Whiteness is bad for science.
It is certainly bad for #CommunicationScience. It is the original #BadScience.
In its unequestioned privilege reified through publication processes and organizational structures of the discipline, it (re)produces bad science, emboldened in White mediocrity and laziness, propping up as normative concepts that have been put forth by White academics for decades. It is bad in its stagnancy. It doesn't move. Take up a Communication Theory textbook and look at what makes up #CommunicationScience. The same old Balance Theories, Dual Processing Theories, and Theories of Communicative Competence dominate. A disciplinary outsider might think that #CommunicationScience stopped developing right at its birth.
In other words, much of what we know as the science of communication is based on White, middle-class samples, theorized by White middle and upper, middle-class scholars. It is lazy because you can do all your claims-making and posturing, protected in your White privilege, getting students in your White college classrooms to sign up for your studies, without ever having to place your #Whiteness under the sun or without having to break your back.
This science is generated through a fundamental communicative move, of setting up the normative Whiteness of communicative phenomena as universals. The scope and definition of what makes up communication even is embedded within assumptions of Whiteness. So the topics of communication, nature of communication, forms of communication worthy of study are entrenched in a narrow ideology that is contextual and culturally specific.
Take for instance the White preoccupation with romance, friendship, and separation in the interpersonal communication literature. That romance is even of interest or is communicative is established by hegemomic norms of Whiteness. Similarly, White norms of marriage and separation, established within a largely US-centric White cultural context preoccupies the study of communication post-divorce in families.
#Whiteness for instance is entirely clueless about say the Bengali concept of "Ekannoborti poribar" (একান্নবর্তী পরিবার) that my partner Debalina and I grew up in. In the Bengali "ekannoborti poribar" or what is roughly translated as the joint family, resources including income and food are shared in a collective pool, and communication is organized around the notion of familial-collective needs. When I received my scholarship to attend graduate school in the US, my cousins, aunts, and uncles organized the money for the plane ticket. When an aunt is sick, all of us cousins collectively organize the money for her medical treatment. The work of care is shared as a collective, embedded in the threads of family and community.
Whiteness, organized on the concept of the atomized individual, lacks at its roots the register to comprehend the organizing principle of the "ekannoborti poribar." This "ekannoborti poribar" however doesn't exist as a contextual anomaly elsewhere. It is a universal across cultural contexts that challenge the Whiteness of atomized individualism. For instance, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Māori concept of whanaungatana serves as a register for centering familial-community care. Seen from the universal of the "ekannoborti poribar," the theorizing of the nuclear or post-divorce family are anomalies, and bad anomalies at that (not one to aspire to). Of course, the paradox of White defensiveness/rage is such that it would immediately respond to such critique by offering some weak non-argument about how the "ekannoborti poribar" too can be explained by some #White theory of the self-serving, rational individual. Or it might pull from examples of communes in White cultures to argue that such examples actually also exist in White contexts (which would actually support my point about universal familial-community economies organized outside the logics of self-serving individualism as the norm).
I can continue with countless such examples. In our collective work in health communication, a number of scholars working with the culture-centered approach (CCA) have spent the last two decades theorizing how the science of White health communication is poorly conceptualized, failing to comprehend the realities of the vast majority of the global communities (Sastry, Stephenson, Dillon & Carter, 2019). In a recent piece published in the Journal of Communication, Ramasubramanian and Banjo (2020) carefully draw out the Whiteness of media effects scholarship, offering a robust framework for challenging this #WhitenessInMediaEffects.
I woke up today to witnessing a White colleague sharing an article that perpetuates the binary of justice versus science (Professors Srividya Ramasubramanian and Walid Afifi have offered excellent critiques of the article, and I am adding here to that conversation). This setting up of the binary, where calls for justice are divorced from the principles of good science, embodies White mediocrity, privilege, laziness, and desire to to keep White privilege intact. It sees terms such as inclusion, decolonization, and diversity as threats to the pursuit of good science, pejoratively framing the academics advocating for these transformations as "social justice warrriors." The article notes "the justice warrior on principle adopts a position that is wholeheartedly anti-intellectual. You need to shun most ideas because they bear the taint of their sinful origins. Maintaining ideological purity is the key focus of your academic life. The world is black-and-white, and only sinners see shades of gray." Note here the caricature of the justice warrior to paint those calling for the decolonization of the discipline. What it understands as good science is of course White science, shaped in the mediocre and lazy notions of Whiteness. In its pursuit of framing calls to justice as anti-intellectual, the article gives away its substantive basis in Whiteness, and hollowness. Like the infrastructure of #Whiteness that constitutes it, in its arrogant posturing, the article epitomizes cognitive shallowness (the sort of arrogant hubris you witness in the largely ignorant White male [the young-I-am-so-oppressed as well as the mediocre failed academic types] worshippers of the Sokal-Squared and Jordan Peterson gibberish).
