims of his toxic predation, Trump leverages Levitt’s life story to coerce his audience of boys and young men as prey who also perform to his benefit. Reminiscent of Vahabi’s (2015) assertion that prey function as resources for predators, Trump exploits the Boy Scouts and their platform to tout characteristics of toxic White masculinity that he has publicly glorified for decades—wealth, winning, intimidation, dominance, sexual prowess, and even his penis size (Cohen, 2017; The New York Times, 2016; Trump & McIver, 2004). The Boy Scouts are so much so propertied prey that even Secretary Zinke, as one of the most powerful men in attendance as both a cabinet member and scout, aligns with Trump rather than Scout Oath and Scout Law despite appearing in his scouting uniform. Resourced by Trump as gleeful prey with the global world watching, the Boy Scouts succumb to him as a means to his desired end—a large audience who responds to him on camera with adoration and complimentary approval regardless of his White patriarchal toxicity.

86  Rachel Alicia Griffin Equally key to Trump’s predation are his varying efforts to feed off of and threaten who or what he deems deficient—whether it be the media that he loves to hate but cannot live without; the government he ran to oversee but outspokenly chides; or the cabinet members that he appointed but lacks outward respect for. An additional way that Trump shows (and shows off) his predation is by sacrificing others at the alter of his presidency. First, as previously mentioned, Trump makes it only 10 seconds into his speech before mockery sets in. Derogatory insults follow when Trump makes it less than 4 minutes before referring to Washington as a “swamp,” “cesspool,” and “sewer” (Regan, 2017). Less than 9 minutes in, Trump amps up his predatory behavior by taking aim directly at Secretary Price. Touting links between the Boy Scouts and his Administration to wild applause, Trump announces that “Ten members of my cabinet were Scouts” (Regan, 2017). After luring the audience to take pride in the role Boy Scouts play in his Administration, Trump sets a trap for Price’s fall from grace. Referencing the second upcoming effort of Republicans to repeal Obamacare, he says, “Dr. Price still lives the Scout Oath, helping to keep millions of Americans strong and healthy … he’s doing a great job. And hopefully he’s going to get the votes tomorrow” (Regan, 2017). Then, with a grimly playful glance over his left shoulder, Trump turns his back to the podium to ask Price directly “By the way, are you going to get the votes?” (Regan, 2017). Returning to the podium and audience, Trump then verbalizes the threat comedically wrapped in his personification as the United States’ reality television president by referencing The Apprentice with a mention of “You’re Fired!,” the catchphrase he became infamous for as the show’s host from 2004 to 2015. He says, “He [Price] better get them. He better get them. Oh, he better. ­Otherwise I’ll say, “Tom, you’re fired!” (Regan, 2017) enticing an audience uproar of laughter. Next, Trump smugly smiles, turns his back to the podium again, and walks back to his row of cabinet/Boy Scout supporters to shake hands, clap shoulders, and laterally pump his arms which altogether serves as a nonverbal acknowledgement of the revved up audience coupled with an implicit articulation of, “What can I do? They love me!” However, cognizant of how predation deceptively browbeats despite outward pleasantries, the Boy Scouts infatuation with Trump functions ironically because they are seemingly unaware that Trump just insulted and threatened Price on a global stage. In effect, Trump utilized flattery and humor to mask his warning and the audience was duped. Thus, despite Price’s MD, long political history including four terms in the Georgia state senate, and appointed cabinet position, and—regardless of his status as a Boy Scout at the Boy Scout’s Jamboree—even he was coerced, consumed, and sacrificed in accordance with Trump’s interest in displaying his predacious domination as a powerful White man at the top of the raced/gendered hierarchy.

Black Women’s Intellectualism  87 Quite telling of just how elemental predation is to Trump’s rhetorical style is how closely his nonverbals parody his World Wrestling ­Entertainment (WWE) appearances with Vince McMahon. Critiqued as a hypermasculine soap opera that trades in the capital of toxicity including aggression, cutthroat competition, and violence (Jhally & Ridberg, 2002; Soulliere, 2006), Cillizza (2017) describes pro wrestling as “the perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s presidency.” At the jamboree, Trump covertly recalls his 2007 “Battle of the Billionaires” performance on WrestleMania XXIII in which he bets, beats, body slams, shames, and shaves McMahon (Nessen, 2016; Oster, 2016). Watching Trump repeatedly turn his back to the audience, rhythmically set his posture and jutted jaw to the right or to the left, laterally pump his arms, and step back from the podium to give and receive masculine accolades from his onstage supporters—the Boy Scouts encounter not only POTUS but also the remnants of his time in the wrestling ring. Thus, although awkward for a presidential address, all of his nonverbal movements make contextual sense for someone trained to perform for and hype a crowd surrounding him on all sides of a wrestling ring. That Trump draws elements of his presidential rhetoric from the WWE for a speech in front of thousands of Boy Scouts is exceptionally indicative of the potency of his toxic White masculinity.

Concluding Reflections As a scholar-activist, my utmost concern is what Black women’s intellectualism exposes concerning how our forty-fifth president leverages toxic White masculinity as an admirably iconic characteristic of both manhood and presidential rhetoric. Black feminist exegesis reveals that toxic White masculinity is not merely an entertaining strategy in Trump’s rhetorical arsenal, rather it is his way of (re)territorializing the center as privileged, egomaniacal, and predatory as a salute to exclusionary U.S. American norms. Encased in nostalgia, “Make America Great Again!” is thus understood as a dangerous rallying cry that allows Trump and his supporters to publicly denounce diversity and difference in favor of a time when White men ruled with utter impunity. Furthermore, Trump’s disillusionment with narratives that depart from his toxicity is even more apparent amid the information about Levitt deliberately left out of his jamboree address; information that would have rendered Levitt’s life story considerably more in alignment with Scout Oath and Scout Law. Despite Levitt’s shortcomings bared via Black feminist spectatorship, he indeed revolutionized residential construction, redesigned suburban metropolises, and acquired exorbitant wealth doing so. However, his greatness or lack thereof as a Scouts’ role model is not confined solely to his accomplishments or failings, rather it is housed within his paradoxical complexity. Had Trump engaged in fulsome storytelling, the Boy Scouts

88  Rachel Alicia Griffin could have been familiarized with Levitt as a socially conscious homebuilder who worked directly with the FHA to advocate for veterans’ mortgages; a family man who paid homage to the roles his brother and father played in the creation of Levittowns; a leader in the Jewish community who served as the president and chairperson of the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York; a business man who was “as graceful in adversity as he had been when times were flush”; and a dreamer who embraced optimism despite failure (Kaufman, 1989; Rosenbaum, 1983). President Trump’s repugnant role modeling at the jamboree, masquerading as idyllic White manhood, is a societal calamity of the highest ­order that belongs to everyone, not just April Ryan or Black women or any Other group that Trump and his Administration target. From founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s exploitive relationship with Sally Hemmings (Gordon-Reed, 1997) to George W. Bush Jr.’s 2002 attempt to capitalize upon Oprah Winfrey’s popularity (Watson & Harris, 2009), Trump is not the first POTUS to subordinate Black women in ­service to dominator culture or the only White male in his Administration to target journalist April Ryan.3 “Since the inception of mass media, black female imagery has been used to maintain the status quo and fuel the capitalist machine” (Stanley, 2009, p. 36); however, the difference between the past and the present is that Black women have achieved what Muñoz conceptualizes as a “forward-dawning futurity” punctuated by a “rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another different world” (2009, p. 1). More pointedly, Ryan was visible and audible as a miner’s canary who signaled danger. Signaling a new dawn indeed, when the POTUS maltreated a Black woman, society noticed, outed his offensive behavior, and continues to publicly “talk back” (hooks, 1989) to his toxic White masculinity. Reminiscent of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), Toni Morrison aptly reminds us of the arduous audacity required to relentlessly toil against oppression in the era of Trump’s political ire. She says, Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of ­“Americaness” is color … So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a p ­ olitical platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble. (Morrison, 2016) Key to resisting the intersectional materiality of whiteness, Critical/­ Cultural, Feminist, and Queer scholars—and everyday people alike— must continually deconstruct privileged rhetoric in favor of humanizing Others. Doing so importantly undermines toxic White masculinity as

Black Women’s Intellectualism  89 a trick and trade of domination that situates White men as righteously privileged, egomaniacal, and predatory at everyone’s expense, including their own. To culturally survive Trump’s presidency, we must struggle against the shared vestiges of terror, hate, and pain with sharp ­intellect, strong will, and candid compassion—Black women have long showed us how.

Notes 1 Executive Order 11063 legally banned discrimination in housing and urban development (Kushner, 2009; Massey & Denton, 1993). 2 This interaction is also somewhat similarly narrated in Trump: How to Get Rich (2004). Of importance to note is that Levitt’s son James questions whether his father and Trump ever had this conversation indicating that “momentum” was “a word that my dad never used; at least I never heard him use it” (Foderaro, 2017). 3 In March 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, a White male, instructed Ryan to “please stop shaking your head again” while answering her questions about investigations into the Trump Administration (Fierberg, 2017).

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Black Women’s Intellectualism  91 Heldermen, R. S. (2017, March 31). Judge approves $25 million settlement in Trump University cases. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www. washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/03/31/judge-approves-25million-settlement-in-trump-university-cases/?utm_­term=.4e95a8d5e1db hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. New York, NY: Washington Square Press. hooks, b. (2013). Writing beyond race: Living theory and practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Jhally, S. (Producer & Director). (1997). bell hooks: Cultural criticism and transformation. [Motion Picture]. United States: Media Education Foundation. Jhally, S. (Writer & Director), & Ridberg, R. (Producer). (2002). Wrestling with manhood: Boys, bullying, and batterer [Motion Picture]. United States: ­Media Education Foundation. Karner, T. (1996). Fathers, sons, and Vietnam: Masculinity and betrayal in the life narratives of Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. ­A merican Studies, 37(1), 63–94. Kaufman, M. T. (1989, September 24). Tough times for Mr. Levittown. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/1989/09/24/magazine/ tough-times-for-mr-levittown.html?pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print Krieg, G., & Killough, A. (2017). Trump asks African-American reporter to set up meeting with Black lawmakers. CNN. Retrieved from www.cnn. com/2017/02/16/politics/donald-trump-april-ryan-congressional-black-­ caucus/index.html Kushner, D. (2009). Levittown: Two families, one tycoon, and the fight for civil rights in America’s legendary suburb. New York, NY: Walker & Company. Kupers, T. A. (2005). Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prisons. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61(6), 713–724. Lacayo, R. (1998). Suburban legend William Levitt. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989781-3,00.html Madison, D. S. (1995). Pretty Woman through the triple lens of Black feminist spectatorship. In E. Bell, L. Haas, & L. Sells (Eds.), From mouse to mermaid: The politics of film, gender, and culture (pp. 224–235). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Massey, D. S., & Denton, N. A. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McAlinden, A. (2006). ‘Setting ‘em up’”: Personal, familial and institutional grooming in the sexual abuse of children. Social & Legal Studies, 15(3), 339–362. Merriam-Webster. (2017). Definition of exegesis. Retrieved from www.­merriamwebster.com/dictionary/exegesis Morrison, T. (2016, November 21). Making America White again. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/makingamerica-white-again Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York: New York University Press. Nakayama, T. K., & Krizek, R. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 291–309.

92  Rachel Alicia Griffin Nessen, S. (2016). 4 ways Donald Trump’s pro wrestling experience is like his campaign today. National Public Radio. Retrieved from www.npr.org/ 2016/04/30/476198343/4-ways-donald-trumps-pro-wrestling-experience-islike-his-campaign-today Newsom, J. S. (2017, July 27). How to keep Donald Trump from spreading his toxic masculinity to future generations. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://time.com/4877364/trump-boy-scouts-jamboree-toxic-masculinity/ Oster, A. (2016, February 1). Donald Trump and the WWE: How the road to the White House began at ‘WrestleMania.’ The Rolling Stone. Retrieved from www.rollingstone.com/sports/features/donald-trump-and-wwe-how-theroad-to-the-white-house-began-at-wrestlemania-20160201 Pace, E. (1994, January 29). William J. Levitt, 86, pioneer of suburbs, dies. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/1994/01/29/obituaries/ william-j-levitt-86-pioneer-of-suburbs-dies.html?pagewanted=all Regan, H. (2017, July 25). Read the full script of President Donald Trump’s Boy Scouts Jamboree speech. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://time. com/4872118/trump-boy-scout-jamboree-speech-transcript/ Rosenbaum, R. (1983, December). The house that Levitt built. Esquire Magazine, 378–391. Sexton, J. Y. (2016, October 13). Donald Trump’s toxic masculinity. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/opinion/­donaldtrumps-toxic-masculinity.html Smith, V. (2000). Black feminist theory and the representation of the “Other.” In N. Winston (Ed.), African American literary theory: A reader (pp. 369–384). New York, NY: New York University Press. Soulliere, D. M. (2006). Wrestling with masculinity: Messages about manhood in the WWE. Sex Roles, 55(1), 1–11. Squires, C. R. (2013). bell hooks: A critical introduction to media and communication theory. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Stanley, T. L. (2009). The specter of Oprah Winfrey: Critical Black female spectatorship. In E. Watson & J. Harris (Eds). The Oprah Phenomenon (pp. 35–49). Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Sutter, J. D. (2011). Times are changing in the early ‘all-alike’ suburb Levittown. CNN. Retrieved from http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/20/ times-are-changing-in-levittown-the-first-u-s-suburb/ The Guardian (2016). Trump University fraud claim revisited by New York appeals court. The Guardian. Retrieved March 1, 2016 from www.theguardian. com/us-news/2016/mar/01/trump-university-claim-revisited-by-new-yorkappeals-court The New York Times (2016). Transcript of the Republican Presidential debate in Detroit. The New York Times. Retrieved March 4, 2016 from www.­nytimes. com/2016/03/04/us/politics/transcript-of-the-republican-­presidential-debatein-detroit.html Time Magazine (2015). Transcript: Read the full text of the primetime ­Republican debate. Time Magazine. Retrieved August 6, 2015 from http://time.com/3988276/ republican-debate-primetime-transcript-full-text/ Tokumitso, M. (2014). In the name of love. Slate. Retrieved from www.slate.com/ articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_ do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html

Black Women’s Intellectualism  93 Tolentino, J. (2016, September 20). Trump and the truth: The “Mexican” judge. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ trump-and-the-truth-the-mexican-judge Totenberg, N. (2016). Who is Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the man Trump attacked for his Mexican ancestry? National Public Radio. Retrieved from www.npr. org/2016/06/07/481140881/who-is-judge-gonzalo-curiel-the-man-trump-­ attacked-for-his-mexican-ancestry Touré. (2017). Donald Trump is the personification of toxic masculinity. The Daily Beast. Retrieved from www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-is-thepersonification-of-toxic-masculinity “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments about Women.” (2016, O ­ ctober 8). The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/­ donald-trump-tape-transcript.html. Trump, D. J., & McIver, M. (2004). Trump: How to get rich. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. Vahabi, M. (2015). The political economy of predation: Manhunting and the economics of escape. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Watson, E., & Harris, J. (2009). Introduction: Oprah Winfrey as subject and spectacle. In E. Watson & J. Harris (Eds). The Oprah Phenomenon (pp. 1–31). The University Press of Kentucky. Winters, G. M., & Jeglic, E. L. (2017). Stages of sexual grooming: Recognizing potentially predatory behaviors of child molesters. Deviant Behavior, 38(6), 724–733.

6 From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas (Re)Locating the Performances of White Femininity Dawn Marie D. McIntosh The ‘White Woman’ is frail, vulnerable, delicate, sexually pure but at times easily led astray. (Frankenberg, 1997, p. 11)

Thirty years ago, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) among many other feminists of color challenged White women to do the labor of marking racial issues within femininity. Yet, White feminists continue to disregard her challenge. Many White feminist scholars, myself included, continue to lack an intersectional-embodied approach to our work, especially with respect to racial intersections. Outside of a few White feminist scholarship (Davy, 1997; Deliovsky, 2010; Frankenberg, 1993, 2001; McIntosh 2014, 2017; McIntosh, 2012; Moon, 1999; Ware, 1992, 1996 2001), the embodied everyday experiences of whiteness in relation to White women continues to remain lost. Most of the work on White femininity is done by feminists of color (Anzaldúa, 1987; Calafell, 2010, 2015; ­Carrillo Rowe, 2000, 2008; Carrillo Rowe & Malhortra, 2007; Hill Collins, 2000, 2001; hooks, 2000, 1982; Hurtago, 1996; Moraga, 2000; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2002; Razack, 2002; Shome, 1999, 2011). Their work is valuable for articulating what White women gain from whiteness. However, whiteness often recenters its power when the toil of articulating White feminine racism falls on people of color because all too often White bodies can and do overlook our personal involvement. White feminist scholars need to begin, return, and/or prioritize doing whiteness research. My working definition of whiteness here articulates the tactical strategies of whiteness (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) by focusing on the performatives of the White body. Using performance theory and the feminist project of intersectionality, I define whiteness as an intersectional embodied performance. Performance theory struggles against binary constructions of race by opening understandings of whiteness as embodied by not simply White bodies but a performing praxis of

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  95 whiteness.  Performance  posits race and whiteness as enactments that are constructed through historical and relational aspects of bodies ­(Warren, 2003). The body performs race, or as Warren claims, whiteness is not a fixed entity but a performative accomplishment (pp. 29–35). ­A lexander (2004) clarifies, “Whiteness ‘itself’ resists codifying. It is only noticeable in its performance. Culture is doing, race is being, and ­performance plays a similar yet alternating role in the accomplishment of social membership” (p. 650, emphasis in original). Approaching whiteness from performance theory centers the body and challenges research to focus on the mundane moments in everyday practices as a means of locating the making and doing of whiteness. Performance theory also requires whiteness scholarship acknowledge that all cultural practices are racially grounded in the politics of whiteness (Warren & Kilgard, 2010, p. 263). However, the normality of whiteness continues to remain lost when we do not organize these performances contextually through the multiplicities of our identities (Moon & Nakayama, 2005, p. 89). To trace the embodiments of whiteness, one must examine the intersections of our identities in relation to whiteness. In other words, intersectionality challenges us to understand whiteness as politically ­organized not only racially but also through our gender, ability, sexuality, age, class, and nationality (Chávez, 2012; Crenshaw, 1991; ­Combahee River ­Collective, 1997; Lorde, 1984; May, 2014). McIntosh (2014) notes the power of whiteness shifts and is performed differently depending on the gender, sexuality, ability, and class of that body. Standing at the performative matrix of whiteness, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, and class clarifies the social reality of whiteness as an embodied act complexly intermingled with all the cultural dominant isms. Working from an intersectional performative principle of whiteness, I return to the White body, the production of whiteness created by White embodiments, and the material effects these performances have on cultural constructions of power. Specifically, I am interested in the White feminine body. I desire to recognize the specificities of White feminine performances within my own life by questioning how whiteness is socially constructed on and continually (re)created through the embodiments of myself/White women. This research begins the process of deconstructing the everyday embodiments of whiteness within/through White femininity. By examining the embodied acts of White femininity, I am translating its particularities and locating the strategic rhetoric of whiteness at the intersections of femininity, White bodies, class, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Demarcating the performative roles of White women is imperative to whiteness research because it works to point to the racial workings of White women and remove the normalcy of whiteness. In turn, the vast claims of whiteness’ invisibility, especially claimed by White people, is made unstable by pointing to the variable visibility of whiteness through these White feminine performances.

96  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh Frankenberg (2001) utilizes a theoretical conception of “images” or tropes to locate workings of whiteness by White embodiments (p. 11). She positions archetypes as racial compositions which asks us not to prove they exist but rather use them as lenses to understand the normative cultural dispositions of bodies (p. 11). Thus, this chapter articulates six White feminine performances to create a theoretical framework of White femininity to signify performative roles White women are cast into and can/do choose to perform. To do this, I center my method on feminist of color scholarship. First, I looked to the feminist of color scholarship that details the controlling tropes constructed on their bodies by White patriarchy (Anzaldúa, 2007, Bernadette Calafell, 2005; 2015; De La Garza, 2004; Hill Collins, 2000; hooks, 2012; Moraga, 2000). This scholarship served as my foundation to locate the performances of their unmarked-dichotomist-White counterpart.1 Specifically, I utilize Hill Collins’ (2000) five controlling images of Black women (Mammies, Matriarchs, Welfare Mothers, Hoochies, and Black Ladies) (pp. 69–96) and the controlling imagery in the Chicana scholarship of De La Graza (2004), Calafell (2005), Anzaldúa (2007), and Moraga (2000), which brought me to six White feminine performances: White Virgin, Good White Female Employee, White Pinup, White Supermom, White Trash Mama, and White Lady. Each of these performances are by no means mutually exclusive or all-inclusive but demonstrate the roles White women are culturally ­expected to perform, can perform, and continue to perform. 2 Following the feminists of color before me, I detail the aesthetic expressions of these six White feminine performances through history (De La Garza, 2004; Hill Collins, 2000), popular cultural texts (Hill Collins, 2000), legends and myths (Anzaldua, 2007), and embodied realities (Calafell, 2005; Moraga, 2000). This chapter is a self-reflexive cultural critique that contextualizes these six performances by locating their racial ­performatives in cultural contexts and pointing to their embodiments of whiteness through scholarship derived from these cultural framings. 3 The remainder of this chapter details the framework for the six White feminine performances.

Performances of White Femininity The White Virgin I begin with the White Virgin because her performances of White womanhood pull from the historical roots of whiteness. She manifests the foundations of White femininity’s power, idealization. Hill Collins (2000) explains that the virgin/whore dichotomy is controlled by images of women of color as jezebels, whores, or “hoochies,” whereas White women are the representation of purity (p. 81). This dichotomy arises

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  97 from the historical roots of slavery where Black womanhood was categorized as sexually aggressive “wet nurses” that served to “emotionally nurture their white owners” (p. 82). The movie 12 Years a Slave ­denotes this historical relationship between women of color as jezebels and White women as “virtuous” in service to White patriarchy (McQueen et al., 2014). Pasty’s (the Black female slave) performance of Black femininity is reduced to a sexual object, while Ms. Epps (the White wife of the plantation owner) performs the respectable White wife dependent on her White husband (McQueen et al., 2014). As the character of Ms. Epps denotes, the performance of the White Virgin hinges on White feminine performances of virtue and propriety. The White Virgin also performs virtue through acts of victimization. The White Virgin primarily pulls on “helplessness” through a White feminine performance of needing “saving,” generally by White men. For example, audience members learn that Master Epps at any moment of marital dissatisfaction will return Ms. Epps “back to that hogs trough where I found you” (McQueen et al., 2014). Interestingly, the audience is brought to sympathize with her character because it matches that very performance of White feminine victimization dominant culture is so ­familiar. The White Virgin’s innocence depends on her performance of helplessness through acts of dependency on patriarchy. Shome (2014) touches on these White feminine performances explaining how the images and media coverage of Princess Diana organized her as a vulnerable mother, whose death was a result to her helplessly falling into extreme fame. These acts of helplessness necessitate White masculinity protect the White Virgin. Here lies the foundation of White feminine superiority that differentiates White women from women of color and obligates White women to protect themselves from any association with aspects of women of color. The White Virgin’s performances are the quintessence of White ­femininity. The White female body must serve patriarchy by exemplifying the norms of heterosexuality. This controlling image serves White male dominance by protecting the White race. White women are accountable to maintain whiteness in relation to sexuality, gender, and race. The White Virgin, in turn, bears the responsibility of representing sexual purity. Today, the White Virgin performs this purity through discursive framings of innocence. Dubrofsky (2006) exposes how White women and women of color continue to be cast in different dichotomous roles within reality television. White women can engage with the sexual promiscuity of The Bachelor but also be granted the privilege to rise above as the ideal “virgin” worth marrying, something the women of color on the show are never granted (p. 58). In addition to this, White women maintain their purity only through “compulsory ‘white’ heterosexuality and racial solidarity” (Deliovsky, 2010, p. 58). Her White sexuality is a practice of discipline and privilege that affords her desirability

98  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh (McIntosh, 2017). The White virgin is pure because she only sexually engages with White men and only mingles with White people. Overall, The White Virgin’s construction of purity categorically places White women as idealized. However, they must properly perform the idealized racial imagery of the White Virgin through embodiments of modesty, needing White heteropatriarchal chivalry, heterosexual and racial solidarity, and virtuous/decorous actions. The White Virgin lays the foundation to performative aspects of White femininity through her projections of innocence, purity, virtue, and helplessness. From performing purity to performing perfectionism, our next archetype knows exactly how to serve White masculinity by working nine to five. The Good White Female Employee The Good White Female Employee aspires to prestigious positions of employment by embodying intersectional performances of whiteness, patriarchy, and classism. The Good White Female Employee originated from the nineteenth-century women’s movement and continues to maintain her roots in these performances of perfectionism, political victimization, ignorance, and competitive natures to this day. With the dominant members of the suffragist movement White, heterosexual, middle-class women, their political goals reflected only politics of gender creating racist and classist divisions among women (hooks, 1982, pp. 122–148). Feminism, then, became categorized as a young White straight bourgeois women’s group, situating a particular image of career-oriented women as White, affluent, driven, single, and educated. Historically, we see these Good White Female employees with their hair tied up or cut in more masculine short hairstyles, in pant suits, with little or no makeup. This is where a White feminine performance like Secretary Clinton is socially punished while First Lady but not while Secretary of State ­because her performance of White femininity matches the Good White Female Employee not the White Virgin (e.g. Bell, 2006; Parry-Giles, 2000). Clinton’s performance of femininity demonstrates how the Good White Female Employee is structured as an “enlightened” progressive woman that cannot be racist because she is an educated feminist. The racist lineage of the suffragist movement follows the Good White Female Employee to this day through her use of “breaking the glass ceiling” at any cost. By not acknowledging the multiplicities of oppression (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997, p. xv), the Good White Female Employee believes she must fight for employment opportunities stripped from her due to patriarchy often at the expense of Others. As hooks (1986) notes, “Identifying themselves as ‘victims’, they (white women) could abdicate responsibility for their role in the maintenance and perpetuation of sexism, racism, and classism, which they did by insisting that only men were the enemy” (p. 128). By unreflexively focusing on

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  99 political  victimization,4 White bourgeois feminists/employees justify their racist, homophobic, and classist behavior as a means to fight for the rights of “all” women. Katy Davy (1997) points out that White straight women are the only performances of femininity allowed to be categorized as “good.” Bell and Golombisky (2004) explain “good” girls within the classroom “don’t talk much, talk long, or staunch uncooperative interruptions” (p. 298). Performances of “good” are embodied by the Good White Female Employee through acts of obedience, submission, and silencing themselves. Calafell (2012) adds that White “feminist” colleagues would instruct her to “suck it up” and ignore the racist and misogynist ­behavior of White male employees to get ahead within the academy. The Good White Female ­Employee understands how to embody these performances to confide in their White male bosses, which grants her many occupational rewards. Those White female employees who do not exemplify the performances of needing White heteropatriarchy differ themselves from the good White female employees. These White women are disciplined as asexual, too assertive, excessively independent, and a threat to other White employees, especially White men. White women employees who do not strategically perform, rather conform, to the performance of White patriarchy threaten whiteness, masculinity, and are culturally disciplined as not “good” employees. However, the primary “good” trait of the Good White Female employee is perfectionism. She cannot do wrong, make a mistake, or be wrong. Perfectionism is accomplished always at the expense of Others and enacted through performances of tactical ignorance and victimization. First, the “good” White feminine performance requires acts of tactical ignorance. “Good” girls cannot ever intentionally do “wrong.” Instead, they mask mistakes through performances of ignorance. White women justify acts of White violence by masking them with “good” intentions of simply not knowing better (Squires et al., 2010, p. 242). Lorde and Rich (1981) pointed out many years ago that White feminism manifested a scapegoat of well-meaning acts of ignorance that violently exploit women of color. To this day, Ortega (2006) notes that White feminists continue this practice of “loving, knowing ignorance” to advance their personal agendas. The Good White Female Employee demoralize her colleagues of color through passive aggressive niceties (Calafell, 2009; 2007; Hurtago, 1996; Razack, 2002). She sits in meetings and speaks over other women, generally women of color, to ensure she is heard and then patronizingly smiles to her female colleague of color as if her words accounted to better both their careers. She masks her racism in liberal acts of political ignorance, claiming her gender marginalization as insight into racism. This complex performance of political ignorance allots White women a means to recenter whiteness and gain workforce privilege.

100  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh When called out on these acts or exposed for wrong doing, the Good White Female Employee leans on performances of victimization. Calafell (2012) claims performances of crying are tactics by White women to “deflect blame and guilt, “victimizing” the white woman while centering whiteness and reaffirming the savage Otherness of women of color” (pp. 122–123). Performances of crying are not entirely absent of honest emotions, but White women must acknowledge these performances are taught to us to gain advantages and abduct blame. Whiteness validates victimizing performances for White women and excludes any person of color to such performances.5 White feminine performances of ignorance and victimization are racist bullying masked as “innocent ignorance.” The Good White Female Employee’s performances provide embodied acts of whiteness that gain her power within the workforce, and, in turn, she is allotted more economical (not to exceed the White male) employment status. While the Good White Female Employee wears suits and slacks, the following White feminine performance works in her miniskirt and heals.

The White Pinup There is no virgin/whore dichotomy when it comes to White women. Rather, sexually idealized White women are categorized as “pinups.” I use the term pinup to signify how these White women are seen as sexual symbols to be displayed and idealized. The White Pinup is the definition of normative heterosexual desire. She saturates popular culture. While she is certainly not portrayed as the White Virgin, the White Pinup is never a whore. She is not dirty or in other articulations a “hoochie” but a “centerfold” for hetero-masculine lust. The White Pinup’s body plays a primary role in her performance of White femininity. Her excessive body is a “centerfold” for idealized sexual desire. Barbie is a global representative of this White, idealized, U.S. American beauty physique. Hedge (2001) notes figures like Barbie serve to organize White femininity as claim to “racial purity, authenticity and cultural exclusivity” (p. 130). Hedge demonstrates how the power of whiteness regarding femininity becomes rooted in Barbie’s White skin, large breasts, small waist, and long blond hair. Redmond (2003) asserts that thin White women are utilized in advertising as idealized representations. The White women on the television series The Girls Next Door serve as cultural examples of the White Pinup’s body and their ­performances of sexualizing their body to acquire White heteronormative power (Burns, & Hefner, 2005–9). The White Pinup’s p ­ erformances of femininity are generally embodied through sexual availability, youthful ignorance, and competitiveness for White male attention. The White Pinup’s performance of sexuality serves heterosexuality, patriarchy, and whiteness to gain power. Her sexuality never resembles

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  101 that of masculine sexuality because her sexual performances are not conquests. Rather, the White Pinup’s performance of sexuality exploits her body in service to White masculine heterosexuality. Her performance of White femininity allows her the privilege to sexualize herself and, in turn, receive financial and cultural rewards. Scholars Gill (2008) and Harvey and Gill (2001) demonstrate how women can use their sexuality for personal gain. While this remains debatable, the undisputable truth is that the White Pinup is granted power because of White idealize beauty norms and heterosexual desire that centers on White masculinity. An example of the White Pinup utilizing her White performances of sexuality is seen through the movie The House Bunny (Lutz et al., 2008). In the movie, Shelly, a White ex-Playboy Bunny, teaches the “ugly” o ­ utcast sorority girls how to get male attention. She explains that you have to “skimp-tify your body by showing as much skin as possible, your legs, arms, belly, and most of all your chest” (Lutz et al. 2008). Shelly demonstrates how the White Pinup obtains power by serving patriarchy through sexualizing herself for White men. Shelly’s character also denotes how her White body is afforded this power because she matches idealized White beauty norms. The White Pinup must also master the performance of ignorance to sexualize herself. Foolishness is a cornerstone to the White Pinup’s femininity. A White woman must remain completely unthreatening to patriarchal whiteness to maintain herself as a sexualized image. Simply look at the slogan for The Bunny House, “Bodaciously going where no Bunny has gone before … College” (Lutz, McCullah, Smith, & Wolf, 2008). The White Pinup relies on White men to make decisions for her and master her life. These acts of naivety and dependence are performative choices that serve patriarchy and whiteness. In the end, they empower White femininity again through acts of needing White masculinity because the White Pinup is “too foolish” to help herself. The White Pinup is culturally accepted because her performance of White femininity does not challenge White masculinity. The White Pinup is not only limited to celebrity status. One can find her at any heterosexual bar, restaurant, holiday party, or social gather for that matter. White women embody the performative norms of the White Pinup to gain social acceptance (e.g. Calafell 2010). These feminine performances may be best learned through popular culture, but in the end, White women know that if they “skimptify their body” in service to White heteronormativity they are socially accepted, deemed desirable, and in turn, are granted much social agency. Notably, the White Pinup’s performance is perhaps the most fragile archetype to maintain because it is intensely rooted on matching the specific White idealized body. Anna Nicole Smith is an example of this fragile performative balance. In her early years, Smith’s body is discursively framed as the ideal White Pinup. However, Brown (2005) claims

102  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh Smith’s very public weight gain and legal battle for her late husband’s money (re)situated her into a White trash trope. The imagery of her White body relies on her White feminine performance as serving White men. When the White Pinup becomes independent or her body alters from idealized norms, she shifts from a sexual object to another White feminine performance. This performative fragility exposes why the White Pinup’s femininity becomes intensely competitive with other women. White power is granted to the White Pinup but always at the cost of another White woman loosing her cultural power. Here we see one reason why White women discursively shame other women’s bodies. Again, the movie The Bunny House demonstrates the undertone of White femininity being ruthlessly competitive with each other for White male attention. The motivation for Shelly’s sexualizing instructions to her sorority sisters is to acquire male attention from the other sorority houses that have cruelly treated the outcast sorority. The performances of the White Pinup center on White men and pivot women against each other for White patriarchal rewards. From Playboy mansions to white picket fences, our next White ­feminine performance capitalizes on the U.S. American Dream through her role in the White nuclear family. The White Supermom The White Supermom embodies many of the same performances of the White Virgin and Good White Female Employee but extends her servitude to White heterosexuality and patriarchy through her performances of White motherhood. The best picture of these performances is captured by the popular 1960s image of the White mother with short blond hair, dressed in a moderate tea-length dress with an apron, holding a pie, and attending to her perfectly groomed White son and daughter. One may ­ erformance conthink this image is antiquated but this White feminine p tinues to remain the staple for modern representations of the White U.S. American nuclear family. While clothing and hairstyles have changed, the performative ideals for White motherhood continue to follow this foundational representation. What positions the White Supermom as “super” is how she can accomplish multiple tasks “perfectly” and remain quixotically happy doing these many household and parenting tasks. She juggles many different obligations with flawless ease all the while maintaining a “happy” marriage, clean house, well-behaved White children, and a perfect figure. The White Supermom must meet each of these unattainable expectations to be recognized as a productive member of the White family, especially if she no longer maintains her full-time or part-time job. With her career now child-rearing, the White Supermom breastfeeds her children, cooks

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  103 only organic foods, homeschools or volunteers at her kids prestigious private/charter school, has a small figure, and always look presentable. In many regards, what makes her “super” is also the very foundation to her whiteness. Conceptualizations of perfect mothering is always granted to White mothers until they prove otherwise in their parenting and homemaking. The unrealistic obligations and unattainable pressures of the White Supermom is placed on all mothers. But only White mothers are afforded the “supermom” framing until they perform otherwise. A great example of the White Supermom can be located on the YouTube-based blog What’s Up Moms cofounded by two White women, Elle Walker and Meg Resnikoff. While much of their series exemplifies the norms of whiteness perpetuated through White motherhood. The series by ­Resnikoff, Eat, forefronts the norms of White culture, whiteness, and White motherhood through expectations of cooking only organic and vegetarian-based food norms. Furthermore, White cultural–based recipes are the only recipes discussed hence the only healthy food options for your family. Shows like What’s Up Moms also demonstrate the core ideals of the White Supermom are White homemaking and motherhood. The White Supermom handles everything in relation to h ­ omemaking. She is responsible for the cleanliness of the White suburbia house, laundry, cooking, rearing the children, and meeting the needs of her White husband. Homemaking is a performance of motherhood that White femininity does in acts of selflessness, silencing herself, and passive aggressions (McIntosh, 2017, p. 164). Moon (1999) claims, “The [white] home is often a site of cultural learning and racial indoctrination wherein dominant notions of “competent” whiteness are reinscribed” (p. 181). The White home plays a key role in the (re)production of whiteness where it is safely learned and embraced. The White home is also a space of extreme cultural expectation on White women. Moon adds, “For white women, home is often a space in which they are trained to take their “proper” place within these relations, in particular, those of white supremacy” (p. 180). Hence, it is the White home that reflects the performative success or failures of the White wife’s embodiment of the White Supermom. The White Supermom also maintains a primary role in patriarchy, heterosexuality, and whiteness through her childbearing and her child-­ rearing. A pregnant White woman’s body is a signifier to whiteness. Taylor (2011) claims, “Only specific types of pregnant bodies are beautiful and/or sexually desirable—white, tight, youthful bodies with social capital and appropriate aspiration” (p. 27). Whiteness maintains power through the hetero-married, pregnant White woman by perpetuating the racist ideology that only women of color have children out of wedlock, ­poisoning society with crime children (Hill Collins, 2000, p. 81). Moon (1999) denotes the importance of the White mother to train whiteness

104  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh onto her children (p. 180). Harris (2000) claims the White woman, “literally embodies both a mediation on and a mediation between the white patriarch and his life’s meanings” (194). Shome (2010) adds, “The ­subject of white femininity emerges in, and through, its subject/ification in white patriarchy. It is because of this that familial domesticity ends up being one of the central dramas in the performance of white femininity” (p. 328). The White Supermom centers her home on the White husband and raising conforming White children. She leaves her job to attend to her children and casts judgment on any mother that does not perform these White domestic obligations. Ware (2001) refers to this White motherhood as “a version of white femininity that is passionately concerned with the task of trying to reproduce the racial purity longed for by their menfolk” (p. 65). White familial domesticity is a primary centerfold for White femininity. The White Supermom showcases how White femininity embodies the possibility to recenter whiteness through White motherhood. Images of Princess Diana and now Princess Kate demonstrate the globalized fixity of White women’s performances of femininity to become bound to the reproduction of whiteness through motherhood and their “super” perfect performances of it (Shome, 2014, 2011). Truly, the White Supermom is a primary performance of feminine whiteness serving heteronormativity. The White Supermom builds her identity on other White femininity performatives of perfectionism, purity, and obligatory expectations. She exemplifies how the White women’s body organizes White heteropatriarchy through her service to it. The White Supermom serves whiteness and patriarchy to such a degree she is the cornerstone figure to the “white patriarchal household,” the bedrock representation of U.S. White culture (Harris, 2000). Western television series featuring White families maintain a long history of centering the home on the White Supermom from Leave It to Beaver, Home Improvement, ­According to Jim, 7th Heaven to current day Family Guy, and Modern Family.6 While each show differs in their premise, they all denote the imperative role of White motherhood’s service to whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. The imagery of the White mothers on these shows work to recenter whiteness through their allegiance and service to this “mock macho” performance of White masculinity (Hanke 1998). Shome (2011) frames White motherhood as a globalized imagery where White mothers represent the ideals of purity, health, and nurturing. These performances of White motherhood “erase the masculinist violence of western colonialism” (p. 390) through her embodiment of nurturing natures. The White Supermom’s femininity protects and reproduces the misconception of White bodies as not projecting racism through their embodied acts. If the White Supermom is the essence of nurturing, surely she is not racist.

