Resisting Whiteness' Rhetorical Silence

This article was downloaded by: [Queensland University of Technology]
On: 02 November 2014, At: 04:22

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:
1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,
London W1T 3JH, UK
Western Journal of
Communication
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwjc20
Resisting whiteness'
rhetorical silence
a
Carrie Crenshaw
a
Assistant Professor in the Department of
Speech Communication , University of Alabama ,
Tuscaloosa, AL, 354870172
Published online: 06 Jun 2009.
To cite this article: Carrie Crenshaw (1997) Resisting whiteness' rhetorical

silence, Western Journal of Communication, 61:3, 253-278, DOI:
10.1080/10570319709374577
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570319709374577
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all
the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our
platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors
make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,
completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of
the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be
independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and
Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,
demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in
relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study
purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,
reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access
and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-
conditions
Downloaded by [Queensland University of Technology] at 04:22 02 November 2014
Western Journal of Communication, 61(3) (Summer 1997), 253-278
Resisting Whiteness' Rhetorical Silence

Carrie Crenshaw
This essay explores the rhetorical dimensions of whiteness in public political discourse
from an ideological perspective. It analyzes a debate between Carolyn Moseley Braun
and Jesse Helms over a patent extension for the United Daughters of the Confederacy
insignia containing a Confederate flag. In this essay I argue that rhetoricians must do the
critical and self-reflexive ideological work necessary to make whiteness visible and
overturn its silences for the purpose of resisting racism. To do this, scholars must locate
interactions that implicate unspoken issues of race, discursive spaces where the power of
whiteness is invoked but its explicit terminology is not, and investigate how these
racialized constructions intersect with gender and class.
O NE MORNING A WHITE STUDENT FROM MY "COMMUNICATION AND DIVER-

SITY" COURSE c a m e to m e i n t e a r s s t r u g g l i n g w i t h h e r beliefs a b o u t
race. She volunteered her reluctance to return home because her family
members were racist. We talked at length, and at the end of our
conversation she thanked me with a smile and said, "I'm so glad you're
white. You're so much more objective than other professors."1 Our
conversation was unusual because white people do not often talk about,
or mark, whiteness in their discourse (Feagin and Vera 139; Franken-
berg 1) even though race talk permeates our private lives and our
public political discourse (Appiah; Gates; hooks, Killing). This unusual
episode reshaped the way I think about my own racialized identity. I
had always thought of myself as an anti-racist2 person, and it disturbed
me that someone would attribute objectivity to me because I am white.
My student had put into words a normally unspoken aspect of my daily
life: my white privilege.
In academic and political discourse, it is also rare for white people to
explicitly reference their whiteness. The strictures of the "approved
identity" in academic writing often prevent us from revealing our
personal social locations and experiences (Blair, Brown and Baxter
CARRIE CRENSHAW (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1992) is Assistant

Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, The University of Alabama,
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0172. A previous version of this manuscript was presented to the
Rhetoric and Public Address Division of SSCA. The author thanks three anonymous WJC
reviewers as well as Becky Bjork, Cully Clark, Tom Harris, Tom Nakayama, Barb
Pickering, and especially, Richard Rouco, John Lucaites, and Stephen K. Anderson for
their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
254 Resisting Whiteness'Rhetorical Silence
402). Public political figures likewise avoid mentioning whiteness in

their discourse (Nakayama and Krizek 297) even though the color of
American politics is implicit in current debates about welfare, affirma-
tive action, crime, and a host of other issues. Moreover, such discourse
tends to ignore the ways in which race, gender, and class intersect with
each other to perpetuate oppressive human hierarchies (Crenshaw,
"Beyond"; Lorde).
Because discursive constructions of whiteness are typically un-
marked and unnamed in personal, academic, and public discourse, they

present a constellation of challenges for rhetorical scholars who are
interested in the ideological role of whiteness in intersecting discourses
about race, gender, and class. Previous rhetorical scholarship has
focused on racist public discourse (e.g., Wander, "Salvation"; Wander,
"The Savage"; Himelstein; Logue; Logue and Garner; Trank), but
Nakayama and Krizek have recently taken our thinking a step further
by mapping the terrain of whiteness. In a provocative study which
names whiteness as a strategic rhetoric, they ethnographically "map"
the "everyday" strategies of the spoken rhetoric of whiteness from a
cultural studies perspective. They are "interested i n . . . the constructed
space of whiteness, not the ways that it influences the margins" and
"do[es] not address racism or racist ideology, although [they acknowl-
edge that] these are closely aligned to many of the ways that whiteness
is constructed" (306n). Their conclusion invites us to move beyond their
initial topological project to investigate how the rhetoric of whiteness
functions in the context of other social relations, particularly gender
(303-305). In this essay, I accept their invitation and join the ongoing
interdisciplinary conversation about whiteness (e.g., Allen; Dutcher;
Dyer; Feagin and Vera; Frankenberg; Frye; Harris; hooks, Black;
Mclntosh; Nakayama and Krizek; Roediger). Because whiteness and
its intersections with gender and class are steeped in silence (hooks,
Black; Mclntosh; Nakayama and Krizek), this essay argues that
rhetoricians must do the critical ideological work necessary to make
whiteness visible and overturn its silences for the purpose of resisting
racism.
To do this, scholars must locate interactions that implicate unspoken
issues of race, discursive spaces where the power of whiteness is
invoked but its explicit terminology is not, and investigate how these
racialized constructions intersect with gender and class. One such
interaction was the debate between Carolyn Moseley Braun (D-IL) and
Jesse Helms (R-NC) over the U.S. Senate's decision whether to grant a
fourteen-year extension of the design patent for the United Daughters
of the Confederacy (UDC) insignia. Because the UDC insignia contains
a representation of the Confederate flag, the debate centered on
whether a Senate approval of the patent would commend a charitable
patriotic organization or commemorate an historical symbol of racism.
Accounts of this debate were widely disseminated in the national news
Summer 1997 255
media and described Moseley Braun's argument as a dramatic history-

