Backchannel Pedagogies: Unsettling Racial Teaching Moments and White Futurity

It’s my third year of graduate school, and we are practicing our research interest “elevator pitches” in class. Tom,¹ a white, male colleague, is listening to my friend Lou² rehearse his pitch when he interrupts to state that Lou’s research is “kind of like what Pritha does.” No one says anything in class, but I email Tom later to tell him that it is troubling to hear white colleagues generalizing about the few students of color in our program, and especially those from distinctly different racial groups like Lou and me.³ If we don’t recognize the field’s diverse range of antiracist scholarship, I attest, we further reinforce its “second-class, non-canonical status.” But because I feel guilty for accusing Tom of maybe being racist, I soften my message at the end: “I respect you as a colleague, scholar, and equal, and hope that we can all work together as up-and-coming scholars to create a more just environment for our students, faculty, and laborers.” (Still, as I agonize over my word choices, I wonder, does Tom feel guilty too? Does he even remember?)

My obligatory declaration of “respect” for Tom is an articulation of what many Black studies and postcolonial theorists have conceptualized as white time.⁴ Whiteness, Brittney Cooper argues, temporally dictates the pace of social progress by displacing BIPOC—through the theft of life, of space, of personhood—and “urging complacency through endless calls to just be patient” (Cooper).⁵ Whiteness has come to “own and master time” by deciding when race can “matter,” and when it cannot (Cooper). In stating my “respect” for Tom, I operationalize white time not just by prioritizing his emotions over mine, but also by conceding the pace of racial progress, the creation of a “more just environment,” to a benevolent vision of us working “together.” (I don’t do this because I want to. I do it because I know how white men in the academy have cleverly gaslighted me when I prioritize my temporality of racial progress over theirs.) Tom responds, finally, by apologizing and asking me if I can meet with him to help him learn more about “antiracist pedagogy”—as if the pedagogical email I had just delicately crafted had not already depleted enough of my time and space. This labor, however, is inconceivable, even unimaginable, to Tom.  

As I think on this memory and many others like it, I am struck by how the positioning of past racism as future pedagogical fodder for white “teaching moments” invokes a version of white time that is unique to the neoliberal academy where “learning,” a highly valuable institutional commodity, is routinely narrated as a path to social and civic consciousness. Consider institutional diversity efforts following recent instances of anti-Black and anti-Asian violence in the U.S. meant to “teach” white people about race and racism: Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center’s 2020 “21-Day Anti-Racism Challenge” after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders; Washington University in St. Louis’s “Day of Dialogue and Action” after the 2014 Ferguson Uprising (McCarthy); or the University of Kansas (KU)’s 2021 “listening and support conversations” in response to the 2021 anti-Asian Atlanta shootings (Graham et al). And in rhetoric and writing studies, a field itself centrally concerned with the transformative power of pedagogy, we can look to the CCCC “Statement on Violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021” (2021). Again mobilizing teaching/learning as a response to racism, the statement “reaffirms our mission” as teachers to equip students “with the means to make sense of their worlds” and to “work toward healing” (CCCC). While I agree that educating our students about the violences of racism is important, it is worth considering how the positioning of individualized pedagogical practices as a path to a more just future risks structurally rescripting racial violences as inspiration for (white) learning.

What does it mean for BIPOC, especially in the academy where teaching holds profound cultural and economic value, when past racism is repackaged as future pedagogical opportunity? How does white time weaponize pedagogy to “dictate the pace” (Cooper) of racial progress? The above examples demonstrate how the white, neoliberal academy’s deep investment in teaching/learning can naturalize ongoing modes of embodied and epistemic racial violence. Indeed, the continued retroactive acknowledgment of racial violence in the institution and its renarration as teaching/learning opportunity often do not signify “progress” as much as they render the real violences faced by BIPOC in the academy and otherwise as abstract “objects” for future white dissection. Furthermore, these rhetorics also obscure the ongoing pedagogies of BIPOC in the academy—both in the classroom and “backchannels”—that have long refused the projects of white time and space. 

The Race-time of the Teaching Moment 

While Lou emphasized his interests across Black studies, digital media studies, and critical pedagogy studies in his pitch that day, Tom’s abbreviation of Lou’s and my research interests reductively under the label of “antiracist pedagogy” in his email embodies a common assumption made about those of us who study race/racism: that our work is the stuff of workshops and classrooms, not the high theory that is typically attributed to white, male scholars. The fusing of antiracism with pedagogy, however, also invokes a particular temporality that white, progressive publics often embrace in their calls to “learn from the past” as a means to a better “future.” As Ohio State’s “21-Day Anti-Racism Challenge” states, for example, “understanding, acknowledging, and relearning our American history of racism” serves as “a powerful lens” for “our journey to become anti-racists” (“21-Day Anti-Racism Challenge”). Here, antiracism is a linear path that involves looking back only to move forward, a schema that leaves little room for racialized, nonlinear temporalities like anger and trauma that unsettle white futurity by being unable or unwilling to “get over it.” This process is furthered by the repetition of “our,” a pronoun that forces all readers into the same temporality: i.e. “our journey to become anti-racists.” If you are not part of “our journey,” you will be left “behind” (in the racist past). 

