For the people who make their living talking about this stuff, it will never be enough.The College Fix reports:
Anti-racism scholar: George Floyd’s death muted real talk about racismA York University professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies and self-described “anti-racist activist within the university” recently issued a paper claiming George Floyd’s murder resulted in a “whitewashed acknowledgement of anti-Black racism” and “reinforced white epistemic authority.”Enakshi Dua’s “Social Ignorance in Times of Conspicuous Racism” draws on her own experiences in higher education, a so-called “autoethnography” which in her words “produce[s] a temporal history of anti-racist action between 2001–2023.”Dua, who teaches courses on feminist theory, anti-racist feminist theory, and postcolonial studies according to her faculty page, claims her “temporal tracing” of events in that timeframe “crucially allows” readers to see how higher ed’s anti-racist efforts ultimately were “disregarded, rejected, and brushed aside.”Following Floyd’s murder (the professor appears to take issue that some called it a “death” prior to the actual court verdict), Dua says predominately white college administrators requested “asks” from anti-racist activists and academics which “ignore[d] the long history of anti-racist activism” and “thereby reinforc[ed] an epistemology of ignorance.”
The resonance of the rhetoric of ignorance to recuperate discourse of anti-Black racism points to the ways in which the responses to Floyd’s murder employed the legacy of the agreement to misinterpret the world, (re)producing a fanciful history that reestablishes a whitewashed acknowledgement of anti-Black racism while simultaneously reconstructing white epistemic authority.
In the post-Floyd aftermath, Dua claims the (continuing) denial of racism extended beyond that from white nationalists, that the acknowledgment of “unconscious bias” subsequently allows for it to “push[ed] away,” and that the use of “we” — as in “we” were all affected by Floyd’s death — is a “recentering [of] whiteness.”
“By tracing the ways in which anti-racism was articulated after George Floyd’s murder, when the social world was making the reality of anti-Black racism hypervisibile [sic], I have illustrated how the very rhetoric of ignorance allowed for the rearticulation of the saliency of the epistemology of ignorance—the agreement to misinterpret the world,” Dua writes.
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