making challenge to racism in the U.S. Senate (e.g., Clymer; Lee;
McGrory). "For once Senators changed their minds. Things that are
usually decided in the cloakroom, were settled on the floor in plain
sight" (McGrory A2). Helms spoke first and Moseley Braun responded.
After Helms' second speech, the motion to table the amendment was
rejected 52 to 48. However, Moseley Braun was ultimately victorious;
after her final speech, the patent extension was denied on a 75 to 25
vote.
This debate is a uniquely interesting rhetorical artifact because it

was a direct and public clash of arguments about race in political
discourse. It constitutes an important example of how two public
political actors' discourse about race and how the personal dimensions
of race, gender, and class entered into their public argument. In the
next section, I argue that ideological rhetorical criticism is an appropri-
ate avenue for analyzing interactions like this one.
Ideological Rhetorical Criticism

There is nothing essential, "natural," or biological about whiteness.
Because the overwhelming unity of our genetic makeup swamps any
human differences that have historically been attributed to race
(Appiah 21; Shipman 269), race itself has been called a biological fiction
(Gates 4). It is the historically located rhetorical meaning of whiteness
that assigns it social worth (Nakayama and Krizek 292).
Whiteness functions ideologically when people employ it, consciously
or unconsciously, as a framework to categorize people and understand
their social locations. Within this framework, whiteness as a social
position has value and has been treated legally as property (Bell;
Crenshaw "Race"; Feagin and Vera; Harris). The term "white privilege"
denotes a host of material advantages white people enjoy as a result of
being socially and rhetorically located as a white person (Crenshaw,
"Race"; Mclntosh; Wellman). Even though many white people sense
that privilege accompanies whiteness (Feagin and Vera), they do not
overtly acknowledge their white privilege because they think of them-
selves as average, morally neutral non-racists. They do not see racism
as an ideology that protects the interests of all white people; rather,
they envision racism in the form of white hooded Klansmen engaged in
acts of racial hatred (Mclntosh 34; Ezekiel 1). Because this ideology can
be produced and reproduced through spoken discourse (van Dijk;
Goldberg), whiteness and its privilege have both ideological and
rhetorical dimensions.
Ideological rhetorical criticism reveals the vested interests protected
by a particular rhetorical framework for understanding social order. It
assists the search for alternatives to oppression and enables us to
engage in right action for good reasons (Wander, "The Ideological"
2,18). While cultural and ethnographic approaches that name the

complexities of our racialized social locations make the rhetoric of
whiteness visible and displace its centrality (Nakayama and Krizek),
an ideological approach helps to uncover the alliance between the
submerged or silent rhetoric of whiteness and white material privilege.
Ideological rhetorical criticism reveals how the public political rhetoric
of whiteness relies upon a silent denial of white privilege to rationalize
judicial, legislative, and executive decisions that protect the material
interests of white people at the expense of people of color.3 Beyond the
realm of "everyday" discourse, public political actors often engage a

submerged or silent rhetoric of whiteness to protect white privilege,
and their arguments are authorized by the powerful institutions from
which they speak. Those authorized arguments in turn sanction the
rhetorical frameworks through which white individuals make sense of
and justify their privileged social status (van Dijk; Wellman).
Stuart Hall's work is useful for grasping the rhetorical nature of
ideology in general and racist ideologies in specific. He defines ideology
as "those images, concepts and premises which provide the frameworks
through which we represent, interpret, understand and 'make sense' of
some aspect of social existence" ("The Whites" 18). Ideological struggles
are struggles over meaning. Meaning is a social production, a practice
of making the world mean something, and this meaning is produced
through language. Language is not a synonym for ideology because the
same terms can be used in very different ideological discourses.
However, language is the principle medium of ideologies, and ideologies
are sets or chains of meaning located in language ("The Rediscovery"
67, 81; "The Whites" 18).
These chains of meaning are not the products of individual intention
even though they are statements made by individuals. Instead, inten-
tions are formed within pre-existing ideologies because individuals are
born into them. Ideologies live within what we take-for-granted. They
exist in our assumptions and descriptive statements about how the
world is. "Ideologies tend to disappear from view into the taken-for-
granted 'naturalised' world of common sense. Since (like gender) race
appears to be 'given' by Nature, racism is one of the most profoundly
'naturalised' of existing ideologies" (Hall, "The Whites" 19).
To understand how racist ideologies operate, Hall draws upon the
work of Antonio Gramsci. While Gramsci did not explicitly theorize
about race, he did investigate the ideological and cultural implications
of region and nation. Hall embraces Gramsci's argument that ideolo-
gies function hegemonically to preserve powerful interests. That is to
say, ideologies are taken-for-granted frameworks that naturalize our
descriptions of the way the world is, including its current power
structures. This power is not achieved solely by coercive might; it also
operates through the consent of those who are subjugated. Hegemony is
the production of consent that determines what is taken-for-granted.
Summer 1997 257
So, our taken-for-granted, naturalized assumptions of what makes
common sense produce and reinforce our consent to the current social
order and its power structures. The advantage of Gramsci's position is
that it makes room for an oppositional consciousness because it
recognizes that hegemony is historically contingent. Because hege-
mony is never stable and is always an ongoing and fluid process of
gaining consent, social transformation through the critical examina-
tion of current relations of power is possible.
Following Gramsci, Hall also believes that it is essential to analyze