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  105 From picket fences to trailer parks, our next White feminine performance is a White mama with a much different parenting style. The White Trash Mama The White Trash Mama exemplifies the performance of failed White femininity. She is lazy, stupid, crude, and poor with a grotesque excess body—either extremely thin or fat. The White Trash Mama serves an imperative role to discipline and define failed White femininity. The White Trash Mama is explicitly “trashy” in the sense of her crass nature and talk (Moon, 1999, p. 186). “Trashy” is framed through the White Trash Mama’s racists, sexually explicit, ignorant, and vulgar performances. She exemplifies failed White motherhood and is a form of darkened White femininity (Watts, 2005). She has children born out of wedlock or products of a “fourteen year-old girl and her funny uncle” (Kipnis, 1997, pp. 118–119) and raises her children to be ignorant and disgruntled blue-collar employees. Performative norms of the White Trash Mama can be located on such television series as My Name is Earl7 and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo8 . Both shows showcase the common imagery of the White Trash Mama and her performances. Both shows feature White young girls who are involved in beauty pageants as children, live in poor neighborhoods with White mothers who do not work, and White fathers with blue-collar jobs. Despite that one is a scripted television series and the other is a reality television series, both shows mirror similar White Trash Mama performances demonstrating the fixity of this White feminine performance. Jennifer Reeder, a performance artist, created a persona “White Trash Girl.” Reeder describes “White Trash Girl” in a fake southern accent as a social outcast, born into poverty as a result of sexual immorality ­(Kipnis, 1997, pp. 118–119). These cultural performances demonstrate how failed White women are limited to one particular trope of sexual immorality, poverty, uneducated, and overall culturally outside the norms of White enculturation. The performative intersections between whiteness, White women, and class are complex here, where class plays a primary role in the d ­ enotation of the White Trash Mama. She is doomed to a life of poverty due to her bad representation of herself (unclean and ragged) (Kipnis, 1997, p. 124), her overall lack of work ethic, her flamboyant hyperaggressive attitude, and overall crass nature towards men. The White Trash Mama is not restricted to poverty, but more so, the performance of failed whiteness confines her to norms of impoverishment, welfare, uneducated, and unsophisticated. She is the only White woman ever culturally represented as domestically beaten and deserving it. For these reasons among others, it is clear that the White Trash Mama experiences hardships of racism. White trash norms are racists limitations that excuse acts of violence,

106  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh confine them to poverty, and overlook issues of domestic violence inflected on White poor women. Often class issues complicate understandings of White privilege. Many White poor challenge the concept of White bodies having privilege due to their experience with racism/classism inflicted on them. The classist and sexist marginalization on the White Trash Mama is similar to many of the controlling images of the Black Welfare Mother denoted by Hill Collins (2000, p. 78). In many ways, these White poor mothers are marginalized by racism too. The performances of the White Trash Mama have much potential to understanding the relationships of multiple oppressions. However, whiteness in White femininity leans on “the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power” (Lorde, 117), something that women of color are never offered the opportunity to do. The seduction to access cultural power is heightened by marginalized identities. Black masculinity or machismo in Latinx identity are examples of how marginalized bodies will exert aggressive acts against Others to acquire some cultural power (Holling 2006; Griffin & Calafell, 2011). In the case of the White Trash Mama, she evokes her White power through her overt racist performances. Moss’ (2003) ethnographic ­research of poor Whites in the United States demonstrates how White bodies are allowed the privilege to choose performances of class (p. 39). However, those White poor who tend to embrace their class positions maintain racial power through explicit racism. While the White Trash Mama is pinned to failed White femininity, she is afforded the privilege of overt racism and granted the excuse for their “trashy” behavior due to their poor upbringing. The White Trash Mama’s racism serves an important role in whiteness by carrying the weight of White racism. In turn, the White Trash Mama culturally differentiate those “enlightened” U.S. bureaucratic White women. Racism becomes deferred onto the lower class to employ White elitist femininity as never racist. By situating the White Trash Mama as hyper-racist, White capitalist patriarchy can manifests elitist White females as “colorblind” and thus not racist (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). While the White Trash Mama may be a “failed” image for White femininity, she plays an imperative role in forming the racist foundations of whiteness and excusing the colorblind/post-race ideologies of whiteness in/through White bodies. Overall, the White Trash Mama serves to define the binary opposition to idealized White femininities. For example, the sexual degradation of the White Trash Mama signifies the fallen White Virgin. Obese or thin bodies, excessively sexualized, and/or extremely vulgar, the White Trash Mama is the White feminine performances of grotesque excess that falls outside the idealized lines of White femininity. Due to her failed white­ irgin ness, she typically is not sympathized or protected like the White V but assumed she “put herself in those positions.” Her verbal and physical

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  107 aggression toward White men frames her as the failing White Pinup that is destined to a life of isolated impoverishment. Her ­posture of aggression toward men, specifically White men, displaces the White Trash Mama as sexually immoral and/or sexually aggressive thus the ruined White Pinup. The White Trash Mama cannot hold a job because her performance of White femininity does not match that of the bourgeois, perfectionist Good White Female Employee. She is culturally framed as ignorant and destined to a life of unemployment and thus the failed White Female Employee. The White Trash Mama falls short in her adherence to whiteness, White femininity, and patriarchy. Overall, she is the binary opposite of the White Supermom. Her children are born out of wedlock and raised without the affective abstractions of whiteness. The White Trash Mama knows her race and her children know their cultural place in impoverished outcast White enculturation. Rather than colorblind logics of the White Supermom indoctrination, the White Trash Mama raises children that embrace Confederate flags and the ideologies that follow that of White supremacist’s logics (Kipnes, 1997,  p.  120). While whiteness still is present and privileges the White Trash Mama, she is used as a scapegoat to promote all other ­performances of White femininity. In most cases, any White woman no matter their financial status who falls outside the norms of idealized White femininity is demoted to framings of “trashy.” From foul language and beer drinking to proper etiquette and tea, our next White feminine performance demonstrates the “proper” performances of White femininity. The White Lady The White Lady’s presentation of self is “natural” and produced with flawless ease, denoting the essence of whiteness performed by the White Lady is not intentional but innate. She presents herself always in expensive designer clothing and glamorous accessories. Her hair and makeup are always done to perfection, generally by her personal stylists. Her body undergoes any and all plastic surgeries to assure that she represents the idealized White female norms of beauty, but these procedures are never known. Shome (2014) demonstrates how the politics of whiteness are discursively framed through the politics of fashion by the White ­upper-class female’s body. A primary positionality the White Lady forefronts is the essence of high class. The White Lady is generally born into wealth and granted paramount opportunities to education and success. She lives in a massive home in a White suburban neighborhood and drives luxury cars. The White Lady is never expected to work which also involves raising her children. She has children, but they are generally raised with the help of a full-time live-in nanny. While motherhood is not her full-time responsibility, she is discursively framed as a loving,

108  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh nurturing, “hands-on” mother. For the White Lady again, motherhood is met with natural ease and performed in perfection. What makes the White Lady the supreme form of White femininity is the fact that her whiteness is never marked. The pictures and stories of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis are the closest fixed images I can locate. Her life as a daughter to a wealthy family, graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in French Literature, married to a successful senator and later President, and mother to four children all paint clear pictures of proper White feminine etiquette. She is remembered by her style, beauty, elegance, and grace, all of which are staples of the White Lady’s feminine performances. Her lifestyle of extreme wealth demonstrates the intersectional nature of upper-class with the White Lady’s performance of femininity. Princess Diana runs a very similar narrative of White femininity. She too exemplifies some norms of the White Lady. Both women function as cultural symbols of idealized beauty, motherhood, and White womanhood. While Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana lived in the public eye, we never really knew them. It is this ability to remain unblemished, unknown, unmarked that is key to the White Lady’s performances. The intersectional points of her class, gender, and race discursively frame the White Lady as inherently wealthy, naturally beautiful, and not “raced.” The White Lady gains extreme White power through her unmarked White femininity. Her ­positionalities, even her class, remains unmarked, and thus framed as perfect. The discursive strategies to idealize the White Lady fall in line with the strategic norms of whiteness to place her embodiments at the center while never discursively marking them as such (Nakayama & Krizek, 1997). While Kennedy Onassis and Princes Diana are images noted, the point here is all White women have access to and embody performances of the White Lady. A primary performance the White Lady has mastered is the passive-­ aggressive niceties that exonerate her superiority through “proper politeness” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 34) The White Lady’s performance of “politely” overlooking issues of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism is whiteness performed. Politely ignoring issues of difference denotes the White Lady’s willingness to becoming submissive servants to White patriarchy (Hurtago, 1996). Moon (1999) refers to this ­“politeness” as hyperpoliteness, which supports colorblindness and White silence around issues of race (p. 192). These performances are manifested through fake-niceties and masked-motivations of superiority. The White Lady limits Others to either perform with her in these “polite” White feminine enactments or be seen as angry and uncivilized. Discourses around race are often tagged as abrasive or callus because it directly confronts White privilege within femininity. Moon (1999) ­explains, “… if they [white women] remain silent, they are able to avoid

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  109 overt conflict by enacting white solidarity” (p. 184). When asked about issues of race, class, or sexuality, the White Lady’s response is nonthreatening silence or polite aversions. These White feminine performances politely acknowledge the harms of these cultural issues, all the while completely removing the role they play. The White Lady is granted the privilege of avoidance (Calafell, 2010). ­Polite evasion allows the White Lady to be seen as an ethical ­person, even a humanitarian, while actually being blatantly racist. ­Likewise, the White Lady is seen as a humanitarian through her discursive erasure of “isms.” Her investment in issues of “social justice” through “post-race” ideologies constructs them as pure, kind, generous women. For example, Madonna and her charity to save Malawian children (Shome, 2014, pp. 144–145). The White Lady’s superiority is practiced by not having to acknowledge her role but rather be constructed as charitable to Others. These performances separate her White body from being raced herself. The White Lady also exemplifies the performance of entitlement in White femininity. The White Lady exposes the art of moving beyond “polite” disregard of racist, sexist, and classist norms by indirectly ­establishing these isms through her performances of White feminine entitlement. The White Lady will interrupt, overlook an Other’s perspective, and/or speak for Others (Alcoff, 1991). For example, she would never speak of racial injustices but rather work through passive aggressive performances that demarcate those marginalized as “deserving what they got.” The White Lady discursively separates herself from Others through enactments of entitlement to normalize White privilege. The White Lady disembodies race from herself through enactments of colorblindedness and in turn dehumanizes Others by reducing them to generalized figures. Overall, the White Lady’s ability to inherently be loved by all, pure at heart, and perfect serve to perpetuate whiteness as unblemished, unmarkable, and never acquired only culturally crowned by select White women. From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas and Beyond … Each of the White feminine performances articulate the roles White women play in and through White supremacy. White supremacy is not often associated with White women and that, in and of itself, is a s­ trategic working of whiteness for and through White women. In a post-­racial, colorblind era, White women have regained their privilege to be clandestinely racist. In turn, White women play an imperative role in recentering whiteness. If White women are culturally organized as nurturing, innocent, and pure, then they are never racist. White supremacy is secured through White feminine enactments of whiteness while simultaneously running covertly under the radar as never marked in these hostile ways. Performances of

110  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh (passive)aggression, victimization, ignorance, entitlement, silence, polite niceties, innocence, sexualization, competitiveness, deliberate foolishness, crying, perfectionism, domesticity, blatant racism, and/or overt superiority all serve as violent ­enactments of whiteness by White women. The reason White women’s bodies continue to be carefully cloaked from connections with White supremacy is because our White feminine bodies serve, as Chow (1990) frames, “sutures” to White men and whiteness (p. 89). White women’s bodies conjoin White masculinity to patriarchy and ensure that White power be maintained through our relationship to it. Ware (1992) claims White women help create a racially divided and patriarchal world (pp. 68–69). Our bodies do this both in obligated service to whiteness and patriarchy and in doing so reap the empowering benefits for our services. Each of these six performative frameworks reveal the codependency White femininity has to White patriarchy. The embodiment of the White Female Employee performing victimization relies on the performance of a White masculine savior. The White ­Supermom’s performance of domesticity perpetuates White patriarchal norms. The White Pinups performance of sexuality secures White hetero-men as the cultural norm of intelligence and the ideal sexual ­desire. The White ­Virgin’s performance of innocence allocates White male dominance as the only authority to decide who is valuable in our society. In the end, White women are granted cultural capital to White privileges by whiteness and patriarchy through our service to White masculinity. Whiteness hinges on the performance of White femininity because our enactments exist only in relation to White patriarchy. The codependent relationship between White femininity and White masculinity ­denote how these performances of White femininity secure White ­privilege. As shown through these different White feminine performances, the ­enactments of White femininity link whiteness to powers of heteronormativity, classism, and patriarchy. Thus, White women play a primary role in empowering White masculinity, which in turn demonstrates how White women protect and reinforce whiteness more generally. In other words, whiteness is secured by White women embodying these performative roles to maintain racial superiority. Ware challenges, Today it is clear that we need to know more about how (and why) women engage in racist activity if we are to understand how white supremacy addresses different groups of people and how it works in conjunction with other systems of domination. (p. 289) White women must begin to identify their embodied performances of whiteness from a critical intersectional performative perspective. White femininity is not simply an engagement of whiteness but White

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  111 femininity, White heterosexuality, White class, White ability, and White nationality. This chapter outlines six embodiments of White feminine performances to reveal how White women’s intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality collide to empower whiteness. If one holds these White feminine performances as a lens to our current cultural pulse, we easily locate popular cultural matches to each of these White femininity performances. For example, we see Carrie ­Underwood as the White Virgin; Kellyanne Conway performing the White Female Employee; Jenny McCarthy enacting the White Pinup, Jessica Alba embodying the White Supermom; Mama June as the White Trash Mama, and Princess Kate performing the White Lady. Locating these performative matches is not difficult, the true c­ hallenge now lies in deconstructing the specificities of these White women’s performative relations to heteronormativity, patriarchy, classism, and whiteness. This chapter has just begun the labor of building the frameworks of White femininity and pointing to the relationships between White femininity, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and whiteness. Now it is critical to point to the specificities of how these relationships emerge, reinforce, and protect White women through these performative frameworks. (If You Are White, Please Keep Reading) What White Woman Are You? I believe whiteness research is a hopeful endeavor. Shome (2000) points out, “By making visible to whites (and non-whites) the everyday functioning of the normative and privileged locus of whiteness, whites can perhaps begin to see, and stop denying, the everydayness of whiteness and their participation and positioning in it” (p. 367). White women, myself included, all too often overlook how our race is compiled into our intersecting social constructions of femininity, class, sexuality, and ability. This racial disregard places White women’s bodies as performative agents to further the workings of whiteness toward ­slippery-invisible-universality. White men may be the primary benefactors to whiteness, yet this piece demonstrates how White femininity serves as part of the privileged foundation. With our bodies intricately tied to the system of whiteness, we also hold the possibilities of racial futurities in our embodiments. My hope for this piece is to clarify to White women how we participate in racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and classism through our performances of whiteness in our everyday mundane acts. As I type this conclusion, I am well aware of whiteness’ ability to shift and alter to maintain its power. Consequently, I know my work here is already changing into new frameworks of White feminine performances to remove White women’s accountability in establishing White power. The internal push-back readers may have with this piece is one example of whiteness’ work to reframe itself. I challenge White readers to be implicated by the performances noted here. Whether you see yourself within

112  Dawn Marie D. McIntosh the Good White Female Employee or as a White Trash Mama, White women must come to understand our identities as culturally framed in and through whiteness. Thirty years ago, Gloria Anzaldúa among many other feminists of color challenged White women to do the labor of marking racial issues within White femininity. Can White women ethically say we have responded to her call? Are you actively challenging the racial issues within your life? I am not sure I can say yes, not yet …

Notes 1 There is a clear dichotomy between women of color and White women. Philip Wander, Judith Martin, and Thomas Nakayama argue, “whiteness does not stand alone. It draws part of its meanings from what it means to be nonwhite” (33). Whiteness works only through relation. Therefore, these binary articulations already exist to manifest White privilege. 2 I recognize that not all White women fall into one of these archetypes. More likely, White women performatively fall into complex interstitials of them. This performative fluidity denotes how White women’s bodies are afforded the racial privilege of more complexity and the power White women have to pull from these different performances depending on the contexts in which they find their bodies. 3 I focus my examples of White performances generally from a U.S. perspective, understanding that these examples are both pulling from a globalized influence and also are influencing a globalized understanding of whiteness. 4 Victim ideology allows for a linear philosophy of oppression that removes White wealthy women from being implicated as oppressors themselves. ­Carrillo Rowe defines this as the paradox of White femininity. 5 Women of color performing victimizing are seen as “angry women of color” not victims. 6 Home Improvement ran from 1991 to 1999 on ABC. The show follows Tim “the tool man” Taylor, who was a husband and father of three young boys. The show followed Tim’s many family, work, and marriage problems. Coach, aired on ABC from 1989 to 1997. This show follows the different rage of masculinities of the coaching staff and their relationships on and off the field. Family Guy is adult animated sitcom that first aired on FOX in 1998 and follows the life of the Griffen family. The endearingly ignorant husband lives with his stay-at-home wife, their three kids, and their dog. According to Jim is a television series that aired on ABC from 2001 to 2009. 7th Heaven aired on The WB from 1996 to 2007 and followed the life of a White Pastor Eric Camden, his wife, and seven children. 7 Here I am referring to the female lead role, Joy Turner. Joy is a White thin uneducated woman, who speaks with a Southern accent. Her cast biography includes winning beauty pageants as a child, falling into a life of crime to “make ends meat,” and marrying men for money. She is vulgarly explicit, aggressive, and sexually flamboyant (www.imdb.com/character/ch0017460/bio) (Garcia, 2005–09). 8 “Here comes Honey Boo Boo” is a reality television version of the same performative character traits of White Trash femininity. The show follows a White poor family from the rural town of McIntyre, Georgia, featuring the childhood beauty pageant contestant, Alana (aka Honey Boo Boo) and her White poor family (Lexton, Rogan, & Reddy, 2012–17).

From White Ladies to White Trash Mamas  113

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7 Digging In White Trash, Trailer Trash, and the (Im)Mobility of Whiteness Tasha R. Dunn “Hey Chelsea. May I speak with you for a moment?” asks Roxy, a ­middle-aged, weathered woman who is stooped over the railing of a porch smoking a cigarette. Roxy was recently hired as the consultant for Myrtle Manor Trailer Park and her controlling presence is not welcome among the residents, including Chelsey, a young, blonde bombshell who is walking her newborn child in a stroller when Roxy confronts her. “Have you guys got the rent money, or—?” “No!” Chelsey sharply ­interrupts, noticeably irritated by Roxy’s inquiry given her precarious situation as a new, full-time mother whose only source of income is the small paycheck her husband collects as a struggling car salesman. “When we have it, we’ll give it to Becky,” Chelsey says, looking up at Roxy while she pushes the stroller back and forth to calm her child. Becky is the manager of Myrtle Manor who has a close relationship with many of the ­residents, including Chelsey and her husband, Jared. “Umm, to Becky?” Roxy asks. “Yea,” Chelsey pointedly replies. “I didn’t sign a lease with you, I’m not going to take orders from you!” Frustrated by Chelsey’s disregard, Roxy puts her left hand out, palm down, and with a smirk on her face says, “Okay, I’ll just serve the eviction notice. Don’t worry about paying her, okay?” “Okay. Okay,” Chelsey says, sarcastically. She continues. “I’ll laugh at the fucking day you get to serve eviction notices. You’re not important here.” The scene transitions to an aside featuring Chelsey who offers a moment of reflection. “I would never give Roxy money because I don’t trust Roxy with anything. ­Nobody likes a skank and Roxy’s a big ol’ skank.” Immediately following this declaration, the focus switches to Roxy, who is now sitting on a golf cart, her main mode of transportation in the neighborhood. “I do not run a trailer park to make friends. Pay and stay or don’t and get the hell out of here.” ­(Season Three, “Manor Meltdown”) Drama surrounding rent collection, as evidenced in the scene above, is a common occurrence on Trailer Park: Welcome to Myrtle Manor, a weekly reality series on TLC that aired from March 3, 2013 to April 23, 2015. Each episode documents the “crazy antics” (TLC, n.d.) of residents at Myrtle Manor, a trailer park located in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Juicy gossip, excessive alcohol use, sexual activity, hostility,

118  Tasha R. Dunn arrests, and debauchery permeate each episode; but this is not a new phenomenon as mediated representations of mobile home communities are rife with similar antics that violate American norms of ­domesticity, aesthetics, cleanliness, morals, and middle-class values (Kusenbach, 2009; Saatcioglu & Ozanne, 2013). Through such representations, ­combined with the recognition that 86 percent of all mobile home occupants in the ­ obile home comU.S. identify as White (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015), m munities have come to be known as “white trash icons” (­ Saatcioglu & Ozanne, 2013); they are filled with people who challenge the often ­assumed homogenous and privileged terrain of whiteness—a phenomenon that warrants attention. Whiteness is a privileged state of being and the marker of racial normativity in U.S. contexts (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Wray, 2006). To be “just white” is to possess no racial identity (Heavner, 2007; ­Nakayama  & Martin, 1999). Whiteness, in other words, is invisible (McIntosh, 1998), refers to a set of largely undefined characteristics, and is considered the “unraced center of a racialized world” (Wray & Newitz, 1997, p. 3), meaning it exists as a standard against which all other racializations are considered deviant (Yancy, 2012). Its privilege often goes unnoticed, which is what makes it powerful and increasingly difficult to talk about (Dyer, 1997). However, if whiteness is ignored, its power will continue to remain invisible, unquestioned, and unchallenged; for this reason, whiteness should be analyzed and therefore made visible (Giroux, 1997).

The Third Wave of Whiteness This chapter heeds Nakayama and Krizek’s (1995) call to closely examine the instances when White people are pushed to and/or located at the margins, as evidenced in mediated representations of mobile home communities. Paying attention to such marginalization is important. While scholarship on whiteness continues to evolve, most of it relies on the binary distinction between Whites and non-Whites. Those who exist within the liminal space between these two groups of people, who are situated at the borders of whiteness, have remained largely outside the critical gaze of whiteness studies (Dykins Callahan, 2008; Heavner, 2007). These borderland people are those with White skin whose marginal existence is premised upon additional variables of identity such as class, region, and gender (Hartigan, 2013). As Frankenberg (2001) indicates, “whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather crosscut by a range of other axes of relative advantage and subordination; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it” (p. 76). For example, White people who are working-class and who live in mobile homes are not inherently privileged; instead, they are considered “white Others” for their inability to abide by the middle- to upper-class standards associated with their race (Newitz & Wray, 1997; Sweeney, 2001).

Digging In  119 Given the recognition of this difference, my work is situated in what Twine and Gallagher (2008) refer to as the third wave of whiteness, which recognizes whiteness as a multiplicity of identities instead of a static or uniform category of social identification. The tendency to essentialize accounts of whiteness can be avoided in this wave since race is considered one of many variables that shape identity. This chapter, for example, not only focuses on race but is equally concerned with how social class contributes to the functionality and lived experiences of whiteness. ­ ecome Recognizing and engaging whiteness as multidimensional has b increasingly important since the unprecedented U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump, which political pundits have repeatedly claimed was fueled by a rapid shift of White working-class citizens into the ­Republican ranks (Davis & Fields, 2016; Tankersley, 2016). The White ­working-class population has since become a central subject of U.S. ­political and cultural discourse. Previously, the “white trash” stereotype made it easy to dismiss members of the White working-class, to cast them to the margins by dismissing them as buffoons. Their role in fostering Trump’s success, however, has prompted an urge to think in more complex ways about whiteness and to consider the margins where White working-class people are situated (Hochschild, 2016). As ­Isenberg (2016) states, “we can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity” (p. xv); it is precisely these layers that have come to define the national identity. To engage these layers and subsequently illuminate the multifaceted nature of whiteness, I build upon work that is situated in the third wave of whiteness by focusing on the discursive strategies used to maintain and destabilize White identity and privilege (Twine & Gallagher, 2008). I specifically analyze the use of the word “trash” and its connection to the onslaught of mediated depictions of White working-class people who live in mobile homes and who, because of their socioeconomic status, are portrayed in particularly problematic ways. I argue that this connection between “trash” and mediated representations of the White working-class population is a discursive strategy that both reveals and reinforces the (im)mobility of whiteness. My use of parentheses within the word, (im)mobility, signifies and highlights a tension that lies at the crux of this work: The immobility of White working-class people, which is discursively constructed, functions to mobilize whiteness. Central to making this argument is the concept of strategic whiteness.

Strategic Whiteness According to Projansky and Ono (1999), whiteness is self-protective because it strives to invalidate any challenge to its authority to maintain its privileged position. One mechanism through which this invalidity occurs is called strategic whiteness, when whiteness is recentered without

120  Tasha R. Dunn calling explicit attention to this fact. Strategic whiteness can be found in several assimilationist media sites that seemingly attempt to challenge racism through the incorporation of people of color, but nevertheless reconstitute White dominance. An example of this can be seen in films with a diverse cast that feature a “white savior,” a White person who appears to know what is best for people of color (e.g., Avatar, The Green Mile, Pocahontas, etc.). The “white savior” is a common racialized trope that subtly and strategically reinforces White supremacy. In media sites where this trope is present, people of color are cast not to change but rather to reaffirm the existing racial order simply by following the lead of “white savior” (Hughey, 2010; Vera & Gordon, 2003). This trope is one of the many mechanisms that secure the privilege of whiteness. As Projansky and Ono (1999) state, “no representational strategy is immune from the potential recuperation of white power” (p. 123)—an observation that can be further developed when considering mediated representations of White working-class people. In the following sections, I show how such representations can function to recenter not just whiteness, but a particular type of whiteness—one that adheres to the class and racial etiquette required of White people to preserve their power and privilege.

Trailer Trash Television Since Beverly Hillbillies, the first widely popular television show to ­feature White working-class people, this group has repeatedly been portrayed as ignorant and uncivilized as they are one of the few targets left in the U.S. cultural shooting gallery. Many other targets have been deemed off limits due to written and unwritten laws of cultural sensitivity (Goad, 1997; Hansen & Cooke-Jackson, 2010). The trend of negatively targeting White working-class people in the media has grown exponentially in the last decade as evidenced in the slew of reality television shows focused on this population (e.g., Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Swamp People, Moonshiners, Duck Dynasty, etc.), creating what has been called a “redneck reality” subgenre (Haynes, 2014). Contributing to this genre are shows centered specifically on mobile home parks, such as Trailer Park: Welcome to Myrtle Manor, Mobile Home Disaster, and Trailer Fabulous. Mediated depictions of these marginal communities and their predominately White and w ­ orking-class residents are relatively common as evidenced not only in reality t­ elevision but also in the host of films where they are featured, including Pervert Park, The Wrestler, Million Dollar Baby, 8 Mile, Boys Don’t Cry, and Drop Dead Gorgeous. There are also several scripted television shows featuring these communities, such as My Name is Earl and the infamous Trailer Park Boys—a satire about the misadventures of White ex-­ convicts who live in a trailer park located in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. This show is now 16 years old and is in its eleventh season,

Digging In  121 with no sign of slowing down. Portrayals of mobile home parks continue to emerge as evidenced in Living the Dream—a comedy series about a ­British family who buys a trailer park in Florida—which is scheduled to be released at the end of 2017. In addition to Living the Dream is TLC’s new and first scripted series, Too Close to Home. Released in 2016, this series follows the journey of Anna, a young White woman who grew up in a trailer park in Alabama and works her way up to a job in the White House where she has an affair with the President of the United States. When her secret is revealed, Anna is forced to return to her old life. Though different in many ways, what draws the aforementioned films and television shows together is not simply that they feature mobile home communities, but how they feature them: crowded, desolate, unsafe,  and dirty—places where it is not uncommon to find dilapidated homes and yards peppered with trash, stray animals, broken-down ­vehicles, and kitschy decor, such as tire gardens. For example, in Trailer Park: ­Welcome to Myrtle Manor, flamingos, empty alcohol containers, and/or weathered, dirty couches are a common sighting outside of the trailers in the neighborhood, most of which are tackily painted in pastel colors. Such portrayals render mobile home communities as settings of social pathology (Kusenbach, 2009). Adding to this sense of pathology is how the residents themselves are portrayed. From the ex-convicts in Trailer Park Boys and the mistress in Too Close to Home, to the sex offenders in Pervert Park, dwellers of mobile homes, which are almost always White and working-class, are routinely portrayed as deviant. They defy embodied signs of distinction (e.g., refinement, refinement, sophistication, and control (Elias, 1978)) because they are depicted as ignorant, dirty, criminal, racist, crude, lacking in control, and addicted to alcohol, drugs, and sex among other things (Kusenbach, 2009; Newitz & Wray, 1997; Saatcioglu & Ozanne, 2013). We see this addiction very clearly in Trailer Park Boys where one of the main characters, Ricky (Robb Wells), can be seen smoking a cigarette or a joint of marijuana almost every scene. Addiction is also highly prevalent in Drop Dead Gorgeous, a film about an annual teen beauty pageant held in a small town in Minnesota. Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), daughter of an alcoholic single mother who hails from a local trailer park, and Becky Leeman (Denise Richards), daughter of the richest man in town and a former beauty-queen mother, are the primary contenders in the pageant. Midway through the film, the trailer in which Amber lives mysteriously catches on fire and her mother, Annette, is caught inside. Though Annette survives, she suffers a major injury. A beer can, which she was drinking when the fire broke out, is permanently fused to the skin of her hand—a heavy-handed indicator of her addiction. To drive this point home even further, Annette’s hand is eventually amputated and replaced with a hook, which she uses throughout the rest of the film to smoke cigarettes since her other hand is occupied with, predictably, a beer can.

122  Tasha R. Dunn The aforementioned gross violations of distinction, which permeate the media, mark White working-class people with a tribal-like stigma (Goffman, 1963), which inevitably reinforces their marginal status. It is no wonder why mobile home communities have come to be known as “white trash icons”—an association that will continue to persist because tight schedules within the production process force producers to rely on stereotypes, regardless of whether they reflect actual character traits or lived experiences (Butsch, 2010; Cooke-Jackson & Hansen, 2008).

The Politics of Trash Tight production schedules, however, are not the only reason this association with White trash stays intact. Casting mobile home communities and their residents as “white trash icons” is a strategy that allows whiteness to maintain its invisibly superior status. In other words, White working-class people are made to appear in the media as if they are incapable of possessing the decorum that is “appropriate” to their race thereby casting them as “off white”; and it is precisely this disassociation that allows whiteness to continue to reign supreme. Adding to this disassociation is the use of the word “trash,” which carries heavy symbolic weight when incorporated into terms predominately aimed at White working-class people, such as “trailer trash” and “white trash.” For ­example, according to Wray (2006), White trash is premised upon fundamental tensions “between the sacred and profane, purity and impurity, morality and immorality, cleanliness and dirt” (p. 2). These tensions are precisely what determine the boundaries of whiteness, including who stays within these boundaries and who is cast to the margins. In addition to what these tensions reveal, the term “white trash” literally racializes class and, by doing so, racializes whiteness for it is one of the only expressions in which race is named for White people. “White trash,” in essence, marks and makes whiteness visible (Heavner, 2007). As DiAngelo (2006) states, it “pollutes whiteness” (p. 54). This pollution can be attributed to the exceeding of decorum required of White people to preserve their power and privilege, as evidenced in mediated representations of mobile home communities and their residents. Those who ­rupture the decorum of whiteness, who fail to perform a normative, White, middle- to upper-class act, are thrown to the curb—the only place where they cannot pose a threat to the symbolic social order ­(Hartigan, 1997; Wray, 2006). “White trash” therefore functions within the logic of the American class system to maintain the superiority of ­middle- and ­upper-class White people. In other words, associating “trash” with White people who are clinging to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder justifies their marginalization (Newitz & Wray, 1997). “Trash” ultimately illustrates one of the many mechanisms (e.g., the “white savior”) that secure the privilege of whiteness because it literally

Digging In  123 and figuratively recenters what is valuable: We throw away what we don’t need and, in the process, what we choose to keep becomes more valuable. The power and value of whiteness is, once again, reinforced—a process that serves as an exemplar of strategic whiteness because whiteness subtly gets recentered. In other words, similar to how people of color appear within assimilationist texts to reaffirm the existing racial hierarchy, White working-class people are cast in film and television shows—specifically those that feature mobile homes—to do the same. While these media sites do offer members of this population a chance to be seen and heard by millions of viewers, their primary function in this type of spotlight is to justify their marginal “off white” status and to disassociate themselves from their race, so that the purity, power, and privilege of whiteness can stay intact. What happens within and beyond the fringes of this spotlight—what we do not see on screen—warrants attention because it sheds further insight into the tension between the immobility and mobility of whiteness, specifically how the immobility of White working-class people is discursively reinforced to enhance the mobility of those who are White and able to climb the socioeconomic ladder.

(Im)Mobile Homes According to 2015 U.S. Census data, 5.9 percent of the 118.2 million homes in the country were classified as a manufactured/mobile home or trailer (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). Eighteen million Americans, or 5.6 percent of the population, live in these homes, which make up the largest amount of unsubsidized housing in the country (Manufactured Housing Institute, 2016). This percentage will likely continue to grow as ­government budgets become more restrictive and subsidized housing becomes less prioritized to address other policies that are deemed more important (Semuels, 2014). Part of what makes mobile homes so appealing is their low cost. The average sales price for a new manufactured home is currently $71,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017a), while the average sales price for a single-family home is $379,500 (U.S. ­Census Bureau, 2017b). This difference is noteworthy, especially in a time when housing prices continue to rise while lower-end incomes remain stagnant. Many Americans do not have the economic leverage necessary to purchase a single-family home. Ironically, this has caused the rental market to soar, resulting in increased rental prices. This unvirtuous cycle exponentially increases the pressure on those who are already economically ­disadvantaged as they are left with few options, hence the increasing appeal of mobile homes. Adding to this appeal is the recognition that the families who cannot afford homes often find that the rentals they can afford are small and/or old; mobile homes are spacious and often newer in comparison (Semuels, 2014).

124  Tasha R. Dunn Mobile homes, as Semuels (2014) observes, are quickly becoming a key part of the “solution” to America’s affordable housing crisis. The numbers speak for themselves as 86 percent of all residents make below the median household income of $56,516 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). Furthermore, in 2016, 55 percent of Mobile Home Owners claimed an annual household income of $30,000 or less (Manufactured Housing Institute, 2016). As Geoghegan (2013) observes, the U.S. poor are much more likely to live in a trailer than the average American. Residents of mobile homes, however, are not just poor; they’re also, as previously established, overwhelmingly White (U.S. Census ­Bureau, 2015)—a fact that explains the racial implications linked to the stigma of mobile homes. For example, “trailer trash,” often used interchangeably with “white trash,” is a term primarily reserved for White ­working-class people who live in trailer parks. Interestingly enough, those who identity as White and working-class are more worried about the negative reputation of trailer living than people of color because this reputation ­threatens the privilege they have by virtue of their race (Kusenbach, 2009). Calling attention to racial privilege in this context is important because, despite the stigma associated with mobile homes, such privilege does not go away. The mere fact that mobile home communities are predominately limited to White folks is a case in point as these communities have been frequently accused of discriminatory ­behavior, such as charging minority borrowers substantially higher interest rates than their White counterparts (Baker & Wagner, 2015). This situation illuminates that racial privilege can still stay intact even as oppressions related to other variables, such as class, have negative effects (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995). In other words, mobile home living is one of the many situations in which race benefits those who are White while simultaneously penalizing them for their class position. This penalization stems from the negative reputation of mobile homes, which is fueled by mediated representations. While these representations do accurately reveal that a majority of residents are White and poor, they fail to explain why residents struggle to make ends meet, often attributing this issue to individual choices rather than structural barriers—a misnomer I know all too well. For 15 years, I lived with my family in a trailer park in rural ­M innesota. My parents tried to move out several times to purchase a suitable ­middle-class home that would signify the mobility we as a family had always craved, but they couldn’t afford to do so. We were stuck. I was reminded of this precarity at the beginning of every month when my mother would begrudgingly write a check for at least $400 to cover the 3,000 square foot lot on which our double-wide1 trailer was placed. The mortgage payment was separate and higher. With no college degrees and meager-paying jobs at a local plastic factory, my parents were always living paycheck to paycheck, so the months when lot rent was

Digging In  125 raised—which occurred at least twice per year—were grueling. $10 here and $20 there added up over the years we lived in that neighborhood. For a long time, I thought my family’s struggle was unique—our neighbors kept their cards close to their chest. However, in 2015, when I was doing fieldwork in mobile home communities for a research project, I discovered that our struggle was not an exception to the rule. Part of my fieldwork involved me interviewing and spending time with several White working-class families to learn about their everyday lived experiences. I was struck by the story of one family in particular who currently resides in a rundown double-wide trailer with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. This family consists of Mary and her husband Steve, who is paralyzed from the neck down and requires around the clock health care. Steve’s sister-in-law and her daughter as well as one of Mary and Steve’s sons, Brandon, and his girlfriend also live in the home, leaving little to no room. Before living in such cramped quarters, Mary and Steve had owned a house, which, due to rising health-care costs, they could no longer afford and were forced to short sell. With limited means and few other options, they, like many U.S. families in their situation, decided to ­purchase a mobile home. But even in a mobile home, an arguably more affordable option, they still struggle to make ends meet. In addition to being charged the price of a brand new trailer for the noticeably dilapidated one in which they live, their neighborhood, like the one in which I grew up, raises lot rent every year despite resident complains. These raises have become so significant that the family pays more in lot rent than they do for their mortgage—a conundrum that is more common that I initially realized.

