Communicative inversions: The everyday practices of white supremacy that hold up the architectures of white privilege
The deployment of communicative inversions, turning materiality on its head, is a necessary tool of white supremacist attacks on anti-racist pedagogy.
These attacks, as we witnessed in the attacks of the Trump administration on the teaching of Critical Race Theory, play out through the portrayal of anti-racist interventions as racist.
For instance, critical analyses of white privilege are projected as racist toward white people. To perform this communicative inversion, the very nature of the critique is inverted, displaced from the analysis of structures of whiteness to individualized performance of hurt expressed by white individuals.
For white supremacists, the denial of anti-racist critiques through their portrayals as racist, uncivil, terrorist, and even extremist, as not belonging in civilized society, serves as the basis for the ongoing politics of erasure of whiteness, a system that as upheld and reproduced as universal the value of Eurocentric white culture.
This politics of erasure is necessary to hold up the architectures of white privilege.
For white supremacists, the denial of anti-racist critiques through their portrayals as racist, uncivil, terrorist, and even extremist, as not belonging in civilized society, serves as the basis for the ongoing politics of erasure of whiteness, a system that as upheld and reproduced as universal the value of Eurocentric white culture.
This politics of erasure is necessary to hold up the architectures of white privilege.
To the extent that any critical interrogation of white privilege can be inverted and labeled as racist, white supremacy continues to perpetuate itself. Any call for racial justice by marginalized communities then becomes racist, and therefore, illegitimate.
In Aotearoa, Māori claims to Te Tiriti are inverted, projected by white supremacists as separatist. Ethnic minority communities documenting the workings of white privilege are marked as racist, terrorist, extremist. The tropes of civility, mired in the logics of whiteness, are deployed to silence the critiques.
It is therefore vital for anti-racist interventions to call out the communicative inversions of whiteness as white supremacist strategies. It is necessary that those that perform such communicative inversions are called out as white supremacists. It is necessary that the whiteness that shapes the conversations on civility be interrogated.
To build and sustain a society that is inclusive is to protect and safeguard the right of the marginalized to render visible the workings of whiteness.
In Aotearoa, Māori claims to Te Tiriti are inverted, projected by white supremacists as separatist. Ethnic minority communities documenting the workings of white privilege are marked as racist, terrorist, extremist. The tropes of civility, mired in the logics of whiteness, are deployed to silence the critiques.
It is therefore vital for anti-racist interventions to call out the communicative inversions of whiteness as white supremacist strategies. It is necessary that those that perform such communicative inversions are called out as white supremacists. It is necessary that the whiteness that shapes the conversations on civility be interrogated.