Post Summer2019 #Whiteness, Co-option, Erasure, and Colonization: The case of #CriticalMedicalRhetoric

The summer (in the registers of the Northen hemisphere, the habitus of the National Communication Association) of 2019 was a revolutionary anchor for the discipline of Communication. I use the term revolutionary in the paradigm shifting sense (borrowing the terms of paradigm established by the #Whiteness of  the #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfSocialScience reading lists). Responding to the #Whiteness reflected in the Distinguished Scholars in the discipline, the revolution started with scholars of colour, gender-disenfranchised scholars, scholars interrogating hegemonic assumptions of ability launching a sustained intervention into the discipline. Through various forms of activist interventions that ranged from social media performances to performative academic pieces, these scholars from the discipline's margins co-created registers for dismantling the discipline by excavating and dismantling its logics of #Whiteness.

This disciplinary moment then created an opening for a wide range of transformations across an array of registers. Under the umbrella of "Communication Scholars for Transformation," hitherto erased conversations (often through techniques of violence and disciplining) were opened up by scholars who have consistently been oppressed, disenfranchised, and placed at the disciplinary margins. These transformations called for decolonizing the curriculum, dismantling reading lists, taking down reference lists, and changing citation practices. They served as registers for imagining academia outside of the narrow confines of what makes up academic work, as well as revolutionizing the journals, books, and other venues of academic production (such as conferences and associations).

The impact of the summer of 2019 has been felt across disciplinary registers. 

Although 2019 emerged then as a disciplinary break-away point, the work of challenging and dismantling disciplinary Whiteness predates the movement by at least two decades. In 1995, Tom Nakayama and colleagues were speaking about #Whiteness, theorizing its hegemonic ascendance through communicative practices. The works of Olga Davis, Bernadette Calafell, Sarah Amira De La Garza, Amardo Rodriguez, Devika Chawla, Priya Kapoor, Brenda Allen, Patricia Parker,  Debashish Munshi, and Priya Kurian, to name a few, were building critical registers interrogating the #Whiteness of #CommunicationStudies. In doing so, these scholars were experiencing several forms of backlash. And yet, this formed the foundational register for dismantling the #Whiteness of #CommunicationStudies.

In 2001, when I started my journey as an Assistant Professor at Purdue University, the discplinary Whiteness was not only in full form, but it was also scripted into the everyday workings of the institution. I have written about these disciplinary structures of #Whiteness and my negotiations of #Whiteness at Purdue in blog entries and performative pieces. These struggles formed the basis for crystallizing the critical interventions into health communication, although they gave voice to negotiations that began in graduate school, shuttling between the violence of erasures of my lived experiences in graduate school pedagogy.

In 2004, the earliest imaginings of the culture-centered approach, inspired by and in solidarity with the voices of Collins Airhihenbuwa, Deborah Lupton, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies Collective, and in walking alongside the struggles for health among indigenous Santali communities in Eastern India, was published in Communication Theory Along the same time, between 2004 and 2005, a number of journal articles critically interrogating the #Whiteness of #HealthCommuication appeared in the journal Health Communication. 

A number of graduate students entering Purdue University, Devalina Mookerjee, Rebecca DeSouza, Ambar Basu, Mahuya Pal, Iccha Basnyat and Induk Kim, joined in as interlocutors, forming the early threads of developing critical interventions into health communication, co-authoring a number of interventions into health communication that appeared in the journals Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Communication Theory, Communication Monographs, and Human Communication Research.  Even as we were collectively developing these critical interventions into health communication, re-doing our citation practices and reading lists from the margins emerged as a critical element of our interventions. 

A vital question for the culture-centered collective was one of the reading list. Reading across the social sciences and humanities approaches to health communication, what was salient in our experiences of co-constructing critical interventions into health communication from the Global South were the #Whiteness of readings into health, the violence embedded in constructions of #WhiteHealth, and the systematic erasure of voices from the Global South. This was also around the time that I started team teaching Purdue's legacy doctoral honours seminar, "Foundations of Human Communication Inquiry: Com 600." The struggles in crafting the syllabus of the course, in including voices of the South into the course, the struggles with being called racist for incorporating voices from the South, I have outlined elsewhere. An entire infrastructure of #Whiteness in the department targeted me/us with various forms of harassment (This experience was unnerving as the first time I co-taught this class with a powerful White Professor was when I was going up for tenure).

I have documented how those early years of intervening into #WhitenessOfCommunicationStudies were marked by struggles against erasures. These techniques of erasure find new forms in post-2019 conversations.

In one of the post summer-of-2019 conversations, as the discipline was starting to build responses to its #Whiteness, a colleague forwarded me an announcement of a book series positioned as "critical approaches to health." This colleague noted the #Whiteness of the series, including the #Whiteness of the editorial board. It was apparent that the new book series was positioned as a critique of and response to White hegemony (ironically, offered by mostly White academics) all the while erasing us, brown and black scholars, who have struggled, fought the battles and the wars in dismantling #HealthCommunicationSoWhite, and often paid the price with our bodies. 

#Whiteness seems to bolster this kind of opportunism. Almost like scavengers, White academics see opportunities for performing critiques of #Whiteness and swoop in when they see new possibilities, once again, starting the process of erasing our brown/black voices and our struggles. In this what-is-positioned as an emergent field/sub-field (#CriticalMedicalRhetoric or some version of it), none of our work, none of our voices as scholars of colour are counted/recognized/seen/witnessed. In fact, our voices are often actively erased, often under some guise of Humanities-Social Science divide which itself is a powerful device of #Whiteness to categorize, erase, and conquer. For instance, in a journal entry documenting the state of #HealthCommunication crafted by a White woman who formed the infrastructure of #Whiteness at Purdue, references to White women (Lupton and Sharf) are offered as entry points to critical health communication, and then skipping over our coloured interventions into #HealthCommunication (which the #WhiteNetwork actively targeted by labeling it as racist) to then make the space for this area of #CriticalMedicalRhetoric. 

This sort of passive aggressive strategy of erasure is integral to keeping #Whiteness intact. More powerfully, the labour and bodies of scholars of colour are both used and then discarded in order to prop up and circulate #Whiteness. When in seeing this #Whiteness, Devika Chawla posted a critical response in the group "Communication Scholars for Transformation," #Whiteness went into a frenzy to find the right kind of brown/black voices to incorporate so it could be seen as inclusive/diverse.

So when today when Devika Chawla posted on Facebook about what strategies of decentering are we going to use, I referred back to this incident, reflecting on what it means to decenter the #Whiteness of #CommunicationStudies. 

The work of #decentering needs to ask, what roles do we as scholars/activists of colour have to play in decentering and dismantling #CommunicationSoWhite? Part of the decentering work I feel is in being absolutely vigilant, about who is speaking, who is doing the talking, and who is placing their bodies on the line. Part of this work of #decentering is in building an absolutely real politics of resistance, which is anchored in irreverence, in being willing to call out the politics of #Whiteness whenever you see it. As scholars/activists of colour, we must consistently interrogate our complicity, when we are co-opted as uncle Toms so #Whiteness can reproduce itself and carry out the work of erasure. While it might be personally beneficial to us, it is absolutely destructive to the movement in performing the tokenistic role of a brown/black academic.

The response to #decentering is not #inclusion, but the actual work of #DismantlingWhiteness.