Striking it Rich in the Trailer Park Business More than ten million people live in mobile home parks throughout the United States (National Manufactured Homeowners Association of America, 2011). Twenty percent of park residents rent mobile homes already placed on designated lots, while the remainder own their homes. Among the 80 percent of owners, only 14 percent own the land beneath their homes (Housing Assistance Council, 2011). The remaining 86 percent of mobile home owners, such as Mary’s family and my family, are at the mercy of the parks’ owners who are free to raise lot rents, add or increase various park fees, and make their own rules about pets, land maintenance, and more. Sadly, lot rents are often raised beyond owners’ and renters’ means (Salamon & MacTavish, 2006). In some parts of the United States, lot rents are over $500 per month, and this number continues to rise (Rolfe, 2011). Once utilities, park fees, and high interest mortgage rates are factored in, tenants can often end up with higher monthly payments than owners of traditional middle-class

126  Tasha R. Dunn homes. While it would seem logical for mobile home residents to pursue better housing options, they often cannot build the capital to do so because of the high amount they are already paying for housing (Hart, Rhodes, ­Morgan, & Lindberg, 2002). Owning a mobile home in a privately owned park can be a trap, and this is not changing anytime soon (Salamon & ­MacTavish, 2006). Multimillionaire Frank Rolfe, the nation’s tenth largest trailer park owner and the cofounder of Mobile Home University, a three-day, $2,000 intensive course for investors on how to “strike it rich in the trailer park business,” claims that one of the perks of investing in these parks is that landlords can frequently raise the rent without losing tenants (Rivlin, 2014). Residents are more prone to deal with the increase than pay the large fee required to move their home to another park or plot of land (Berlin, 2011; Neate, 2015) As Rolfe (2011) states: One of the bedrocks of the mobile home park as an investment vehicle is the inability for most customers to ever leave. At a cost of around $4,000 to move a mobile home from point A to point B, few tenants can afford to move out even if they are unhappy with the product or the price. This locked-in tenant base is what enables park owners to enjoy phenomenally stable revenue figures, even in major recessions. Trailer parks, in short, are a profitable business and they have produced even greater revenue since the 2008 financial crisis, which significantly bolstered the demand for affordable housing (Neate, 2015). The growth of the trailer park business has not gone unrecognized. In fact, some of the country’s wealthiest investors have contributed to this growth. Billionaire Sam Zell, for example, is the largest mobile home park owner in the United States. One of his companies, Equity LifeStyle Properties, owns and operates nearly 140,000 manufactured home communities. In 2016, Zell’s company generated $856,280 worth of revenue, contributing significantly to his $5 billion-dollar fortune. Clayton Homes, the biggest mobile home manufacturer in the United States, is owned by the nation’s second richest man, Warren Buffett, whose net worth is $74.4 billion. Warren also owns the two biggest mobile home lenders, twenty-first Mortgage Corporation and Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance Company. It is important to note that Zell and Buffett are two among many wealthy real-estate tycoons whose choice to invest in the trailer park business reverses the Robin Hood story: Stealing from the poor to give to the rich becomes normalized (Neate, 2015). The trailer park business, however, is not only reserved for real-estate tycoons. The success of this business has also prompted ordinary people with little or no experience in real estate to hop on board. In fact, every one to two months, Mobile Home University hosts boot camps in

Digging In  127 various cities throughout the country. Here, Rolfe convinces students of the many benefits of investing in affordable housing. He claims that mobile home parks, in particular, are currently the hottest sector in real estate. As stated on his website: With over 20% of Americans trying to live on $20,000 per year or less, the demand for mobile homes has never been higher—and the big winners are the owners of the mobile home parks in which those customers reside. (Mobile Home University, 2018) Rolfe adds that, because there is so much demand for affordable housing, and local authorities are often reluctant to give permission for building new parks, park owners can easily raise rent and thus increase their ­profit—a fact that attracts new investors and consequently fuels the trailer park business (Neate, 2015). In addition to having to deal with frequent increases in rent, people who purchase mobile homes also have to pay higher interest rates. This is because a manufactured home is often considered personal property, like a car, rather than as real estate. In 2013, for example, 78 percent of all homes located in trailer parks were dubbed personal property. If and when this happens, those who choose to purchase a manufactured home are forced to use a chattel loan, or a loan for personal property, instead of a typical real-estate mortgage. The problem is that chattel loans are significantly more expensive for borrowers. In fact, interest rates on loans for mobile homes can sometimes be twice as much as the rates for traditional homes built on-site. This may explain why nearly 70 percent of all manufactured housing purchase loans are considered subprime (Semuels, 2014). The irony with the aforementioned increased expenses is that mobile ­ aterially homes are anything but mobile; they are both physically and m immobile (Salamon & MacTavish, 2006). Rolfe (2011), for example, provides a conservative estimate of $4,000 to move a mobile home. ­According to Sullivan (2014), this process can range from $5,000 to $10,000 once permitting and installation fees are factored in—an amount that is more than what some owners pay for a mobile home. Apart from cost, which fosters immobility in a material sense, mobile home units are prone to structural damage if relocated, which makes them physically immobile as well. In fact, a vast majority of these homes remain placed on their original sites and are not relocated because they are either too old, weak, or anchored to survive a move. This limiting setup is all the more problematic when ownership in a privately owned park is framed as an opportunity. People across the United States, such as my family as well as Mary and her family, buy into this “opportunity,” thinking of it as a way to live frugally and save for bigger and better commodities. What we once considered to be a

128  Tasha R. Dunn potential source of upward class mobility instead becomes the source of our immobility, leaving us trapped, broke, and unable to escape (Hart et al., 2002; Salamon & MacTavish, 2006).

A “Trashy” Conclusion While the association of “mobile” with mobile homes is entirely misleading, what I find equally misleading is how mediated depictions of mobile home communities, and White working-class people in general, rarely call attention to the aforementioned structural issues that members of this population face, which are prevalent and growing. Isenberg (2016) aptly explains that shedding light on these issues would reveal the often denied yet problematic tension between the dream of upward mobility that Americans are encouraged to pursue and the uncomfortable truth that class barriers often prevent that dream from ever coming to fruition. As Semuels (2016) notes, it is increasingly harder to experience ­mobility in the United States. In fact, it is more likely for citizens to end up where they start than it is to climb the socioeconomic ladder. This has been especially true for White working-class folk who, since the 1970s, have ­experienced a severe decline in their wages, working and living conditions, as well as social status (Coontz, 2016; Hochschild, 2016). Consequently, many members of this population are pessimistic about their future as well as the future of the United States, and over half believe that their children will be worse off than they are (Coontz, 2016; Summers & Simon, 2016). The pessimism experienced by many White working-class citizens helped contribute to the rise of Donald Trump, in part, because he not only acknowledged their sentiment but made a series of (empty) promises (e.g., to create more jobs and ensure the government defends hard-­working Americans) to reverse it and thus increase their chances of experiencing mobility (Davis & Fields, 2016; Isenberg, 2016). Such an event necessitates a greater focus on the margins, where White ­working-class people are situated, to better understand their pessimism and the structural barriers from which it is derived. For the purposes of this chapter, I have only focused on one of these barriers—(im)mobile homes—but there are several more that warrant attention. If these barriers are not exposed, they will continue to prevail, and mediated representations of White working-class people will continue to play a significant role in this covert process. This is because such representations distract viewers from recognizing these barriers by portraying White working-class people as blameworthy for their misfortunes. Whether we see them on screen engaging in “crazy antics” at a place like Myrtle Manor or finding alternative ways to violate the decorum associated with their race, the underlying assumption is that White working-class people are responsible for their lot in life. Their marginal position is deserved. This message, however, is nothing new as conservatives have repeatedly blamed systemic failure on the personal flaws of

Digging In  129 marginal individuals since the second decade of the twenty-first century (Isenberg, 2016). And as long as mediated representations continue to reinforce this notion, the margins are where White working-class people will stay. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to these margins, to dig in the “trash” and discover pieces of this population’s story that have been thrown away and buried to strategically reinforce and recenter the power and privilege associated with whiteness. There are two major benefits to digging in the trash. First, this process can move whiteness studies away from focusing primarily on the binary between White and non-White, toward embracing grey areas where other variables of identity can be found—variables that shape whiteness and, by doing so, demonstrate its existence as a socially constructed site of privilege that can, and should, be challenged. In short, the assumption that whiteness is a homogenous privileged entity can be debunked by illustrating how variables like class and gender influence and ultimately fracture whiteness—a realization that has the potential to decrease and dismantle the power of whiteness. Second, paying more attention to the margins of whiteness can reveal lived experiences which offer a new and more serious perspective of a population that has often been the butt of cultural jokes. In short, this kind of work can challenge mediated stereotypes, which ignore the complexities of people and their experiences by telling only one essentializing story—a story that media-makers choose to tell and media-audiences are expected to rely on to make sense of a given population. Digging in trash after its been thrown out can be unpleasant, but such work necessarily exposes pieces that can challenge the discursive strategies used to reveal and reinforce the (im)mobility of whiteness. In other words, this labor is important because it reveals how using words like “trash” and depicting a marginal population in essentializing ways are strategic devices: They foster the immobility of White people who struggle to make ends meet to enhance the mobility of those of the same race who do not share this struggle. Exposing this form of strategic whiteness consequently destabilizes it making room for racial and class equality. It is time to turn the politics of trash on its head by digging in.

Note 1 A double-wide is made of two modular units that have been connected together side by side lengthwise making the width double that of a typical mobile home.

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8 A Forgotten History of Eugenics Reimagining Whiteness and Disability in the Case of Carrie Buck Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies In 1927, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a 17-year-old White woman named Carrie Buck became the first woman legally sterilized in Virginia due to supposed feeblemindedness. She lived with her foster parents because her mother, Emma, had been sent to the “Virginia Colony for the ­Epileptic and Feebleminded,” a nearby mental asylum. When Buck was 17, she was raped by a relative of her foster parents and impregnated. While she was carrying her child, her foster family sent Buck straight to the ­Virginia Colony to finish her term because they were too embarrassed that people would find out that the father was one of their relatives ­(Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 1–50, 2009a–2009c). According to an National Public ­Radio interview with Cohen (2016), Virginia Colony Superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy, a White, upper-class, man, had been looking for someone to sterilize and when he became aware of ­Carrie Buck’s situation he felt he had found his perfect victim. He wanted her to be the first person to be sterilized in Virginia under the Virginia ­Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924. Priddy believed that Buck embodied the common law description of feebleminded because her mother had been institutionalized for feeblemindedness as well. In fact, Buck was born in the Virginia Colony because of her mother’s institutionalization. Therefore, Buck and her newly born child from out-of-wedlock were labeled feebleminded too. At the time, feeblemindedness was a catch-all phrase for “Any individual who was considered to have mental, ­social or moral deficiencies” and having a bastard child was considered a moral deficiency (Hasian, 1996, p. 6). In 1927, modern-day terms such as “crippled” and “imbecile” to describe disabilities did not exist and instead one was labeled feebleminded regardless of their specific condition. It is imperative to look at Buck’s case from an intersectional lens since she was a poor White woman living in the south. Intersectionality is “A series of multiple intersections that often cross each other, creating complex crossroads where two, three, or more of these routes [­ gender, race, age, class] may meet in overlapping dimensions” (Crenshaw, 2003, p. 47). It is impossible to look at this case and not see how the routes of

134  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies whiteness, class, gender, and sexuality impacted the characterization of Buck as a disabled individual. While mental illness is often thought of as an ­invisible disability, in this case the doctors successfully argued that feeblemindedness was something that was visible and measurable through tests regarding genetics, appearance, and sexual behavior. Our positionalities, one of us a White, queer-femme female professor with invisible chronic illness and emotional disabilities, and a queer, light-skinned Latina female undergraduate student, who is often read as White ultimately influence how we come to this text. As queer women affected by many of the same systems of oppression as Buck, we are ultimately drawn to empathize with Buck. As Madison (2006) suggests, “We are critical and self-reflexive of how we think about our positionality and the implications of our thoughts and judgments” (“Dialogic Performative,” p. 322). Our positionalities shape our orientations to the world and situate our positionalities within the analysis of Buck’s case. We are concerned with unearthing the power dynamics present in Buck’s case and how her body became a mechanism of control by the state. In this chapter, we argue that power structures of the court system and doctors disciplined certain bodies because of multiple and intersecting identities. While the Buck v. Bell case has traditionally been looked at as only a case of disability, we argue that an intersectional analysis ­reveals how power structures worked to regulate White bodies through biopower. Thus, using critical rhetorical analysis, we interrogate how, class, gender, sexuality, whiteness, and disability shed light on the implications of biopolitics on bodies labeled feebleminded, White, poor, female, and supposedly heterosexual. In doing so, we argue that this labeling of people is a norming mechanism of biopower that is still present today.

Eugenics, Whiteness, and Disability The Eugenics Movement During the Eugenics Movement of the early twentieth century, ­government-backed eugenicists’ main goals were population control and procreation of desirable qualities. These qualities consisted of a ­perfect White, middle-class, healthy race, with the end goal of breeding out ­“undesirable” qualities such as feeblemindedness and racial impurities. As Hasian (1996) argues, “Among the many diverse issues that touched on the subject of eugenics, no question was more prominent in the minds of many English and American audiences than what to do about protecting the future members of the race” (p. 30). Many consider this period akin to a genocide because people of color, the poor, and disabled Whites were targeted for forced sterilization, while those

A Forgotten History of Eugenics  135 seen as socially, culturally, and mentally fit were encouraged to procreate (Hasian, 1996). Much of the idea for forced sterilization came from the nineteenth century scholars like Charles Darwin. In 1859, Darwin claimed that only animals that are strong survive, and those that are weak become extinct. He slowly turned this idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ toward the human population, questioning why we provide care to the “weak” if they were not meant to survive ­( Brignell, 2010). Darwin wrote in his 1871 treatise, The ­D ecent Man, “We civilised men … do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick … thus the weak members of society propagate their kind” (Darwin, 1871). With Darwin’s theories fresh in the nineteenth century, scientists started taking it upon themselves to incorporate the idea of “survival of the fittest” and apply that to the entire population. One of these scientists was Sir Francis Galton, a respected British scholar, who after studying the British upper class in 1883 concluded that superior intelligence and abilities were inherited (Norrgard, 2008). He believed that an elite position in society was due to good genetic makeup and ­advocated that the human race could be improved through selective breeding of individuals with “desirable” traits (“Introduction to Eugenics,” 2015). He questioned “Could not the race of men similarly be improved? Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?” ­(Brignell, 2010). This approach seemed reasonable based on the genetic knowledge of the early 1900s. Around the same time, Gregor Mendel showed by experimenting with pea plants that selective breeding was possible. He was able to predict the offspring of plants with the use of dominant and recessive genes, so scientists believed that the same could be done with humans. Eugenicists believed that by carefully controlling human mating, conditions such as mental retardation, psychiatric illnesses, and physical disabilities could be eradicated (Norrgard, 2008). In the United States, “Sixty percent of those sterilized were women, and a large majority of those sterilized were poor and white” ­(Stubblefield, 2007, p. 162). However, folks of color, especially ­A frican American and Black, for years had been subjected to the practices of eugenics through slavery. Hasian (1996) explains, “During the years of slavery, black women and men were dehumanized by a system that profited from the breeding of slaves” (p. 52). Much of the research on the formal eugenics movement focuses on poor, White people, thus recentering whiteness, while the historical and cultural milieu in which whiteness flourished. Because of this, doctors and the state needed to create reasons and ways to control White populations, and labelling people as feebleminded or disabled was the most simplistic way to do this.

136  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies Whiteness Whiteness is a contentious concept that has been examined from ­several angles. Throughout history, whiteness has been discursively constructed, often monolithically, as pure, spiritual, clean, virtuous, chaste, and free of sin (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Dyer 1997). Dyer (1997), a critical media scholar, argues that whiteness has three parts: color or hue observable in the world; the physical tint of the skin color; and also a symbolic system of meanings or discourse. Smith (2004) agrees with Dyer’s last measure that, “Whiteness has no meaning, no certain description, outside of the meaning given it by Western, or more specifically, ­A merican culture” (para. 23). This notion suggests that there is no reality to whiteness, which, is a problematic falsehood, and one that dismisses the experiences of folks of color and White people. Critical race scholars argue that whiteness, like any other racial category, is both discursively constructed, but also material in its consequences (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Dyer 1997). Harris (1993), a critical race and legal scholar, suggests the concept of “whiteness as property” to demonstrate the economic and cultural capital associated with whiteness. She writes, “Becoming white increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one’s life rather than being the object of others’ domination” (p. 1713). Harris (1993) writes that if one had the cultural currency, especially if one’s body was read by the outside as White, then Black people were allowed more agency over their bodies. However, Crenshaw (1991), another critical race theorist, argues for an intersectional examination of identities, especially in terms of the specificity of Black women’s experiences when dealing with the law and justice system. Crenshaw’s (1991, 2003) use of intersectionality suggests that we must look to the ways that subjects are produced through differing and interlocking systems of oppression and privilege. In communication studies, Nakayama and Krizek (1995) suggest that scholars need to examine the strategic rhetoric of whiteness, looking at the particularities of White experience. In this pivotal article, they explain that we need to push the boundaries of the center, of whiteness, because it allows for an understanding of particularities and not essentialisms. Building on the argument that whiteness needs to be named because it is not an essentialism, Warren and Hytten (2004) suggest that whiteness is an enactment, an embodiment, and a performance. They ask, “What does it mean to claim whiteness, to embody whiteness, to speak whiteness, to be named within whiteness, and to levy the power of whiteness?” (p. 322). As McIntosh (2014) articulates, “Understanding identity as a performance returns agency to the body and complicates the binds of heteronormativity and whiteness” (p. 156). When scholars are challenged to think of whiteness not only as a performative, but

A Forgotten History of Eugenics  137 as a performance, we are challenged to see how raciality and sexuality are written with and through bodies, and not in the same ways. While whiteness is always imbued with racial privilege in the sense that privilege takes on different forms as it intersects with other identities. The privileging of the body could be problematic and essential for folks with disabilities. Feminist scholar Alcoff (2015) challenges the notion of monolithic whiteness and the assumption that all whiteness has the same implications. For example, Alcoff (2015) says, “Whiteness as a term is not conterminous with dominance, but with a particular historical experience and relationship to certain historical events” (p. 8). Continuing, she writes, “Whiteness should not be reduced to racism or even racial privilege … no social identity can be defined by a single vector across every possible context, and even White identity constitutes a social disadvantage in some situations” (p. 9). When it comes to the early twentieth century, Alcoff (2015) states, “This is just to say that whiteness then was not too different from what whiteness is now” (p. 18). For this project, we conceptualize that whiteness is not a monolithic entity, but an intersectional performance of identities. Within this, we do believe that whiteness offers material benefits to those who claim it, or are claimed by it, and yet, know that based on history, politics, and other cultural identities that whiteness does not function the same ways, whether throughout time, or across lines of difference. We adopt this position because Carrie Buck’s whiteness was not the only influencing factor over her forced sterilization. Rather her class, her disabilities, her gender, and her presumed heterosexual promiscuity were vectors that worked together to mark her as an “other” in the eyes of the law. These identities exposed Buck, and others like her, to a eugenics movement, which sought to control the population of poor, disabled Whites, along with folks of color, some poor and disabled, others not, to perpetuate a pure, elite, able-bodied, White race. Disability Studies and Crip Theory Disability Studies is a complex field that deals with the intersectionality of positionalities, identity, citizenship, sexuality, gender, privilege, and individual sovereignty. The field itself looks to provide a “Strong philosophical argument for the need to de-medicalize and politicize the construct of disability” (Wappet, 2017, p. 6). Goodley (2017) suggests that Disability Studies rejects the view that disabilities inherently mean a failure to be able-bodied (p. xi). People with disabilities are often categorized as not human and broken, while able-bodied individuals are seen as “white, male, monied with straight citizenry” (Goodley, 2017, p. 94). The consequence of this narrow-minded stance, however, has caused for disabled individuals to be stereotyped as “weak, pitiful, dependent,

138  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies passive … and deserving of their predicament” (Ware, 2001, p. 107). Part of this instability is that able-bodiedness is a temporary state, where someone able-bodied may become disabled at any time because of accident or illness (Bryan, 2006; Wendall, 1996). Siebers (2017) cautions against the individualistic construction of disability because it tends to only consider an individual’s experience of pain rather than advocating for disabilities as a pain caused by society. However, Ware (2001) advises us to be careful of recreating an ability– disability binary which Ware (2001) explains is when disability is looked at through a cultural lens where, “ability is interrogated in much the same way that gender is interrogated by feminist studies and Whiteness is interrogated by ethnic studies scholars” (p. 110). The stigmatization of the disabled body is always determined by society. Folks with intellectual, cognitive, and emotional disabilities are often ignored when it comes to making sense of disabilities (Raghavan & ­Patel, 2008). Social and societal stigma negatively view individuals with disabilities in general, but Kubiak (2000) argues that those with mental health disabilities are more negatively affected than those with physical disabilities. Carlson (2017) suggests that we need to view people with intellectual disabilities, like Carrie Buck, as, “Nuanced, capable, and fluid,” and, “those surrounding the individual must provide the environment that supports expressions of nuance, capacity and change” (p. 85). In communication and disability literature, there is a prevalence of scholarship focusing on the scientific and physiological aspects of disabilities. Anderson (2017) points out that communication courses that explore power of communication when shaping identities, as well as ­interacting face to face with individuals with disabilities, will combat misconceptions and prejudices toward people with disabilities and reshape and educate individuals on their misconceptions and prejudices about disabilities. Diverging from this, Defenbaugh’s (2013) piece explores social stigma and support for those with invisible and chronic illnesses. It is in this vein that some communication studies scholars who have taken up the call of not only studying people with disabilities, but rather incorporating Disability Studies into their scholarship. Bell (2017) believes that disability studies should be labeled “White Disability Studies” because the field itself fails to face issues of race and ethnicity (p. 410). He argues that in the United States, disabled individuals are considered as the “largest minority community,” which places them in a singular lens without consideration of its diversity. Most of the disability studies literature comes from first-hand accounts of White individuals, which creates a “dearth of writing about and for disabled people of color” (p. 406). Disability studies seems to take whiteness as a norm and disregard people of color and individuals who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community (Bell, 2016). Disability Studies as a field of study should be

A Forgotten History of Eugenics  139 looked at more reflexively especially when looking into issues of race and ethnicity so that the drought that disabled people of color face ends. The intersections of addressing the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and disability need to be addressed in the field of disabilities instead of just having an overall a White one. Crip theory recognizes that disability is a valid identity that should be acknowledged and celebrated. Bone (2016) suggests that “crip” seeks to challenge the constructions about people with disabilities by individuals who are able-bodied. There have been many negative words used to define those who are disabled, including “handicapped” and “freak” (p. 1298). These terms were created by able-bodied individuals who created a hierarchy giving “Preference to the visibly disabled bodied” (p.  1298). “Crip theory acknowledges the historical exclusion of ­diverse group within the disability community (e.g. persons of color, gay, ­lesbian, transgender) as a consequence of internalized oppression within the disability community” (Williams, 2018, para. 4). Crip can be used to encompass and be an inclusive term for individuals with disabilities (Williams, 2018, para. 2). Bone suggests that Crip theory is a critical project and that we should “Strive to improve the living conditions of the community we examine,” in this case those with disabilities, or Crips as some of us like to be called (Bone, 2016, p. 1298). Emphasizing Crip theory allows us, as intersectional scholars, to read Buck’s case as a product of several sites of identity production, as we break from a tradition of communication and Disability Studies scholarship that is primarily White and pragmatic in its orientation.

Biopower Foucault (1997) describes the attempt at population control by institutions of power as biopower. Whereas discipline is about the way individual bodies are subjected to power structures, biopower is, ­“Technology of power over ‘the’ population as such, over men insofar as they are living beings. It is continuous, scientific, and it is the power to make live” (p. 247). This draws on his earlier work in History of Sexuality (1978) where he discusses the ways in which sex and sexuality have been used as mechanisms of control, over individuals often for the good of the state. In the same period, the analysis of heredity was placing sex (sexual relations, venereal diseases, matrimonial alliances, perversions) in a position of “biological responsibility” with regard to the species: not only could sex be affected by its own diseases, it could also, if it was not controlled transmit diseases or create others that would afflict future generations. Thus, it appeared to be the source of an entire capital for the species to draw from. Whence the medical - but also

140  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies political - project for organizing a state management of marriages, births, and life expectancies; sex and its fertility had to be administered. The medicine of perversions and the programs of eugenics were the two great innovations in the technology of sex of the s­ econd half of the nineteenth century. (Foucault, 1978, p. 188) Foucault (1997) suggests that, “We are, then, in a power that has taken control of both the body and life or that has, if you like, taken control of life in general—with the body as one pole and the population as the other” (p. 253). Foucault argues that the body is no longer a sovereign space, but instead bodies have become a mechanism of state control. This primarily occurred through norming of the body and the state. “The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize” (Foucault, 1997, p. 253). As Foucault (1997) explains, The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that her death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. (p. 255) As Buck found out, in the end, her body belonged to the state. Her White, poor, disabled body became more than just her body, and rather became a way for biopower to actualize.

Method Critical Rhetoric Critical Rhetoric at its core is a framework that acknowledges and analyzes discourses of power. Critical rhetorical analysis as a method blends critical theory with rhetorical criticism to critique traditional ­sophist and platonic rhetorician’s search for the truth. It is also concerned with ­ideology and unhinging power relations and hierarchies (McKerrow, 1989; Ono & Sloop, 1992). When writing of critical theories, Ono (2011) suggests that, “Power as a constitutive dimension of social life … is inclusive of the different ways power functions” (p. 94). He continues, suggesting that such a perspective on “critical” allows us to examine “social inequity, oppression, political resistance, institutional analysis, social and political organizing and organizations, vernacular logics, and cultural differences in critical

A Forgotten History of Eugenics  141 scholarship” (p. 95). As such, critical rhetoric provides us with the tools to perform an intersectional critique focusing on power dynamics imposed upon bodies characterized as inferior within U.S. ­A merican culture. By using critical rhetoric as a method, we examine power dynamics in ­ iscourses the Buck v. Bell court transcript to demonstrate how disability d are still salient today. To do so, we read and analyzed 116 pages of the official Buck v. Bell court transcripts. Through these ­transcripts, themes emerged: the belief in the inheritance of feeblemindedness; the sexualization of the disabled body; and sovereignty. Buck was characterized as a poor, White woman who was considered sexually impure because of her illegitimate child, and yet, we do not know if Buck was disabled because of the ways disabilities were characterized in the early twentieth century. Rather than focus on whether Buck is disabled, we look at how ­rhetoric of feeblemindedness was impacted by race, class, gender, and sexuality. We also examine how this intersectional rhetoric impacted Buck’s ­sovereignty by playing into the fears of race-tainting, female sexual hysteria, and imbecility. Buck was disciplined individually, but she also became a symbol for population control and biopower. ­Eugenics became a biopolitical mechanism to control Buck and others like her from procreating in the name of preservation of the perfect White race. As one White appearing, queer, Latina woman, and one White, queer, disabled femme, we are invested in dismantling systems of power that restrain bodies from their own governance to proliferate state-­sanctioned violence at the expense of the marginalized. This gets to the heart of using a critical rhetorical framework, which challenges normative power structures, and seeks to restore agency to bodies of those who are considered other for their race, class, gender, sexuality, and other intersecting identities.

Heredity In the twentieth century, the recent scientific discovery of heredity was closely associated with diagnosing someone as “feebleminded.” ­R hetorically, “feeblemindedness” has operated as an ambiguous term for a variety of maladies. During the early twentieth century, doctors believed feeblemindedness was a consistent and predictable genomic deficiency for those: Unsafe and dangerous to himself and others, and to the community, and who consequently requires care, supervision, and control for the protection and welfare of himself, others and the community, but who is not classable as an “insane person” as usually interpreted. (Buck v Bell, 1926, p. 82)

142  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies From this definition, we can see that feeblemindedness and insanity are not the same thing, but that there is a connection between them, ­however dubious. Insanity and feeblemindedness are categorized by the 1075 Code of Virginia as two separate entities where insanity is ­classified as significantly worse. Yet feeblemindedness still dehumanizes individuals with cognitive and emotional disabilities. In the case of Carrie Buck, after doctors administered the Binet-Simon intelligence test, the results concluded that Buck was “feebleminded of the lowest grade, having a mental age of 9 years” even though her chronological age was 18 (Buck v Bell, 1926, p. 34). From the quote above, we see how the intersection of ableism and ­patriarchy work together to prioritize masculinity by using the word “himself,” even in the case where a woman is on trial. As Foucault (1997) explains, The normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation  … thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and technologies of regulation on the other…the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between body and population. (p. 253) Carrie Buck was subjected to government legislations and White male doctors in positions of power who made decisions about her body as the property of the State of Virginia. Preventing the spread was essential to the preservation of a perfect, White, middle-upper-class, sexually normative race. While the idea of the pure White race has been debunked as mere myth, at the time the notion of heredity was that undesirable traits could either be passed down through generations or environmentally attributed. Gregor Mendel’s fundamental laws of inheritance was a key piece of evidence that was used by the doctors and eugenicists to suggest that if heredity of traits could be proven in pea plants, the same could be said about humans. Both Dr. DeJarnette and Dr. Priddy, the Superintendent of the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded, agreed that Carrie Buck ­inherited feeblemindedness from her mother, Emma Buck, who was institutionalized for having defective qualities when Buck was a young age. In the testimony below, White middle-upper class prosecutor Col. ­Aubrey Strode asks Mrs. Anne Harris, a White middle-class district nurse from Charlottesville, Virginia, to provide information on Emma Buck, to which she replies: A:  Well,

I know that Emma Buck, Carrie Buck’s mother, was on the charity list for a number of years, off and on—mostly on; that she was living in the worst neighborhoods, and that she was not able to,

A Forgotten History of Eugenics  143 or would not, work and support her children, and that they were on the streets more or less Q:  Cannot you tell us more facts about Emma and Carrie? What sort of people were they? A:  Well, Emma was absolutely irresponsible. She did not have any idea of providing for herself and children. She was literally on the streets with her children, and the numerous charity organizations worked for her at different times, but all that was done for her was to give her relief. Q:  Can’t you tell us what the trouble was with her? A:  Well, she didn’t seem to be able to take care of herself. She would not work. She had these children, and she did not take care of them or herself. Q:  You speak of her not living with her husband: did she continue to have children in spite of the fact? A:  Yes, sir. Q:  Were they her husband’s children? A:  No, sir, no question of them being her husband’s. (Buck v Bell, 1926, pp. 42–47) From the quote above, we infer that because Emma Buck “lived in the worst neighborhoods,” was part of the “charity list,” “wouldn’t work,” and lived “on the streets” that the Buck family were members of the impoverished White class. Rhetorically, poverty was seen as a set of immoral choices that labeled the Buck family as feebleminded, which provided justification for Carrie Buck’s sterilization. This was to prevent future offspring with undesirable traits from being part of the lower classes, and thus, harming society. This is a function of biopower, as Foucault (1997) suggests that in population regulation, “The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole” (p. 253). Hasian (1996) notes that eugenicists were most concerned with how women procreated generations of feeblemindedness and other negative traits. Eugenicists purposefully circulated stories about “poor women [who] were characterized as the carriers of ‘germplasm,’ and those afflicted with this disease became the targets of massive publicity campaigns to cleanse America of the dysgenic” (p. 81). Women who ­participated in sex work or had illegitimate children were accused of being dysgenic and were labeled feebleminded. Rather than knowing if one actually was disabled, eugenicists believed they could predict the propensity for mental illness based on genetics, especially from the mother’s side (Hasian, 1996). Although the Buck family was impoverished and White, feebleminded, poor, people of color were also affected by the eugenics movement. In the trial, Dr. Stephen DeJarnette, the Superintendent of the Western

144  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies State Colony, was asked by Carrie Buck’s lawyer, Mr. Whitehead about the promiscuity of women being institutionalized to which he answers: “Yes, and one point I am glad you mentioned - they come there, having had venereal diseases and having had children, and brother, worse than all, white women come there having negro children” (p. 73). During the twentieth century, interracial marriage and sexual relations were still considered taboo, so for DeJarnette to emphasize that women were being institutionalized for something “worse than all,” the ­ negro children” demonstrated his racial prejudice and desire bearing of “ to keep bloodlines pure. From his use of the term, “brother” we can see that there is camaraderie between these White, elitist, men that unites these men in White power and privilege, while constructing other raced individuals as worse. Foucault (1997) suggests the connection of race and biopower is racism, The first function of racism [is] to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower…the distinctions among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. (p. 253) In 116 pages of court testimony, any race other than White is mentioned only four times. By its absence, whiteness is marked as the racial norm for society. This is not to suggest that there is any monolith of White people, but that whiteness is the norm both discursively and materially (Alcoff, 2015). Foucault suggests that killing has been justified because of racism—that in separating races, labeling some as superior and others as inferior has allowed the state to function as a mechanism of control over populations, deciding who lives and who dies based on sexuality, bloodlines, and disabilities.

Sexuality During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the control over reproduction became a main source of biopower through the ­disciplining of individual women’s bodies for the benefit of society. As Foucault (1997) explains, “Sexuality represents the precise point where the disciplinary and the regulator, the body and the population are articulated” (p. 252). The following passage where DeJarnette is responding to Whitehead articulates: A:  Is

it your idea that feeling safe in sterilization, she will cohabit more promiscuously? Very likely … [a] feebleminded person is very easily

A Forgotten History of Eugenics  145 over-sexed, and it makes but very little difference in my opinion; she would be over-sexed anyhow, and that would be for only one generation. Q:  But say this girl was sterilized and turned out and in six months she had contracted syphilis, because, as you say, this sterilization has not abated her sexual desires at all. She does know she will not have any more babies, and she goes out and goes on a rampage. A:  She has already been on one. Q:  Well, say she goes on another? A:  Very likely. (p. 73) DeJarnette’s responses exemplify the prejudicial belief that a feebleminded person is “over- sexed” as compared to an able-bodied person. Both DeJarnette and Whitehead were concerned that Buck would spread venereal disease because she had previously gone on a sexual “rampage.” However, this was not the case when in fact she was raped by ­Lawrence Dudley who was a relative of her foster family and by all accounts too incorrigible to go outside (Buck v Bell, 1926). Rather than admit to the reality of the situation, Whitehead and DeJarnette played into fears about women’s sexuality during this time period. According to Foucault (1978), these two men were likely vexed by the notion of: Hysterization of women’s bodies: a three-fold process whereby the feminine body was analyzed - qualified and disqualified - as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality; whereby it was integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of pathology intrinsic to it; whereby, finally, it was placed in organic communication with the social body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure). (Foucault, 1978, p. 104) Through the exchange of Whitehead and DeJarnette regarding Buck, we can see how they believed in the myth of women being hypersexual ­deviants. Buck’s gender combined with her feeblemindedness made her the likely target of this sexual stigma. We can also see through Foucault’s (1978) passage, how sexuality became medicalized as something to do for procreation rather than recreation. While DeJarnette and Whitehead were concerned with regulating the number of undesirable offspring of the feebleminded, they also wanted to propagate the species with normative traits. The attempt to sterilize Carrie Buck was eugenicists way of controlling her sexuality through her ability to reproduce. While they were taking great precautions to prevent pregnancy, because of Buck’s supposed sexual urges, the doctors did want to ensure that she could still experience such pleasures. When Col. Strode’s questions, “He [DeJarnette] said

146  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies that the chief benefit [of sterilization] was that they might go out and enjoy sexual relations?” Dr. Arthur Estabrook, a White, middle-upper class male from the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, responded with, “She could enjoy sexual relations, assuming that they were carried out under the sanction of society, that is assuming that she was married” (Buck v Bell, 1926, p. 86). Under the guise of sexual satisfaction, the doctors still made sure to discipline Buck’s body through the institution of marriage, whereby heterosexual, monogamous sex was the only appropriate way to express one’s sexuality. As we can see, this is one of the attempts to “reduce all of sex to its reproductive function,” even though she could not reproduce (Foucault, 1978, p. 103). Both in the past and currently heterosexuality has been a means for organizing society and not just a relational formation. According to Foucault (1978), “The sex of husband and wife was beset by rules and recommendations. The marriage relation was the most intense focus of constraints; it was spoken of more than anything else … it was required to give a detailed accounting of itself” (p. 37). As Foucault demonstrates, it is important not to confuse sexuality with relationality, although they have often been reduced to one entity. In Buck’s case, because she conceived a child out of wedlock, due to rape, she was dissonant from the heteronormative nuclear family model. Doctors targeted this dissonance by deeming Buck’s daughter to be illegitimate, due to her mother’s supposed immoral sexual tendencies. As Priddy states, “She could go out … probably marry some man of her own level and do as many whom I have sterilized for diseases have done— be good wives—be producers, and lead happy and useful lives in their spheres” (Buck v Bell, 1926, p. 89). According to the doctors, if Buck were to have the surgery and then marry, she could fulfill her wifely duties. However, Buck could never fully carry out her wifely ­duties because she would never bare children post-sterilization. Again, her body became a site for both discipline, insofar as she was told what she could and even more important could not do with it in terms of sexual mores around disability, and also a regulation because these mores condemned her to childlessness.

Sovereignty Whiteness is linked to sovereignty, as it primarily has been White people who have been allowed to own their bodies (Hasian, 1996). Gender, disability, and sexuality all impacted the amount of say certain White people had over their bodies. In 1927, post slavery, era of Jim Crow, people of color were still often reliant on White people for resources and thus lacked sovereignty. According to Foucault (1997), “The classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death was one of sovereignty’s

A Forgotten History of Eugenics  147 basic attributes … [it] means that he can, basically, either have people put to death or let them live” (p. 240). In this sense, what does it mean to live but have no say over one’s life? Foucault (1997) suggests that there is a fine line between life and death if one is constantly at the expense of biopolitics. For example, Col. Strode asked Carrie Buck the obligatory question, “Do you care to say anything about having this operation performed on you?” to which Buck responded, “No, sir, I have not, it is up to my people” (Buck v Bell, 1926, p. 26). This was the only question that was ever directed to Buck. Her response can be interpreted in a number of ways, for example, her words demonstrate her feelings of personal powerlessness in the face of the penal system, doctors and peers. Rather than say anything too much for herself, she instead leaves her sovereignty in the hands of the people. Of course, we have to wonder to what extent she could speak for herself since we do not know the actual degree of her disabilities, nor if she was disabled at all. What we do know, however, is that although she was of legal age, she had a guardian, Mr. Robert G. Shelton, a presumably White, middle-class male assigned by the court to speak for her. Because of being young, disabled, poor, and female, she was at the mercy of those who held the power to her life over her. In the following, Whitehead is asking Estabrook about Buck’s ability to be independent: Q:  You say she is A:  She is. Q:  And therefore

incapable of being taught to take care of herself?

unless somebody took her and looked after, she would land in the poorhouse? A:  No… Q:  But you said she was incapable of taking care of herself? A:  She is incapable of taking care of herself in the manner which society expects her to. Q:  Do you mean to say that she is incapable of making the home for herself that a perfectly normal woman would? A:  She would not. She would earn a partial living. Q:  Would not the possibility be that she would be a charge on the community?… A:  There are grades in the ability to take care of one’s self. I would say in the case of Carrie Buck she would not be capable of taking care of herself to the fullest extent. (Buck v Bell, 1926, p. 85) Estabrook argues that with sterilization Buck would be able to live her life and be an asset to society. While she would not end up in the “poorhouse,” she would still be dependent on someone to conform to societal

148  Kathryn Hobson and Sophia B. Margulies expectations. Although, she may find happiness in the way that the judicial system deemed appropriate, the truth is that she would have to give up control over her personhood. This is not because as a woman her personhood is wrapped in her womb, but instead that she would have to prove her productivity in socially acceptable, albeit ambiguous ways. The doctors’ suggestion that she would need close monitoring means that she would be watched and scrutinized and thus regulated, l­acking any semblance of control over her life. Biopolitics is concerned with deciding who to let live and who to let die, but in the case of a young, poor, White, and disabled woman from Virginia, no one ever asked if her sterilization felt like death.