the historical specificity of racist ideologies in a non-reductive manner.
He rejects the gross form of economism in which everything is seen to
be determined by class structures, and instead he highlights the need
to understand and conceptualize other oppressive forms of social
differentiation including culture, region, nationality, and ethnicity.
Doing so enables a productive reconceptualization of the "class subject."
The class subject is not homogenous; there is never simple unity among
people said to be of the same "class." Rather, hegemony is a dynamic
process of the production of consent within and between different
sectors and segments within classes. Thus, Gramsci's work can help us
to understand how race and class intersect. We need not accept the
false choice between class based explanations and race based explana-
tions. In addition, Hall argues that Gramsci's notion of hegemony
helps us to understand one of the most common, least explained features of'racism': the
'subjection' of the victims of racism to the mystifications of the very racist ideologies
which imprison and define them. He reveals how different, often contradictory elements
can be woven into and integrated within different ideological discourses; but also, the
nature and value of ideological struggle which seeks to transform popular ideas and the
'common sense' of the masses. All of this has the most profound importance for the
analysis of racist ideologies and for the centrality, within that, of ideological struggle.
("Gramsci's" 440)
A critical ideological approach to racialized discourse reveals the
ongoing struggle over the meaning of race. It makes room for opposi-
tional consciousness by helping us to "see" the meaning of racialized
constructions and the vested interests they protect so that we can
contest them. In addition, as the following analysis of the Braun-Helms
debate illustrates, it enables our understanding of the intersections
among racialized, gendered, and class discourses.
To learn more about whiteness and its rhetorical intersection with
gender and class, I turn to the debate over the UDC insignia. On May
12, 1993, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee rejected the patent
extension for the insignia. On July 22, Helms offered an amendment to
the National Service Act overturning the committee's decision. Moseley
Braun, surprised by the attempt to evade the committee's decision,
nonetheless moved to table his amendment and engaged Helms in a
forceful debate. Helms spoke first, and Moseley Braun followed. Helms
responded, and the motion to table the amendment failed 52 to 48.
Moseley Braun, threatening to filibuster, spoke a second time. Several
other Senators then spoke, and the amendment was tabled. Helms
finished this exchange with parting comments.
The paucity of studies that examine African American and especially
African American women's rhetoric make it even more important to
study this debate carefully (Houston 1; Houston Stanback 28; Rigsby
191). Though there may be a danger in turning "the voice and beings of
non-white women into commodity, spectacle" (hooks, Talking 14), it
may be that this is an unavoidable aspect of rhetorical criticism itself

because published criticism is the examination of the symbolic behav-
iors of others for an audience in exchange for academic currency.
However, one purpose of this essay is to illustrate that ideological
rhetorical criticism designed to reveal white privilege should be done in
a self-reflexive fashion. Such self-reflexivity reveals these ideological
limitations for the purpose of meeting our obligation to be inclusive,
systematic, and liberating (Houston Stanback 28). I begin by tracing
Helms' and Moseley Braun's major arguments in sequence to shed light
upon their discursive struggle over the meaning of whiteness and its
intersection with gender and class.
Helms: Whiteness' Silence and Feminized Patriotism

In rejecting the patent extension the Judiciary Committee had
accepted Moseley Braun's arguments that honoring the UDC would
symbolically condone slavery. Helms, therefore, was faced with a
situation in which he had to refute the presumption of racism. Helms
initially redefined who was harmed by absenting race and tacitly
relying upon whiteness' invisibility. He characterized the Committee's
patent rejection as an "unintended rebuke .. . unfairly aimed at" a
group of gentle, elderly ladies (S9251). According to Helms, UDC
members are "ladies . . . most of them elderly, all of them volunteers at
veterans' hospitals and many, many other places" (S9251). Chastising
the Committee for insulting the UDC, Helms noted that "most of these
ladies, as I say, are elderly and are not the kind of gentle souls when
[sic] the Senate Judiciary Committee should want to offend deliber-
ately, let alone rebuke" (S9251). Helms' construction of the UDC
members as gentle elderly ladies, without the power or desire to be
racist, undercut the claim that they were capable of inflicting harm
from a privileged racialized position. Thus, on one level, the invocation
of a traditionally gendered discourse served to maintain Helms' silence
about the UDC members'whiteness.
Helms' emphasis on gender also intersected with another strategy
often used to mask whiteness: equating whiteness with nationality.
White and American are often assumed to be synonyms (Nakayama
and Krizek 300). Helms argued that the UDC's feminized patriotism
justified a Senate decision to honor them. Likening the UDC to other
Summer 1997 259
patriotic organizations, Helms marshaled extensive references to the
UDC's charitable work: "When the military calls, the Daughters of the
Confederacy always answer" (S9252). The UDC served in support roles
in World War I and World War II. "During Korea, Vietnam, and Desert
Storm, the UDC served their country by ensuring that soldiers and
sailors were taken care of both during and after battle" (S9252).
Helms' ideological strategy, his struggle to define the meaning of the
UDC, is even more apparent in his discussion of the group's origins.
Helms' description illustrates both how this construction of patriotism