Whiteness’s investment in forward, linear movement is an overwhelmingly imperialist phenomenon. As Aníbal Quijano argues, the colonial construction of time is characterized by a “linear, one-directional evolutionism from some state of nature to modern European society,” a narrative that casts non-Europeans as perpetually “in the past” (Quijano 553) while Europeans are seen as “modern and futurally open” (Al-Saji 6). Colonized peoples’ pasts are thus rendered both “irrelevant to the present” (Al-Saji 7), and, I’d add, future. However, a key feature of white time is also the disavowal of racism. As Alia Al-Saji argues in her reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), racism—and specifically, anti-Blackness—is not only naturalized under a white colonial schema, but it is also rationalized as a “mere reaction to the racialized other” (4). This constitutes what Helen Ngo calls a “racialized forgetting” characterized by “a deliberate unknowing or not-knowing, but also a leaving behind and moving on” (Ngo 234). Ngo points, for example, to how public controversies involving charges of racism are typically deflected by claims to innocence or ignorance (245). Paradoxically, these controversies often result in public declarations to “do better” in the future, yet continue to proliferate among white publics in ways that are repetitive and circular.

The assumption that white people need simply to be “taught” about racism to redress it is a particular brand of racialized forgetting that is foundational to contemporary U.S. institutions of higher education. We can see this in the post-WWII transformation of English studies and the subsequent rise of institutional diversity initiatives. The postwar institutionalization of “multicultural” literature in English Departments as an “efficacious tool for [white] Americans to get to know difference” (2), Jodi Melamed writes, was largely motivated by a U.S. imperialist project to establish the country geopolitically as a global power in the 20^th century supposedly committed to racial and ethnic equality (20). The curricular initiatives that accompanied this project, such as the teaching of “race novels” to “teach tolerance,” were geared mostly towards white students’ abstract engagements with racial difference rather than an emphasis on situated “knowledge produced from below” (Melamed 32). These initiatives typically stayed within the bounds of a “master narrative” that emphasized the linear triumphs of racial minorities—and specifically, African-Americans—in “defeating racism” through “full inclusion in American democracy” (Melamed 37), even as anti-Blackness and xenophobia continued on behind the scenes post-Civil Rights in the form of Reagan-era initiatives to shrink welfare, the War on Drugs, and the subsequent rise of privatized prisons.⁶

It is against this backdrop that practices of teaching/learning about racism in higher education were recruited into a white temporality characterized by a particular kind of racialized forgetting that still proliferates today. The rescripting of the historical, cultural, and political labor of racial minorities as a mode of “overcoming” the racist past secured a white futurity that allowed whites to see themselves as “good antiracists by virtue of their [abstract] antiracist feeling” (Melamed 38, emphasis mine), while at the same time evading responsibility for the racial here and now. This “leaving behind and moving on” (Ngo 234) abstractly embodies linear, progressive movement, but as most BIPOC already know too well, the cultural, historical, and political progression of white time in practice is actually much more tautological and amnesic. This is reflected in how universities’ commitments to leverage education to “uncover the racism that permeates our world” (Colombo) in 2021 after Atlanta do not sound much different from their stated commitments to “enhance public dialogue about racial equality” in 2014 after Ferguson (Princeton University Office of Communications), or the NCTE’s call nearly 20 years ago in 2001 to teach “critical literacy as an instrument essential to an informed citizenship and global understanding” after the post-9/11 proliferation of Islamophobia (NCTE). These teaching/learning moments suggest that as long as whiteness demonstrates good racial “feelings” to be better, the racial violences of the past can be overcome, forgiven. 

The ongoing capital of rhetorics of teaching/learning—especially as progressive (white) publics enter yet another “reckoning” in the wake of racial death (see Figure 1)—feels impossible at times to dismantle, especially for students and faculty of color whose survival in the academy is largely contingent upon their perceived enthusiasm to welcome whiteness “in” rather than calling it “out.” Is there a way to imagine an antiracist pedagogy beyond white futurity and progressivism? Can I be a human in the academy rather than a symbol for white learning? I am often so exhausted that I don’t have time to think deeply on these questions.  

Backchannel Pedagogies

In retrospect, Tom’s request that day for me to educate him about “antiracist pedagogy” so he can embody “good” whiteness is unsurprising. As a South Asian woman and immigrant, I have also long been aware of the untouchable status of pedagogy in rhetoric and writing studies, a deeply gendered and racialized phenomenon that positions teachers as romantic martyrs, and students as inherently benevolent.⁸ These narratives obfuscate a recognition of the institutional inequities that make marginalized teachers’ work difficult or impossible (Brewer 47). At the same time, though, I think also of the “backchannel” conversations I have had with my many South Asian/Asian-American, Black, and Latinx women mentors the academy that embody a different kind of pedagogy from that which exists in the classroom. “It’s always good to have a white man in your back pocket,” one visiting scholar once advised me in the few minutes before her talk. “As a small woman of color, you’ll have to make yourself bigger somehow,” said another over dinner a few years later. And some advice from a faculty mentor when I once went to her office to express my frustration at the casual racisms of my white colleagues: “Silence is a legitimate response.”