Conclusions Biopower has affected different populations in myriad ways. It is not just about disabilities, it is not just about race, it is not just about gender or reproduction, and it is not just about heterosexuality, but it is an amalgamation of all of these intersections. Whiteness is always complicated by other identities and discourses. Disability also plays into our discursive and material fears of whether, should we find ourselves disabled, will we have lost the right to our lives as well? The reality of disability and whiteness is that they are wrapped up in one another. Whiteness as a dominant discourse has rhetorically functioned as able-bodied through discourses of purity and perfection. To challenge whiteness, we have to begin to crip it—to examine how disability discourses have been framed to prioritize White people, at the expense of people of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized groups. Biopower shows us what is to continue happening if we do not challenge social norms, which prioritize government control at the expense not only of individual liberty but also at the expense of forming coalitions between groups of different people. As queer, ­feminist, and crip scholars, we are committed to politics that ­challenge normative power structures to forge these alliance possibilities.

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Part III

Intersectional Readings of Whiteness through Discursive Strategies

9 Monstrous Authenticity Trump’s Whiteness Rachel E. Dubrofsky

At the time of this writing, almost a year after the Trump administration came into office, the reality of a Trump presidency has left those who are left-leaning or centrist in their political orientations incredulous. There are also a lot of unanswered questions about this ­administration and the election. Most pressing, according to the mainstream press, are details about the possible impact of Russian interference in the election—did the Trump campaign conspire with the Russians to influence the outcome? What we know is that Trump has the support of a significant number of U.S. citizens, and the support of most Republicans in the House and the Senate—or at least, these politicians have thus far been reticent to vocalize objections to the actions of the Trump administration. Trump’s candidacy for the presidency and his presidency have been marked by excessively ­i nappropriate behavior according to norms for the presidency. For instance, one of the many incidents to consume mainstream media was Trump tweeting insults about MSNBC ­Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski. Public response to this incident has followed the usual ­pattern, with the popular press, pundits, democrats, and so forth accusing Trump of misogyny and of being mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency (for example, see Stelter 2017, and the CNN ­Tonight video Don Lemon: President Trump should be ashamed). Media attention to such incidents is exhaustive, with the focus of the attention on Trump’s idiosyncrasies, with an implicit assumption that Trump acts independently. My contention in this chapter is that Trump’s behavior is part of the machinery that is the Trump administration, and that to understand the critical significance of the Trump administration, it is helpful to frame Trump as part of a larger structure of disenfranchisement that existed long before Trump entered the scene. As Serwer notes in a poignant article in The Atlantic, The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such ­policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its

156  Rachel E. Dubrofsky appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal. (Serwer, 2017) Nonetheless, a president expressing these ideas through the kind of behavior Trump exhibits is new: We are seeing a repackaging of ageold misogynist, racist, homophobic, White supremacist views. Rachel ­Maddow, on the June 30, 2017, episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, articulated both the conventional and startling nature of Trump’s behavior: Politicians have always tried to distract the public from certain issues by shifting attention away from certain things (Trump’s tweets are a good example). However, Maddow posits that Trump offers an outrageous version of this distraction tactic. Significant is the level to which Trump is willing to sink to distract and its implications. As Maddow explains, Trump pushes the envelope by being disgusting, his behavior suggesting that, unlike previous presidents, he has no regard for the institution of the presidency. Integral to my argument in this chapter is that to make sense of Trump, we need to understand the significance of the ways in which Trump breaks convention when it comes to norms for presidential behavior and middle-class whiteness, while keeping in our purview the fact that the breaking of these conventions ultimately affirms age-old misogynist, White supremacist, homophobic, and xenophobic views. As a critical scholar who examines popular culture for clues about how disenfranchisement and oppression are made normal, mundane, embedded into the everydayness of our lives, the Trump administration appears to make this task futile: Oppression and disenfranchisement are front and center on the agenda. There is nothing to “reveal” as a critical scholar. White supremacists are in the White House, literally. At the same time, long before the Trump administration came into power, people of color in the United States—BlackLivesMatter being the most obvious and public example—have been pointing out the overtness of racism and the crippling ways it impacts people of color. The risk for critical ­scholars, progressives and the left, is that we respond to Trump in a reactionary manner, harking back to a romanticized version of the recent past. This tendency is already apparent in discussions about ­post-truth and the “dangers” of abandoning “truth” and “fact.” As ­Mejia, Beckermann, and Sullivan (28 June 2017, June 28) note, the 2016 presidential election gave rise to “a veritable cottage industry of opinion pieces, conferences, and academic articles … attempting to make sense of how a racist, misogynistic, neo-nationalist member of the economic elite could win a presidential election.” Importantly, these authors point out that the election results were not surprising for those cognizant of the history of “racism, sexism, and nativism” in the United States, though others tended to see Trump’s election as “a by-product of the

Monstrous Authenticity  157 closed-information ecosystems made possible by the rise of ­social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter—as if racism, sexism, nativism, let alone segregation, are recent inventions in American history” (Mejia et al., 2017, June 28). As Mejia et al. (2017) explain, this “belief that the problems of the present are due to an abandonment of the principle of truth betrays the political nostalgia that plagues both the left and the right.” My goal is to examine the “Trump-moment” within a larger historical context, seeking continuity with long-standing forms of structural oppression, while trying to understand the shift, at least in appearance and form, of this version of White supremacist, misogynist homophobia. Building on Mejia, ­Beckermann, and Sullivan’s arguments, I suggest that examining newer forms of media and their impact in this set-up adds an important dimension, but that these newer forms of media re-articulate long-­standing issues. I find that the current culture of surveillance, and the ethic of authenticity privileged in that culture, an ethic that is particularly salient in the reality TV genre (let us not forget Trump’s starring role in The Apprentice), helps us understand Trump’s popularity. That the Trump administration is problematic, I take as a given. For critical scholars, this is not an insightful conclusion. Hailing from a tradition influenced by Michel Foucault, my interest is in making sense of how we got to the present moment. While critical scholarship often seeks to unravel how things are normalized, this chapter shifts that approach by looking at how Trump is made abnormal, and subsequently, how racism, misogyny, and whiteness are normalized. An important aspect of our culture is surveillance, which is specifically relevant for ­understanding Trump, since he is a well-known reality television celebrity and reality TV packages surveillance footage as an entertainment product. Bonnie Dow astutely notes that One explanation for Trump’s unexpected victory is that voters were attracted to who he was and how he presented himself as much as or more than what he said … The same can be said for Clinton’s lack of appeal for those same voters. (Dow, 2017, p. 136) Indeed, Trump’s popularity lies largely in his irreverent personality and his consistency in that behavior, regardless of context. Trump refuses to alter his behavior to suit the norms of the presidency. Prior to his candidacy for the presidency, Trump’s reputation was as an outspoken and crass real-estate mogul, whose divorce from Ivana Trump in the 1980s was scandalous and acrimonious. In 2004, Trump became a r­ eality TV celebrity, thanks to his role on NBC’s The Apprentice. Since Trump is often accused of treating his presidency like a reality TV show, I take this accusation literally. Indeed, as Emily Nussbaum (2017), TV critic for the New Yorker, insightfully notes “if The Apprentice didn’t get Trump

158  Rachel E. Dubrofsky elected, it is surely what made him electable.” I explore how breaking expectations, so central to affirming authenticity in the reality TV genre, is also how Trump is framed in mainstream news articles, though in this instance he is presented as breaking conventions for the presidency. Trump’s ability to appear to break conventions for the presidency, and norms for middle-class whiteness, and the fact that this breaking of convention functions to affirm his authenticity, I argue, is a marker of White privilege and makes whiteness usefully visible at a moment of intense White fragility, enabling him, as Rachel Griffin articulates in her chapter for this collection, to leverage his toxic masculinity to embolden other White men to do the same. As Serwer reminds, “a majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals” (2017).

Method I focus on mediated representations of Trump. I am interested in how he is framed, presented, not who he might be in real life, his intentions, feelings, and so forth. I begin by looking at two humorous media portrayals of Trump. The first is a mock front page published by the Boston Globe, an apocalyptic foretelling of a day under President Trump. A few months after the Boston Globe’s mock front page, Cracked, a popular humor website which began in 2005 and is inspired by the magazine Cracked (first published in 1958), created a video just over 9 minutes long that went viral, titled “What If Donald Trump Is Just An Elaborate Prank?” where fiction becomes fact. As of December 11, 2017, the video had 948,732 views on YouTube. I examine the video and mock front page to illustrate a pervasive mocking attitude about Trump as a way of opening up a discussion about the implications of the attitude of savvy knowing that permeates the mainstream press articles I also examine. For the news articles selected for the analysis, I wanted perspectives that were not supportive of Trump. This yielded articles from papers that are liberal-leaning, as well as from some right-leaning papers. ­Finding a workable number of news articles for a close textual analysis was not an easy task. The sheer number of articles written about Trump is overwhelming, as any Google search for “Trump” using the “news” category reveals—at the time of this writing, google pulls up “About 96,700,000 results” (direct quote from Google). I narrowed the focus to the period after the primaries and before the election, so I could focus on Trump and not the other candidates in the primaries. Since so much has happened— is happening—since Trump took office, it seemed wise to look at the period prior to Trump taking office. Nonetheless, the quantity of articles about Trump in the press during the primaries was prohibitive. To find a workable number, I focused on endorsements of Clinton, all of which devoted significant space (more than half the article) to a discussion of

Monstrous Authenticity  159 Trump’s weaknesses as a candidate. Still, the endorsements for Clinton were plentiful—even papers that typically only e­ ndorse ­Republicans refused to endorse Trump. As Levy and Greenberg note in Mother Jones (2016), “Some papers with a history of endorsing Republicans have not only changed sides in this election, but have rebuked Trump with unusually strong language.” I further narrowed the selection by looking at endorsements for Clinton from papers with the highest circulation in the most densely populated urban centers. I ended up with twelve articles published between July 28, 2016, and ­November 3, 2016, from the following papers: The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, USA Today, The Philadelphia ­Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The New York Daily News, and The Dallas Morning News. I examine each story, with a focus on Trump. What I find is not surprising: Trump is painted as temperamentally unfit for the presidency, inconsistent and changeable, and ignorant. My interest is in opening up a discussion of the implications of these constructions of Trump. I make the argument that these presentations of Trump provide critical insight about the importance of authenticity at this point in time in a surveillance society, and I examine the concomitant implications for notions of whiteness.

Trump the Monster Trump’s supporters and detractors characterize him as an unconventional candidate for the presidency. Some news stories and social media memes align Trump with Hitler and Mussolini, suggesting he is akin to a European fascist despot, the likes of which the United States has not seen in a presidential candidate. It is worth noting that democrats also had a candidate in the primaries who was unconventional, Bernie S­ anders. Like Trump, Sanders expressly dis-identified with his party and with traditional ways of doing politics. As well, right-wing Republican candidate Ted Cruz advocated for policies in line with, and sometimes more right-wing than Trump’s. My point: it is not Trump’s policies that make him remarkable. Neither Cruz nor Sanders attracted the same media attention as Trump—both of whose policies were more unconventional than those hinted at by Trump—nor did they succeed in the primaries. Framing Trump as abnormal, and monstrous (Hitler-like), obscures the way Trump is normative, particularly in his racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, and xenophobia, and elides an examination of his authentic-seeming presentation of self, which is key in understanding Trump’s popularity. The trope of the monstrous in critical scholarship has typically functioned to tease out how people of color, women, queer, the disenfranchised, are made not-normal. The notion of monstrosity is used

160  Rachel E. Dubrofsky to make sense of social anxieties about otherness (Al-Ghabra, 2015; Calafell, 2012, 2015; Levina & Bui, 2013; Moreman & Calafell, 2008). ­C ohen (1996) discusses seven theories of monster culture, including the idea that the body of the monster works as a cultural space; the monster is part of difference; and the monster incites a ­ onsters are leaky, uncouth, they say what ought crisis of categories. M not to be said when it ought not to be said. For instance, Amanda R. Martinez, in a forum piece about Trump in Women’s Studies in ­C ommunication, notes how Trump frames “Others” as monstrous to justify misogynist and racist measures (Martinez, 2017, p. 146): “Trump supporters are exerting this control through hate crimes, (micro) aggressions, intimidation, and harassment (Hatewatch Staff). Trump’s win emboldened racists, while we, the monstrous Others, struggled to respond” (Martinez, 2017, p. 146). At the same time, Trump is articulated in the popular press as ­monstrous himself, uniquely horrible in his breaking of convention, doing the unthinkable, saying the unsayable. For example, nine of the twelve articles I examine emphasize the unusualness of the 2016 election, either explicitly or implicitly because of Trump’s behavior and personality. Some simply, but emphatically, state that this election is unique and different, others make statements like “this is not an ordinary election” ­(“Clinton for President,” 2016, S­ eptember  29), “not a normal election year” (“Hillary Clinton for President,” 2016, September 25), “not a normal presidential race” (“The Chicago Sun-Times endorses Hillary Clinton,” 2016, September 30) and that although “every presidential race is described as ‘defining’ and ‘historic,’ this time, it’s true.” The Daily News labels the election “bizarre” (“Daily News: We endorse Hillary for president,” 2016, October 28). Others are more specific about the challenges of this election, writing things like that the election presents us with “the starkest political choice in living memory” (“These are unsettling times that require a steady hand,” 2016, November 3). The election is set apart from all previous elections, implying the issues are also new. At the center of articulations of the unusualness of the election is Trump’s ineptitude as a presidential candidate, his startling and inappropriate behavior—he is monstrous as a presidential candidate. The Miami Herald writes: He’s the star of this political reality show of his own making, a sick parody of a real political contest. He’s the ringmaster of a circus that attempts to conceal his lack of gravity by relying on the entertainment value of insults, exaggerations, lies and promises completely devoid of credibility and substance, characterized by his pie-in-thesky vow to “make America great again.” (The Miami Herald recommends Hillary Clinton for president of the United States, 2016, October 14)

Monstrous Authenticity  161 Trump’s character is derided, his approach belittled, and his goals framed as unrealistic. Trump is unsuited for the presidency because he is unfit emotionally, mentally unstable, and unable to appropriately control his presentation of self—he is leaky. The focus is on Trump’s flaws as a ­human being, presenting him as an aberration as a presidential candidate because he outrageously defies expectations for ­appropriate behavior for the presidency: He would be a monster in the White House, wreaking havoc, upending expectations, creating a crisis of categories. Though irony and humor are not used in the newspaper articles examined, as they are for The Boston Globe mock front page and the Cracked video discussed shortly, the articles speak from a similar position of knowledge and insight: The writers clearly see the reality of the situation, a reality Trump and his supporters cannot see, and the writers see this because they are savvy, informed citizens, as is the presumed audience for the articles. The perspective taken is that a reasonable person knows Trump is not a viable choice for president, and anyone who considers supporting Trump must not be in his or her right mind. The papers proclaim the obvious choice, summarily dismissing Trump: “There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November,” since “Resume vs. resume, judgment vs. judgment, this election is no contest” (“We recommend Hillary Clinton for president,” 2016, September 7). Trump is presented as clearly unqualified for the presidency (“Clinton for President,” 2016, September 29; “Hillary Clinton would make a sober,” 2016, September 23; “These are unsettling times that require a steady hand,” 2016, November 3), and, in the words of one article, “uniquely unqualified” (“Hillary Clinton for president,” 2016, October 12) for this job. His suitability for the job is also in question (“Trump is unfit for the presidency,” 2016)—one article, for instance, notes Trump’s “total lack of fitness for the presidency” thanks to his “horrible judgement” (“The Miami Herald ­recommends Hillary,” 2016, October 14). Another piece comments that, compared to Clinton, Trump’s “infirmities as a candidate” are plain to see, and it is “absurd—and perilous—… to suggest that her flaws are in any way on a level with his” (“Hillary Clinton would make a sober,” 2016, September 23). Along similar lines, The Dallas Morning News writes, of Clinton, that “her errors are plainly in a different universe than her opponent’s” (“We recommend Hillary Clinton for president,” 2016, September 7). Choosing Trump is not only a dangerous move, but nonsensical, particularly when Clinton is, the articles suggest, an imminently reasonable choice. One article proclaims Trump’s “obvious unsuitability for the presidency ….” and that what Trump needs is “to see a psychiatrist, not a nuclear-launch code” (“Hillary Clinton for President” Boston Globe, 2016, October 8). Another editorial makes plain that to choose Trump is “to repudiate the most basic notions of

162  Rachel E. Dubrofsky competence and capability” (“These are unsettling times that require a steady hand,” 2016, November 3). Further, as the Miami Herald proclaims, The priority of every voter who cares about standards of honesty and decency, not to mention the future and direction of this country, is to reject what Donald Trump represents. America does not need an arrogant, self-absorbed charlatan in the Oval Office. (“The Miami Herald recommends Hillary,” 2016, October 14) Voting against Trump is the only choice a sane person can make, a moral imperative, a barometer of one’s “honesty” and “decency.” The assumption, as with the mock front page and video discussed shortly, is that supporting Trump makes no sense for anyone who has a modicum sense of morality or ethics, or respect for democracy. Trump voters exist in the realm of the unhinged, those out of touch with reality, with no sense of right and wrong. Trump is here uniquely remarkable in his horribleness, individualized. Trump, and his supporters, are Othered, made monstrous. Benjamin Studebaker (2017, April 1) insists on the importance of normalizing Trump to effectively resist the larger structural issues that created Trump and the machinery that supports him. I take up ­Studebacker’s call. What are the implications when a powerful, White rich man is made monstrous, abhorrent, exceedingly not-normal? How does this situate misogyny, racism and homophobia? Might presentations of Trump as monstrous frustrate a contextualizing of such things within a larger postracial and postfeminist era that preceded Trump? How do articulations of Trump as monstrous reify understandings of what is “normal” and “good,” obfuscating critical understandings of oppression and disenfranchisement?

Mocking the Monster Jason Wilson, in a piece for The Guardian (2017, May 23), notes the growing use of irony by the alt-right, and the increasing interest by scholars in understanding this phenomenon (Marwick & Lewis, 2017; Milner & Phillips, 2017; Nagle, 2017; Ross, 2017). Wilson writes “experts say that the ‘alt-right’ have stormed mainstream consciousness by weaponizing irony, and by using humour and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents” (2017, May 23). He cites Alice Marwick, co-author of a report on online media and disinformation: “irony has a strategic function. It allows people to disclaim a real commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them” (Wilson, 2017, May 23). Marwick, interviewed by Wilson, says “troll culture became a way for fascism to hide in plain sight” enabling things like “non-ironic Nazism”

Monstrous Authenticity  163 to masquerade as “ironic Nazism” (Wilson, 2017, May 23). Picking up Marwick’s articulation of how irony functions in extremist rightwing social media spaces, I wonder how this way of using irony suffuses other media spaces. Flipping the focus, how might irony work in more ­progressive contexts? What, in these contexts, is non-ironically being ­reinforced through the use of irony and humor? What are the implications of the implicit assumption of knowing savvy that accompanies much irony and humor? The April 2016 mock front page published by the Boston Globe is a horrifying foretelling of what a day with Trump as president might look like. The page speaks of panic about a president unable to exhibit appropriate behavior for the presidency. The center photo is of Trump, florid, mid-shout, with the byline “Live Now: President Addresses the Nation” and “Breaking News: Trump: Deport illegals ‘So Fast your Head Will Spin’” across the bottom of the photo. Below are the headlines “US Soldiers Refuse Order to Kill ISIS Families” and “New Libel Law Targets ‘Absolute Scum in the Press’” (direct quotes from Trump), illustrating Trump’s uncouth behavior and bloodlust. Other headlines have Trump being awarded a Nobel Prize, penning a novel, and having a park named after him, attesting to his narcissism and hubris, qualities unbecoming of a president. At the time of this writing, headlines in national papers often rival those of the Boston Globe’s mock front page. The dark humor of the mock front page speaks to the reader from a perspective of knowledge, presuming the reader shares this knowledge: we know better than to elect Trump. The mocking tone assumes we are in on the joke that is Trump, savvy to the dangers of a Trump presidency. This perspective is rooted in a sense of righteousness about what the United States stands for. The apocalyptic vision is a reactionary call for a return to an imaginary pre-Trump era of civil politics, when leaders spoke rationally, wars were fought justly, immigration policies were compassionate, and the news media was not owned by the one percent aligned with government and big business. This apocalyptic story dangerously elides the larger machinery that is the government and big business, belying a cultural preoccupation with individualism and an obfuscation of the systemic. Taking Trump for the system means we forget that the current machinery produced a string of White supremacist Trumps: Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Ted Cruz (to name a  few), and leaves us longing for the more civil days of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Dick Cheney, when White elite men knew how to speak their hatred in a civil manner. This perspective suggests that Trump is uniquely horrible and that getting rid of him would make the United States a better place—make America great again. In June of 2016, just a few months after the Boston Globe’s mock front page, Cracked created a 9-minute video titled “What If Donald Trump is Just an Elaborate Prank?” The video parodies what happens when

164  Rachel E. Dubrofsky distinctions between so-called “truth” and “fact” are irrelevant. What starts as a prank cooked up by two White millennial men turns into reality. We watch as what is framed as an outrageous mock Trump campaign gains momentum, propelling Trump to the primaries. Unlike the Boston ­ loodthirsty tyGlobe’s mock front page where Trump is a narcissistic b rant, Trump is here a mindless pawn in an elaborate prank concocted by the two men. The video shows the two men increasingly incredulous as their fake campaign garners public support. They realize, in horror, that they have unwittingly created a monstrous but viable candidate. The repeated refrain, “it will all be worth it for the big reveal at the end,” uttered by the men throughout, rings hollower and hollower as the video progresses and the mock campaign gains momentum. The video uses real clips of Trump, intercut with comments from the men, such as “the wall bit played. It’s a child’s idea as a resolution to the immigration problem. Crazy. Did he imply that Mexico is sending us rapists?” The other guy responds “he didn’t imply it, he flat out said it.” At one point, one of the guys says, “oh man, that was the worst debate performance I have ever seen. I keep wanting to say I couldn’t have scripted a worse debate performance, and that’s true, because I scripted this one!” As we see real clips of Trump doing increasingly bizarre things, one of the men says “I haven’t seen the numbers yet, but there is no way he bounces back. This was fun! And weird.” However, in the next scene, interns and support staff are hired to manage the huge workload for the (fake) Trump ­campaign—Trump’s popularity has grown. The men, increasingly amazed and horrified at Trump’s rise to popularity, try to reassure each other with statements like “The longer this goes on, the funnier it will be when we reveal it was a prank.” Twice during the video, the men receive calls from Trump. Both times, Trump cries like a baby. On the first call, amidst the crying, Trump says, almost inaudibly, “I don’t wanna” while the men reassure him with “We know you are scared, we know you are tired, and you don’t want to do this anymore … it will be over soon and it will be hilarious …” In one of the last scenes, after Trump wins the primaries, the two men are sitting at a conference table, smoking and drinking, depressed. One says “what are we gonna do now?” The other responds “go and meet the press in five minutes and talk about how this is really a win for the American people. Just eight years of working in the White House and then we will tell everyone …” he adds listlessly “it’s going to be funny? It’s going to be so funny.” They laugh thinly. Trump calls, again crying like a baby, this time no audible words. The video ends. Unlike the mock front page of the Boston Globe which conjures an unimaginable future, the horror of the video lies in showing what leads to that terrible future: when what is absurd and unfathomable, becomes reality. The Cracked video paints a confounding and troubling world where fact and fiction are interchangeable. Like the mock front page, the video suggests that the Trump campaign was unusual, in this instance for its

Monstrous Authenticity  165 dissemination of untruths and the troubling number of people willing to believe the lies. The video also speaks longingly of a past when politicians’ campaigns and actions were based on truth, lamenting our current unprecedented post-truth world. This perspective, however, humorously yet effectively erases a long history of politicians telling lies: George W. Bush and the “weapons of mass destruction”? Watergate? The Iran ­Contra Affair? To name a few particularly notable cases. Presidents ­lying is nothing new. Granted, the rate at which Trump does this is indeed unprecedented, but let us not forget that lying is not a new activity for a president. This humorous video also suggests there is a clear distinction between truth and fact, a suggestion that reeks of positivism, eliding the importance, particularly in dealing with questions of inequality, of looking at whose truth is being presented, from which perspective, for what ends, and of inquiring about truths that are absented in the facts. The video and the mock front page express incredulity and horror about a Trump presidency. The mock front page sees the problem as a Trump problem: He is a narcissistic despot. The video points the finger at people who buy into Trump, who accept what is absurd (and fabricated) as a desirable reality. In the video, Trump is presented as incoherent, childlike, and without agency—it is the two men who are the masterminds, Trump the pawn, lacking intelligence. The mock front page, on the other hand, frames Trump as agentic, with terrible intentions, and supremely self-centered. Significantly, both The Boston Globe and Cracked take a position of righteous knowing, the stories told from a stance of certain knowledge that Trump is a terrible presidential candidate, and Trump and his supporters are ignorant. This situates the creators as savvy and enlightened, and Trump and his supporters as clueless. As Dow points out about Trump supporters “it is a mistake to label them as irrational. Rather, their grounds for political judgement were simply not what we expected” (Dow, 2017, p. 137). Critics of Trump missed the boat by assuming that the rhetoric of the Trump campaign was so obviously ludicrous to all. This same tone of savvy knowing and assumption about what is so clearly right, but without the humor, permeates mainstream news stories endorsing Clinton and criticizing Trump, the main focus of the discussion below. What are the implications of assuming a righteous position of knowledge, without the humor? How can we resist the construction of Trump as monstrous and pursue Studebacker’s (2017) call to see Trump as exceedingly normal? One way, I suggest, is to place Trump in the context of a surveillance culture that includes reality TV, examining Trump in light of notions of authenticity articulated in the reality TV genre.

Surveillance and Authenticity: Learning from Reality TV Trump starred on his own reality TV show and is often criticized for treating the presidency like a reality show. Taking this criticism literally, I look at how Trump’s behavior is framed in ways that align with the

166  Rachel E. Dubrofsky behavior of reality TV participants. On reality TV, participants affirm their authenticity when they seem to break the conventions of the reality genre—for instance, when we see the producers talking to participants (showing the behind-the-scenes machinations), a participant tearing off his mic and running away from the camera (making visible the technical aspects of the show), or a participant hysterical and unable to control her emotions despite the presence of cameras and the knowledge that she is being filmed (and might be seen by millions). Such instances make visible, apparent, the fact of surveillance and of the apparatus involved in producing the shows. Arguably, seeming to break the convention (of ­pretending there is no camera, no production) is part of the convention of reality TV. Authenticity results from the juxtaposition of production and what is presented as spontaneous, unplanned behavior within a controlled and surveilled space—what Enli calls an “authenticity puzzle,” a tension between mediation and seeming spontaneity (Enli, 2015, p. 85). Looking to scholarship on music genres, Enli (2015) finds that performances by singers are seen as authentic if they both “respond faithfully to genre conventions” and “include spontaneous elements or improvisation” (Enli, 2015, p. 12). This tension is apparent in the reality TV genre where, when emotions burst forth, seemingly unplanned, despite the participant being under surveillance, the fact of surveillance verifies the authenticity of the emotions (Dubrofsky, 2011). Enli (2015) uses the term “mediated authenticity” to detail this tension. Mediated spaces are curated, produced to encourage and invite certain performances, which sets up a tension with the requirement for spontaneity. A truism of reality TV is that participants who present as so comfortable on camera that they behave in ways that suggest they forget about the cameras—as they would, we imagine, in their normal everyday lives—or who are so overcome with emotion that they cannot contain themselves despite the cameras, are articulated as authentic. This is so regardless of how dislikeable the character or the behavior: Consistency, not likeability, is the barometer of authenticity. Furthermore, authenticity is a characteristic used to assess the value of participants: those who present as most authentic (in their “goodness” or “badness”) are often the ones given the most airtime, the stars of a given season. Auslander, via ­Stuart Hall, describes everyday authenticity—what reality shows attempt to reproduce in an exceedingly contrived context—by saying that “what is real, is total self-expression and authenticity in the here and now. Life is a l­oosely-organised series of unplanned ‘happenings,’ ‘with the stress on the immediacy, the spontaneous participation and the free-form expressiveness of the response’ (Hall 183)” (Auslander, 2006, pp. 10–11). The emphasis is on unplanned actions. However, this “is paradoxical because the performers in media are often expected to ‘be themselves’ and ‘act natural,’ but also always be compatible with the format criteria”

Monstrous Authenticity  167 (Enli, 2015, p. 10) since the spaces invite specific types of behavior. Looking at this idea within the context of reality TV, participants should not appear “too controlled, or seem staged and pre-planned in their performances” because, despite knowledge that the footage will be manipulated by TV workers, “viewers generally believe that the raw material of these shows is authentic … and they seek those moments when the emotional authenticity is exposed (Aslama & Pantti, 2006; Hill, 2005)” (Enli, 2015, p. 85). This is what I have elsewhere theorized as a “call to the real” (Dubrofsky, 2011). Key for the call to the real is the sense that, despite the cameras, the contrived context and the manipulation by TV workers, what the viewer sees are the actions of real people, doing real things, at a moment in time. Relatedly, displays of consistent behavior (even hateful behavior) across disparate spaces also affirm authenticity (Dubrofsky, 2011) since this establishes a stable core identity regardless of context—the person does not perform for different audiences. I build on Enli’s notion of “mediated authenticity” and the “authenticity puzzle,” adding the idea of “performing-not-performing” ­(Dubrofsky & Ryalls, 2014), which emerges in contexts of surveillance. Performing-not-performing means appearing to behave in a manner that does not involve performing, seeming to be one’s true self despite being under surveillance. Ryalls & I (2014) argue that the privileging of performing-not-performing carries over into contexts where surveillance is not directly present, with a favoring of spontaneous, unplanned, unrehearsed behavior, especially behavior that ostensibly cannot be ­repressed. And, performing-not-performing is linked to markers of authenticity. Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) specifies that the authentic is seen as residing “in the inner self … the outer self is merely an expression, a performance, and is often corrupted by material things” (p. 11). Key is that authentic spaces are ones that are, despite a hyper-branded and commercial culture, seen as “not commercial” (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 11): These are considered “the space of the self, of creativity, of spirituality” ­(Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 11). The authentic self is thus an untampered-self, the expressive part of the self, unmarked by the demands of the market. Pointedly, authentic selves are ones that do not appear to perform for the outside world. Performing and being authentic are in opposition. The notion of performing-not-performing moves away from essentialist and naturalized ideas about authenticity, emphasizing all behavior as performance and bringing to light the parameters for ­authentic-seeming behavior. In this instance, performing-not-­performing enables a focus on the details of how Trump is mediated as being authentic: on the construction of authenticity. Trump presents as the same (monstrous, unpredictable, and dislikeable) person on his reality show, in his many public appearances prior to his bid for the presidency, during his campaign, and as president. He seemingly has no regard for the requirements of appropriate behavior

168  Rachel E. Dubrofsky in a given context. For instance, Trump is regularly infantilized in the press as petulant, unruly, and narcissistic, like a child having a tantrum. One article calls Trump “bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world” (“Hillary Clinton for president,” 2016, October 12). The suggestion is that Trump needs supervision. He needs civilizing. He is ignorant and needs to be informed. He is not the right person for this job because his values and character do not meet expectations for the presidency. As the Chicago Sun Times puts it, “In this election, issues of character and temperament have taken center stage because one candidate, Donald Trump, has little character and a bratty temperament” (“The Chicago Sun-Times endorses Hillary Clinton,” 2016, September 30). These things may or may not be true (establishing this is not the aim of my project), but this articulation of Trump suggests he is not afraid to be himself, will not be susceptible to political pressures, and will push back against the Washington establishment (and defy c­ onvention), ­regardless of consequences. Trump might change his mind, he might be inconsistent, he might appear to be lying in the moment, but his behavior is so unconventional and unexpected for a politician that he presents as instinctively responding to what is ­happening in the moment. This construction of Trump animates markers of authenticity in mediated contexts. The mainstream press, however, fixates on behavior that suggests Trump is inappropriate for the p ­ residency, without attending to how this behavior authenticates Trump, and how authenticity might be the very quality that makes Trump viable as president. Dow (2017) points to the significance of Trump’s behavior, her words worth quoting at length: Trump’s unrestrained discourse and his disturbing lack of ­traditional presidential qualities were precisely what enabled him to project a persona for his supporters as an outsider to politics, as someone who would not operate as usual. It’s not so much what he said; it’s that he would say it at all. Because someone who would flout the rules of decorum so consistently and remain unapologetic about it was someone who would not be cowed by Washington’s ways, who would not let propriety keep him from getting things done. For voters who had witnessed almost eight years of one of the most eloquent presidents in history, a leader whose conduct was always deliberate and thoughtful, the contrast could not have been more stark. Yet those same voters’ experience—their central ground for political judgment—told them that having a thoroughly presidential president had not done them much good. (p. 137)

Monstrous Authenticity  169 Trump’s very refusal to adhere to conventions for presidential behavior is, as Dow emphasizes, what makes him an attractive presidential candidate to some. It is these same qualities that articulate Trump as authentic. An aspect of performing-not-performing is to appear to inhabit a space seamlessly, to be doing what is expected in a given space—this often involves racialization. In her work on the phenomenology of whiteness, Sarah Ahmed (2007) notes that the history of what occurs in spaces creates the living legacy of what makes sense in those spaces: If history is made “out of” what is passed down, then history is made out of what is given not only in the sense of that which is “­always-already” there before our arrival, but in the active sense of the give: as a gift, history is what we receive upon arrival. (p. 154) How spaces conform or not to our presence is a result of what has occurred before our entry into that space, a kind of offering upon our arrival. If spaces have always habituated to White bodies, they will continue that legacy by giving the gift of continuing to habituate to whiteness to each new arrival to that space. Spaces are not neutral. Importantly, Ahmed implores us “to examine not only how bodies become white, or fail to do so, but also how spaces can take on the very ‘qualities’ that are given to such bodies” (2007, p. 156), making it easier for some ­bodies to perform-not-performing—perform whiteness—than others. In her words, “Spaces also take shape by being orientated around some bodies more than others. We can also consider ‘institutions’ as orientation devices, which take the shape of ‘what’ resides within them” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 157). Ahmed’s articulations of the phenomenology of whiteness forces attention to how spaces enable some to be more at ease, more comfortable, concomitantly facilitating the process of making these people appear more natural and authentic, appearing to not perform. As the discussion above demonstrates, the newspaper articles lament the many ways Trump does not conform to the space of the presidency, how uncomfortably he occupies this space by breaking genre conventions for the presidency. For instance, he uses “bellicose rhetoric” that “alarmed conservatives” (“Clinton for President,” 2016, September 29); he is “thin-skinned” (“Hillary Clinton would make a sober,” 2016, ­September 23), “temperamentally unfit” (“Hillary Clinton would make a sober,” 2016, September 23) for the presidency, and, as Robert Gates says Trump is “temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform” (“Clinton for President,” 2016, September 29). As one piece puts it, “Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks the temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents” (“Trump is unfit for the presidency,” 2016, September 29).

170  Rachel E. Dubrofsky As well, Clinton is “unlike her blusterous opponent whose outrageous remarks … about Russia were merely the most recent bizarre outburst to unsettle our allies” (“These are unsettling times that require a steady hand,” 2016, November 3). Significantly, Trump’s breaking of convention for the presidency creates a crisis of categories, what Bernadette M. Calafell (2015) calls the function of monsters (Calafell, 2015, p. 6): disruptive hybrids with incoherent bodies that do not fit normative categories. In this instance, ­however, the crisis of categories—norms for the presidency and ­middle-class whiteness (discussed shortly), do not work to question norms, resist oppression, instead, the crisis reifies the alliance between authenticity and whiteness. Trump’s monstrosity works to affirm his authenticity through his inability to play by the rules, and his seeming relentless urge to always be himself regardless of the demands of a specific context or role. He will be himself despite the fact that doing so defies every convention for a president. In so doing, Trump affirms he is unchanging, consistent, compulsively himself—he cannot help but be himself—regardless of consequences, even in light of being criticized for having a “dangerous lack of judgment and impulse control” (“We ­recommend Hillary Clinton for president,” 2016, September 7), an “erratic temperament” (“These are unsettling times that require a steady hand,” 2016, ­November 3) and no “credible explanations” for his plans (“Trump is unfit for the presidency,” 2016, September 29). The Dallas Morning News quotes the Arizona Republic: “Trump’s inability to control himself or be controlled by others represents a real threat to our national security,” adding “His recent efforts to stay on script are not reassuring. They are phony. The president commands our nuclear arsenal. Trump can’t command his own rhetoric” (“Clinton for President,” 2016, September 29). Trump is framed as not in control of his behavior, but importantly, this situates him as also unwilling to be controlled by others. As the quote from the Dallas Morning News notes, when Trump tries to control himself and follow a script, the problem is that he appears inauthentic—he seems more authentic when he does not attempt such things. In sum, popular press discussions of Trump’s behavior evaluate him according to markers of authenticity, particularly those valued in the context of a reality TV show: Participants who are impulsive and emotional, under the purview of the camera, show that they are acting without pretense, authentically.