masks whiteness and how his formulation of a feminized patriotism
makes women seem too benign to be racist. First, Helms redefined the
Confederate flag as a patriotic symbol of an honorable cause rather
than a symbol of racism. He referred to the Civil War as the "War
Between the States" and the fight "for Southern Independence." These
terms depict the Civil War as a conflict between two autonomous
nations and construct Confederate patriotism as allegiance to an
independent nation, thereby skirting the importance of the slavery
issue in the Civil War. UDC members maintained their patriotic
allegiance to both the United States and the Confederacy by "bur[ying]
the sword" while also continuing to honor the "courageous men who
fought and died for the case they believed in" (S9252). The silent
assumption that Americans are white masked the slippage in Helms'
move to redefine the Confederate flag as a symbol of patriotism. To be a
Confederate patriot is to be committed to national independence. This
parallels the definition of American patriotism as a commitment to
America's national independence. A person who assumes that white
and American are synonyms would more easily ignore the absence of
slavery in this equation. Thus, Helms argued that since the Senate
regularly honors American patriots, it should also honor a group of
women who are both Confederate and American patriots because there
is no difference.
Second, Helms' account relied upon a benign construction of women's
patriotism. Rhetorical appeals to patriotism have often been masculin-
ized as heroism in battle, and U.S. military policy has historically
excluded women from combat. Women's patriotism, on the other hand,
is typically constructed, as in Helms' discourse, in relation to men in
battle. UDC wives, widows, and daughters of Confederate soldiers do
not continue the fight; they merely preserve the memory of their
courageous men. Such feminized patriotism masks whiteness both by
invisibly equating patriotism with whiteness and by constructing it as
innocuous. According to Helms, "There is not one evil member of the
UDC. There is not one member of the UDC who wants to pick a fight
with anybody. As I say, many of them are in rest homes, retirement
homes, and they are marvelous ladies" (S9252).
This analysis of Helms' opening argument illustrates how the
ideology of white privilege operates through rhetorical silence. Helms'
statement was an argument over the meaning of the UDCits

members, its actions, and its insignia. It was an ideological struggle to
maintain silence about the members' whiteness and its implications
through a strategic use of gender. Two key issues arise here. First,
rhetorical silence about whiteness sustains an ideology of white
privilege. Second, intersecting gendered discourses work to preserve
this silence.
Helms' silence about whiteness naturalized the taken-for-granted

assumptions contained in his framework for understanding who is
harmed by this decision. The "colossal unseen dimensions [ofj the
silences and denials surrounding" whiteness are key political tools for
protecting white privilege and maintaining the myth of meritocracy
(Mclntosh 35). This silence is rhetorical and has important ideological
implications. Scott observes that silence and speaking have symbolic
impact and as such are both rhetorical. When considering the dialectic
of speaking and silence, he thinks of silence as the absence of speech.
Silence is active, not passive; it may be interpreted. Furthermore,
silence and speech may be both simultaneous and sequential. The
absence of speech about whiteness signifies that it exists in our
discursive silences. It may often be intentional; it can be interpreted,
and it can occur simultaneously with the spoken word. Whiteness'
silence is ideological because it signifies that to be white is the natural
condition, the assumed norm. Scott notes that silences symbolize the
nature of thingstheir substance or natural condition. Silences symbol-
ize "hierarchical structures as surely as does speech" (15). Indeed, the
very structure of privilege generates silences, and "ironically, the most
powerful rhetoric for maintaining an existing scheme of privilege will
be silent" (10). Thus, silent rhetorical constructions of whiteness like
Helms' protect material white privilege because they mask its exis-
tence.
hooks articulates the more specific notion that silence is a key part of
racist oppression that operates in a myriad of ways. Silencing rage
against oppression, for example, is a tool of colonization, a way to
enforce and perpetuate racism (Killing 14). In his speeches, Helms
attempted to respond to Moseley Braun's charge of racism by maintain-
ing silence about whiteness. Moreover, hooks has pointed out in a
different context that focusing solely on gender deflects attention from
racist and classist oppression. She notes that by focusing solely on
gender, white feminists have ignored problems of race and class by
remaining silent about them (Talking 19-20). While Helms certainly
did not articulate a pro-feminist view of women, he did attempt to
re-focus his audience's understanding of the UDC by using a traditional
construction of their gender while remaining silent about their race.
That is, Helms appealed to a traditional view of the UDC members as
gentle elderly ladies who are too powerless and patriotic to inflict the
harm of racism. He attempted to preserve silence about their whiteness
Summer 1997 261
by deflecting the issue, changing the subject from race to gender. Thus,
Helms' arguments illustrate how whiteness, usually unmarked and
unnamed, can maintain its ideological silence in public political
discourse, even in the face of a charge of racism, by changing the subject
to the powerlessness of women.
Moseley Braun: Dissociation, Definition, and the Limits of

