Whiteness in Academia: A Look in the Mirror
I came across a call for papers today on gender-based violence in education in the developing world. Super niche, but I had written a paper during my third-year of my undergrad on GBV in Africa, and thought maybe I could adapt parts of it and use my research to re-submit.
Christ, what a mess of a paper.
Structurally, it’s fine, needs some work, and the prose is acceptable for an undergraduate-level paper. But, does it ever reek of white academia. Despite multiple disclaimers about the history of colonialism in feminism and avoiding essentialism, and a few African feminists sprinkled here and there, my paper does essentially the opposite of what it identifies as problematic.
I describe Africa as monolithic, there’s a huge lack of specificity and examples. I identify race and gender as part-and-parcel but then in the next paragraph separate them once again and identify gender as the core issue. It’s so messy, and the worst part was I wrote this paper semi-recently, while in Africa, while working in development.
The point is, when I wrote that paper I thought that I knew better. I thought that I had learned enough, seen enough, listened enough, to know what neocolonialism looked like and what white supremacy looked like. But the educational institutions that I learned the identifying features of these things, are also the institutions that perpetuate them.
I did not learn how to confront my whiteness and my privilege, I was never asked to interrogate my positionally nor was my whiteness ever put under the microscope in the same way racialize identities are. What I learned was abstractions: white supremacy happens “out there”, neocolonialism is only perpetuated by the State, and thus, there is no personal responsibility. Academia claims objectivity above all else and personal identity, especially white identity, doesn’t matter. But it does, it always has, and will continue to matter. How I engage in rhetoric, what I look for, is highly dependent on my own lived experience. And when it’s not, I go bumbling forward, picking up whatever sticks but unable to parse out what is useful, what needs to be said, and what is not. I’ve never been encouraged to ask, “am I the right person for this topic? What is my personal relationship to this topic?” and as a result, lived-experiences are dissected, categorized, and filed away for the next undergraduate to dig-up and make a mess of.
How can I understand gender in Africa if I am not African? If I am not Black or racialize? If I am not colonized? And if I am to try and understand these, more caution is required, twice the work is required, it shouldn’t be a matter of how under or over-saturated the topic is, my identity as a white scholar in a colonial institution should require that I ask these questions. Every. Single. Time. I am exploring issues that do not affect me or my identity. Caution, empathy, and awareness should be the first items on the research check-list, not disclaimers or footnotes to be added later.
Moreover, taking the time to interrogate positionally requires time. But the industry of academia demands a constant outpour of product, and this product is knowledge and information. As an undergraduate, tight-deadlines and constant papers perpetuated this. It trained me not to think too deeply and critically, but to work efficiently and quickly, at the expense of my subject matter and my personal growth.
I’m working, as many are, to identify and unlearn my own inherent biases, and fight for racial justice. Since writing that paper, I have learned a lot, and continue to strive to be better. But square one in that required acknowledging race as a lived experience that I am not a part of. Think about that for a moment. I am a university-educated, 24-year-old woman, who has written papers on gender in Africa, but race was not a category that I considered as central to gender or identity. Race is not a lens I really considered at all.
It should not have taken multiple years in my undergrad to learn that, nor the emotional labour of my Black supervisor. There has to be a better ways. Central to education should be self-reflection and interrogation. We should consider the personal identities of authors, which is already a consideration being promoted by many indigenous scholars. Whether we like it or not, who we are and our experiences (or lack there of) matter.
I know that I will continually f*ck-up and make mistakes and take-up space where I shouldn’t. That’s okay, my own process of unlearning white supremacy is constant and life-long. But knowledge-generating institutions that allow my privilege to go unquestioned will be around long after I am gone. And this isn’t a new call to action; BIPOC activists and academics have been calling for change for decades. Shame on me, shame on all white scholars for ignoring them, for pursuing paper accolades ahead of meaningful change that starts with dismantling the institutions that benefit us. We are the problem. We need to stand with them and demand change.