Crass Whiteness: Making Whiteness Visible Race and class are interanimated with authenticity in presentations of Trump. Part of what makes Trump monstrous is the tension between his identity as an elite (White) man and the framing of him in the media as someone who has no class—in the colloquial sense of displaying crass

Monstrous Authenticity  171 behavior, and lacking education and financial capital—despite his financial status, education, and business success. Just as the presentation of Trump as breaking norms for presidential behavior affirms his authenticity, the uneasy coupling of Trump’s privileged whiteness and crass, lower-class behavior, in the context of the presidency, verify his authen­ aking ticity, reify the alliance between authenticity and whiteness, m whiteness visible. Adding class to Ahmed’s discussion of the phenomenology of whiteness helps tease out how the contrast between Trump’s status as a rich White man and his behavior, marked as rude and uncouth, affirms how White bodies, regardless of transgressions of racialized class norms, most easily access authenticity (even if their authentic selves are widely despised). Trump’s behavior makes him indigestible into the space of the presidency, incoherent, but his whiteness, wealth, and status enable him to take this space hostage. As one article details “Trump’s candidacy has thus far been impervious to outrages and displays of ignorance and instability that would long ago have sunk any other politician in memory” (“Daily News Editorial Board says Vote Hillary Clinton,” 2016, July 28). Trump’s exhibition of authenticity enables him to inhabit this space at this moment because his behavior in a surveillance society marks him as authentic. Importantly, however, this type of authenticity, in this space, at this time, is an ethic most easily claimed by a White body. Trump is articulated in mainstream news as monstrous in relation to White (middle-class) norms, making whiteness evident. Tasha ­Rennels (2015) argues that a transgression on reality TV occurs when a White body does not perform according to middle- or upper-class expectations, making whiteness, which would otherwise remain invisible, visible. Though the reality TV genre may be particularly suited to the display of behavior lacking class (working-class and poor, crass behavior), it expressly makes that behavior seem aberrant, inviting the viewer to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed for the participant on display. Rennels (2015) details how this occurs in the reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, about a poor working-class family presented as uncouth and unable to control their bodily functions, which ran on the cable network station TLC from 2012 to 2014. Rennels shows how constructions of the working-class poor bring to light the liminality of lower classness and highlight the boundaries of appropriate whiteness. Fox, in theorizing authenticity and class in the country music genre, looks at how Crockett’s performances equate “poor white country c­ ulture with the bestial, the scatological, the abject. One can read this positioning as a provocative ‘liminality’ associated with the lower classes” (Fox, 2012, p. 27). Calafell (2015) outlines what she calls the ­“monstrosity of whiteness,” a whiteness infected by otherness—lower-classness in this instance. The liminality of working-class whiteness makes visible the boundaries of whiteness, marking working-class whiteness as

172  Rachel E. Dubrofsky monstrous. This makes whiteness visible by making a particular kind of whiteness not-normative. White fragility is rampant in the United States right now, centered in debates about political correctness, free speech, and immigration. These discussions are ultimately about letting White people be explicit and unapologetic about their White privilege. As Serwer (2017) articulates, Trump “embodies the rage” of his supporters “while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of” (Serwer, 2017). In this ­context, marking whiteness as monstrous functions strategically, ­facilitating an articulation of whiteness as disenfranchised, under attack, oppressed. Trump’s presentation as monstrous, Othered, capitalizes on a sense of being a White outsider to an imagined rabid liberal center: Trump’s monstrous whiteness aggressively and skillfully claims a space for White privilege in a world presented as oppressive to White people.

Closing Thoughts The significance of Trump’s racialization comes into sharp focus if we consider the impossibility of Obama being elected, and surviving the presidency, had he behaved in the manner Trump does. The discomfort expressed in the newspaper articles about Trump occupying the space of president makes visible the way Obama seamlessly enacts the politics of respectability (behaves in ways that make clear his values are consistent with those of middle-class whiteness) and performs being comfortable in White spaces. What if Obama tweeted just one of Trump’s inflammatory tweets? Treated one foreign government in the abrupt and rude manner Trump has treated several? Given a speech filled with the contradictions and angry rhetoric we hear from Trump? Imagining Obama doing such things feels absurd. Obama earned his right in the space of the presidency through carefully curated behavior. Obama is polished, ­measured, mindful in his presentation of self, qualities typically valued and required in a president, but which are not markers of authenticity right now. Trump is none of these things, and though this apparently makes him an undesirable candidate for president according to the newspaper articles ­examined above, it also presents him as consistently authentic. While there was resistance to Obama’s policies, resistance that was often inferentially or overtly racist, his demeanor, his temperament, his character, were rarely in question. With Trump, his character and his policies are always in question, and yet, he won the presidency and remains president. Only a body like Trump’s—White, male—can enact the kind of monstrous behavior with which he is credited and win the presidency. The orientation of the space of the presidency is also gendered. Just as with Obama, it is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton doing any of the things Trump has done. In fact, the behavior displayed by Obama falls flat when enacted by Clinton. When she behaves in this way, she is

Monstrous Authenticity  173 accused of being inauthentic because she seems too controlled, too explicitly performing the role of politician—behaviors, arguably, exhibited by Obama. Indeed, even though Trump is framed in the press as too angry, unpredictable, and sensitive to be president—characteristics ­unsuited for the presidency—Clinton is articulated as embodying presidential ­behavior perfectly: steady, even-tempered, cool demeanor, eloquent speech, controlled emotions. And yet, this does not work in Clinton’s favor. ­Criticism of Clinton shows the ways in which the space of the presidency is gendered: Clinton’s demeanor, in the body of a woman, fits uneasily, even if she possesses the qualities desired in a (male) president. At the same time, I imagine that if Clinton did a fraction of the things Trump does, she would be called over-emotional and hysterical. Only a White male body could transgress expectations as Trump does, including expectations of classed whiteness, and in so doing, prove his authenticity and win the presidency—such is the privilege of White masculinity.

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Monstrous Authenticity  175 Moreman, S., & Calafell, B. (2008). Buscando para nuestros hijos: Utilizing la llorona for cultural critique. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 1(4), 309–326. Nagle, A. (2017). Kill all normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and tumblr to trump and the alt-right. Zero Books. Nussbaum, E. (2017, July 31). The TV That Created Donald Trump: ­Rewatching ‘The Apprentice,’ the show that made his Presidency possible. The New Yorker. Retrieved from www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/the-tv-thatcreated-donald-trump. Parton, H. D. (2016). Horrors of the Trump Doctrine: Inside the GOP Frontrunner’s Terrifying Interview with the NY Times. Salon. Retrieved from www.salon.com/2016/03/29/ the_horror_of_the_trump_doctrine_inside_ the_gop_frontrunners_terrifying_interview_with_the_ny_times/. Rennels, T. (2015). Here comes honey boo: A cautionary tale starring white working-class people. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12(3), 271–288. Ross, R. (2017). Against the fascist creep. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Serwer, A. (2017, November 20). The Nationalist’s Delusion. The Atlantic. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalistsdelusion/546356/. Stelter, B. (2017, June 30). ‘Donald Trump is not well’: Brzezinski and Scarborough respond. CNN. Retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/30/ media/mika-brzezinski-joe-scarborough-respond-to-trump/index.html Studebaker, B. (2017, April 1). We Must Normalize Trump to Beat Him. benjaminstudebaker.com. Retrieved from https://benjaminstudebaker. com/2017/04/01/we-must-normalize-trump-to-beat-him/#more-3244 The Chicago Sun-Times endorses Hillary Clinton for president. (2016, September 30). The Chicago Sun Times. Retrieved from http://chicago.suntimes. com/opinion/editorial-vote-for-clinton-and-avert-a-train-wreck/ The Miami Herald recommends Hillary Clinton for president of the United States. (2016, October 14). The Miami Herald. Retrieved from www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article108145747.html These are unsettling times that require a steady hand: That’s Hillary Clinton. (2016, November 3). The Houston Chronicle. Retrieved from www.chron. com/opinion/recommendations/article/For-Hillary-Clinton-8650345.php. Trump is unfit for the presidency (2016, September 29). USA Today. Retrieved from www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/09/29/dont-vote-fordonald-trump-editorial-board-editorials-debates/91295020/. We recommend Hillary Clinton for president. (2016, September 7). The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved from www.dallasnews.com/opinion/ editorials/2016/09/07/recommend-hillary-clinton-us-president. Wilson, J. (2017, May 23). Hiding in plain sight: How the ‘alt-right’ is weaponizing irony to spread fascism. The Guardian. Retrieved from www. theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/23/alt-right-online-humor-as-aweapon-facism?CMP=share_btn_fb.

10 Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror in Twenty-first Century Counterterrorist Rhetorics Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller When U.S. and Coalition foreign public officials during the twenty-first century decide to characterize particular dissident groups as “terrorists,” or when they pass infamous “executive orders” on immigration “reform,” it is notoriously difficult to discern any individuated racial ­animus, nationalist bias, or religious discriminatory intent. The very popularity of hegemonic nationalistic ideologies, and the apparent ­legalistic ability of countless Department of Justice lawyers to help hide the identity politics involved, ensures that contemporary neoliberal elites and their publics will be bombarded with racialized texts and volatile arguments about ethnic targeting that can appear to be neutral, objective, and antiseptic. In some cases, the screening of Muslims at airports, or requests for help from Arab Americans and other communities to help discover “patterns” of terrorist behavior, can be coded as efforts that ­actually help with the assimilation of those who want to prove to the U.S. nation-state that they understand the duties that come with ­A merican citizenship during wartime. This complicates matters for intercultural scholars who are interested in unpacking and critiquing these official, hegemonic strategies that go beyond individual initiative, and the attempt to hide the power of whiteness in many of these situations may frustrate those critical investigators who are interested in rendering visible some of the features of what, on the surface, may appear to be a colorless, post-racial war on anyone who carries out international “terrorism.” That said, in this particular chapter we invite researchers to extend some of the heuristic interdisciplinary work that is being carried out that begins with analyses of “triumphal whiteness” as entrée points for more nuanced critiques of the ways that purveyors of U.S. and European counterterrorist policies try to hide the discriminatory underpinnings of their activities that divide and conquer. There are many religious and secular arguments that can be used to frame permutations of the arguments about the coloring of particular Anglo-American nationalistic powers, and Lofton (2006) once ­challenged those who wish to advance a “thesis of triumphal whiteness” to provide scholarly evidence that the forging of connections

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  177 between “Christian cohesion and white nationalism” actually led to certain ­exclusionary practices (p. 140). Professor Benhabib (2017) is one of those who has taken up this challenge, and she acknowledges the conundrums that arise when cultural critics and others try to find the typologies and grammars that are associated with the “triumphal whiteness” that may be promoted by those who have a “subliminal interest” in “­authoritarian personalities” (para. 18–20). She elaborates by suggesting that concrete evidence of this triumphal whiteness can be found in the guise of nationalistic discourses that seem to wed business success with notions of the need for strengthening endangered nations (Benhabib, 2017, para. 18–20). Moreover, she contends that instead of just trying to oppose these sedimentations by turning to the media or to the public and labeling particular activities as “fascist,” “patriarchal,” “white,” or “reactionary” engaged scholars need to help people see how particular policies interfere with the pursuit of caring, civic institutions (Benhabib, 2017, para. 19).1 This chapter also takes up some of these daunting challenges, and it will be our contention that several variants of triumphal whiteness have manifested themselves in “national security” disputes over terrorism. More specifically, American authorities and European Union communities have formulated controversial, purportedly “colorblind” policies that are populist in nature and that, by extension, hide the lingering rhetorical power of the ethnic, class, and gendered prejudices that gave rise to those policies in the first place. We argue that there is no coincidence that the American and ­European purveyors of these triumphal narratives assiduously avoid discussing the role that local militias, White far-right groups, and “lone wolf” terrorists play in perpetuating terrorist violence. They also conveniently make absent the role of normalized cultural discrimination in discussions of what might have contributed to terroristic mindsets to begin with. Indeed, there are no shortage of neoliberals, working on several continents, who work hard to find legal and social distinctions between “white violence” and “foreign terrorism.” For years—and particularly since Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012—American neoconservatives have acted as major stakeholders in this disputation. Some dreamed of the time when they could take office and pass legislation that might do a better job of tackling the existential dangers posed by every lurking threat of “Islamic fundamentalism.” And yet, we would hazard the guess that a concerning minutia of neoconservatives reject the notion that “beefing up” Homeland Security has anything to do with race, class, gender discrimination, or triumphal whiteness. Typical counterterrorist metanarratives circulating since 9/11 often contain the claim that to believe that the preponderance of terrorists today does not come from select Middle Eastern countries, or that

178  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller “fundamentalist” Islam has no causal links to the promotion of security threats to the American homeland is naïve at best, purposefully ignorant at worst. Those who circulate these clichéd story lines almost invariably take the position that empirical evidence, and not their personal beliefs, warrants the passage of emergency laws that have to target particular people of color. In contrast, the adoption of critical intercultural approaches to ­terrorism enables scholars to see the praxis behind the formation and implementation of key U.S. and European counterterrorist policies. This engaged way of viewing policies and populist rhetoric helps us demystify some of the arbitrary and draconian nature of what otherwise might ­appear to be beneficent, and colorless, laws, and regulations. Dayan (2013) did a masterful job of explaining the Kafkaesque nature of some of the decisionism that goes into determining who can be strategically ­labeled as “terrorist” and thereby excluded from the body politic of some empowered nation-states: Who gets banned and expelled so that we can live in reasonable consensus? Let us name them now. Criminals. Security Threats. ­Terrorists. Enemy Aliens. Illegal Immigrants. Migrant Contaminants. Unlawful Enemy Alien Combatants. Ghost Detainees. These are new orders of life; they hover outside the bounds of the civil, beyond the simple dichotomies of reason and unreason, legal and illegal. The receptacles for these outcasts are in the wilderness, the desert, or islands cut off from sociocultural networks of daily life…. [T]his ongoing global cultivation of human waste, brazen in its display, makes our sense of inclusion a rare and precarious privilege. (p. 22) Is it possible that triumphal whiteness gains ideological ascendency when it can carry out these exclusionary bans and expulsion tasks in front of neoliberal audiences while appearing in the guise of some innovative, egalitarian, civic reformation? More often than not, those neoliberals who write implicitly and strategically about ethnicity and t­ errorism do so in ways that focus on threatened “behaviors” of ­“jihadists” (Volpp, 2014; see, e.g., Bergen, 2016). Dayan (2013) is not the only interdisciplinary writer who has noticed that the representational framing of the terrorist “other” has everything to do with crafting of counterterrorist rhetoric that focuses on selective inclusion and exclusion. Beinart (2013) has similarly argued that since the time of the Founders, a historical opposition has existed between “white” and “Muslim,” and this has only widened since the events of September 11, 2001. “Being white has meant,” Beinart (2013) explained, that “both culturally and legally,” being “one of us” precluded one from being a Muslim (para. 6). While some might argue that this type of

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  179 binary transcends nationalistic provincialism and is a part of a broader “clash of civilizations” (Cloud, 2004), or a manifestation of juxtaposed orientalist and occidentalist ways of viewing dangers (Said,  1979), we would argue that regardless of scope this all involves a coloring of terrorism. To defend the arguments that we make regarding the coloring of ­terrorism and the attempted elision of what some call “white terrorism,” the rest of this chapter provides readers with three vignettes. Each of these vignettes puts on display various racialized fragments that go into the production of what Jasbir Puar (2007) has called “terrorist assemblages.” These assemblages are the dense, intersectional, grammars, bodies, and even movements that are cobbled together in select ways to characterize Muslim women and other terrorists in pathological ways (Puar, 2007). The three vignettes that we have selected will interrogate the ideological formation that went into the coloring of the Breivik attacks in Norway, the case of the “Boston bombers,” and the recent neoconservative responses to debates about President Donald Trump’s executive orders regarding restrictive immigration. We use these three influential case studies—that we consider to be representational of many other ­related dispositifs—as a way of highlighting how particularly evocative assemblages of race, ethnicity, religion, and nationalistic shards can be fused together in dense American and European rhetoric that help forge, essentialize, and maintain what Blum (2005) once called the “White Republic.”

Anders Breivik, “Lone Wolf” Terrorism, and Unmentionable Baltic Whiteness Our first vignette details the curious case of Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian mass-murderer whose politically motivated attacks made worldwide headlines in 2011. Media coverage of Breivik’s killing spree denoted cultural confusion and debates over the racial constructions of “terrorists,” particularly with regard to the metaphor of an anomalous, right-wing “lone wolf,” as well as the role of systemic, mainstream racism in promoting homegrown terrorist acts perpetrated by apparently “normal” (read: White and Christian) Norwegian citizens. On July 22, 2011, Breivik launched the deadliest Norwegian murder spree since World War II. Breivik, a thirty-two-year old White male, donned a police uniform, parked his van, and set off a fertilizer bomb outside the office of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, killing eight people. From there, he fled the scene by ferry to Utoya Island, located about twenty miles from Oslo. Still in uniform, he opened fire on a Labour Party youth camp. He pursued the fleeing campers to kill as many as possible. Sixty-eight died by Breivik’s hand, most of them were children and

180  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller young adults. Only 3 hours had elapsed between the time the first bomb went off and the moment Breivik was taken into police custody. In 3 hours, 77 people lost their lives (CNN Library, 2017; Knausgaard, 2016). Norway did not have to wait for long before finding Breivik’s motive. In his 1,500 page manifesto entitled “2083: A European ­Declaration of Independence,” he detailed his “personal reflections and experiences during several preparation phases” leading up to the July 22 attacks (quoted in “Breivik Manifesto,” 2011, para. 1). The manifesto dated as far back as 2002, with large copied directly from that of the American “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski, with small but important changes such as replacing the villainous U.S. “leftists” with European “cultural ­M arxists” (para. 4). Breivik claimed to be part of a farright resistance movement based off of the Knights Templar, a medieval military monastic order from which many White-supremacist movements have taken influence. Regardless of the dubious veracity of his membership in “PCCTS, Knights Templar Europe,” the fact remains that Breivik (2011) believed he was tasked with combatting the “Islamisation” of Europe to lead a “conservative revolutionary movement in Western Europe” (para. 6). Detailing his application for rifle ownership, he claimed that “the truth” of his intentions was “executing category A and B cultural Marxists/multiculturalist traitors” (para. 16). Aware that completing his planned attack might result in his death, Breivik painted himself as a tragic hero for whom “martyrdom draws ever closer” (para. 30). Breivik dedicated nearly a decade to writing his motive for murder, nearly all of which was based on a radical White-supremacist ideology bent on reaffirming Norway’s racial/religious purity and resisting multiculturalist sociopolitical endeavors. To call him anything other than a political terrorist seemed, at first glance, impossible. Nonetheless, the impossible occurred. Norway and the rest of the Western world engaged in a global discursive dispute over Breivik’s “terrorist” status, with some parties saying he obviously was, and others opting to explain him away as a “lone wolf.” Applying the metaphor of a lone wolf to a known killer is a means to describe someone thoroughly out-of-touch with mainstream thought, “a lone nut with no ties, no connection to his society” (Kimberly, 2011, para. 11). William ­Boston of Time argued that Breivik’s case exemplified a lone wolf, a “new, ­potentially deadly paradigm shift in the world of extremist violence” (Boston, 2011, para. 1). According to Janne Kristiansen, head of Norway’s domestic intelligence, “He’s not a solo terrorist. He’s a lone wolf who has been very intent on staying under the radar of the security services by leading a lawful life” (quoted in Boston, 2011, para. 2). Breivik ought not to be confused with a proper terrorist, as “evidence so far indicates that Breivik acted alone and is using claims of a wider network as a tool to manipulate the media and keep himself

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  181 in the headlines” (para. 3). The Huffington Post’s Unni Turritinni offered a psychological analysis of Breivik that contradicted his terroristic status and replaced it with that of a mentally impaired lunatic. Turritinni compared Breivik to American school shooters, pointing out “they may have been isolated or bullied as children” and are motivated primarily by “rage and revenge” (Turritinni, 2016, para. 6). “All children are born beautiful and untainted,” claimed Turritinni, including men like Breivik. Something merely “happened to them along the way” (para.  11). Richard Orange of the Guardian similarly exclaimed that calling Breivik a terrorist as opposed to a “deranged lone wolf” would give a mentally unstable extremist exactly what he wanted but did not deserve. Rather, he was a troubled, pathetic man who for years had “so worried child psychologists that they recommended removing him from his mentally ill mother” (Orange, 2016, para. 7). Proper terrorists, ­Orange claimed, “have contact with other extremists. They go to training camps” (para. 9). All Breivik, a “psychopathic narcissist,” deserved was “ridicule” (para. 18). Many journalists and editorialists took issue with the lone wolf trope as applied to Breivik, particularly the tendency by narrators to look more deeply into Breivik’s motives and mental health than they would for a killer from the Islamic faith. The Independent’s Nishaat Ismail condemned how “The Breiviks of the world are consciously separated from appellations such as ‘terrorist’ to maintain the belief that only those who hold a certain set of beliefs ever qualify” (Ismail, 2016, para. 12). She warned, “if we don’t condemn terrorism in all its forms, we can never learn from atrocities” (para. 12). Mark Karlin, a writer for B ­ uzzFlash, also critiqued this metaphor: “It is the prerogative of white eurocentric culture to attribute violent acts even on a large scale of members of the dominant classes to individual pathology rather than ‘terrorism’” (Karlin, 2015, para. 3). By choosing to apply terms like “extremist, radical or mass murderer, but not a terrorist” to Breivik, the mass media continued its overtly racist tendency to use the word terrorist “automatically when a Muslim commits an act of violence” (Karlin, 2015, para. 3). Margaret Kimberly of Black Agenda Report concurred with Karlin’s critique, condemning the “tacit understanding that white people are never to be referred to as terrorists, even when they detonate bombs and shoot nearly one hundred people to death in a well-planned and deliberate act” (Kimberly, 2011, para. 6). And Chauncey DeVega of Alternet concluded that The shock and awe by racism deniers and white victimologists, that a white person, a white middle class man especially, would ever be a priori suspect of a crime is a mirror for the gross narcissism of the White Soul. (DeVega, 2011, para. 1)

182  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller There are many explanations detailing why calling Breivik a terrorist was a more difficult task than, perhaps, it might have been. And, as the aforementioned editorialists pointed out, much of them have to do with the color of Breivik’s skin and his ability to “pass” as a prototypical Norwegian citizen. Post-9/11 scholarship indicates that within Western cultures, Middle Easterners, and “those who look Arab or Muslim” (Grewal, 2003, p. 541), have become “the new racial other” (Grewal, 2003, p. 546), resulting in many who “equate Arab or Muslim male with “terrorist”” (Cole, 2003, p. 49). To be confronted with the threat of White, middle-class domestic terrorism is therefore a source of cultural anxiety and antagonism. Embracing the idea of a terrorist who is not “Other,” but rather “One of Us,” forces societies to endure a form of cognitive dissonance that is often resolved by refusing to acknowledge the problem at all. The White, homegrown terrorist is an aberration, a fluke, and nothing more. Thus, in the case of Breivik, confrontation and resolution of racial projects of the past absorbs a lot of energy, which we read here as being expressed as … blaming violence on other people’s cultures, but on individuals when the culture in question is a Nordic one. (Garner, 2014, p. 419) The epistemic framing of Breivik as a “lone wolf” as opposed to a classic terrorist therefore reflects an unacknowledged, yet pathological, politics of whiteness bubbling beneath the surface of Norwegian (and largely Western) culture. As Garner (2014) has insisted, Breivik’s actions reflected a larger, globalized assemblage of racist, colonial ideologies. His discursive “links with white nationalist supremacists and islamophobes elsewhere” should ultimately “tell us that this case is as much about the circulation of ideas at a specific moment in time as the actions of an individual” (p. 411). These discursive configurations had a host of cultural antecedents. The contemporary moment is consistently infiltrated by past grievances, as “European nations, despite their uneven engagement in the colonial moment, are part of a wider Euro-American political and social culture generated by that colonial moment” (Garner, 2014, p. 408). Norway’s particular placement in the Western history of colonization further ­perpetuates the country’s difficulty grappling with race, racism, Otherness, and Us-ness in the twenty-first century. A former colony itself, Norway exemplifies the process by which: Postcolonial states are often faced with the triple problems of conjuring a narrative of the past that leads inexorably to the creation of the nation-state; fetishizing elements of national culture and heritage that distinguish the nation from others; and socialising people

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  183 into feeling they belong to the new nation. These fictions emerging from confronting nation-building tasks do not have to be historically accurate. (Garner, 2014, p. 407) Norway’s contemporary fictions are thus generated by a cling to whiteness, both as a familiar skin color and a cultural ideology. Pseudo-­historical stories of a Norwegian culture generated and perpetuated through some distinctively White culture contribute to contemporary White supremacy, which, along with racial categorization, were essential to the construction of European modernity. Thus, to turn a blind eye to the contradictions in the terms used to describe a Breivik versus a Bin Laden is simply “a blunt refusal to engage with the extensive racist anti-immigrant discourse predating Breivik’s actions” (Garner, 2014, p. 417). Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that in the wake of Breivik’s actions, Norwegian politicians and mass media rearticulated its national identity as one of triumphal whiteness. As Myrdahl (2014) has explained, initial mass media coverage of Breivik’s “surviving victims” included men and women of color—voices traditionally excluded from Norwegian media. Oslo politician Prableen Kaur, a woman of color, gained national notoriety because of her “survivor” status. In her massively publicized public statements, she emphasized her “belonging to the Norwegian present and past,” thus expanding public discourse and media narratives of who can be Norwegian (Myrdahl, 2014, p. 490). The media representations “showed both what might be possible when embracing all Norwegians in the national community and the barriers that the pre-existing discourses pose to such expansions” (p. 492). However, within a few months of the terrorist incident, coverage had once again shifted to focus on White actors—a distinct “whitening” of the coverage demonstrating “this this particular interruption only to a very limited extent shifted the contours of whiteness” (Myrdahl, 2014,  p.  492). Although Utoya survivors of color had been coded as “good,” and thus acceptably Norwegian, their “survivor” status ultimately overshadowed their capability of being used as “experts” that might ultimately have shed light onto the systemic discrimination that allowed Breivik to do what he did. The ever-whitening of coverage represented Norway’s (and many other Western nations) preference for “colorblind” political and social discourse. Indeed, in the wake of Breivik’s assault, politicians condemned his actions while subsequently praising Norway’s right to free speech—even when such speech was ultranationalistic. ­Politicians’ seemingly pro-unity, pro-multicultural stance explicitly rejected “concerns about the intimate links between Breivik’s views and those implicitly or explicitly advocated by a wide range of

184  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller mainstream actors” (Myrdahl, 2014, p. 493). While Breivik’s individuated violence was to be judged, contemporary collective discourses about multiculturalism, ­I slam, and immigration that might have encouraged his actions were to be left un-interrogated in the name of freedom of speech. While free speech is certainly a national quality to be praised, the strategic inclusion of such discourse in political ­statements ­demonstrates Hedda Hakvåg’s assertion that “openness and ­democracy become measured by the national community’s ability to ‘take’ and tolerate racism, misogyny, and religious prejudice and discrimination rather than actively challenge it” (Hakvåg, 2015, p. 107). Certainly, Norway did not advocate far-right violence as a political strategy—they merely accepted far-right rhetoric as a legitimate player in Norway’s political sphere. Such a strategy may seem benign to those already part of the White community, but for those alienated from cultures of whiteness on the basis of race, ethnicity, etc., such discourse holds dangerous implications for their ability to ever truly “belong.” Color-blind Norwegian discourse in the aftermath of Breivik’s terrorism thus conveniently forgets the extent to which mainstream, politicized whiteness (cloaked as “free speech”) allows for the long-standing disenfranchisement of many Norwegian citizens. Norway, like most (if not all) of the Western world, has a long and deep history of racist praxis stemming from colonial ideologies based upon White supremacy. While responses to “Others” have varied through time and across space, Norway’s contemporary moment has consistently featured a rise in anti-immigration discourse perpetuated by far-right, populist political parties. That Breivik existed at all is no mere anomaly, as his ultranationalist, racist ideology stemmed from existing and ­preexisting mainstream discourses surrounding national identity and its connection to whiteness (Garner, 2014). His decision to go on a terroristic killing spree may or may not have been done outside of any organized group or terrorist “cell.” Nonetheless, to depict him as a “lone wolf” out of touch with normality belies the interconnectedness of Breivik’s violence with the epistemic violence of toxic ­whiteness. As such, as Garner (2014) aptly noted, it is more accurate to place ­Breivik “as lying at the end of a continuum of racist ideas and practices, intimately woven into the fabric of national discourses, than representing a separate extremist space, unrelated to the political mainstream” (p. 412). The discursive controversies over whether Breivik was a ­terrorist or a mentally ill, lone wolf, and the distinct colorblind responses by politicians and the media, conclusively demonstrate ways in which terrorism is distinctly “colored” according to historically situated cultural zeitgeists. Norway, however, was not alone in the circulation of these colorblind responses.

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  185

The Obsession with Determining the “Race” and Allegiances of the Tsarnaevs, the “Boston Bombers” Our second vignette decodes some of the fragmentary portions of the journalistic, legal, and public coverage of violent activities of the ­Tsarnaev brokers, and we agree with Solomon’s (2013) assessment that it is time that we participate in “decoding the invisible whiteness in Boston bombing coverage …” (para. 1). On April 15, 2013, two bombs were set off during the Boston ­Marathon. Three individuals were killed and more than 260 people were injured, and immediately a phalanx of American police officers, FBI agents, and K9 units were dispatched to track down those who committed these reprehensible acts. Discussion groups on social media platforms like Reddit sought to help identify the perpetrators, and the New York Post provided a typical example of some of the early assertions that circulated when it reported that investigators already had a suspect in mind—“a Saudi Arabian national” (Volpp, 2014, p. 2209). Yet the coloring of the perpetrators suddenly shifted when the leading suspects in the Boston Bombing—Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—were ­publicly identified as “ethnic Chechens” who grew up in Russia and then moved to the United States. One man who was interviewed on CNN about the Marathon Bombing following a major manhunt explained to reporters that at first he, like others, were mistaken that the suspect “was white, you know, a regular American” (Carter, 2013, para. 21). In the same way that Irish immigrants after the famine were characterized as non-Whites, the Chechens who were linked to violence in parts of the former Soviet Union were racialized in ways that highlighted their perceived national and ethnic status. For the next several weeks and months, heated debates took place as participants in this disputation debated about whiteness as property (see, e.g., DeVega, 2013), the necessity for racial profiling, and the need to keep track of select immigration populations. Pundits who wanted to racialize terrorism in general harped on the supposed differences that existed between “whites” and “Caucasians” [from the “real” parts of Russia], foreign terrorists and domestic non-terrorists, observers conversed about the best ways to take advantage of America’s latest intelligence gathering and counterterrorist efforts. As Professor Szpunar (2015) noted, those who did not wish to focus on the alleged whiteness of the assailants could place blame on the child-rearing efforts of Tsarnaevs’ mother, “their turbulent home life, a mysterious uncle named Misha, their Chechen heritage,” Tamerlan’s “battered brain,” and even “failed attempts at realizing the American dream” (p. 5). While Anglo-American conservatives did their best to psychologize the Boston bombings and focus on the foreign nature of terrorism, ­liberals in mainstream presses and activists writing for alternative

186  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller presses worked hard to counter this by illustrating how pigmentation and ethnic origin had little to do with the psychological, social, or material conditions that might lead to the adoption of terrorist practices. Walsh (2013), for ­example, argued that whatever their status, the ­Tsarnaev brothers seemed to resemble ordinary “young American mass murders” more than they looked like members of organized Al-Qaeda terrorist cells (para. 11). All of this wrangling led to a host of interdisciplinary studies and “common sense” ways of understanding just who was, or was not, “white.” For example, those who wanted to could argue that information could be gleaned from U.S. Census information led to the indisputable conclusion that according to the “rule of Law” the Tsarnaev brothers were legally “white.” Grieco (n.d.), writing on the 2000 census and the “white population” at that time, told readers that a reproduction of the question of race that came from the 2000 census showed that the term “white” refers to people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who reported “white” or wrote in entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Near Eastern, Arab, or Polish. In the same way that earlier generations could be embarrassed by the haunting legacies of discrimination and the old “one drop rule,” now twenty-first century generations were having to learn about the contingent, ideological, and shifting nature of color classifications in new rhetorical situations. While populists often tried to configure the ­Tsarnaev brothers as non-White foreigners, “Russian,” etc., the official discourse—purveyed by those whose who were trapped by having to deal with Orwellian histories of whiteness formation—tried to explain to some Americans that those of Russian or Chechen descent were going to be treated as “white” in official circles. Walsh (2013), who commented on some of these tensions, complained that “conservatives’ insistence the Tsarnaevs are absolutely not white” was “curious,” given the etymology of the word “Caucasian” and the expansive nature of the list of groups that conservatives viewed as possessing whiteness (para.  7). On other occasions, these same conservatives welcomed the inclusion of more groups as “white” for purposes of identity politics, but now that terrorism was the topic a transvaluation of ideas permitted a temporary, and strategic escape, from this type of possessory whiteness. Liberal or radical critiques bothered those who were sure that being American, and being involved in local terrorism, rarely had anything to do with whiteness. A contributor from the right-leaning Newsbusters. org from opining that after the passage of a few days it looked like the Boston Bombing “suspects” were “not white Americans” (Pornoy, 2013). The journal commentary contained an article by Peter Wehner that characterized the Tsarnaev brothers as two young men were “radicalized and became jihadists” and let his readers know that these perpetrators

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  187 of the Boston Marathon bombings were not real “white Americans” (­ Wehner, 2013). This type of commentary led some pundits to claim that the Tsarnaev brothers should be official racially marked as “brown” to help Whites overcome feelings of uncertainty and helplessness in the face of the realities that racial profiling might not help alleviate the problems of domestic terrorism (First Post Staff, 2013). This type of disputation about the racialization of the Tsarnaev ­brothers also spilled over into legal spheres. For example, one contributor to the Fordham Law Review speculated on whether the Boston bomber debates put on display the differential suspicion and legal treatment that was meted out to those who are placed on either side of the “line between ‘the white ethnic’ and ‘Islamic terrorist,’” a condition at least in part attributed to the straddling of a gray zone where some are pushed into the murky spaces that are occupied by those who might seem to be “brown” or “appearing as Muslim” (Volpp, 2014, p. 220). Where those who come from the Caucasus regions being airbrushed in ways that discriminated between Whites in ways that were threatened more than “say a Lindh Walker, the all-American kid from Northern California”? (First Post Staff, 2013, para. 4). All of this would become more complicated when President Trump started to argue that people of color from select nations also ought to be prevented from entering the country if they constituted existential threats to the American Homeland.

Trump’s Executive Order and the Color Coding of Foreign Terrorism During the first few months of his presidency, President Donald Trump signed several executive orders that were intended to carry out promises that would better aid border officials who were trying to “secure” the nation’s borders from would-be terrorist network threats. In ­theory, ­President Trump’s executive order is color-blind and race neutral, t­ emporarily banning refugees and immigrants from some of the ­countries that neoconservatives selectively link to the origins of “fundamentalist” ­terrorism—Iran, ­ fficials representing the Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. O Trump administration use counterterrorist rhetoric about emergencies, existential security threats, and m ­ ilitary necessity as they identify those who are linked to countries “of concern.” Verden (2017) explains that Trump’s defenders gleefully contend that their motivations are no different from former Presidents ­Carter or Obama, and that much of the neoliberal pushback comes from concerns ­regarding the over inclusive nature of laws that include “green card holders” (para. 1–3). However, Verden (2017) is convinced that the real intent behind these immigration bans involve a “renewed investment in whiteness” that is accomplished by “fanning the flames” of both “Islamophobia and anti-Blackness”

188  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller (para. 4). He notes that if this was truly about keeping people same from specific countries that could be linked to 9/11, then it would have been Saudi Arabia that would have been targeted and ­A mericans would have noted that “zero” deaths have come at the “hands of anybody from any of the countries banned” (para. 6–7). One of the ways of masking this pigmentation of terrorism involves the continual invocation of real, as well as assumed, examples of where Muslims have been linked to acts of terrorism, and this in turn is used to make “empirical” claims about realpolitik realities. Sean Spicer, for example, famously claimed the suspected Quebec City Mosque attacker provided a typical case study that illustrated the practicality behind President Trump’s temporary travel “ban.” While Trump himself had initially agreed with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the exact motives behind the attack were unclear, this did not deter the White House Press Secretary from issuing this statement: “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the president is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security” (quoted in Follman, 2017, para. 5). Note how this choice of cases implies the need to color foreign terror threats while defenders of these practices simultaneously circulate vague color-blind clichés about Homeland vigilance that has nothing to do with discrimination. Intentionalist frames that focus on Trump’s innocence are used in ways that give no hint about the differential consequentialist ways that terrorist threats are combatted. When some of Trump’s defenders did admit that this implied some profiling, they defended the use of what was viewed as common-sense counterterrorism. Early Fox News reports, for example, indicated that one of the suspects in the mosque “terror attack” was of “Moroccan origin,” implying that ethnicity and national origin had everything to do with the spread of national security threats (Follman, 2017). It later turned out this person from Morocco was a witness, not a suspect. Ironies, inversions, and ambiguities swirled around all of these ­pro-Trump attempts to defend the rationality of the U.S. president’s immigration orders. For example, the more that journalists learned about some of the details behind the Quebec City mosque attack, the more it looked as though it had been perpetrated by those who shared Trump’s prejudices and geographical imaginations. The White 27-year old university student who was charged with the attack on that mosque in ­Quebec City—Alexandre Bissonnette—was described by Canada’s Globe and Mail as someone who “was known in the city’s activist circles as a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump” (Perreaux & Andrew-Gee, 2017, para. 1). Some of Bissonnette’s extremist views and actions were said to have been inspired by France’s far-right National Front Leader Marine Le Pen’s visit to Quebec City in March of 2016.

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  189 Fox News later retracted some of the linkages that were made between Muslims and the Quebec City mosque attack, but this simply meant that neoconservatives and other defenders of President Trump’s order had to find other examples that might buttress their claims. Another famous case, that involved potential domestic threats to the American homeland, came when Kellyanne Conway claimed that the Bowling Green “massacre” provided another justification for the restrictive nature of President Trump’s executive orders on immigration. In February of 2017, Aaron Blake, writing in the Washington Post, noted that Kellyanne Conway’s “Bowling Green massacre” gaff wasn’t a mere “slip of the tongue,” because this was something that she had mentioned before in other contexts. As a growing number of vocal Trump critics complained about the arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable nature of the operative logics that were streaming out the Trump Administration during the early months of his presidency, his supporters did their best to illustrate the biased, “liberal” nature of “underreported” instances of terrorist attacks that were perpetrated by Muslims or Arabs. They focused even more attention on those situations where those attacks could be linked in some way to the nations that are said to be the fundamentalist, Islamic hotbeds for breeding terrorism—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. When color was mentioned in these discussions of American migration or refugee restrictions, some of Trump’s defenders would try to make comparisons between lesser domestic threats and greater foreign dangers. In February of 2017, when CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked Representative Sean Duffy why the President wasn’t talking about the “white terrorists who mowed down six Muslims praying at their mosque,” he responded by surmising that there was a difference between what happened at a Mosque in Quebec and the dangers that were faced by ­A mericans. As far as he was concerned, in the Quebec case you “don’t have a group like ISIS or al Qaeda that is inspiring people around the world to take up arms and kill innocents…” (Scott, 2017, para. 4). When she persisted to question Duffy and also brought up the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the U.S. representative tried to configure these as atypical examples, that paled in comparison with “dozens” of organized terrorist efforts. This led Scott to argue that Duffy seemed to see a major difference between “white terror” and “Muslim terror” (Scott, 2017). No wonder that President Trump’s administration received Congressional support when they decided to divert some counterterrorist resources away from the threats that might have been posed by White supremacists so that they could focus primary attention on Jihadism and “radical” Islam (DeVega, 2017). In fascinating ways, neoconservative commentators have not only defended President Trump’s new executive orders restricting migration— they have also lashed out at the federal judges who were characterized

190  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller as obstructionists who used lawfare (the politics of law) to stand in the way of the American people’s will. Kane (2017) for example, complained about the 43-page “jeremiad” written by Derrick Watson, a U.S. judge in Hawaii, and he blasted Judge Theodore Chuang, a federal district judge in Maryland, for claiming that this was all an effort for the “realization of the long-envisioned Muslim ban” (para. 1).