Nationalism
To counter Helms' opening argument, Moseley Braun chose a

strategy of dissociation and definition. Initially, she argued that a
"refusal to extend this extraordinary honor by this body does not stop
them from doing whatever it is they do, from continuing their work in
the community and the like" (S9253). Giting letters from the Patent
Commissioner, she maintained that the organization "can continue to
fundraise. They can continue to exist. They can continue to use the
insignia" (S9253). For Moseley Braun, the only issue was "whether or
not this body is prepared to put its imprimatur on the Confederate
insignia used by the United Daughters of the Confederacy" (S9253).
Moseley Braun's description of what the issue was not led to her
definition of what the issue was: the nature of the symbolic statement
made by a Senate that honors a Confederate symbol. She argued that
the decision to approve the honorary patent was not a decision to honor
the good works of a group of gentle elderly ladies. Rather, it was a
decision to honor a symbol of slavery. She challenged the assumption
that the South was fighting solely for national independence and
questioned the propriety of the patent: "Those of us whose ancestors
fought on a different side in the Civil War, or who were held, frankly, as
human chattel under the Confederate flag, are duty bound to honor our
ancestors as well by asking whether such recognition by the U.S.
Senate is appropriate" (S9253). Moseley Braun then pursued this line
of argument by attacking Helms' definition of the symbol as "revisionist
history" (S9253). Interestingly, her key observation about the pro-
slavery meaning of the Confederate flag initially did not include any
explicit mention of whiteness.
Instead, she appealed to common cultural knowledge about Confed-
erate symbols citing the historical use of the Confederate flag to resist
civil rights advances: "When a former Governor stood and raised the
Confederate battle flag over the Alabama State Capitol to protest the
Federal Government's support for civil rights and a visit by the
Attorney General at the time in 1963, everybody knew what that
meant" (S9253). Then she argued that the Confederate symbol's history
informs our present day understanding of its meaning: "Now, in this
time, in 1993, when we see the Confederate symbols hauled out,
everybody knows what that means" (S9253-S9254). By repeatedly
using the words "everybody knows," she encouraged her audience to
enthymematically remember the flag's history and relegate the symbol
to a racist past by rejecting its propriety in the present.
By employing this enthymematic strategy, Moseley Braun chose not
to explicitly mention whiteness in her initial retort. Instead, she noted
what "everybody knows" about symbols of white supremacy and being
white. Referring repeatedly to "what everybody knows" about the
meaning of the Confederate flag seemed to indicate that she recognized
the symbol's hegemonic influence. If "everybody knows" that the symbol
represents white supremacy, then the use of the symbol signifies

consent to the assumption that white privilege is natural and should be
taken for granted. Yet, her enthymematic strategy also illustrated her
unwillingness to take up an explicit discussion of whiteness and its
implications. Ideologies operate hegemonically when we collectively
consent to assumptions that are often unspoken because they are taken
for granted as what is natural. Because of these unquestioned beliefs,
the very act of naming the assumption, much less criticizing it, is
extremely threatening. No one wants to say explicitly what "they
know," what is assumed to be true, about symbols of white privilege.
Even when Moseley Braun ultimately did name the Confederate flag
as a symbol of white supremacy by quoting the Vice President of the
Confederacy, she commented on her reluctance to do so, saying:
I was not going to get inflammatory. In fact, my staff brought me this little thing earlier,
and it has been sitting here. I do not know if you noticed it sitting here during the earlier
debate in which I was dispassionate and tried my level best not to be emotional and
lawyering about and not get into calling names and talking about race and racism. I did
not use it to begin with. (S9257)
In her second speech, she did use the quote to explicitly critique the
Confederate flag as a symbol of white supremacy, but she clearly
anticipated the firestorm of controversy that erupts when one chal-
lenges a powerfully hegemonic assumption. So, even though she
recognized the hegemonic influence of whiteness, challenged a symbol
of racist ideology in her first speech, and later explicitly named
whiteness, her strong reluctance to do so indicated that she was
constrained by the hegemonic influence of a racist ideology.
Moseley Braun's next argument reveals more about this hegemonic
constraint. After appealing to what "everybody knows" about the
Confederate flag, Moseley Braun provided an alternative unifying
symbol of patriotism for her audience to embrace: "The flag, the Stars
and Stripes forever is our flag, whether we are from the North or South,
whether we are African-American or notthat is our flag" (S9254).
Here, Moseley Braun appealed to the American flag as a patriotic
symbol that would "put behind us the debates and arguments that have
raged since the Civil War [and] get beyond the separateness [and]
division [that are] fanning the flames of racial antagonism" (S9254). By
naming the Confederate flag as a counter-productive symbol of racial
Summer 1997 263
antagonism, Moseley Braun redefined Helms' argumentative ground
and forced him to defend the Confederate flag as a symbol of racial
hatred against the American flag as a symbol of patriotism.
However, as Nakayama and Krizek have noted, contradictory rhetori-
cal strategies enable whiteness to dodge challenges to its invisibility
(302). Moseley Braun's argument that the American flag stands for all
Americans also had limitations, for nationalism itself often relies upon
a construction of whiteness. Historically, the legitimacy of our new
nation was guaranteed through a discourse that used whiteness to