I never responded to Tom’s request that day, and I left my office so he wouldn’t stop by unannounced. At the time, it didn’t feel that deep. I was tired. Thinking back on it now, however, I see that by responding with silence/absence as a survivalist reclamation of my time and space, I cultivate what Chela Sandoval calls a “middle voice” of possibility, or “differential consciousness” (146). The “middle voice” represents a “mechanism for survival” (156), a “modal form of consciousness” (155) that is “capable of acting both from within ideology and from outside ideology” (156) as a matter of situated, political necessity (174). This differential consciousness is distinct from either/or oppositionalism and has long been utilized by U.S. women of color and Third World feminists in the here and now and often across, as Cherríe Moraga puts it, “seemingly irreconcilable lines” (qtd. in Sandoval 58). By responding with silence/absence, I orient myself differently to white time’s dualisms (“stuck” in the past vs. linear futurity) to avoid, if even fleetingly, the white institutional traps of both the apology and teaching moment. One might also refer to this intentional silence/absence as what Dalia Rodriguez and Afua Boahene call “silent rage.” Silent rage is a space in which women of color both “make ourselves subject” and buy time to reflect, to “ask questions that [we] . . . may have been fearful of asking” (451). If I’m tired, do I have to speak? If I’m a teacher, do I have to teach? If they apologize, do I have to forgive?

I think of women of color and Third World feminist practices like “middle voice” and “silent rage”—which I have learned from my professional and citational women of color mentors—as backchannel pedagogies with the potential to both deflect the racial forgetting that underpins ongoing calls for white teaching/learning moments and make possible alternative temporal logics to white institutionality. In refusing a futurity that recruits us into the teaching moments that repackage racial injury as abstract pedagogical inspiration for whiteness to “do better,” backchannel pedagogies highlight the transformative power of the spaces that exist “in but not of” white institutions (Harney and Moten 26): hushed advice during office hours, stealthy text messages at conferences, shady memes shared on Twitter, sarcastic notes I write to my future self in the margins of books. These moments of joyful, silent rage are often ephemeral in the face of a white racial forgetting that continues to force us into unpaid, unrecognized pedagogical labor in the form of diversity service, university committees, and infinitely generous emails to white colleagues. Indeed, backchannel pedagogies aren’t always loud enough to interrupt the seductive pull of institutional teaching moments around race and racism because their power depends to some extent upon their ability to remain invisible to whiteness. But in remaining invisible, they make possible the pedagogies women of color feminists in the academy have long mobilized in institutional spaces where we have been, paradoxically, both hypervisible, yet also deeply isolated. And perhaps most importantly, they offer alternative frameworks for (re)valuing our pedagogical, intellectual, and professional work in the here and now, a space-time where whiteness—with its continual calls for understanding, for forgiveness, for “moving on”—hardly ever lets us live.

Endnotes

1. “Tom” is a pseudonym to preserve anonymity. return
2. Louis M. Maraj, now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. Lou and I are currently co-authoring a book on the racial politics of the teaching moment. return
3. Lou identifies as a Black Caribbean immigrant, and I identify as a South Asian immigrant. While we share some South Asian ancestry, we write from radically different epistemological perspectives. return
4. In addition to the scholars cited later in this essay, see also Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), Saidiya Hartman’s “The Time of Slavery” (2002), and Charles Mills’s “White Time: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory” (2014) for a range of conversations about the racialization of time, history, and rhetorics of progress. Toni Morrison has also routinely explored the racial “distortion and erasure” of Black histories in her literary works, criticisms, and interviews (Davis and Morrison). return
5. See also Tamika Carey’s “Necessary Adjustments” (2020) for a discussion of the related concept of “temporal hegemony.” return
6. See Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) and Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016). return
7. See George Yancy’s Black Bodies, White Gazes (2008) and Adrienne D. Davis’s “Identity Notes, Part One: Playing in the Light” (1997) for extended discussions of the “white gaze.” return
8. See Kirsti Cole’s Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? (2014), Donna J. Nicol and Jennifer A. Yee’s “‘Reclaiming Our Time’: Women of Color Faculty and Radical Self-Care in the Academy” (2017), and Meaghan Brewer’s Conceptions of Literacy (2020). return

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COVER IMAGE CREDIT: Sourced from Fregni, Jessica, and Laura Zingg. “Examining Learning Through an Anti-Racist Lens.” Teach For America, https://www.teachforamerica.org/one-day/top-issues/examining-learning-through-an-anti-racist-lens. Accessed 15 December 2021.

KEYWORDS: anti-racism, pedagogy, whiteness, diversity, resistance