Conclusion The three vignettes that we have used in this essay illustrate some of the domestic and international flavor of the coloring of terrorism in varied violence contexts. Sadly, Norway’s example is just one of many illustrations of how terrorism and pigmentation discourses merge as the EU’s borders are patrolled to make sure that a few “good” people of color are allowed in while dangerous “Others” are kept out. When most mainstream Anglo-American presses, journals, movies, or popular press outlets depict “international terrorism” for their consuming and counterterrorist savvy audiences, they do so in ways that buttress the Trump Administration’s claims regarding the dangerous of select national ­communities who are linked to “Islamic fundamentalism” or Jihadism. A comparative review of our three vignettes illuminates the ways that the devil is in the details, and we illustrate how the resonance of some of these securitized whiteness arguments can circulate as if they were color-blind and had little to do with the selective targeting of any ethnic community. If other researchers wish to extend our intercultural analyses, they may want to notice the repetitive nature of these types of discursive formations: 1 Those who wish to paint terrorism with the colors of Islamic fundamentalism, or foreign “Jihadist” linkages, would begin by magnifying the dangers that were alleged posed by intransigent enemies who envied America, refused to accept Judeo-Christian values, or stubbornly held on to primitivist Islamic societal visions instead of accepting neo-liberal values. 2 This magnification of threats would then be followed by reductive strategies that were used in binary ways to portray the White purveyors of violence as a few “bad apples,” mentally ill individuals, or “lone wolfs” who posed relatively minor dangers in comparison with the existential threats posed by organized terrorist networks and cells. 3 Those who configured migrants and would-be refugees and others as potential terrorists could then link rhetoric of national securitization and militarization to a host of other neoconservative and populist concerns, including the dangers posed by illegal immigration, supposed warfare, border patrolling, biometric tracking, etc.

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  191 It is the protean nature of all of counterterrorism framing of people of color that becomes so dangerous, especially when it parades in the guise of dispassionate colorblindness. In a host of ways, what the case studies in this chapter show us are the anxieties, the frustrations, and the motivations behind some of the rhetoric and performances that are used to mark for many intercultural ­societies the “other” who perceptually threatens so many homelands and shores. In the same way that defenders of slavery or the slavery trade worried about the difficulty of detecting dangerous, disaffected slaves who “commingled” with free persons of colors during the abolitionist years, those who search for terrorists as they form their counterterrorist apparatus want to be able to detect, prevent, and manage the mobility of domestic or “lone wolf” terrorism. Again, these are not new concerns. As one journalist explained during the debates over racial profiling and terrorism in 2013: Over its long history America has regularly featured a process of sorting white from nonwhite, even among European immigrant groups. I’m not a huge admirer of the now-dated whiteness studies academic movement, but those scholars did help illuminate the way various groups of European immigrants, particularly the Irish, but also Jews, Italians and Eastern Europeans, “became” white over time, in a complicated process of determined assimilation, gradually lessening prejudice by existing “white” society, and most important, the arrival of newcomers to take the place of the scapegoated nonwhite other, alongside the definitive nonwhite scapegoats, ­A frican-Americans. Embracing racism and xenophobia, sadly, could be a shortcut to white status for previously nonwhite European immigrants. (Walsh, 2013, para. 5) We contend that this gets more complex when securitized rhetoric plays on the fears of anxious post-9/11 audiences who are convinced that ethnic and racial categorization has everything to do with reducing foreign and domestic terrorist risks. Sadly, if we are right, as we continue to fight this “perpetual” global war against terrorism—with foes in places like the Sudan, Yemen, Syria, or Iraq—the list of targeted people of color will continue to grow. ­Because the terrorist stereotype produced by American or ­Coalition ­decision makers is not just limited to race, ethnicity, nationality, or ­religion (Chen, 2010), the profile of a terrorist has been applied to individuals who are neither Middle Eastern, Arab, nor Muslim (Kaplan, 2006; LCCREF, 2003). In sum, it will not suffice to continue to conservative counterterrorist rhetoric as if they had little to do with pigmentation, national origin,

192  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller religion, or power politics. As Professor Shome (2014) explains, it would be wrong for critical cultural scholars to pay exclusive attention to the characterization of individual subjects who occupy the position of the “other”: Whiteness acquires meaning today through constant mediated ­reproductions and repetitions and diverse images and logics of whiteness. And these images and logics, that are subject to constant and relentless media techniques of cut-and-paste … ultimately produce a larger assemblages of meanings about particular modes of whiteness … in a given national moment and context. (p. 19) The assemblages that were crafted during the Breivik, Tsarnaev, and Trump executive order situations will become a part of these larger ­dispositifs in the coming years. During the fall of 2017, the United States experienced one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history when 64-year-old Stephen ­Paddock carried more than a dozen rifles into a Mandalay Bay hotel room in Las Vegas and killed at least 58 people. More layers were added to those shaded dispositifs that we referenced earlier when the Trump administration and local law enforcement agents refused to characterize this as an act of terrorism. King (2017) characterized this as an example of the “white privilege of the ‘lone wolf’ shooter.” He elaborated by noting: No Muslim ban stopping immigrants and refugees from a few randomly selected countries from reaching our shores would’ve slowed this down. Paddock, like the majority of mass shooters in this country, was a white American. And that simple fact changes absolutely everything about the way this horrible moment gets discussed in the media and the national discourse. Whiteness, somehow, protects men from being labelled terrorists. (King, 2017, para. 3–4) Sadly, this would be just one of many examples of ethnic stereotyping and the racialized ways that viewing terrorism becomes inextricably entangled in nationalist configurations violence. As we noted earlier, the designation of “lone wolf” helps disaggregate the number of crimes that are committed by those characterized by the media and public officials as White “lone wolves.” This label would be used to describe the acts of James Holmes when he killed 12 in Aurora, Colorado, as well as the White supremacist activities of someone like Dylann Roof, who killed a South Carolina pastor and eight other parishioners. When President Trump wants to comment on such acts, he sends along expressions of regret and condolences to those who suffer from lone wolf attacks, but

Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  193 this is not linked to any demands for stricter gun control, governmental initiatives on domestic violence or calls for more cultural sensitivity. Contrast with the ways that Trump links “terrorist” attackers with policy initiatives like his “Muslim travel ban.” In fascinating ways, many of those who make arguments linking the disparate treatment of violence to media commentaries on color often become involved in heated academic and public debates with those who want to highlight other “factors” or variables. For example, after a November, 2017, shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas—that left dozens dead—Professor George Ciccariello-Maher, a political scientist at Drexel, wondered publicly why so many mass shootings in the United States were perpetrated by White men. In an interview with Democracy Now, Ciccariello-Mayer not only argued that White men were “prone” to carry out these massive attacks—he also averred that this was “stoking a sort of victim complex among white men” (Democracy Now Staff, 2017, para. 2). Contributors to right-wing media outlets suggested that this Drexel professor be excluded from campus, and his classes were initially cancelled. Soon after this, Singal (2017), writing for New York Magazine, responded that “whiteness doesn’t cause mass shootings,” and he labeled Ciccariello-Mayer’s claims as examples of argumentation there were a part of an “emerging sub-genre of post-mass-shooting punditry” (para. 6) that hurt “progressive discourse on crime and race” (para. 15). Singal wanted to avoid what he viewed as reductionist deliberation, where the “swapping” older “blackness violence arguments” for “whiteness violence” arguments (para. 13) did little to help society. He implied that talking about whiteness and mass shootings detracted from the efforts of policy makers who carried about the real factors, enhanced gun-control legislation or addressing problems with “domestic violence” (Singal, 2017, para. 1). Singal asked: Why not wait and learn more about why Devin Kelley, that 26-year-old who carried out the massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killed 26 people and injured others at that town’s First Baptist Church? This variant of color-neutrality argumentation assumes that any major commentary on linkages between ethnicity and crime, or race and mass atrocities, is always essentialist, preventing what some might call multifactorial analyses. However, what individuals like Singal (2017) overlook are the ways that media outlets, public administrations, and other communities use talk of other “factors” as coded ways of making inferences based on naturalized notions of pigmentation. As Lalami (2017) explained, the “color of terrorism” appears in societal frameworks that indicate that we will “do everything to prevent terrorist attacks, but are seemingly powerless against white male shooters” (para. 1). When Omar Matten killed 49 people in Orlando, Florida, he was quickly characterized as a “terrorist” by mainstream media outlets, but when Whites commit similar acts, press outlets hesitate to characterize this as terrorism.

194  Marouf Hasian and S. Marek Muller Lalami (2017) notes that perhaps this is because the “solitary nature” of acts that are linked to lone-wolf actors make us feel as if these acts are random and unavoidable, while the mass shootings committed by networked terrorists can be controlled through counterterrorism. Note, how, for example, how, after Mateen opened fire in a gay nightclub, President Trump could tweet that he “appreciated the congrats for being right on Islamic terrorism” (Lalami, 2017, para. 5). Why did the nation’s commander-in-chief refrain from talking about ethnic causality when the attackers in mass attackers are not configured as people of color? This avoidance of grappling with presences and absences in violent contexts continues apace. In November of 2017, when Sayfullo Saipov was accused of driving a truck down a crowded bike path in M ­ anhattan that killed eight and injured a dozen more, federal prosecutors focused on this was all a part of a “long-planned plot” that helped the cause of ISIS. Vilified as a resident of Uzbekistan who happened to be living in the United States since 2010, the news coverage of this attack did not focus on lone wolf possibilities but rather “an act of terror.” Law enforcement sources based some of their decisionism on the way that suspect alleged yelled “Allahu Akbar” [God is Great in Arabic], an example of aural alienization. One CNN “terrorism analyst,” Paul Cruickshank, told reporters there was a “significant problem with jihadism in ­Uzbekistan” (Prokupecz, Levenson, Gingras, & Almasy, 2017, para. 37). This implied that the presence of those influenced by Jihadist thinking came from “Central Asia,” posing one more alien threat that necessitated border vigilance. President Trump promised his supporters that he would step up “extreme vetting” after the Saipov attack, that he interpreted as meaning that the American nation must not allow “ISIS to return or enter our country” (quoted in Jacobs, 2017, para. 1, 10). Again, it is no coincidence that during the GWOT, the color of terrorism is naturalized in politicized ways that need decoding by critical cultural scholars.

Note 1 For similar worries regarding the racialization of terrorism during some of these conflicts see Abu Bakare (2017), Huq and Muller (2017) and Ifill (2017).

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Triumphal Whiteness and the Coloring of Terror  197 Orange, R. (2016, March 17). Don’t call Anders Breivik a terrorist – He is a sad fantasist leading an army of one. Guardian. Retrieved from www.telegraph. co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/12196616/Dont-call-Anders-Breivika-terrorist-he-is-a-sad-fantasist-leading-an-army-of-one.html Perreaux, L., & Andrew-Gee, E. (2017, January 31). Quebec City mosque attack suspect known as online troll inspired by French far-right. The Globe and Mail [Canada]. Retrieved from www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ quebec-city-mosque-attack-suspect-known-for-right-wing-online-posts/ article33833044 Pornoy, H. (2013, April 19). Sorry David Sirota: Looks like Boston ­Bombing suspects not “white Americans.” NewsBusters. Retrieved from http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/howard-portnoy/2013/04/19/sorry-david-­sirota-looksboston-bombing-suspects-not-white#ixzz2RSI5mCLc Prokupecz, S., Levenson, E., Gingras, B., & Almasy, S. (2017, November 6). CNN.com. Retrieved from www.cnn.com/2017/10/31/us/new-york-shotsfired/index.html Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Scott, E. (2017, February 8). Duffy: “There’s a difference” on white terror and Muslim terror. CNN.com. Retrieved from www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/ politics/sean-duffy-white-terrorism-cnntv/ Shome, R. (2014). Diana and beyond: White femininity, national identity, and contemporary media culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Singal, J. (2017, November 6). Whiteness doesn’t cause mass shootings. New York Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/ whiteness-mass-shootings.html Solomon, A. (2013, April 25). Decoding the invisible whiteness in Boston bombing coverage. Colorlines. Retrieved from www.colorlines.com/articles/ decoding-invisible-whiteness-boston-bombing-coverage Szpunar, P. M. (2015). From the other to the double: Identity in conflict and the Boston Marathon bombing. Communication, Culture, & Critique, (2015), 1–18. Turritinni, U. (2016, July 25). Was the Munich shooter a lone wolf terrorist or a suicidal rampage killer? Huffington Post. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/was-the-munich-shooter-a-lone-wolf-terrorist-or-a_ us_5795dc42e4b0b3e2427caec9 Verden, R. W. (2017, January 30). Trump’s ban is whiteness doing what whiteness does. RyanWilliamsVerden.com. Retrieved from https://ryanwilliamsvirden. com/2017/01/30/trumps-ban-is-whiteness-doing-what-whiteness-does/ Volpp, L. (2014). The Boston Bombers. Fordham Law Review, 82, 2209–2220. Walsh, J. (2013, April 22). Are the Tsarnaev brothers white? Salon. Retrieved from www.salon.com/2013/04/22/are_the_tsarnaev_brothers_white/ Wehner, P. (2013, April 23). The war goes on. Commentary. Retrieved from www.commentarymagazine.com/terrorism/the-war-goes-on/

11 Nightmares of Whiteness Dreams and Deportability in the Age of Trump Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez

On September 5th, 2017, the Trump administration derailed the world of hundreds of thousands of young adults—DACAmented immigrants— and their families, with the declaration that the policy ­“Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) be terminated. Enacted by President Obama in 2012, DACA provides protection from deportation for some individuals who entered the United States as children without proper documentation. The initial announcements of its end, first made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then by Trump, sparked immediate public response. There was, of course, some public support for the announcement, from immigration-restrictionist organizations as well as from those hoping the repeal would lead to more comprehensive immigration reform legislation (Alvarez, 2017; Barreto, 2017; Silverstein, 2017). However, media accounts of the repeal were overwhelmingly filled with protests as politicians, corporate executives, e­ veryday ­citizens, ­DACAmented individuals, and their families called foul (­ Battaglio, 2017; King & Carcamo, 2017). In a rare directed attack on Trump, President Obama responded: “To target these young people is wrong … It is self-­ defeating … And it is cruel” (quoted in Kimball, 2017). Similarly, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg named the move “particularly cruel” (quoted in Shear & Davis, 2017). Even House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) initially spoke in opposition to the repeal, allegedly calling on Trump in the days before the announcement to keep the policy in place (Kopan & Acosta, 2017). By late in the day on September 5th, Trump had revised his initial declaration and established a window of negotiation, tweeting ­“Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA … If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!” and declaring his support for the DACAmented: “I have a love for these people” (quoted in Kopan, 2017). The announcements by both Sessions and Trump named the ending of DACA in mostly racially neutral terms—framing the issue as one of constitutional violation perpetrated by Obama’s willful politics. As Trump proclaimed, “President Obama … [made] an end-run around Congress … violating the core tenets that sustain our republic” (Trump, 2017). ­Session commented that DACA was created in ways that were “inconsistent with the Constitution’s separation of power” (quoted in Beckwith, 2017).

Nightmares of Whiteness  199 Still, while both announcements emphasized Obama’s misdoings and the imperative for Trump to right the course of immigration law, both also turned explicitly to race. Trump, veering briefly from his references to Obama’s ill-considered if not authoritarian move, referenced a “massive surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America including, in some cases, young people who would become members of violent gangs throughout our country” (Trump, 2017), while Sessions announced that we “cannot admit everyone who would like to come here” (quoted in Beckwith, 2017). The overwhelming impetus for the ending of DACA, citizens were told, was premised in the racially coded language of law and order: “Simply put, if we are to further our goal of strengthening the constitutional order and the rule of law in America, the Department of Justice cannot defend … [Obama’s] overreach” (quoted in Beckwith, 2017). In the immediate days and weeks that followed, the outcry over the decision continued. Many commentators raised the magnitude of the repeal, noting that some 700,000–800,000 youth, often named D ­ reamers, would be affected (Bennett, 2017; Bennett & Mascaro,  2017). Others reiterated the early language of Obama, naming the decision cruel, reckless, and inhumane (Palomarez, 2017; Watanabe, 2017) as well as a ­testament to the kind of nation we do not want to be (King  & ­Carcamo,  2017). Democratic leaders vowed to fight the decision ­(McGreevy, 2017; Toure, 2017). Across the chorus of disapproval was a strikingly ­consistent argument: the 800,000 or so now-vulnerable and frightened individuals were innocent youth who deserved better. These youngsters, filled with hopes and dreams, ready to contribute to the only nation they had ever known, were a part of this nation—even if their entry was problematic. In this essay, we turn to these representations of the DACAmented to ask how the discourse surrounding the repeal of DACA sheds light into the current machinations of race and whiteness. Across our analysis, we attend to this pervasive attachment to the lives and futures of the DACAmented, a discourse we find strikingly different—if not unique—in national conversations on (un)documented immigration. We argue that the discourses surrounding DACA, including both dominant media representations and reported voices of the DACAmented themselves, function as modes of rhetorical racialization. This racialization pivots primarily on the prevalence of support for DACA—a sup­ ACAmented as good port that ­manifests through a narrative of the D and deserving immigrants who have been forced back into deportability, and thus into fear and illegality. We suggest that in the constitutive rhetorical logic of deportability, support for DACA turns on two poles of race—­pawnability and stoppage. We begin by thinking through the literature on deportability and its implications for illegality. Drawing then on the work of Sara Ahmed, we suggest that the constitutive logic of deportability is, at its core, an affective logic, primarily of

200  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez race. We then turn to the prominent narratives of support—the good ­DACAmented immigrant and the fearful ­DACAmented immigrant. Here, we situate the good immigrant through pawnability and the fearful immigrant through illegality and stoppage. We conclude by naming the intersecting force of pawnability and stoppage the nightmare of whiteness.

Race, Deportability, and Illegality In recent years, scholars invested in questions of nation and immigration have turned a critical eye to a national, if not global, emphasis on deportation as the immediate solution to perceived immigrant problems (e.g., Bloch & Schuster, 2005; Boehm, 2016; Kanstroom, 2007, 2012). Indeed, the rise of deportation, as both practice and discourse, has been named a “deportation regime”—a “paramount technique for refortifying political, racial, and class-based boundaries” (Peutz & De Genova, 2010, p. 4). As De Genova (2010) argues, “the practice of deportation has … emerged as a definite and increasingly pervasive convention of routine statecraft” (p. 34). The practices of deportation today, as across history, increasingly serve not just as mechanisms of removal, but as everyday techniques of power and surveillance, writing (il)legitimacy and (im)morality into national codes of belonging. Within the United States, deportation has a long and storied condition. Though ostensibly serving as a mechanism for protecting the nation, ­deportation has been a crucial tool through which the nation crafts—and maintains—its identity and character. Originating ­formally in 1882, with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which allowed for the deportation of Chinese laborers, deportation was initially deemed an act of national protection, not a mode of punishment nor a means through which to control the racial, ethnic, or class composition of the nation (Hester, 2017). Still, as deportation law developed, between 1882 and the 1920s, the categories of deportability, strangely akin to those of inadmissibility—“‘idiots,’ the ‘insane,’ ‘paupers,’ ‘polygamists,’ ‘persons liable to become a public charge,’ people convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving ‘moral turpitude,’ to sufferers ‘from a loathsome or dangerous’ contagious disease”—­suggested that deportation law was indeed a mechanism through which the nation’s character, if not color, was being created (Hester, 2017, p. 26). In his account of the origins of deportation law, Kanstroom (2000) argues that the cases which first established deportation law emerged in a “powerful convergence of racial, ideological, cultural, and doctrinal factors” (p. 1906). Similarly, Buff (2008), attendant to the connections between the origins of deportation law and its contemporary practice, concludes: “the ­history of deportation in the twentieth century maps connections between economic restrictionism, political repression, and racialized

Nightmares of Whiteness  201 nativism” (p. 537). The deportation regime and the rhetoric of deportation in the contemporary political moment is derivative of the history of racializing logics of deportability. In large part, the identity work of deportation, or what we might name more simply the whiteness of deportation, lies in the ways that deportation policy and deportations themselves serve as evidence of a nation’s power and sovereignty (Peutz & De Genova, 2010, p. 10). As Cornelisse (2010) explains, deportation proves the nation’s power to expel despite, if not because of, its own faulty immigration laws (p. 104). That is, to the degree that U.S. immigration laws do not (cannot, are not actually designed to) exclude certain “undesirable” populations—those who do our cheap labor, for instance—deportation demonstrates the state’s power over its residents. Indeed, Kanstroom (2007) concludes that deportation law, at least within the United States, functions partly as what he names “post entry social control,” regulating, seemingly without end, the lives of non-citizens (p. 2–6; see also Kanstroom, 2000). Consider here the designation “likely to become a public charge” (LPC) (see Hester, 2017, p. 141–169). The public charge language emerged initially, in 1882, as a category of immigrant inadmissibility, precluding entry to those suspected of relying on social services. By 1891, the language had changed such that one could be denied entry or be deported if they were “likely to become” a public charge. Over time, the period upon which a person was subject to deportation through LPC grew, creating ever-longer windows of heightened vulnerability in which any number of actions—appeals for social services, illnesses, loss of employment—made one susceptible. As Molina (2010) argues, the LPC clause, for those Mexicans who regularly came and went from Mexico, “created a near-continuous potential for deportation” (p. 643, emphasis added). Kanstroom (2007) reiterates this “near-continuous potential,” explaining that “a noncitizen may be deported for conduct that was not a deportable offense when it occurred” (p. 6). It is in deportability, its perpetual fluidity and volatility, that deportation law has its most potent force. It is on this point that scholarship on deportation is adamant. Actual deportations are traumatic and horrific; still, the disciplinary force of deportation lies as much—if not more—in deportability as in deportation itself. It is deportability, which Hester (2017) defines simply as “the status of being deportable,” that conscripts the lives of precarious populations (p. 1). Peutz and De Genova (2010) explain: “it is deportability, then or the protracted possibility of being deported—along with the multiple vulnerabilities that this susceptibility for deportation engenders—that is the real effect of these policies and practices” (p. 14). Deportability, manifested through media representations and DACAmented voices, functions racially in discourses seek center the “bad immigrant” who can harm “real” Americans as well as in circulating emphasis on fear and vulnerability, which constitutes individuals as “illegal.”

202  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez The implications of deportability for those situated within it are considerable. Notable is the impact of deportability on labor. Consider here Maira’s (2010) invocation that deportability is linked to the imperial state. This connection, though complex and multifaceted, serves the nation through the ways that deportability positions individuals as disposable labor. Cockcroft (1986) details the discrepancies between deportations and deportability, noting that, even in times of heightened nativism, when considerable public and political attention is given to deportation, the number of deportations pales in comparison to the number of undocumented immigrants allowed to enter the country: ­“deportation and importation … occur simultaneously” so that a constant oversupply of anxious workers is always available (p. 42). De Genova (2004) concurs: “deportability … provides an apparatus for sustaining Mexican migrants’ vulnerability and tractability—as workers— whose labor power, inasmuch as it is deportable, becomes an eminently disposable commodity” (p. 161). Deportability, then, while certainly an effect of one’s legal residency status, is much more than that. Indeed, we suggest that deportability functions rhetorically as a racial project. It is in deportability that bodies are racialized. Maira (2010) claims that the logic of deportation regimes is a constitutive one (p. 299), which De Genova (2002) names the “‘illegality’ effect,” that spectacle—the invasions and floods that dominate public discourse, the deleterious effects on the nation and its rightful citizens—that has to be endlessly created anew so as to sustain the cultural climate of deportability (p. 437). While deportability is produced and sustained through legal mechanism, it exceeds those legal parameters, circulating discursively, fixing bodies (often regardless of residency status) within it. If the constitutive—racializing—logic of deportability lies in the production of illegality, and thus, vulnerability, then what is clear is that this logic is not just a constitutive logic, but an affective one. The Affective Force of Deportability Theories of affect have generated considerable insight among scholars interested in both race and in rhetoric. In part, affect theory takes us to the immediacy of bodies. For rhetorical scholars, such arguments turn to questions of representation and circulation, identification, and bodies. For critical race scholars, affect theory illuminates the intersections of race and racism, taking us to race as a saturated way of being. At the intersections of rhetoric and race, we suggest, affect theory helps us think through the complex and contradictory materialization of bodies. As scholars of affect theory maintain, affective energies—those distributions of emotion, laden with histories, politics, experiences, and memories—mobilize and motivate, generating (dis)affiliations and (dis) identifications. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) note, “Affect … is the name

Nightmares of Whiteness  203 we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion— that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension” (p. 1, emphasis in original). Reliant on, though not reducible to discourse, affects intensify and circulate through and across both bodies and the discourses those bodies invoke and evoke. To think race and affect is to center bodies as the carriers—the signs, vehicles, storehouses—of culture, politics, and histories and to place those bodies within the cultures, they come to comprise. Indeed, it is to suggest, as Ehlers (2012) does, that race “is the effect of affect” (p. 85). Ahmed (2004b) writes, “It is through affective encounters that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which ‘gives’ the subject an identity that is apart from others” (pp. 52–53). Hate and fear, love and intimacy surface on bodies—raced bodies—creating the very “ ­ surfaces” and “boundaries” of those bodies, constituting and locating them in their worlds (Ahmed, 2004a, p. 117). McCann (2016), reminding us that affect precedes race, explains, “the mobilization and, therefore, capture of affect enables its expression” (p. 134).1 Contemporary racial politics and discourses, such as those surrounding conversations and debate on DACA, are laden with the circulations and attachments of affect, the fear and hatred, the hope and promise, which surface on bodies in ways that manage and organize both racial and social politics. In this way, the political implications of affect for race are significant. Our very participation in and affiliation with race is channeled through our affective orientations. In part, as Cloud (2003) explains, our identities and affinities morph through what she names the “affected” public, “an artificial social construct that e­ nforces ­e motional identification over heterogeneity and dissent” (p. 129, ­emphasis in original). Within this affected public, reasoning about race looks quite different, in part because reason is replaced with “feeling” (Chaput,  2010,  p. 3). That is, our sense of belonging, if not our very sense of being, “contains a number of prior affective investments” linked to bodies that “look” or “feel” American or “alien” (Cisneros, 2012). It is in this constitutive force of affect that we see inroad for theorizing race, rhetoric, and racialization. We pause in this essay on two key concepts inspired for us in Ahmed’s work—pawnability and stoppage. In her discussion of race and temporality, Ahmed argues that race operates as what we might think of as a future/past guarantee, and in doing so, she suggests that the pawnability of race—its easy transfer across bodies—is a mode of racialization. That is, she suggests that experiences of race in the moment are premised on a collapse of future certainty with past certainty. We know that race is a danger or a threat partly because we know that raced bodies will, most certainly, bring harm to us. This futural certainty—this promise of race—is premised upon our certain knowledge that these raced bodies—in some ways almost

204  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez these very raced bodies—have brought danger and harm to us in the past (Ahmed, 2004b, p. 79). As she explains, in these instantaneous shifts between past and present, these shifts that manifest in the present, the particularities of raced bodies morph into universalities. A single moment comes to define a feeling, an experience, a racial category. The swiftness of the associations, Ahmed suggests, the ease with which they can be transferred from body to body to body, seemingly endlessly, produces the pawnability of race, situated raced bodies as interchangeable. One horrific brown body can be (mis)recognized again and again among all horrific brown bodies. A second key mode of racialization that Ahmed inspires in our thinking is what we are naming here as stoppage. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) compares a White male body with a Black male body. She turns to Fanon and writes, “Fanon’s phenomenology of the black body could be described in terms of the bodily and social experience of restriction, uncertainty and blockage, or perhaps even in terms of the despair of the utterance ‘I cannot’” (p. 139). She notes that for Merleau-Ponty, the successful (White) body is “able” to extend itself to act on and in the world. But, she continues, “to be black or not white in ‘the white world’ is to turn back toward oneself, to become an object, which means … being diminished as an effect of the bodily extensions of others: For bodies that are not extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? Each question, when asked, is a kind of stopping device: you are stopped by being asked the question, just as the question requires you to be stopped. (p. 139) In climates of deportability, there is, of course, literal stoppage—raids, arrests, detentions—and each of these moments of literal stoppage is marked by the racializing questions: Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? Bodies are raced. As Cisneros (2012) suggests, they “look ‘illegal,’” and thus they become illegal, through stoppage (p. 139). Deportability constitutes individuals into illegality, we suggest, through stoppage, both literal and figurative. Across the analysis that follows, we suggest that representations of the DACAmented, both from dominant discourse and from their own voices, as represented in dominant discourse, consolidate circulating affective energies around immigrants and citizens. More specifically, we suggest that representations of DACA and the DACAmented ­racialize, and they do so in part through pawnability and stoppage. We identify two key themes in the discourse that function critically to racialize: DACAmented as good and deserving immigrants and the end of DACA as fearful. Despite our attention in the analysis to representations of the

Nightmares of Whiteness  205 DACAmented, our argument on racialization turns as much to the racialization of non-DACAmented immigrants than to the DACAmented themselves. In short, we suggest that the two key themes serve to racialize non-DACAmented immigrants as other. That racialization lies in the affective force of support, which we argue positions the DACAmented as racial pawns, and of fear, which functions as a stoppage mechanism.

Race, Racialization, and DACA Any casual consumer of public media is likely familiar with the prevalent narratives surrounding immigration in the United States. In the oft-told tale of the United States as a nation of immigrants, the United States stands as a nation made strong through its ability to forge its character and its path through the willing embrace of immigrants— those hardy and resourceful individuals who came to the country looking to achieve the “American Dream”. That story, of course, stands in stark contrast to the other endlessly-reiterated narrative—the immigrant as threat and danger to the American people and their livelihood. Immigrants are cast as those undeserving masses who come to the country in selfishness, if not criminality, to take from the country, but never to give to it. Figured across much recent discourse as Mexican (and perhaps Latin American or Hispanic), these immigrants or “illegal aliens,” constitute one of the nation’s most serious problems. Given the salience of both frames, it is not surprising that conversations around DACA invoke the polarity of the deserving and the undeserving, the good and the unwelcome. Dreams of Whiteness I know they want the bad hombres out… I want them out to. But I’m not one of them (quoted in Dvorak, 2017) Through all of the pro- and anti-immigration rhetoric, there is little question of the “good immigrant/bad immigrant.” Rather, it is spoken as truth that some immigrants are “bad” and some immigrants are “good,” and we know it is “illegal aliens” who are bad, dangerous, undeserving. This long-standing frame, typically attached to Mexicans, carries such force that it has become somewhat of a trope for immigration itself. So how is it that the DACAmented evade this characterization, standing not as exemplars of the problems of immigration? For indeed, representations of the DACAmented, both from dominant voices and from the DACAmented themselves, consistently situate DACAmented as good immigrants.

206  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez Crucial to this overall frame is the notion of innocence, a term that is pervasive in mediated accounts of the (potential) end of DACA. 2 Overwhelmingly, this idea that the DACAmented are innocent comes in discussions of their arrival. One account notes that the DACAmented “were brought here as children by their parents” (Decker, 2017), while another notes, “You have 800,000 young people, brought here, no fault of their own” (Mascaro, Bennett, & Lauter, 2017). As these two representative fragments demonstrate, there are at least two clear patterns in the framing of innocence—the DACAmented are young, they were/are children, and they did not come here. They were brought. Thus, their actions were not criminal. Instead, as one headline notes, the ­DACAmented are “blameless” (Bruk, 2017). Readers learn the DACAmented are not only blameless, but they were often unaware of their status. Consider the testimony of Rafael Agustin: “I was in shock … I knew I was an ­immigrant  … But I didn’t know we were undocumented immigrants” (quoted in Villarreal, 2017). Innocence works in these narratives as what Ahmed (2004b) terms a politics of alignment. “We” are invited into discussions of DACAmented immigrants as innocent and deserving to identify with them and to see them as like “us”—the rightful and deserving citizens of the nation. This identification, Ahmed (2004b) explains, is affectively saturated. We love those with whom we identify (p. 52). Consider the ways these attributions of innocence shape a larger narrative of the DACAmented as ­different. Yes, they are immigrants and they are undocumented, but, we learn, they are not like other immigrants. Named “the most sympathetic of immigrants,” the DACAmented are framed within a narrative of belonging (Decker, 2017), while the non-DACAmented are framed by their “lack” of DACAmented status, by illegality. For instance, a statement issued by Telemundo described the DACAmented as “valuable members of our community” (quoted in Battaglio, 2017), while an editorial in the New York Times called them “Americans in every way that matters” (Krugman, 2017). Similarly, University of ­California ­President, Janet Napolitano commented that “In all ways except one, they are ­A merican” (quoted in Watanabe, 2017). Even self-named Trump supporters positioned the DACAmented and DACA as different from other immigrants and policies. For instance, Arizona resident Steve Feld noted that “You can’t send them back if they grew up here … That’s not fair,” while Sheryl Dressel, also an Arizona resident, proclaimed “They’re ­A mericans” (quoted in Finnegan & Barabak, 2017). There is a hereness in these proclamations and representations, and that hereness names them as almost American. Belonging surfaces on the bodies of DACAmented immigrants, shaping not just what Ahmed names their “skin,” their identity, but also bringing them in to the fold. In part, such surfacing emerges in discussion that emphasize the ways that the DACAmented participate in

Nightmares of Whiteness  207 society. For instance, American politician Leon Panetta (2017) went as far to say “They [dreamers] would make outstanding soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen.” DACAmented youth join in this narrative as well naming themselves as hard working, deserving of American opportunities, freedoms, and responsibilities because of their innocence. Their very stories of their commitment to the nation and their fit with “us” do the work of racialization. Indeed, across their narratives, we can see the performative racialization at play. Juan Escalante, from Tallahassee, Florida, explains that DACA allows individuals to contribute to their communities: “DACA beneficiaries could continue to pursue higher education, starting businesses, or putting their skills to use” (“American Dreamers”). Miriam Santamaria, a small business owner from Houston, Texas, explains, “We are not asking for handouts, only for an opportunity to work hard, pay taxes like other citizens, and mostly, live our lives in peace for the first time” (“American Dreamers”). Finally, Ana Sanchez, a student from Elgin, Texas, writes, “I want to give back to this country” (“American Dreamers”). In these snippets, we see the DACAmented written into the nation, becoming part of the dream. DACAmented immigrants, then, are not the undocumented immigrants we typically imagine, fear, and often hate. Instead, in many ways, the DACAmented emerge as vulnerable and deserving, even as normative citizens aligned with American values. Without question, these representations install a narrative that is curiously open. We suspect that this prevalent frame may signal some shifting boundaries between whiteness and other. Our interests, however, lie in the other implications of this frame or in the ways that innocence and deservingness serve as strategies of racialization of criminal and undeserving. What, we wonder, does this construction do? How might it reproduce normative structures of whiteness? Is it possible that these frames, even in their considerable potential to disrupt whiteness, retrench it? Does the support for DACA serve the racialized—if not also economic—needs of the nation? Are the DACAmented merely racial pawns who serve in this narrative as a reminder of the dangers of immigration? The force of the narrative of innocence that runs through the discourse on DACA, perhaps as the defining frame of DACA, lies in its long history in U.S. public culture and memory. Good immigrants, those rugged and enterprising individuals who came to this country, worked hard, and gave themselves to the nation—much like Ana S­ anchez above— have long stood in as representations of national character and national ­identity—these immigrants transformed themselves into Americans and into whiteness. This temporal force, or the intensity and truth of historical memory, aligns DACAmented with the nation, surfacing national character—whiteness—on the very bodies of DACAmented. They were brought, as children. These hard working, innocent, and deserving

208  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez children are blameless and should not be punished, but protected.3 But of course, the surfacing, Ahmed reminds us, does not end at the skin of the individual. Instead, it bounds the social, constituting otherness. While these frames align the DACAmented with “whiteness,” so too do they call forth, relentlessly, otherness—the undeserving and the criminal. For if the DACA were brought, they were brought by o ­ thers—knowing adults, often their parents, and these others continue to carry the burden of race. Indeed, we suggest, these others, who appear only rarely in the discourse, are magnified in their absence. Consider the almost complete lack of any discussion of the fate of their parents. A narrative concerned about innocent children would, seemingly, feature the parents or adults who care for those children. Curiously—or not so curiously—mention of parents is scarce. That which appears tends toward blame. As one letter writer, naming the end of DACA a “travesty,” notes, Dreamers are here “because their parents entered the country illegally” (Lowenstein, 2017). It is in the narratives of support and the moves to alignment that whiteness surfaces on DACAmented immigrants and racial otherness saturates other “immigrants”—those “bad hombres.” For if there is support for DACA, there is also absolute insistence, often across party lines, that protecting DACA mandates (harsh) immigration reform. The special can be protected, but the rest of them must go. Quickly, readers learn, DACA may continue if Congress can pass harsh immigration laws ­(Mascaro, 2017; Scarborough, 2017). News reports repeatedly link support for DACA to the building of a border wall (Mascaro & ­Bierman, 2017) and to overall immigration reform, typically framed as entailing greater security and enforcement measures (Bennett & T ­ anfani, 2017; Shear & Davis, 2017). Often reiterating Trump’s vow to pass immigration reform that “provides enduring benefits for the American citizens we were elected to serve,” the news coverage frames the concerns around DACA such that what remains central is the narrative that ­immigration— and immigrants—are national problems, if not threats (quoted in “Is Trump,” 2017). Nightmares of Whiteness Right now, all the high school students I work with are afraid (Aleman, quoted in Dougherty, 2017) If racialization occurs across the discourse surrounding DACA through pawnability, so too do we see racialization through stoppage. Climates of deportability persist and grow through affective climates of vulnerability and precarity, and the discourse surrounding the end of DACA illustrates, and exacerbates, this climate. In this section, we trace articulations of fear and vulnerability in representations of (DACAmented)

Nightmares of Whiteness  209 immigrants and note the ways that vulnerability is articulated with movement—or stoppage. What emerges is a clear narrative in which ­DACAmented immigrants fear deportation and in that fear also risk losing their dreams in the United States. If deported, their lives in the United States will reach immediate cessation. Put differently, deportation stops the current life trajectory of DACAmented immigrants. Meanwhile, the fear of deportation also works to freeze DACAmented immigrants in a state of worry, of uncertainty, of needing to retreat back to the shadows. The fear of waiting to see what fate the Trump administration will decide for them—as Trump continues to deport immigrants in highly publicized spaces—leaves DACAmented immigrants in a liminal space. Not surprisingly, the discourse both by and about DACAmented immigrants is laden with fear and despair. Sofia De La Vega, an EMT student, states, “I will be deported and eventually, left with nothing to live for. I pray for an opportunity and to stop feeling like there isn’t any room for me here” (“American Dreamers”). Rodriguez recalls the life she lived before DACA, “under the notion of fear and uncertainty.” She continues, “Dreamers like me kept their dreams and secured them in a box called ‘Limitations’” (“American Dreamers”). In other words, DACA allowed Rodriguez the opportunity to pursue higher education, obtain a job, and feel secure (even if temporarily): “I was free from the fear of deportation and that enabled me to gain confidence in my abilities” (“American Dreamers”). A common cultural anecdote is that fear makes one fight or flee—but fear can also make one stop. Moreover, fear in the context of these personal stories emerges as a hindrance to acquiring any social capital or mobility. The ticking clock toward the DACA renewal period seemingly locks DACAmented immigrants into fear—it emerges in the narratives as all-encompassing, even perhaps all-defining. Indeed, across the accounts, fear emerges as constitutive. That is, fear names the DACAmented, making them “illegal.” For Vianey Romery, a social worker from the Bronx in New York, the fear takes over: “Every two years I renew my DACA with the anxiety that it could end … the fear of it all ending has become an overwhelming state of mind.” In other comments, what emerges is the sense that for the DACAmented, their very ways of being, even of existing, have changed. For instance, Deyanira, a student from Austin, Texas, explains, “we would have to return to the shadows and live life in constant fear” (“American Dreamers”). Other DACAmented immigrants like Ari are recent home owners who have started their own businesses. Ari notes “the fear of losing everything I have is real, the fear of getting deported to a country I don’t know is real” (“American Dreamers”). In these tales, DACAmented immigrants emerge as consumed by fear and jeopardy. Put with Ehlers (2012) arguments on race, effect, and affect, such discourses reveal the racialization. To live in deportability is to live in fear, to be shaped and surfaced by fear. Race becomes fear. To be

210  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez brown is to be afraid. “Brown feelings,” Muñoz (2006) reminds us, “are not individualized affective particularity … they more nearly express … a larger collective mapping of self and other” (p. 679, emphasis added). In this collective mapping, the significance of stoppage is particularly crucial. Fear expressed, as it in in these narratives—as the fear to move, as the experience of being frozen, stilled—is the mapping that quite l­iterally prevents the brown body from extending into the space of the social. Fear of moving contains individuals, literally locking them in to place as it also then contains them. Consider that constant message to raced ­bodies— stay in your place. A teacher from San Antonio, Texas, ­Julia ­Verzbickis, explains, “Knowing that I could lose all the freedom I’ve gained is a paralyzing fear” (“American Dreamers”). Another account, detailing the experiences of “Mark,” notes that “he did not feel safe venturing out of the neighborhood, terrified that he would be randomly asked by police for identification that he did not have” (Bruk, 2017). Elsewhere, a teacher told the Huffington Post, “What we’re seeing is a lot of parents who used to pick up their children from school and now they’re sending them on the bus … the parents are afraid to come to school” (quoted in Planas & Carro, 2017). The parents are afraid to move. To move risks being found. Movement increases one’s deportability. Intersecting with these articulations of fear in the discourse are the accounts of surveillance, the naming of raids and arrests. In these frames, we see most vividly the constitutive force of stoppage. Because applications for DACA require that individuals name themselves as undocumented and provide their contact information, circulating in the accounts are accounts of being tracked and found (Branson-Potts, 2017; Hetrick, 2017; Villazor, 2017). For instance, immigration attorney Reaz Jafri, reflecting on the responses of the DACAmented immigrants he works with, recounted “They’re wondering, ‘Now that I’m no longer protected, can ICE now come and find me? Because ICE now knows where I live, where I work’” (Mark, 2017). Betty refused to give her name to the reporter writing the story “because she’s afraid she’ll be found and deported” (Bermudez, 2017). Deportability consumes. If we think this stoppage with De Genova (2010) argument that the freedom of movement is core to what it means to be human, the affective containment of brown bodies is not just a fear of being deported, it is an act of abjection (pp. 57–59). What emerges is the clear disciplinary force of stoppage. De Genova (2004) makes clear that the deportation regime works by managing individuals, making them “illegal.” The notion of “stoppage” can thus be thought alongside the enactment of “stop and frisk” by police officers or a general call to “freeze.” Stop and frisk, we know, is a racialized practice, a “technology of racism” that is extended by “practices of indefinite detention” or in this case, the near-­continuous potential for deportation (Ahmed, 2006, p. 140). Stoppage then is both a political economy and an affective one. It “leaves its

Nightmares of Whiteness  211 impressions” upon those bodies that are stopped and those empowered to call Stop! (Ahmed, 2006, p. 140). The difference between a “stop and frisk” and the fear of stoppage that immigrants are facing in our contemporary political sphere is that racialized stoppage linked with the possibility of deportation causes one to stop themselves (i.e., limit their public ­visibility) before being stopped by the authorities. Being stopped is to make the body a site of social stress (Ahmed, 2006, p. 140), but it is also to make an immigrants body highly publicized as criminal, as outsider, as “other.” Publicized cases of detention, raids, arrests, and deportations, attention to sanctuary, and even articulations of fear circulate in this economy, accumulating the energies of fear and impressing upon those who may be wondering “Am I next?”