define the United States as racially different from other nations. This
discourse was used to transform political differences among whites into
racial differences between whites and blacks (Michaels 658). Even a
large faction of white abolitionists adhered to a notion of white
nationalism and perpetuated racist and sexist stereotypes about freed
slaves (Fredrickson 164; hooks, Ain't 54), and racism has often since
rationalized and justified colonialism (Ross 2). Further, whiteness as
the defining characteristic of United States nationhood has been used
to justify Native American genocide and harsh anti-immigrant rheto-
ric.
Moseley Braun spoke as a class privileged person who quite possibly
believes the nationalist ideology represented by the American flag. Yet,
her speech indicates that ideologies of privilege conceal contradictions,
for Moseley Braun's appeal to nationalism reflects a commitment to
current class structures and neglects a deeper appreciation for the
connection between racism, sexism, and classism in the United States.
White privilege can be sustained by nationalistic discourse which
preserves class distinctions. As hooks has noted, class "divisions serve
the interest of neo-colonial white supremacy, for they lead to the
formation of a new black bourgeoisie who work to strengthen the
imperialism and capitalism of mainstream white culture while simulta-
neously advancing their own class interests" (Killing 169). Challenging
white privilege threatens alliances with white privileged people who
control most of the wealth in the United States. Those alliances are a
precondition for the successful pursuit of class privilege, and class-
unifying nationalistic discourse promotes those alliances. Thus, hooks'
point is that the pursuit of class privilege dampens resistance to white
privilege because of the intersection between racism and classism.
Moseley Braun's opening argument illustrates this phenomenon. A
class privileged Senator Moseley Braun ignored nationalism's racial-
ized definitions of nationhood and its historical allegiance with racism.
As a result, the contradictions inherent in employing nationalistic
discourse to resist racism severely limited her initial argument.
Helms' Second Line of Argument: Senate Bullies and Racial Others

Although Helms did not explicitly point out this limitation of
Moseley Braun's argument, he did capitalize on the historical strategy
of uniting whites by denning race as a characteristic of a non-white
other. Helms argued that the patent denial "unfairly singled out [the
UDC] for punitive action" (S9256). He insisted that Moseley Braun was
inflaming racial tensions where there were none. Helms noted, "As far
as I know, race relations in North Carolina are excellentthey may not
be good in Illinois, or OhioI do not know about that, but in North
Carolina they are fine" (S9256). Thousands of people "enjoyed the good
living in North Carolina, people who love our state and they love the
South. As far as I know, there is no bitterness between the races"

(S9256).
Helms argued that in terms of inflaming racial tensions the UDC is
blameless: "I have never heard the UDC mentioned as having created
any dissension whatsoever, racial or otherwise" (S9256). Instead, he
argued that Moseley Braun purposefully had created dissension by
attacking a harmless UDC for political gain: "I hope the Senator from
Illinois has not embarked upon an inflammatory political gambit. We
should avoid theatrics. There should be no ad hominem attacks"
(S9256). Here, Helms suggested that Moseley Braun's mention of racial
issues was an inflammatory political ploy based on unfounded personal
attacks, and he implied that Moseley Braun was creating a problem
where there was none before. According to Helms, race became a
problem because the trouble-making outsider, Moseley Braun, made it
one. Otherwise, the issue of race would be irrelevant. Next, Helms
attempted to reverse the moral blame by depicting Moseley Braun as a
bully picking on the UDC with unfounded accusations of racism: "If a
Senator is going to use tactics of this sort, it would be better if she would
pick on somebody her size" (S9256). According to Helms, not only was
Moseley Braun creating a problem by unnecessarily making a political
issue out of race, she did so as a bully, an unwanted outsider destroying
the harmony of the status quo. Both of these statements illustrate
Helm's argumentative strategy of "othering."
I define "othering" as the rhetorical practice of depicting people of
color as having the characteristic of race while simultaneously assum-
ing that white people are somehow not "raced." West notes that when
black people are "viewed as a 'them,' the burden falls on blacks to do all
the 'cultural' and 'moral' work necessary for healthy race relations" (3).
The rhetorical strategy of othering has dangerous material results
because the way we discuss race shapes both our perceptions and
responses to racial issues. Helms' second line of argument coupled the
initial strategy of portraying the UDC as gentle elderly ladies with a
strategy of attributing race as a characteristic of a trouble-making
outside other. This othering allowed him to depict the UDC as
undeserving victims of a racial political ploy.
In his second speech, Helms initially constructed the UDC as lacking
the power to be racist and, through the strategy of othering, as not
responsible for any "unintended" racism. He sustained this initial
Summer 1997 265
argument with rhetorical silence about UDC members' white privilege.
He never mentioned the word "white." Thus, his second strategy,
attributing race as a characteristic of a non-white other, also relies
upon silence about whiteness. Helms argued that race is only relevant
when a racialized "other" makes it into a political ploy that victimizes
undeserving elderly ladies. Both of these constructions in the ideologi-
cal struggle over the meaning of race were designed to maintain silence
about the power of white privilege.
At this point in the Senate debate, it appeared that Helms' silencing

strategy would succeed; the Senate rejected Moseley Braun's motion to
table the amendment 52 to 48. Faced with Helms' othering strategy,
Moseley Braun threatened to filibuster the amendment. She noted: "I
started offmaybeI do not knowit is just my day to get to talk
about race. Maybe I am just lucky about that today" (S9257). With some
trepidation, she engaged another, more powerful, appeal: rhetorical
enactment.
Moseley Braun's Second Strategy: Rhetorical Enactment