What it sees as intellectual, as rigorous method, is #Whiteness. And herein lies paradoxically the anti-intellectualism of Whiteness. It lacks the cognitive capacity to even begin comprehending the deep and rigorous work of theorizing and methodology that goes into generating, building, and sustaining decolonizing registers. Yet, its arrogant posturing as the arbitrator of knowledge is integral to sustaining it. Ironic how the posturing of humility, much like other White articulations such as civility and dialogue, are integral to the silencing of calls to decolonize.
The reality is that the White science of communication is poorly equipped to address the actual challenges we are witnessing as a global community (It is too happy with its lazy work with White college students). Its obsessions with the individual and with irrelevant phenomena tied to a deeply individualised pursuit of life is not even capable of comprehending the fundamental challenges to humanity today, inequality, climate crisis, loss of indigenous livelihoods, crises generated by neoliberal reforms, and health epidemics to name a few. These basic questions facing the survival of our earth, eco-systems and life forms are deeply anchored in justice, and they are committeed to the pursuit of building rigorous science.
For too long, as a discipline, #CommunicationScience has perpetuated its fundamental #Whiteness. This has of course been integral to perpetuating and protecting jobs and rank privilege of White scholars in the discipline. Of course, this has worked through the erasure of labour of academics of colour at the margins, through the framing of this labour as unscientific, and through the profiteering from this labour (consider the hours that have to go into educating #Whiteness and responding to its anti-intellectualism, including the work of writing this post as response to a mediocre article).
Yet, at this moment, in the midst of a pandemic, amidst the imminent challenges of climate change and deep inequalities produced by the Whiteness of neoliberal individualism, seeing the call to social justice as the fundamental pursuit of good science is a necessary step for the discipline. Justice must be at the center of our theoretical and methodological work. If we want to contribute to the fundamental questions of survival that face our eco-systems, the specter of Whiteness underpinning #CommunicationScience must be urgently dismantled.
References
Ramasubramanian, S., & Banjo, O. O. (2020). Critical Media Effects Framework: Bridging Critical Cultural Communication and Media Effects through Power, Intersectionality, Context, and Agency. Journal of Communication, 70(3), 379-400.
Sastry, S., Stephenson, M., Dillon, P., & Carter, A. (2019). A meta-theoretical systematic review of the culture-centered approach to health communication: Toward a refined,“nested” model. Communication Theory.
The reality is that the White science of communication is poorly equipped to address the actual challenges we are witnessing as a global community (It is too happy with its lazy work with White college students). Its obsessions with the individual and with irrelevant phenomena tied to a deeply individualised pursuit of life is not even capable of comprehending the fundamental challenges to humanity today, inequality, climate crisis, loss of indigenous livelihoods, crises generated by neoliberal reforms, and health epidemics to name a few. These basic questions facing the survival of our earth, eco-systems and life forms are deeply anchored in justice, and they are committeed to the pursuit of building rigorous science.
For too long, as a discipline, #CommunicationScience has perpetuated its fundamental #Whiteness. This has of course been integral to perpetuating and protecting jobs and rank privilege of White scholars in the discipline. Of course, this has worked through the erasure of labour of academics of colour at the margins, through the framing of this labour as unscientific, and through the profiteering from this labour (consider the hours that have to go into educating #Whiteness and responding to its anti-intellectualism, including the work of writing this post as response to a mediocre article).
Yet, at this moment, in the midst of a pandemic, amidst the imminent challenges of climate change and deep inequalities produced by the Whiteness of neoliberal individualism, seeing the call to social justice as the fundamental pursuit of good science is a necessary step for the discipline. Justice must be at the center of our theoretical and methodological work. If we want to contribute to the fundamental questions of survival that face our eco-systems, the specter of Whiteness underpinning #CommunicationScience must be urgently dismantled.
References
Ramasubramanian, S., & Banjo, O. O. (2020). Critical Media Effects Framework: Bridging Critical Cultural Communication and Media Effects through Power, Intersectionality, Context, and Agency. Journal of Communication, 70(3), 379-400.
Sastry, S., Stephenson, M., Dillon, P., & Carter, A. (2019). A meta-theoretical systematic review of the culture-centered approach to health communication: Toward a refined,“nested” model. Communication Theory.