Whither Whiteness amid Deportability? We live in the deportation regime. The intensity of that regime was made nationally visible in September 2017, when the Trump administration announced the end of DACA. In the days and months that followed, DACA became almost a household topic. Even those unfamiliar or removed entered the conversation. Protests and boycotts, calls for lawsuits, and sanctuary announced loudly—this is immoral, this is unnecessary. Such protests and outcries have raised national awareness, even ­potentially pushing on the boundaries of national belonging with the claims that the DACAmented are almost as American as are citizens. At the same time, the spectacle of DACA has recycled the affective intensities of whiteness. We have traced here two rhetorical modes of racialization across the discourse surrounding DACA, pawnability and stoppage. Without a doubt, the outpouring of support for DACAmented immigrants is significant. If DACA continues, the 800,000 or so DACAmented will be able to move through their lives more easily, and that movement, both literal and figurative, will help to locate the DACAmented more, possibly even within the imaginaries of nation and whiteness. We want to be very clear that our analysis does not discount the dreams, goals, and hopes of many DACAmented immigrants, but rather seeks to contextualize the controversy of DACA within a discourse of racialization—one that also has deleterious a/effects on non-DACAmented immigrants. We cannot help but pause on the rhetorical significance of support, for in many ways the spectacle surrounding DACA and the deportability of DACAmented immigrants promulgates the stoppage of race. I­ mmigrants, as well as brown bodies more generally, are fixed ever more forcibly into the good/bad divide. The rhetoric of “good” immigrants is mapped securely on to the bodies of DACAmented immigrants. ­However, the mapping of “bad” immigrants is insecure; it floats and moves, shadowing brown bodies, who become, again and again, racialized immigrant bodies—labeled criminal, threatening, disposable.

212  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez Just as DACAmented immigrants, named special, deserving, and even American, are oriented in this discourse toward whiteness, their very towardness forces the orientation of undocumented immigrants back toward criminality, undeserving, and illegality. In this moment, as we await decision on DACA what has been vividly clear is that the DACAmented are pawns whose values lies in their exchangeability. We can—and likely will—trade them for immigration reform, greater surveillance, a wall. But the trade value of the DACAmented does not end there. Instead, the discourses of support and goodness marshal detest and disgust. We trade our love and support for the right to greater animosity, and we do so in the love of nation. That is, DACAmented immigrants become pawns that restore our faith in our tales of our nation as welcoming of (some) immigrants, and this faith allows us to deport and detain guilt free. As Ahmed (2004a) reminds us, when we align in love, we are also aligning in hate. We “love” our country as we hate those who threaten it. While pawnability racializes immigrants back into criminality and ­deportability, so too does stoppage racialize. As we traced across the discourse, the spectacle surrounding DACA intensified the ­already-hostile national climate of intensity. Layered across the voices of ­DACAmented immigrants. More precisely, what we hear is the fear of moving and that fear stops. For many, the stoppage is literal—­ individuals are afraid to be seen, afraid to go out, afraid of being detained and deported. So too do we see stoppage embedded across the larger representations of DACA, whether voiced in concerns that all DACA applications increase the vulnerability of DACAmented or in accounts of raids and arrests. When Ahmed (2006) attends to stoppage, she argues that the freedom of bodily movement is already racialized. White bodies extend, non-White contract, White bodies connect to the social, and non-White bodies are abjected. Deportation is, of course, an extreme form of stoppage—non-White bodies are not just abjected, and their abjection prompts their physical rejection. They are removed from the body of the social. We are reminded, as well, of De Genova’s (2004) comments on the discursive force of deportability: deportability is decisive in the legal production of Mexican/migrant ‘illegality’ and the militarized policing of the U.S.-Mexico border, however, only insofar as some are deported in order that most may ultimately remain (un-deported) – as workers, whose particular migrant status has been rendered ‘illegal’. (p. 161) Deportability stops—individuals don’t move. Raced into “deportability,” and thus into “illegality,” they are thus (re)made into ideal—at least in terms of their ideal exploitability as workers.

Nightmares of Whiteness  213 Taken together, the strategies of pawnability and stoppage that pervade the discourses surrounding DACA and DACAmented immigrants tell us much about the contemporary workings of whiteness. Indeed, we suggest that the discourses surrounding DACA are deeply consequential. Whiteness is materialized on the bodies of some, its perpetual allure—the dream of safety, freedom, mobility—cast as attainable just as its absolute rigidity—the nightmare that yet again raced bodies are cast into fear and vulnerability—is made clear. When we think about the spectacle created in Trump’s announcement of the end, what emerges is a case of strange bedfellows. Pawnability and stoppage, support and fear, welcome and rejection intersect into what we think of as the power—and nightmare— of whiteness. Whiteness, Ahmed (2007) argues, functions as a kind of “public comfort,” a mode of being at ease—and at home—in the world (p. 158). But that ease is premised on the dis-ease. What we see at play in pawnability and stoppage are two modes of seemingly discordant racialization. One appears to be both embraced and stopped. But what if the embrace is its own moment of stoppage; one is embraced that that race can be stopped. This, we fear, is the racialization of deportability.

Notes 1 To be clear, McCann specifies blackness, not race. We extend his argument to race broadly. 2 As of this writing, the outcome on DACA remains unclear. To date, two federal judges have declared that Trump’s ending of DACA was ended without sufficient legal reasoning (Dinan, 2018). 3 Indeed, the language of protection is pervasive across this discourse.

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214  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez Beckwith, R. T. (2017, September 5). “We cannot admit everyone”: Read a transcript of Jeff Sessions’ remarks on ending the DACA program. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://time.com/4927426/daca-dreamers-jeffsessions-transcript/ Bennett, B. (2017, September 5). Trump plans a reprieve for young immigrants; He’s expected to keep DACA intact for half a year to let Congress work on replacement. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com. colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1935142759?accountid=14503 Bennett, B., & Mascaro, L. (2017, October 10). DACA allies bypass Trump aides Trump seen as more pliable than his aids; Supporters of young immigrants hope to persuade president to reject the views of his hard-line advisors. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://colorado.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search. proquest.com/docview/1948892167?accountid=14503 Bennett, B., & Tanfani, J. (2017, September 6). Trump ends ‘Dreamers’ program; ‘Dreamers’ crushed; Trump to phase out protections for 800,000 young immigrants; President speaks of ‘love for these people’ and with little guidance, gives congress a deadline to help them. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/ 1935659605?accountid=14503 Bermudez, E. (2017, September 19). DACA parents’ extra burden; Their worries, fears and guilt from bringing children to U.S. illegally are heightened by program’s cloudy future. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://colorado. idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/ docview/1940058240?accountid=14503 Bloch, A., & Schuster, L. (2005). At the extremes of exclusion: Deportation, detention, and dispersal. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28, 491–512. Boehm, D. (2016). Returned: Going and coming in an age of deportation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Branson-Potts, H. (2017, September 19). “Dreamers” sue over DACA edict; Six beneficiaries of program say Trump’s plan to phase it out is unconstitutional. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://colorado.idm. oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/ docview/1940058199?accountid=14503 Bruk, D. (2017, September 6). DACA repeal forces blameless into life of crime. Observer. Retrieved from http://observer.com/2017/09/daca-repealcause-increase-crime-rates/ Buff, R. I. (2008). The deportation terror. American Quarterly, 60, 523–551. Chaput, C. (2010). Rhetorical circulation in late capitalism: Neoliberalism and the overdetermination of affective energy. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 43, 1–25. Cisneros, J. D. (2012). Looking “illegal”: Affect, rhetoric, and performativity in Arizona’s SB 1070. In D. R. DeChaine (Ed.), Border rhetorics: Citizenship and identity on the US-Mexico frontier (pp. 133–150). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Cloud, D. (2003). Therapy, silence, and war: Consolation and the end of deliberation in the “affected” public. POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention, 2, 125–142. Cockcroft, J. D. (1986). Outlaws in the promised land: Mexican immigrant workers and America’s future. New York, NY: Grove Press. Cornelisse, G. (2010). Immigration detention and the territoriality of universal rights. In N. De Genova & N. Peutz (Eds.), The deportation regime:

Nightmares of Whiteness  215 sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement (pp. 101–122). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Decker, C. (2017, September 6). TRUMP ENDS ‘DREAMERS’ PROGRAM; ANALYSIS; republican party’s future is at stake too. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://colorado.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquestcom.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1935659646?accountid=14503 De Genova, N. (2002). Migrant ‘illegality’ and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 419–447. De Genova, N. (2004). The legal production of Mexican/migrant “illegality.” Latino Studies, 2, 160–185. De Genova, N. (2007). The production of culprits: From deportability to detainability in the aftermath of “Homeland Security.” Citizenship Studies, 11, 421–448. De Genova, N. (2010). The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. In N. De Genova & N. Peutz (Eds.), The ­deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement (pp. 33–65). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dinan, S. (2018, February 13). Court orders restoration of DACA program. Washington Times. Retrieved from www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/ feb/13/court-orders-full-restoration-daca-program/ Dougherty, J. (2017, October 19). “All she ever knew was America”: This high school athlete had a plan. Then DACA was rescinded. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/sports/this-high-school-daca-studentsfuture-is-uncertain-as-she-awaits-trumps-deal/2017/10/19/96f2ede2-b2a011e7-99c6-46bdf7f6f8ba_story.html?utm_term=.5b06b4dcbba6 Dvorak, P. (2017, October 9). She can’t bear to leave her kids. But she doesn’t want to be a criminal. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/local/she-cant-bear-to-leave-her-kids-but-she-doesnt-wantto-be-a-criminal/2017/10/09/44c40ea2-acfb-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story. html?utm_term=.f9a97f19d715 Ehlers, N. (2012). Racial imperatives: Discipline, performativity, and struggles against subjection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Finnegan, M., & Barabak, M. Z. (2017, September 16). Trump’s backers learning to be flexible; Deals with Democrats and a DACA reversal part of the grand plan, Arizona supporters say. Retrieved from https://search-proquestcom.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1939170691?accountid=14503 Hester, T. (2017). Deportation: The origins of U.S. policy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hetrick, D. (2017, September 8). Murphy: I’ll block feds from using DACA data in NJ. The New York Observer. Retrieved from https://colorado.idm. oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/ docview/1936807999?accountid=14503 Kanstroom, D. (2000). Deportation, social control, and punishment: Some thoughts about why hard laws make bad cases. Harvard Law Review, 113, 1890–1935. Kanstroom, D. (2007). Deportation nation: Outsiders in American history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kanstroom, D. (2012). Aftermath: Deportation law and the new American diaspora. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kimball, S. (2017, September 5). Read Barack Obama’s response to Trump’s decision to end DACA. CNBC. Retrieved from www.cnbc.com/2017/09/05/ read-barack-obamas-response-to-trumps-decision-to-end-daca.html

216  Lisa A. Flores and Logan Rae Gomez King, L., & Carcamo, C. (2017, September 6). Trump ends ‘Dreamers’ program; Defiance in the face of uncertainty; DACA recipients upset, but not about to give up on the lives they’ve worked for. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1935658876? accountid=14503 Kopan, T. (2017, September 5). Trump ends DACA but gives Congress window to save it. CNN. Retrieved from www.cnn.com/2017/09/05/politics/­dacatrump-congress/index.html Kopan, T., & Acosta, J. (2017, September 1). Ryan asks Trump to hold off on scrapping DACA. CNN. Retrieved from www.cnn.com/2017/09/01/politics/ paul-ryan-daca-trump-immigration/index.html Krugman, P. (2017, September 5). The very bad economics of killing DACA. New York Times. Retrieved from https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/ the-very-bad-economics-of-killing-daca/ Lowenstein, H. A. (2017, September 5). President Trump, Don’t forsake the ‘Dreamers.’ New York Times. Retrieved from https://nyti.ms/2x8bhY2 Maira, S. (2010). Radical deportation: Tales from Lodi and San Francisco. In N. De Genova & N. Peutz (Eds.), The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement (pp. 295–325). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mark, M. (2017, September 6). ‘Can ICE now come and find me?’: DACA recipients fear data they provided to government will be used against them. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://nordic.businessinsider.com/ daca-dreamers-homeland-security-information-2017–9/ Mascaro, L. (2017, September 7). President appears eager for a DACA agreement.  Los Angeles Times.  Retrieved from https://colorado.idm. oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/ docview/1936075670?accountid=14503 Mascaro, L., Bennett, B., & Lauter, D. (2017, September 5). Hope for resolution to ‘Dreamers’ dispute; Trump’s tentative deal with Democrats indicates a break in a decades-old impasse over the immigrants. Los Angeles Times. ­Retrieved from https://colorado.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-­proquest-com. colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1938798597?accountid=14503 Mascaro, L., & Bierman, N. (2017, September 14). Democrats, Trump reach deal to help ‘Dreamers’; The two sides differ over whether the border package might include wall funding. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://search-­ proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1938381969?accountid=14503 McCann, B. J. (2016). “Chrysler pulled the trigger”: The affective politics of insanity and black rage at the trial of James Johnson, Jr. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 46, 131–155. McGreevy, P. (2017, September, 12 ). State sues to protect state sues to block DACA edict; lawsuit says trump’s decision to rescind DACA program is unconstitutional.  Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://colorado.idm. oclc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/ docview/1937579606?accountid=14503 Molina, N. (2010). Constructing Mexicans as deportable immigrants: Race, disease, and the meaning of “public charge.” Western Historical Quarterly, 17, 641–666. ­ erformativity Muñoz, J. (2006). Feeling brown, feeling down: Latina affect, the p of race, and the depressive position. Signs, 31(3), 675–688. doi:10.1086/499080

Nightmares of Whiteness  217 Palomarez, J. (2017, September 4). Why I’m resigning from Trump’s diversity coalition. New York Times. Retrieved from https://nyti.ms/2x8njkb Panetta, L. E. (2017, September 5). Leon Panetta op-ed: What about the ‘Dreamers’ who serve us? The Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-trump-dreamers-daca-military20170905-story.html Peutz, N., & De Genova, N. (2010). Introduction. In N. De Genova & N. Peutz (Eds.), The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement (pp. 1–29). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Planas, R., & Carro, J. (2017, February 27). This is what Trump’s immigration crackdown is doing to school kids. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/elementary-school-kids-terrified-by-­ immigration-arrests_us_58a76321e4b07602ad548e14 Scarborough, Joe. (2017, September 14). With Trump, it is never over. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/with-trumpit-is-never-over/2017/09/14/2496ca2e-996f-11e7-b569-3360011663b4_story. html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.99738243c081 Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In G. J. Seigworth & M. Gregg (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shear, M. D., & Davis, J. H. (2017, September 5). Trump moves to end DACA and calls on Congress to act. New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes. com/2017/09/05/us/politics/trump-daca-dreamers-immigration.html Silverstein, J. (2017, September 5). Sen. Lindsay Graham says he supports end of DACA if Congress gets time for new policy. New York Daily News. Retrieved from www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/lindsey-graham-supportdaca-congress-fix-article-1.3468294 Toure, M. (2017, September 5). New York will sue Trump in effort to keep DACA. The New York Observer. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com. colorado.idm.oclc.org/news/docview/1935883039/FD2B473C57664B99PQ/1? accountid=14503 Trump, D. (2017, September 5). Full statement: Trump explains decision to kill DACA. NBC News. Retrieved from www.nbcnews.com/politics/ donald-trump/full-statement-trump-explains-decision-kill-daca-n798801 Villarreal, Y. (2017, September 12). From one dreamer to many; Gina Rodriquez’s mission to bring Latino stories to TV takes a timely twist. Los Angeles Times. ­Retrieved from https://colorado.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search-­ proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1937579921?accountid=14503 Villazor, R. C. (2017, September 4). What do dreamers do now? New York Times. Retrieved from https://nyti/ms/2x5BGWr Watanabe, T. (2017, September 6). Trump ends ‘Dreamers’ program; C ­ alifornia college leaders vow to protect students. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1935656327? accountid=14503

12 “The Colonial Jesus” Deconstructing White Christianity Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza Introduction Though the relationship between whiteness and Christianity has been studied, albeit sporadically across many fields, the communicative process by which Christianity and whiteness became articulated has not been theorized. In this chapter, we argue that whiteness and Christianity become intertwined through the production of a White savior trope. We name this trope the “Colonial Jesus” and argue that like whiteness, the Colonial Jesus is “deemed to be the ‘One’, the axiomatic norm that defines racial ‘differences’, which maintains the status of a ­‘superior’ race and yet, paradoxically, as unraced, human as such” (Yancy, 2015, p. 197). In other words, the Colonial Jesus articulates to whiteness ­because it naturalizes “the production of identity on top of differences, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 54). As such, the ubiquity of the White Christ, despite historical evidence to the contrary, should not be dismissed as accidental, or apolitical, instead, we argue that the articulation of White supremacy with Christianity started as a colonial project that is now manifesting in the discourse of White nationalism. The colonial imagery renders bodies of color simultaneously visible and profane through metonymy, substituting the spiritual purity of a White Christ with a racialized idealized in whiteness. Shome (1999) ­condemns this ideology as a legacy of the colonial discourse of the racialized body of the “other” constructed through fixed tropes, which continues to operate to date. Echoing Shome, Yancy (2015) denounces how whiteness continue to express itself micro-aggressively through “white bodily movement, white gazes, white discourse, insults to Black bodies and bodies of color, even if unintentionally” (p. 201). The small expressions of whiteness described by require communication scholars to attend to the body because the body is a place where the line between the discursive and the material blurs. The relationship between discourse and the body expresses itself in the quotidian practices of movement, judgment, and speech that reproduce White supremacy through illocutionary performances.

“The Colonial Jesus”  219 In contrast, one should never forget that “a colonial culture can remain when the colonizer has physically departed from the colonized space” (Shome, 1999, p. 111) leaving behind indelible markers of White domination. As such, even hundreds of years after the end of colonial rule, the narratives, tropes, and aesthetics that normalized colonial power may still remain. For example, pigmentocracy is still a powerful force in Latin America (Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2009) which suggests that the social and political process that reproduce whiteness may operate below consciousness insidiously replicating in the discourses of people of color. Thus, “whiteness is not just about bodies and skin color, but rather more about the discursive practices that, because of colonialism and neocolonialism, privilege and sustain the global dominance of white imperial subjects and European worldviews” (Shome, 1999, p. 108). In this chapter, we will deconstruct the “Colonial Jesus” to demonstrate how White supremacy and Christianity articulate together to naturalize racist nativist ideology. We argue that, in the current context of globalization, the colonial legacy of the representation of Jesus as a “white man” maintains whiteness as a propaganda tool to perpetrate the othering of people of color, and thereby overtly and/or covertly r­ etain the power of White supremacy. Through a case study of the “Unite the Right Rally” (UTRR), we illustrate how Christianity still operates as a racialized code for whiteness in othering and oppressing bodies of color in the United States. We advocate for a postcolonial approach to Christianity that challenges the whiteness of Jesus and thereby attempts to disarticulate Christ—and by extension Christianity—from whiteness. To draw a connection between Christianity and Whiteness, we will begin our investigation by exploring the established research on whiteness in the communication field.

Whiteness as a “Strategic Rhetoric” As a social system, “whiteness relies on discourses, communication, and cultural performances for the historical, systemic, and structural ­perpetuations of the race-based superiority” (Toyosaki, 2016, p. 243). Relying on a variety of methods and/or approaches, communication scholars across disciplines, for many years, have theorized about whiteness ­(Martin & Nakayama, 1999; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; ­Toyosaki, 2016; Warren, 1999, 2001, 2003) to critically investigate how whiteness is used and/or performed in our everyday lives to reproduce particular types of identities (Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, & Bradford, 1996; Moon, 1999, 2016; Moon & Flores, 2000; Shome, 1999). These studies have revealed how whiteness operates as an embodied identity of “white subjectivity” to reproduce White privilege. Positioning whiteness as “strategic rhetoric” used to reproduce an ideology of race superiority (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995), critical intercultural

220  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza and/or rhetorical studies scholars have also attempted to unveil how whiteness is co-opted overtly or in more subtle ways to maintain itself as the invisible cultural norm and retain the power and privilege of White people. Within this body of scholarship, research has proliferated, both nationally and internationally, in a variety of issues among which media coverage and/or representations (Dyer, 1988; Griffin, 2015; Moon & Nakayama, 2005; Projansky & Ono, 1999; Shome, 1996, 2000; Tierney, 2006), education/pedagogy (Fassett & Warren, 2010; Hytten & Warren, 2003; Yep & Lescure, 2018), identity performance of masculinity/femininity/ queerness (Dubrofsky & Ryalls, 2014; Griffin & Calafell, 2011), strategic silence (Crenshaw, 1997; Potter, 2015), and the post-apartheid era ­(Milazzo, 2015; Steyn, 2004). Such scholarship has demonstrated how White ideology is strategically used by Whites as “a locus from which Other differences are calculated and organized” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 297) to reproduce a discourse of Otherness that promotes White racial privilege and thereby oppresses bodies of color. Although research on whiteness is growing, little attention has been paid to the relationship between whiteness and religion. For instance, despite the historical imbrication of White supremacy and Christianity operating in the current context of globalization, there has been very little exploration of the ways that these two ideologies function in a communication context. However, focusing on religion as a space of whiteness performed, a few scholars in the field of communication and/ or related disciplines—Dyer’s (1997) seminal work on representations of whiteness in Western visual culture, Yancy’s (2012, 2015) pivotal ­research on Christology and whiteness, Lacy’s (2008) study on White religious absolutism, and Stratton’s (2016a, 2016b) scholarship on religion and multiculturalism in Australia—have called attention on how whiteness still operates as a rhetorically racial universal, which often remains unquestioned due to its invisibility (Dyer, 2002). In an attempt to shed more light into the intricacies of whiteness and Christianity in communication studies, we extend Nakayama and Krizek’s (1995) theorization of “strategic whiteness” to the colonial ­Jesus. At the heart of our investigation is to understand how whiteness is strategically used as a marker of racial difference in Christianity to reproduce an ideology of White supremacy. We position whiteness as a “rhetorical construction” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) to uncover “the everyday, invisible, subtle, cultural, and social practices, ideas, and codes that discursively secure the power and privilege of white people, but that strategically remains unmarked, unnamed, and unmapped in contemporary society” (Shome, 1996, p. 503). We argue that, “whiteness as a strategic formation of racial privilege” (Moon & Nakayama, 2005, p. 89) can be performed, both bodily and discursively, to “sustain the global dominance of white imperial subjects and European worldviews” (Shome, 1999, p. 9)

“The Colonial Jesus”  221 Building upon scholarship on whiteness as performance (Cooks & Simpson, 2007; Warren, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2009), we posit that “strategic whiteness” as embodied practice acknowledges the materiality of the body that historically reproduces racial White privilege through repetitive discursive acts in communicative interactions/encounters in a given space, time, and context. Such discursive practices, rooted into colonialist/neocolonialist legacy of White supremacy, position “Whiteness, as a social identity, [that] deploys strategic rhetoric to reinvent, re-secure, and reposition itself needs” (Moon & Nakayama, 2005, p. 91). ­Ultimately, positioning whiteness as strategic rhetoric calls for examining how whiteness can be simultaneously deployed and obscured, functioning ­underneath consciousness even though it is an exercise in material power. As argued by Warren (2001), in studying whiteness as a strategic rhetoric we are committed to examine “the rhetorical force behind the cultural social position” (p. 95) it generates as well as “the social identity constructed, and then levied, for political purposes” (p. 95) that serves its hidden agenda. Along with Nakayama and Krizek (1995), we “take everyday discourse as a starting point in the process of marking the territory of whiteness and the power relations it generates” (p. 296). In sum, whiteness is a discursive phenomenon, one that works on a nearly invisible register. This invisibly is produced, ironically, through a continual investment in centering White values, sensibilities, and spaces. Colonial whiteness defines the colonized as barbarous, making any deviation, physical or spiritual, from the White norms proof of the colonized need for White control. But, this was not always the case. How did Christianity, and Jesus in particular, “become” White? By what processes, on whose authority, and for whose interest/purpose did the Savior of slaves from Egypt become a tool for the colonization and enslavement of people around the world? In the next section, we engage in a genealogy of the Colonial Jesus, tracing his image and his influence across history.

Genealogy of the Colonial Jesus For centuries, Christian missionaries used a plethora of European cultural biases-phenotypical, racist, and religious discourses to indoctrinate enslaved and colonized people of color across the world (Snyman, 2008; West, 2012). A major cultural bias remains the social construction of the “White Jesus.” Blum and Harvey (2012) argue that while there was no visual representation of Jesus in the first centuries of Christianity, iconography reached its peak during the Middle Ages with Catholic ­Europeans who reproduced various visual imageries of what “the ideal Jesus” would look like: “a Western European, as having light skin, often with light-colored hair and even blue eyes” (Ruether, 2012, p. 102). Consequently, “from the Middle Ages to the present, Christ (as well

222  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza as God, Mary, and the disciples) have been depicted as light-skinned ­Europeans” (Ruether, 2012, p. 102). West (2012) argues “the ease with which white-supremacist ideas fuse with Christological belief in contemporary Christianity is rooted in the history of Christian theology” (p. 114). Originated around the mid-first century as a Jewish Middle Eastern religious group in Judea, ­Christianity did not start out as European; ironically, at the time of inception, Christians were a marginalized group. However, through its expansion in Europe, and more specifically around the fourth c­ entury, western civilization co-opted Christianity. As a result, Europeans “translated the foundation of Christianity to the European body [culture] which, became the white body [culture] as the discourse of race evolved” (Stratton, 2016a, p. 615). Dyer (1997) names the following strategies to illustrate this Europeanization process: The persistence of Manichean dualism of black: white that could be mapped on to skin colour difference; the role of the Crusades in racializing the idea of Christendom (making national/geographic others into enemies of Christ); the gentilizing and whitening of the image of Christ and the Virgin in painting; the ready appeal to the God of Christianity in the prosecution of doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism (p. 17) Dyer (1997) concludes: “not only did Christianity become the religion, and religious export, of Europe, indelibly marking its culture and ­consciousness, it has also been thought and felt in distinctly white ways for most of its history” (p. 17). The historical articulation with Christianity and White supremacy via colonialism explains how White evangelicals can, in the contemporary historical moment, identify as openly White-supremacist-hetero-patriarchal-anti-semitic-islamophobic-­racistnativist and Christian. Ultimately, “Africans brought to the Americas as slaves, Africans, indigenous peoples of the Americas and Asians colonized by Europeans, have been given a Christology which not only looks ‘white’ but validates the dominating power of Western imperialism and colonialism” (Ruether, 2012, p. 111). Throughout the world, Christianity was brought by explorers and missionaries to the natives as a colonial tool of expansion to fulfill their “mission civilisatrice.” For instance, “Africa was Christianized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of European colonization by English, French, Germans, Portuguese, Belgians, Spanish and Italians” (Ruether, 2012, p. 107). In contrast to Africa where European colonizers operated for about a century, in Latin America, “colonial rule by Spain and Portugal lasted more than three hundred years—­going back to the end of the fifteenth century with Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean in

“The Colonial Jesus”  223 1492-until the nineteenth century” ­(Ruether, 2012, p. 108). As a result, “a Christology shaped by European ­Catholic missionaries and reflecting and validating colonial domination was deeply entrenched in Latin ­America Catholic Christian culture for more than 470 years” ­(Ruether, 2012, p. 109). In a similar way, in North America, “Indians” were being ­Christianized around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while Christianity supported the slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries throughout (Copeland, 2012; Ruether, 2012; West, 2012). For centuries, Christianity served as tool of European expansion to justify racial hierarchy and thereby promote White supremacy by ­holding people of color—Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, etc.—­inferior to Whites (Lacy, 2008). As part of the mission civilisatrice, “the colonial focus of Christian missionary groups was the conversion and elevation of this [the] savage” (Stratton, 2016b, p. 21). More specifically, “religious institutions along with theologians proclaimed that the mission of the white race was to “civilize and Christianize” the heathen, the savages, the less fortunate-all lesser beings in God’s creation” (Wander, M ­ artin,  & Nakayama, 1999, p. 16). The “Kill the Indian, save the man” narrative that justified the United States’ government Native American boarding school experiment is premised on the notion that “these people are not only different, but they are saved” by Whites (Stratton, 2016a, p. 616). For example, Lacy (2008) notes that pro-slavery advocates in the ­nineteenth-century United States argued that the institution of slavery was ordained by God and good for the slave’s “savage soul” (p. 281). Mignolo (2005) notes that around that time, the term “culture” was used to name and describe those alien and inferior “cultures” that would be under European “civilizations.” More specifically, people of color were associated with “nature and instinct” which symbolized “primitiveness” as opposed to Whites who identified with “culture, mind, and rationality” as symbol of “civilization” (Hall, 2001; Shome, 1996). This is why “defenders of slavery and colonialism claimed that these efforts [of mission civilisatrice] were in fact a blessing to Africans [and other people of color]-who by their biological efforts were incapable of taking the first steps to civilization” (Wander, Martin, & Nakayama, 1999, p. 16). For example, describing the case of Anglicanism in Australia, Stratton (2016b) explains how Christianity was a major feature of European culture to the extent that the two terms could be used interchangeably: Anglicanism was transferred as an integral aspect of the developing Australian culture. Anglican Christianity was understood as the foundation of the European values its expresses. It is, then, no wonder that it is linked with assimilation. Complementing the whiteness of modern Christianity, to be an Anglican Christian meant, ideally to be European, and white. (p. 18)

224  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza European colonizers embarked on their “mission civilisatrice” of reproducing the “noble savage” “through a dissemination of the values, languages, and ideologies of “civilization” and a simultaneous r­ epression of other indigenous forms of knowledge production” (Shome, 1999, p. 112). For instance, Mignolo (2005) notes that although the Indians of the New World, and particularly those of Aztec and Inca Empires governed themselves with wisdom and sophisticated cultural knowledge, ­Spanish Colonizers positioned them as barbarians because their souls lacked Christianity. Consequently, traditional cultural values and practices of the ancient Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations were already consigned to a forgotten past (Mignolo, 2005). In a similar way, Ruether (2012) asserts that colonization “meant treating Africans as personally and culturally “primitive,” their culture as backward if not demonic, thus seeking to strip Africans of their African cultural identity and to impose a Christianity and European language and culture seen as normatively human” (pp. 107–108). Christian European expansion “was given concrete expression in brutal socioeconomic practices, namely Christian leadership in the Atlantic trade slave that brought millions of kidnapped Africans to the Americas and in centuries of European civilization of black and brown peoples” (West, 2012, p. 114). From this perspective, Christianity and capitalism were nodes in the colonial matrix of power that enabled the massive exploitation of labor, land, and culture around the world ­(Mignolo, 2005). For instance, Lacy (2008) notes that upon the emergence of capitalism, “preachers and leading politicians invoked “God’s will” to ­justify the extreme dominance, brutality, cruelty, and destruction of Native American and Mexican cultures in North America” (p. 281). Likewise, ­Christian scriptures have been used “to ­explain the ­ enesis is origins of negative racial difference” (Lacy, 2008, p. 280). G often cited as “proof that Blacks descended from Cain, ­Canaan, Ham, and other biblical characters whom God ‘marked’ owing to transgression and sin” (Lacy, 2008, p. 281). Snyman (2008) argues that “in the Judeo-Christian imaginary, the Negro was projected as that figure ­degenerated by sin and thus supernaturally determined (via Noah’s curse on Ham) to be the nearest to the ape” (p. 405). More precisely, “Africans were declared to be the descendants of Ham, cursed in The Bible to be in perpetuity ‘a servant of servants unto his brethren’” (Hall, 2001, p. 332). For missionaries, such discourses justified enslavement as a means of saving “the ‘wild human being’ from whom no blessing follows because God had withdrawn blessings from him or her” (Snyman, 2008, p. 406). Additionally, missionaries used a number of religious practices to impose European cultural views. West (2012) argues that for missionaries, “the kind of moral worthiness Jesus recognizes was posited as necessitating black people’s acceptance of their racially inscribed nothingness

“The Colonial Jesus”  225 that only Jesus’ blood could transform” (p. 124). Thus, to be redeemed by the blood of Christ, as part of the baptism ritual in Africa, candidates must confess their nothingness before God, cut all ties with their families, reject all their cultural practices, and most importantly assimilate to White cultural and ideological norms (as summarized by West, 2012). However, such strategy was once again a masquerade because in the case of Black slaves’ baptism in the United States, “not even the sacrament of baptism could redeem black from the damnation and predation of slavery; rather, baptism served to tame, to temper, to discipline the slave for ease of subjugation and profitability of service or sale” (Copeland, 2012, p. 182). Even more, “it was conceded that while the blood of Jesus could not change the blackness of the slave’s body, it would transform the status of the slave’s soul … This alone, it was thought, would empower the slave’s market value” (as cited by West, p. 119). As a result, a “good” and “noble savage” was the “Christian black slave” devoted to the White master and emulating whiteness (Hall, 2001). Moreover, around the “Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century white evangelists frequently utilized racially encoded imagery to represent truths and falsehoods about their mission to enslaved and colonized blacks” (West, 2012, p. 118). For instance, “the ideological manipulation of ­representation of Jesus Christ [as white] in American Christian preaching, teaching, and art served and advanced racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability” (as cited by ­Copeland, 2012, p. 187). Addressing the impact of racial hierarchy that followed Christian colonization in the United States, Ruether (2012) mentions that “colonial law first defined the identity of the European settlers as “English” or “Christian” but Africans and “Indians” could become Christians” (p. 103). By the late seventeenth century, colonial powers close the potential loophole when “white” replaces “Christian” and “English” to define the European settlers and differentiate them from “others” (p. 103) entrenching Whiteness as a privileged subjectivity through legal discourse. In sum, the production and replication of the “Colonial Jesus” articulated the aesthetics of European culture with religious justifications for slavery and colonization. The ethno-European features of the ­Colonial Jesus also naturalized White-supremacist power relationships by teaching colonized people to worship and obey a White savior. Since “the bright, white light of Christ’s truth was juxtaposed with the black darkness of the evil and barbarism” (West, 2012, p. 118). Following this logic, if Jesus “were depicted as a brown-skinned, dark-skinned, ­semitic-looking person, undoubtedly closer to what Jesus actually looked like, this would be noticed by most Western Christians, and probably seen as demeaning” (Ruether, 2012, p. 102). Thus, “Christ underwent a process of bleaching a Jewish man into an Aryan Christ with blonde hair and blue eyes” (Snyman, 2008, p. 405).