Enactment is an electrifying reflexive rhetorical form in which the
speaker incarnates the argument; she is the proof of her claim
(Campbell and Jamieson 9). In her response to Helms' rebuttal,
Moseley Braun resisted Helms' gender and race stereotypes by engag-
ing in an act of symbolic self-definition; she enacted the argument that
we should reject symbols of our racist past in favor of herself as a
symbol of the changing present. She simultaneously embraced two
aspects of her identity by clearly establishing herself as a representa-
tive of both her slave ancestors and her current constituents. First, she
described the personal indignation evoked by a Confederate symbol of
slavery:
The issue is whether or not Americans, such as myself, who believe in the promise of this
country, who feel strongly and are patriots in this country, will have to suffer the indignity
of being reminded time and time again, that at one point in this country's history we were
human chattel. We were property. We could be traded, bought, and sold. Now to suggest
as a matter of revisionist history that this flag is not about slavery flies in the face of
history Madam President. (S9257)
By including herself in the subject "we," Moseley Braun defined
herself as a representative of both her slave ancestors and all contempo-
rary Americans, and she explicitly defined the Confederate symbol as
one that stood for her own enslavement. Obviously, Moseley Braun
herself is not a slave. However, by making the statements "we were
human chattel," "we were property" and "we could be traded, bought,
and sold," she became the proof for her claim that the Confederate
symbol of slavery is truly offensive because it stands for the idea that
she could be treated as human chattel. To make clear the meaning of
the symbol, she further challenged Helms' abstraction of the Confeder-
ate flag from its racist history by quoting the Vice President of the
Confederacy: "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the
opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the
great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery,
subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition"
(S9257). In this way, Moseley Braun confronted Helms' historical
narrative by making whiteness present in the discussion of the Civil
War. In her previous speech, she had refrained from explicit mention of
whiteness, preferring instead to employ an enthymematic appeal to
what "everyone knows." Here, she chose to clearly state the connection
between the Confederate flag and white supremacy as further proof
that it is a symbol of her own enslavement.
At the same time, Moseley Braun argued that contemporary white
Americans, unlike the Confederate Vice President, reject racial subordi-
nation: "It is absolutely unacceptable to me and to me [sic] and to
millions of Americans, black or white, that we would put the imprima-
tur of the United States Senate on a symbol of this kind of idea"
(S9257). She argued that the 1992 elections were evidence of broad
public rejection of racism and sexism (S9257-S9258) and that "the
people of Illinois had no problem voting for a candidate that was
African-American" (S9258).
Moseley Braun's enactment strategy dissociated the patent renewal
decision from UDC members by providing a powerfully persuasive
alternative interpretation of who would be harmed by the outcome of
the vote: "This is not a matter of little old ladies walking around doing
good deeds. There is no reason why these little old ladies cannot do good
deeds anyway. If they choose to wave the Confederate flag, that
certainly is their right" (S9258). Instead, she argued that the vote was
about putting "to rest once and for a l l . . . the division in our Nation. . . .
And the people of this country do not want to see a day in which flags
like that are underwritten, underscored, adopted, approved by this
U.S. Senate" (S9258). Helms had constructed the decision to reject the
patent as an insult to a group of gentle elderly ladies who do good deeds.
Moseley Braun directly refuted his position by dissociating the symbol
from the UDC's good deeds and making vividly clear the flag's
representation of white supremacy.
Moseley Braun's enactment strategy also directly refuted Helms'
characterization of her as a racial outsider stirring up trouble in a
racially harmonious status quo. Instead, she argued that Helms'
attempt to honor the Confederate flag, a symbol of white supremacy,
was itself the original act of racial antagonism. Her enactment strategy
constructed the patent renewal decision as a divisive attempt to
circumvent the will of an electorate who see her as a symbol of change
from a racist past:
[T]he imprimatur that is being sought here today sends a sign out to the rest of this
country that that peculiar institution has not been put to bed once and for all; that,
indeed, like Dracula, it has come back to haunt us time and time and time again; and
Summer 1997 267
that, in spite of the fact that we have made strides forward, the fact of the matter is that
there are those who would keep us slipping back into the darkness of division, into the
snake pit of racial hatred, of racial antagonism and of support for symbolssymbols of
the struggle to keep African-Americans, Americans of African descent in bondage.
(S9258)
Moseley Braun argued that Helms'request for the Senate's imprimatur

on a symbol of white supremacy was an act of racial hatred and
antagonism because it actively supported a symbol of the struggle to
keep African Americans like Moseley Braun in bondage. Through an
othering strategy, Helms had originally characterized Moseley Braun

as an outsider disrupting a racially harmonious status quo. Moseley
Braun refuted this strategy by recasting the description of the situa-
tion. She claimed that Helms was responsible for dragging us back into
the "snake pit of racial division" by actively seeking the Senate's
approval of a symbol of white supremacy.
Moseley Braun's argument shifted the moral burden of racism to
those who would approve the symbol and ignore its representation of
white supremacy. Her presence in the Senate as symbol of the
electorate's rejection of racism placed her in a powerful position to
remind her colleagues of their patriotic responsibility to repudiate an
historical symbol of racial hatred. In Hall's terms, Moseley Braun
raised oppositional consciousness by enacting her argument against
Helms' racist ideology. She contested his construction of the racialized
"self" underpinning his ideological formation of race by presenting her
own person as an icon of her liberated slave ancestors. In this way, her
enactment revealed that Helms' historically contingent conception of
race was a social construction that should be rejected. After several
Senators spoke lauding Moseley Braun's powerful arguments, Senator
Ford moved to reconsider the vote, and the amendment was tabled 75
to 25.
Helms' Final Comments: Racial Ploys are Political Prostitution