226  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza A major consequence of this ideology is that “the ideal humanity on which the West based itself was less established by God as a natural order than on the perception of Christian White men” (Snyman, 2008, p. 404), who activated discourses of religion and science to justify ­inequality as divinely ordained, culturally progressive, and biologically inevitable. In a parallel vein, Dyer (2001) reminds us how “racial imagery [in Christianity] is central to the organization of the modern world” (p. 9). For instance, Blum and Harvey (2012) note that in the United States, visual imageries of Jesus were not present until the early nineteenth century when the United States became a nation. They specify that even if there were any, these representations of Jesus were not of a White man with blue eyes and brown hair. Instead, Jesus “was made white in this form at exactly the moment Americans were buying and selling more slaves and justifying the expropriation of Native American lands in the Southwest” (Gilbreath, 2012). Thus, making Jesus White sanctified the colonial lust for land, power, and slave labor. In the following section, we explore current manifestations of the relationship between Christianity and whiteness in the United States through a case study of the “Unite the Right Rally” (UTRR) in Charlottesville events of August 2017.

“Unite the Right Rally:” A Case Study of Christianity and Whiteness After tracing Christianity’s long and circuitous route as a tool of colonization and slavery, our genealogical account explains how Christianity became a religion for and about White people. The colonial legacy of the White Jesus connects to modern whiteness in the United States through discourse that positions Christianity as synecdoche for the cultural and moral “superiority” of the European people. Christianity perpetuated the moral inferiority of colonized people in relation to White people by describing non-Whites as inherently savage, uncivilized, and immoral. In this sense, White Christianity defined the colonial subject through negation. The colonizer became Christ-like, the colonized became ­debased; submission to God became conflated with submission to colonial rule. We believe that trope of the Colonial Jesus finds its contemporary in the White nationalist movement. The ideology of White nationalism completes the colonial narrative by naturalizing White people as “natives” to the American continent. The inversion of the narrative from White colonist to White native reconfigures the scope of colonial Christianity from a discourse of territorial expansion to an attempt to shore up the nationalist imaginary. In this section, we explore current manifestations of the relationship between Christianity and whiteness by applying the insights gained from our genealogy of colonial Christianity to demonstrate how the “Unite the Right Rally” (UTRR) on August 11–12, 2017, drew on a pastiche of Christian themes in an attempt to

“The Colonial Jesus”  227 maintain a White nationalist movement. We posit that, to understand how the UTRR uses whiteness “as an ideological, materially manifested, and embodied hegemonic way of life” (Moon, 2016, p. 285) to promote White nationalism in the United States, it is crucial to analyze these events “through the interlocking axes of power, spatial location, and history” (Shome, 1999, p. 108). Historical account of Christianity and Whiteness in the Charlottesville conflict can be traced back to the Lost Cause of Confederacy as a movement advocated by White Southerners to restore a White ­A nglo-Saxon supremacy following the aftermath of the civil war (Lacy, 2008). Guided by the belief of their superiority as “Christians,” these White supremacist Southerners historically used Christianity to justify slavery and their romanticism for the confederacy to justify ­a nti-Black ­violence as way to prevent any threat to the destruction of Southern White culture, and thereby protect the rise of White supremacy (Lacy,  2008). The ­Charlottesville conflict is a recent episode of how the perpetration of such White supremacist ideology is spreading throughout the United States following the controversial debate about the removal of confederacy monuments (e.g., flag, statue, etc.). The Charlottesville conflict generated from the State of Virginia’s decision of removing the confederate statue of Robert E. Lee. The decision of many states, including Virginia, about removing confederate monuments was influenced by South Carolina’s following the Charleston Church Massacre of June 2015. On June 17, 2015, Dylan Roof, a White supremacist, attended the rebuilt Methodist Episcopal Church during a bible study. After an hour of reading and interacting with the all-Black congregation, Roof pulled out a gun and murdered nine people (Sanchez & Foster, 2015). As the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South founded in 1816, The Methodist Episcopal Church has always played a significant role of incubator for resistance to White supremacy from slavery to the civil rights movement (Copeland, 2012) as well as the Black Lives Matter movement today. It is crucial to historically contextualize the Charleston Church shooting as a racially motivated violence that occurred on the anniversary of “the rising” of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In fact, in June of 1822, city officials in Charleston thwarted an alleged slave rebellion, planned by Denmark Vesey, a cofounder of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The so-called rising in Charleston led to the execution of thirty-five Black people, including Vesey, and the burning of the original church. The lynchings and burning of the church served as an “object lesson” for the Black community, both an expression of White power and the willingness to commit violence in its name. Similarly, when asked on the motivation behind his barbarous actions, Dylan Roof justified his violence as retribution for Black on White crime, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go” (para, 9).

228  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza In the aftermath of the shooting, pictures surfaced of Roof holding a handgun while standing next to a Confederate flag. The shooting’s connection with the antebellum history of Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston put national attention on what was an already heated ­regional debate about the appropriateness of Confederate imagery in government and public spaces. The shooting contributed to the changing of the South Carolina State Law when the state Senate breached the twothirds vote threshold for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House. The Confederate flag, first installed in 1962, had survived multiple attempts to remove it. After the Charleston shooting, the South Carolina State Assembly voted 103 to 10 in favor of removing the flag. Following the lead of South Carolina, other states, including Virginia, began removing Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park. While it may initially appear as if the battle over the removal of Lee’s statue was not about religion, the historical account developed above highlights several points on how the legacies of Christian ­colonization directly inform the Charlottesville conflict. We have particularly identified three aspects: first, our research shows how the UTRR expresses itself as hostile to both Islam and Judaism by asserting the two religions as threat to the lives and culture of Christians in the United States; second, we show that the organizers of the alt-right movement maintain a colonial narrative that the indigenous peoples, in this case Latinos and Mexicans, are bestial, hypersexual, and violent; and, third, we look at how the UTRR movement deploys the rhetoric and iconography of the antebellum South to make a White nationalist argument. The first facet of Christianity deployed by the UTRR is evident in the anti-Semitic and Orientalist discourse expressed. Stratton (2016a) ­argues that modern Christianity positions “Jews, Muslims and savages as the Others of Christianity” (p. 616) because “Jews, Muslims and ­savages are not only non-white, [but also] they represent everything ­antithetical to the Christian order on which civilization is founded” (p.  616). Similarly, demonstrators used the Nazi slogans “14 words” and “blood and soil”, both direct references to the Third Reich. The 14 words are “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” (Perry & Blazak, 2009, p. 41). These words reference the “white genocide,” a term for the threat posed to White people from immigration, multi-­culturalism, and miscegenation (Perry, 2004). During the rally, the demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and “White Lives Matter” (Heim, 2017). Such discourse demonstrates how “the demonisation of Islam, but by implication any other religion [Judaism in this case] appears to threaten the hegemony of Christianity” (Stratton, 2016b, p. 28) as a propaganda tool of White supremacy in the United States. This discourse locates immigrants and non-Christians as

“The Colonial Jesus”  229 an existential threat to White people while also actively participating in the glorification and preservation of the Third Reich. Jason Kessler was the primary organizer of the UTRR. Kessler filed the permit, organized the speakers, and promoted the rally. He disavows the title “white supremacist” and is even critical of Nazism, declaring that “White people deserve to have a movement that is not associated with Nazi bullshit but the movement is full of young men without ­judgment and older men who refuse to set a good example” (Kessler, 2017a). Kessler maintains a close relationship to openly White supremacist hate groups such as Stormfront, the Klu Klux Klan, and the Proud Boys. ­Kessler’s critique of these groups is more about “image” than ideology. For example, in a twitter exchange about the image of the alt-right, ­Kessler re-tweeted Matthaios, “No Swastikas or Nazi salutes/imagery so we are not perceived as literal Nazis … not much to ask is it?” To which Kessler replied, “You tell them that OVER AND OVER but how can you stop them when the entire leadership of the altright does it in private? You can’t stop idiocy” (Kessler, 2017b). These quotations help us to contextualize the politics of the White nationalist movement. Kessler and the members of the alt-right describe themselves as White advocates, but Kessler’s statements expose the ideology of the movement’s leadership. Matthew Heimbach was an invited speaker and event headliner, whose position in the movement comes from being founder of the ­Nationalist Front, a Neo-Nazi coalition. His interpretation of the UTRR was one in which White people stood up in solidary for each other. He stated, “We achieved all of our objectives, we showed that our movement is not just online, but growing physically. We asserted ourselves as the voice of white America” (Thomson, 2017, para. 7). These types of quotations show that the UTRR was more than just a rally about free speech; it was also a demonstration of White power. Though hailed as a huge success by Kessler and the other organizers, the rally turned violent, ending in the injury of nearly 40 people and the death of Heather Heyers. In addition to the anti-Semitism of the UTRR, the Charlottesville rally also celebrated racist nativism, a discourse that describes people of color as non-native of the United States (Pérez Huber, 2009). As pointed by Lacy (2008), to perpetrate otherness or people of color, White supremacists “vilify and name their racial enemy in extreme ways, by using crude references, racial slurs, epithets, ridicule, jokes, and obscenities to generate hate and alert complacent publics that a racial devil violated their sacred moral, civil and social values” (p. 293). In a similar way, White nationalists at the UTRR used racist nativist discourse, be it anti-­Semitic, anti-Black, anti-Islam, or anti-immigrant deeply rooted in the colonial project of Manifest Destiny, which held that God granted White Christians dominion over the land and peoples of the Americas

230  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza (Gonzales, 2000; Lacy, 2008). For instance, this discourse remains present in the anti-Latino narrative perpetuated by the far right (DeChaine, 2009; Flores, 2003; Holling, 2011; Ono & Sloop, 2002). America’s early colonial experiments relied heavily on ethnic chauvinism to warrant violence against non-White populations ­(Gonzales, 2000). The ideology of Manifest Destiny contained within it both material and racial justifications for the colonization of the Americas (Gonzales, 2000). Those in attendance at the UTRR rally represent an extreme position regarding immigrants and people of color. The notion of “white genocide” is a key term for understanding the ideology of the Charlottesville protest. According to White nationalist movement, Latino immigrants are depicted using the religiously inspired notions of hypersexuality and moral degradation and are thought to be “outbreeding” White people in the United State. As ­Kessler says, “And btw, black people are not and never have been a threat to the existence of whites on this continent. The e­ xistential  threat is being overwhelmed by hispanic illegal immigration” (2017c). The immigration discourse of the UTRR alienates immigrants ­(DeChaine, 2009) in an attempt to shore up the borders of the civic imaginary by articulating White America as under threat from a rising tide of immigrants. These tropes are the continuation of the colonial legacy, in which indigenous people in northern, central, and southern America were described by early Christian Missionaries as bestial and hypersexual (Mignolo, 2005). Then, as now, people of color from this continent are talked about as “other,” foreign,” and “alien” despite their history in the Americas (DeChaine, 2009; Flores, 2003; Holling, 2011; Ono & Sloop, 2002). Finally, our analysis reveals that the material and visual rhetoric of the UTRR included shields emblazoned with the logo of the KKK, ­Confederate flags, swastikas, and “Make America Great Again” hats. ­Media attention also highlighted the use of tiki torches, described as both ridiculous and reminiscent of slave patrols and lynch mobs. As noted by Lacy (2008), White supremacists rely on hyper-rhetorical activities such as “uniforms, hoods, masks, loyalty oaths, emblems−crosses and swastikas−and flags” (p. 282) to express their racist ideology. ­Similarly, the night of August 11, over 200 Unite the Right protesters used these tiki torches for a moonlight march to Lee’s statue. There they met their enemy. A group of about 30 U-Va. Students— — students of color and white students— — had locked arms around the base of the statue to face down the hundreds of torchbearers. The marchers circled the statue. Some made monkey noises at the black counter protesters. Then they began chanting (Heim, 2017, para. 12)

“The Colonial Jesus”  231 Violence erupted as White nationalists began pushing at the students, throwing torches, and attacking with pepper spray. Meanwhile, the ­surrounded counterprotesters sang, prayed, and were eventually protected by Antifa counterprotesters. The violence continued into the next day, as White nationalist militias showed up armed with riot shields, clubs, body armor, handguns, and AR-15s. Southern Crosses waved proudly next to the banners of the Klu Klux Klan, at one point an exchange between protestors even raised the specter of the mass murder that was the flashpoint for the conflict. “‘Go the f--- back to Africa,’ one yelled back. ‘F--- you, n-----!’ many also screamed. ‘Dylan Roof was a hero!’” (Heim, 2017, para. 41). The references to the slave trade and the mass shooting, at an event that is also is anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, and anti-Semitic, expose how contemporary White supremacy articulates to Christianity. Moreover, the Confederacy’s use of the Bible as a justification for slavery continues today in the discourse of the UTRR. Anti-Black Christianity came to the Americas via the Middle Passage and was the basis of the pro-slavery argument of the Confederacy. As Jeffeson Davis, president of the Confederacy stated: My own convictions as to negro slavery are strong. It has its evils and abuses…We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him - our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude…You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be. (Davis, 1996, p. 319) Lacy (2008) states that throughout history “white absolutists (e.g., white supremacists, Ku Klux Klamsmen, Nazis, fascists, and hate groups) appropriated Christian scriptures” to reclaim a “mythic superior Aryan identity” (p. 281). Similarly, history repeats itself today as White nationalists rely on Christianity to position themselves as the “superior race” as well as “God’s chosen people,” and thereby justify the killing and oppression of people of color. All of this demonstrates how Charleston murders and the aftermath, including Charlottesville, extend the logics of colonial Christianity into the modern era. The organizers and members of the UTRR call on a system of racially coded supremacy indelibly linked to White American Christianity. In the next section, we propose a postcolonial approach to Christianity in an attempt to disarticulate the religion from White supremacy.

Decolonizing White Christianity Shome and Hedge (2002) position postcolonial studies as a highly political, interventionist, and transformative scholarly approach that “theorizes

232  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza not only colonial conditions but why those conditions are what they are, and how they can be undone and redone” (p. 250). Our genealogy of the Colonial Jesus intervenes against the conflation of whiteness with Christianity by using the “look” of Christ to engage in a critique-of-whiteness (Pinn, 2012, p. 169). In this section, we demonstrate how, in the current context of globalization, a postcolonial approach to Christianity is useful to deconstruct the whiteness of Jesus as well Christianity by redefining Christ, and by extension Christianity, beyond whiteness. More concretely, postcolonial efforts to deconstruct the whiteness of Christianity are rooted in liberation Christologies, which thrive for “socially transformative understandings of Christ as alternatives to Christologies that implicitly or explicitly validate an identification of Christ with white European domination and/or define redemption in a social way that supports passivity in the face of oppression and injustice” (Ruether, 2012, p. 106). From theology of enculturation in Africa to theology of liberation in Latin America and Black theology in the United States, people of color have “been engaged particularly in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, in decolonizing this “white” Christ, recovering Christ as liberator against oppression, by imaging him (and sometimes even her) in terms of their own visions of liberation and authentic humanness” (Ruether, 2012, p. 111). As anti-colonial theological approaches, what all these initiatives share in common is “to seek culturally indigenous and liberating views of Christ against those that validate colonial domination” (Ruether, 2012, p. 106). As stated by Pinn (2012), positioning/redefining Christ as “a person of color” “involves not so much a biological statement as much as it is an epistemological and ethical statement,” (p. 173) even more this means “that Jesus Christ is known visually through the placement of black bodies [bodies of color] in time and space, and is present wherever effort is made to fight racism and challenge white supremacy’s basic logic” (p. 173). In fact, “a repudiation of Jesus as “white” is done in order to define a Black, “Indian,” African and Asian Christ as the authentic nature of Christ and as truly redemptive for nonwhites” (Ruether, 2012, p. 105). Without the intention of promoting liberation Christologies as the ultimate way to fight against racism in the United States, we think that they provide venues to deconstruct White ­Christianity as an “exponent of colonialism and imperialism” (Snyman, 2008, p. 398). Positioned as anti-racist theologies, liberation theologies are devoted to fighting racial injustice and other types of oppression committed against people of color that are justified in the name of God and White supremacy. For instance, African theologies of enculturation emerged around the mid-twentieth century in response to colonial power to advocate for racial diversity because Christ himself represents the incarnation of all races as the Bible states that all have become one in Christ

“The Colonial Jesus”  233 ­ merica, (Dickson, 1984; Idowu,1973; Mbiti, 1969). Similarly, in Latin A liberation theologies emerged in the late 1950 to 1960s to denounce “the “white” Christ brought by the European missionaries or given to the slaves in America that sanctions “white” power and domination” ­(Ruether, 2012, p. 110). Prominent theologian figures such as Gustavo Gutierrez (1973), Juan Luis Segundo (1976), and Jon Sobrino (2001) coined the motto “the preferential option for the poor” to emphasize liberation theology’s commitment of freeing the oppressed from the claws of systemic social injustice. Thus, it is not surprising that this theology is often referred to as “theology of the oppressed.” Along the same lines, Black theologies emerged in the 1960s during the era of civil rights movement, and the Black Power movement in particular “that embraced the term ‘Black’ as a liberating symbol against the historical use of whiteness as racial superiority” (Ruether, 2012, p. 106). Proponents such as Albert Cleage (1968), James Cone (1986), and Deotis Roberts (1974) have advocated for a Black theology that “is the unapologetic embrace not only of Jesus Christ as sympathetic to the plight of God’s ‘dark’ children, but of Jesus Christ as embodying blackness” (Pinn, 2012, p. 172). In our attempt, as critical scholars, to seek ways of challenging views of Christianity that promote White supremacy—like the UTRR case— we think that all these initiatives of decolonizing White Christianity across the globe provide a fertile platform to critically rearticulate Christ as a person of color standing on the side of people of color oppressed by White supremacy through slavery and colonization. This is to say that, from a postcolonial standpoint, liberation theologies position Christ as an activist who fights with and for people of color against White dominance (Pinn, 2012; Ruether, 2012). Following this logic, we condemn UTRR’s kind of Christian theology, which perpetuates White supremacy. Aligning ourselves with Yancy (2012), we believe that liberation theologies are incompatible with whiteness “as a historical process that continues to express its hegemony and privilege through various cultural, political, interpersonal, and institutional practices, and that forces bodies of color to the margins and politically and ontologically positions them as sub-persons” (p. 5). Moreover, whereas we are mindful of how religion can inform culture, the UTRR case study shows how White nationalists “inverted, twisted, and perverted Christian theology to convert their material poverty into a spiritual quest to reclaim their white heterosexual masculine Aryan identity and, with it the material control of the state” (Lacy, 2008, p. 281). Thus, we decry a conception of American culture as “White America and Christianity” (Toch, Deutsch, & Wilkens, 1960, p. 179) in a culturally diverse country such the United States. Indeed, we think that such conception positions Christianity as a privileged religion while simultaneously demonizing other religions such as Islam or Judaism, which in turn automatically reproduces Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

234  Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza Likewise, we condemn the Christianization process of American culture, which infringes upon religious freedom. As mentioned by Stratton (2016b), such religious intolerance is contrary to the argument that the United States “could be composed of diverse communities sharing and enriching each other” (p. 29).

Conclusion In this paper, we pursue a line of argument that explains how ­Christianity became articulated with whiteness. Like Yancy (2012), we argue, “[White] Christianity operates simultaneously as a physical and virtual monochromatic white space,” (Yancy, 2015, p. 200) which oppresses people of color. Our genealogy shows that the Colonial Jesus was a rhetorical technology of control used to naturalize the oppression of bodies of color. Connecting this genealogy to current manifestations of ­Christianity and whiteness in the United States, our analysis of the “Unite the Right Rally” (UTRR) of August 2017 reveals that legacies of Christian colonization are still operating to promote a White supremacist agenda. More specifically, we identified three themes: (a) the demonization of other religions mainly Islam and Judaism through a­ nti-Semitic as well as ­Islamophobic discourses; (b) the othering process of immigrants as bestial, hypersexual, and violent; and (c) the use of rhetoric and iconography of the antebellum South to promote White nationalism. Following the above logic, we posit that Christianity as a rhetorical space of whiteness still “raises important questions about white routine mobility and how white racialized space facilitates white movement within that space, white affirmation within that space, and a sense of white belonging and being at home within that space” (Yancy, 2015, p. 200). Thus, in this project, we engage in the daunting task of denaturalizing the articulation between whiteness and Christianity by showing how the White Jesus, and by extension the White Christian are “a product of the social, political, and cultural possibilities generated through history” (Warren, 2003, p. 33). By doing so, we strive to prevent the erasure of colonial violence through White nationalist discourse.

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Contributors

Bernadette Marie Calafell (PhD, University of North Carolina) is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the ­University of Denver. She is the author of Latina/o Communication Studies: ­Theorizing Performance (Peter Lang, 2007) and Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture (Peter Lang, 2015). She is also the co-editor (with Michelle Holling) of Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz? (Lexington, 2011). In 2009, she received the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance from the National Communication ­Association (NCA). The following year she was named the Scholar of the Year Award from the Latina/o Communication Studies Division and La Raza Caucus of NCA. Most recently, in 2017, she was the recipient of the Lambda Award from the Caucus on LGBTQ Concerns of NCA. Alison Y. Cheung is a second year doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on rhetoric and cultural studies, specifically on transnational Asian American subcultural media and industry. She is the co-author of “The ­Evolution of Controversy: A Pentadic Analysis of Gay Rights Arguments” published in the Pennsylvania Communication Annual, which received the Article of the Year Award from the National States ­Advisory Council. Rachel E. Dubrofsky  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research is rooted in a critical/cultural studies tradition, with a focus on popular culture and an emphasis on the role of surveillance and issues of race and gender. Some of her work has appeared in the journals Critical ­Studies in Media Communication¸ Communication Theory, ­Communication, Culture and Critique, Feminist Media Studies, and Television and New Media. She is the author of The ­Surveillance of Women on R ­ eality ­Television: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette (2011) and the co-editor of the collection Feminist Surveillance.

240 Contributors Tasha R. Dunn is an Assistant Professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Her research is centered on critical/cultural studies, qualitative inquiry, popular culture, performance studies, whiteness, class, and gender. Tasha’s recent work has been published in ­Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, ­Journal of ­Contemporary Ethnography, and The Popular Culture Studies Journal. She also has a ­ ediated ­Representations and forthcoming book, Talking White Trash: M Lived Experiences of White Working-­Class People. Shinsuke Eguchi  (PhD, Howard University, 2011) is an Associate Professor of intercultural communication in the Department of ­Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico. His research interests focus on critical intercultural communication, queer of color critique, gender and intersectionality, whiteness, Asian/Pacific/American studies, and performance studies. His work has appeared for publication in various outlets such as Communication Theory, Communication, Culture, & Critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Communication Inquiry, and Popular Communication. Lisa A. Flores is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado. Her research and teaching interests lie in rhetoric, critical race studies, and gender/queer studies. Her most recent work examines historic narratives of immigrants and immigration, mapping an argument of race making, particularly at the intersections of nation, citizenship, and labor. She is the recipient of the Latino/a Scholar of the year award from National Communication ­Association’s (NCA) Latina/Latino Communication Studies Division, the Young Scholar Activist Award from the same division, the New I­ nvestigator Award from NCA’s Rhetoric and Communication Theory Division, and the Wallace Award from NCA. She has published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Currently, Lisa is the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Speech and the forum editor for Women’s Studies in Communication. Logan Rae Gomez is a PhD student in rhetoric and culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research addresses the rhetorical dimensions of embodiment, identity, and resistance in the context of gendered violence and discourses of whiteness. Logan’s work has appeared in First Amendment Studies. She participates in the Academic Community & Diversity Committee for the College of Media, Communication and Information at CU Boulder. She is also the Vice Chair (2017–2018) for the Student Section of the National Communication Association.

Contributors  241 Rachel Alicia Griffin (PhD) is an Associate Professor of race and communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. As a critical intercultural scholar, her research interests span Black feminist thought, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, sexual violence, popular culture, sport, and education. Currently serving as the Book and Media Review Editor for Women’s Studies in Communication, Dr. Griffin has also published in several journals including Women’s Studies in Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, The Howard Journal of Communications, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Additionally, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming collection Adventures in Shondaland: Identity Politics and the Power of Representation (Rutgers University Press). Marouf Hasian, Jr. is a full Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. His areas of interest include critical cultural studies, critical legal studies, critical memory studies, postcolonial criticism, and critical security studies. Kathryn Hobson (BA, Luther College; MA, PhD, University of ­Denver) is an Assistant Professor of communication studies at James Madison University. She primarily teaches courses in cultural communication and is the affiliate faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on critical intercultural communication, intersectional identities, and arts-based qualitative methods. She has published in Qualitative Inquiry, Liminalities, Kaleidoscope, and has authored and co-authored several book chapters about intersectionality, queerfemme identity, and social change. Ronald L. Jackson II (PhD) is the President of the National Communication Association and Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Ronald L. Jackson II is one of the leading communication and identity scholars in the nation. He is the author of fourteen books including Scripting the Black Masculine Body in ­Popular Media, Interpreting Tyler Perry (with Jamel Bell; Routledge), and the 2014 Comic-Con Eisner Award finalist Black Comics: ­Politics of Race and Representation (with Sheena Howard; Bloomsbury). He has two forthcoming books: an anthology entitled Gladiators in Suits: Race, gender, and politics of representation in Scandal (with Kimberly Moffit and Simone Puff) and Contemporary Public Speaking, a textbook with Oxford University Press. He has held faculty appointments at Pennsylvania State University and University of Illinois. Charles LuLevitt is a doctoral student at the University of Denver. His research interest intersects critical cultural theories with international relations and performance autoethnography.

242 Contributors Sophia Margulies is an undergraduate student at James Madison University, majoring in communication studies with an emphasis in cultural communication. Her research interests include poetic inquiry, intersectional identity, and social justice. S. Marek Muller is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication Studies at Ball State University. She received her PhD from the University of Utah in 2018. Her specializations include rhetorical theory and criticism, environmental communication, critical cultural communication studies, and critical animal studies. Kent A. Ono is a Professor in the Department of Communication. His research focuses on rhetoric; media and film studies; and race, ethnic, and cultural studies. He was a faculty member at the University of ­Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, D ­ avis, before coming to Utah. He has authored/co-authored three books: ­Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a ­Colonial Past (Peter Lang, 2009); Asian Americans and the Media with Vincent Pham (Polity, 2009); and Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 with John Sloop (Temple University Press, 2002). He is the past ­editor of Communication and ­Critical/ Cultural Studies and past co-­editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication (with Ron Jackson). He co-edited a book series titled, Critical Cultural Communication, at New York University Press (with Sarah Banet-Weiser). Gloria Nziba Pindi  (PhD, Southern Illinois University Carbondale) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at ­California State University San Marcos. Her research lies in the area of critical intercultural communication, Black feminisms, and performance of the self in transnational context. Her scholarship focuses on African immigrants’ process of identity negotiation in diasporic context with a critical approach to diversity and social justice. Dr. Antonio Tomas De La Garza is an Assistant Professor of communication at California State University San Marcos. He researches the ways that communication reifies and/or resists White supremacist power relations. His current work focuses on the U.S./Mexico borderlands as an anchor for discursively produced violence. His interest in theory derives from a desire to explore the ways that scholarship can become relevant to political struggle. His work include De La Garza, A. T., DeChaine D. R., and Ono, K. (2015) “A Border Lands Topography: The State and Future of Rhetorical Border Studies” in Rhetoric Across Borders, and Anne Demo Ed., De La Garza, A.T. and ­ daptation Ono, K. (2015) “Retheorizing Adaptation: Differential A and Critical Intercultural Communication” in Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.

Contributors  243

Editor Bios Dawn Marie D. McIntosh  (PhD, University of Denver) is an independent Scholar. As a critical intercultural communication scholar, her research focuses on the embodied politics of identities, whiteness, intersectionality, and race through critical performance ethnography, performance studies, and critical rhetoric. Her work can be found in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, and Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. Dreama G. Moon  (PhD, Arizona State University) is a Professor at ­California State University, San Marcos. Within a critical human rights framework, her research focused on the varied communicative processes by which relations of domination are constructed, negotiated, reproduced, and resisted with special attention to race and White supremacy. She is the co-editor of Race(ing) Intercultural Communication: Racial logics in a Colorblind Era and the co-editor and contributing author to Women Prisoners: A Forgotten Population. Thomas K. Nakayama (PhD, University of Iowa) is a Professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. He is a fellow of the International Association of Intercultural Research, a former Libra Professor at the University of Maine, and a former Fulbrighter at the Université de Mons in Belgium. He pioneered much of the early work on whiteness in communication studies beginning with “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric” (1995). He is the co-author of Intercultural Communication in Contexts, Experiencing Intercultural Communication, Human Communication in Society and Communication in Society. He is the co-editor of Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity and The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication. He is the founding editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.

Index

able bodied 137–139, 145, 148 affect theory 202, 217, 199, 202–210 affective 6, 47, 50, 54, 211; white affect 48, 58, 59, 60, 107; nonwhite affects 58, 59 Alba, J. 111 Anglo-American 150, 176, 185, 190 The Apprentice 85, 86, 157, 175 Arab 28, 176, 182, 185, 186, 189, 191; Saudi Arabia 188 Arab American 176 Asian American 29, 6, 15, 16–20, 23–25, 29–42, 55–61 Asianness 6, 17, 18, 19, 24–25, 37 Barbie 100 biopower 134, 139–140, 141, 143, 144, 148; biopolitical 141 Bissonnette, A. 188 Blacks 37, 223, 224, 225 Black Lives Matter viii, 227 black feminist thought 4, 5, 7, 74 black feminist spectatorship 70, 74, 87 Black women 69, 70, 72, 74, 78, 87–89, 96, 135, 136 borderland 54, 56, 57, 118 Boy Scout Jamboree 7, 70, 75 Breivik, A. B. 8, 179–184, 192 Brzezinski, M. 155 Buck, C. 133–147 Buck, E. 142 Buck V. Bell 134, 141, 142–143, 145, 146, 147 Charlottesville, VA vii, 8, 15, 133, 142, 226–231 Chicana 6, 47, 50, 54, 96 Chicanx 50 Chinese 20, 56, 58, 59, 60, 200 Chinese Exclusion Act 200 Christian A. 29, 34, 35, 36–41, 177

Christianity 1, 8, 179, 190, 218, 234 Civil Rights Act 1, 16 Clinton, H. 69, 73, 79, 80, 83, 85, 98, 157–160, 161, 165, 168–173 crip theory 137, 139 critical performative method 20, 47 color blind 1, 5, 16, 18, 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 184, 187, 188, 190 Colonial Jesus 218–234 controlling images 96, 106 Conway, K. 111, 189 Curiel, G. 81, 82 DACAmented 8, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204–213 DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals deportation vii, x, 8, 198–213 deportability 8, 198, 199–202, 204, 208–213; affective force 202–205; discursive force 212; logic 201, 202; racial project 202 Dreamers vii, 3, 8, 199, 207–210 disability 7, 8, 59, 133, 134, 137, 138, 139, 141, 146, 148 Disability Studies 137, 138, 139 disidentification 6, 47 essentialism 72, 136 Eugenics Movement 134, 135, 137, 143 exegesis 69, 70, 87 feebleminded 133–145; feeblemindedness 133, 134, 141; feebleminded and heredity 141–144; feebleminded and sexuality 144–145 Galton, F. 135 genealogy 221, 226, 232, 234 The Girls Next Door 100 Guevara, C. 51

246 Index hegemonic masculinity 73 Here Comes Honey Boo Boo 105, 120, 171 Hispanic 205, 230; white Hispanic/ Hispanic whites 2, 36; nonHispanic 36 The House Bunny 101 hyper-politeness 108 hysterization 145 intellectualism 70, 74, 87 intersectionality ix, 4, 5, 49, 94, 95, 133, 136, 137, 139; intersectional i, ix, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 49, 62, 70, 88, 94, 95, 98, 108, 110, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 179 intersectional embodied performance 94 I-Other dialectic vii, viii Islamic fundamentalism 177, 190 Japanese Americans 55–58 Jeong, K. 6, 15–17, 19–28 Jim Crow 2, 146 Kennedy, J. 51, 77 Kennedy, R. 51, 65 Kennedy Onassis, J. 108 Latin/a/o/x 2, 3, 34, 36, 50, 51, 52, 53, 106, 134, 141, 205, 219, 222, 223, 228, 230, 232, 233 Le, P. 6, 29–32, 34–43 Levitt, W. 74–85, 87–90, 92 Levittown 75–76, 78, 80, 90–92 Levitt and Sons 75, 76, 77, 78 liberation theology 233 Madonna 109 Mama June 111 Mendel, G. 135, 142 mental illness 7, 134, 142, 150 Mestizx 50 McCarthy, J. 111 Miss America 85 Miss Universe 85 mobile home communities 118, 121–122, 124–125, 128 Mobile Home University 126, 127 Morales, D. 51, 52, 62, 63, 65 Moore, G. 71 Moy, A. 59, 60 Muslim 58, 176, 178–179, 181–182, 187–193, 197, 228 Muslim American 56, 58 My Name is Earl 105, 114, 120

nativism 156–157, 201–202, 229 neoliberalist vii, x Obama, B. vii, 3, 79–80, 83, 172–173, 177, 187, 198, 199 pawnability 8, 199, 200, 203–204, 208, 211–213 performance theory 7, 94, 95 performativity 46 performative writing 31 personal narrative 48–49 people of color i, x, 3, 6, 15, 16, 24, 31, 32, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 61, 62, 73, 76, 77, 78, 82, 94, 120, 123, 124, 134, 138, 139, 143, 146, 148, 156, 158, 159, 178, 187, 190, 191, 194, 219, 221, 223, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234 postcolonial i, 6, 182, 219, 231–233 post-race 106, 109 post-racial 16, 17, 25, 46, 109, 176, 179 post-positivist 48 Priddy, A. 133, 142, 146 Princess Diana 97, 104, 108 Princess Kate Middleton 104, 111 queer 6, 29, 30–42, 47, 54, 74, 134, 141, 148, 159; queerness 6, 29–42, 220; queer-Femme 134; queer scholars 88 queer liberalism 6 race; invisibility of race 30, 31, 46, 48; performing race 19, 47, 94, 95; postrace/post-racial 16, 17, 18, 25, 46, 106, 109, 162, 176; race relations 3, 16; raced 8, 30, 48, 49, 58, 70, 72, 86, 108, 109, 144, 203, 204, 210, 212, 213; racial hybridity 50; racial temporality 203; superior race/racial superiority 110, 144, 218, 219, 231, 233; unraced 118, 218 racialization 8, 25, 30, 36, 37, 42, 118, 169, 172, 187, 194, 199, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 211, 213 reality television 86, 97, 105, 112, 120, 157 Reeder, J. 105 reflexivity 4, 9, 62, 77; self-reflexive 96, 134 Resnikoff, M. 103 rhetorical racialization 199 Roof, D. 192, 227, 228, 231 Ryan, A. 70–73, 88, 89

Index  247 Saipov, S. 194 Sessions, J. 198–199 Smith, A.N. 101–102 social class i, 6, 7, 119 stoppage 8, 199, 200, 203–205, 208–213 technology of racism 210 terrorism i, 6, 8, 176–179, 181–182, 184–194 toxic white masculinity 7, 69–70, 73–75, 80–85, 87–88 trailer park 105, 117, 120–121, 124–127 Trump, D. J. vii, xii, 1, 3, 7, 8, 69–76, 78–89, 119, 128, 155–163, 165, 167–173, 179, 187–192, 193–194, 198–199, 206, 208–209, 211, 213 Trump, I. 85 Trump University 81 Twelve Years a Slave 97, 115 Underwood, C. 111 Unite the Right 219, 226, 230, 234 victimization 41, 97–100, 109–110 Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded 133 Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act 133 Walker, E. 102 What’s Up Mom 103 Whites ix, x, xii, 1, 2, 3, 8, 18, 37, 46, 47, 48, 61, 106, 111, 118, 185, 187, 193, 220, 223, 230; disabled whites 134, 137; non-whites 9, 36, 48, 111, 118, 185, 226, 232; Hispanic whites 36; white race 97, 137, 141, 142, 223; white superiority 15, 35, 97 white genocide 228, 230 white nationalism 177, 218, 226, 227, 234 white masculinity 6–8, 53, 60–61, 69–70, 73–75, 80–85, 87–88, 97, 98, 101, 104, 110, 173 white femininity 7, 59, 94–98, 100–101, 106–107, 111–112 white savior 120, 122, 218, 225 white skin privilege 50

white supremacy 1,2, 6, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 19, 47, 50, 61, 77, 78, 79, 103, 109, 110, 120, 183, 184, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 227, 228, 231, 232, 233, 236, 243 whitespeak 1 white trash 7, 95–97, 99, 101–103, 105–107, 109, 111–112, 118–119, 122, 124; White trash norms 105 white women 94–116, 144 Whitehead, I. 144, 145, 147 whiteness; absolutism 220; affective nature 107; authentic(ity) 3, 23, 26, 37, 58, 59, 61, 100, 155, 157, 158, 159, 165–174, 232, 235; embodied 4, 7, 30, 61, 94, 95, 99, 100, 104, 110, 219, 221, 227; fragility i, 6, 48, 49, 158, 172; ideology 220; (im)mobility 7, 117, 119, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129; intersectional 94; invisible i, 7, 46, 47, 48, 111, 118, 134, 138, 171, 185, 220, 221; invisibility 5, 30, 62, 95, 220; monstrous 8, 159–162, 164–165, 167, 170–172; multifaceted 1, 6, 9, 119; performance 4, 7, 8, 15, 16, 19, 24, 46, 49, 50, 55, 58, 59, 61, 70, 95–112, 218, 221; privilege viii, x, 8, 46, 64, 88, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 131, 158, 172, 192, 195, 196, 219, 221, 235; problematic falsehood 136; property 32, 78, 83, 90, 127, 136, 142, 150, 185; strategic v, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 27, 29, 31, 34, 36–42, 44, 45, 46, 64, 91, 95, 99, 108, 109, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 129, 131, 136, 150, 162, 172, 178, 187, 219, 220, 221, 235, 236, 237; Third Wave 118, 119, 132; triumphal 176–178, 183; universal 4, 46, 48, 111, 204, 214, 220; violence 99, 177 whitespeak 1 whitewashed 9, 28 women of color 10, 43, 47, 48, 59, 60, 62, 64, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103, 106, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 149, 173, 183 working-class 54, 130, 132