Senator Helms spoke last and defended the invisibility of whiteness
until the very end. He claimed that the Senate "rose above principle
this afternoon when the specter of race was introduced by contrivance
into the debate. Race should never have been introduced and would not
have been except for the political rhetoric and partisan oratory that
happened this afternoon" (S9271). Race, understood by Helms as a
political ploy of a non-white other, had subverted fair play in the U.S.
Senate: "It was not those of us on this side who introduced race into the
debate this afternoon. It was a political ploy to escape responsibility for
false pretense that should not have happened in the first place"
(S9271). He argued that the Senate's decision was based upon "petty
meanness" and that the opposition were "pious, self-satisfied Senators"
who "were talking about some fabrication from their own minds for
partisan political purposes" (S9271).
Tellingly, Helms' final argument also relied upon gender to buttress

his construction of race as a divisive political ploy; however, he did not
invoke the same traditional view of women as gentle ladies he had
advanced earlier. Instead, he likened political partisanship to prostitu-
tion: "But the turncoats who ran for cover for political reasons, who
changed their positionwell, it's kind of like Dick Russell said decades
ago. Maybe they were indeed practicing the world's second oldest
profession" (S9271). According to Helms, a vote for the patent renewal
would have been a vote to protect traditional femininity embodied in

the gentle ladies of the UDC. In contrast, the ultimate vote to reject the
patent was a despicable act of (political) prostitution, the essence of
corrupted femininity. This submerged intersection of race and gender
resonates with more explicit historical constructions of pure white
womanhood designed to prevent miscegenation and protect white
racial "purity" (Clinton). A prostitute allows her body to be "violated" by
strangers; she is "impure." A political prostitute practices "race mixing^'
for political gain and, as a result, makes the political body impure and
morally corrupt. Helms initially accused Moseley Braun of disrupting a
racially harmonious status quo. Here, he accused his predominantly
white male colleagues of engaging in an act of interracial political
prostitution with the disruptive racial outsider by supporting Moseley
Braun's motion to table the amendment.
Moreover, Helms' charge of political prostitution directed toward
Moseley Braun had sinister overtones given the history of racist sexual
stereotypes of black women. Indeed, hooks notes that during and after
slavery "the institutionalized devaluation of black womanhood encour-
aged all white men to regard black females as whores or prostitutes"
{Ain't 62). Helms' implication was that Moseley Braun was a prostitute
who led the (mostly white male) Congress astray into political prostitu-
tion. Thus, Helms' ended his defense of a pro-slavery symbol with a
bitter invocation of a racist and sexist stereotype born out of the
institution of slavery.
Implications
This analysis brings into focus several observations about how
whiteness operates rhetorically and ideologically in public political
discourse. First, the ideology of white privilege maintains its invisibility
through rhetorical silence. Rhetorical silence protects the invisibility of
whiteness because it both reflects and sustains the assumption that to
be white is the "natural condition," the assumed norm. Rhetorical
silence about whiteness preserves material white privilege because it
masks its existence and makes the denial of white privilege plausible.
Hall argues that language is the principle medium of ideologies
because ideologies are sets or chains of meaning which are located in
language. However, ideologies also "work" through rhetorical silences
which conceal privilege. Ideological systems are made up of both
Summer 1997 269
presences and absences because positively marked terms 'signify' "in

relation to what is absent, unmarked, the unspoken, the unsayable"
(Hall, "Signification" 109). In this case, the ideology of white privilege
"works" through rhetorical silence about whiteness.
Second, gender- and class-based discourse can intersect racial dis-
course to maintain the silence of whiteness. Racism, sexism, heterosex-
ism, classism, and other forms of oppression often interact materially
and rhetorically (Crenshaw, "Beyond"; Eisenstein; Frye; Lorde). Gen-
der is located in a racialized context and as a consequence has racial

meaning. Race both constructs and fragments our understanding of
gender (Brooks-Higginbothom 257-258). Based on these premises,
Haraway argues that there is a race/gender system that produces and
reproduces a racialized patriarchy (129). As a result, language is both
racialized and engendered, coded with racial and gendered assump-
tions from the beginning (Eisenstein 3). Likewise, classist assumptions
also exist in racialized and gendered discourses and often work to
conceal the contradictions of ideological privilege (hooks, Feminist;
Lorde).
The analysis of this debate reveals how rhetorical silences that
maintain an ideology of white privilege are sustained by their intersec-
tion with sexism and classism. Initially, Helms attempted to dodge the
accusation of racism by invoking a traditional conception of gender
difference that celebrated the UDC's feminized patriotism. Thus, one
way that a public political rhetoric of whiteness maintains its silent,
privileged ideological status is to assert that patriotic middle-class
American/white women who do good works are too powerless to be
racist. Helms' arguments also illustrate how whiteness also maintains
its rhetorical silence through a strategy of "othering" that is bolstered
by a notion of corrupted feminity. By asserting that racism no longer
exists, othering defines race as a characteristic of a trouble-making
non-white outsider whose open discussion about race is a divisive
political ploy and, by extension, an act of political prostitution. Histori-
cally racist sexual stereotypes of black women as prostitutes resonate
in Helms' accusation of political prostitution. White people who support
"racial others" (like Moseley Braun) are engaged in (political) prostitu-
tion, the essence of corrupted femininity. Anti-racism is constructed as
"race mixing" for the purpose of political gain. This, coupled with
Helms' construction of "good femininity" as white, middle class, hetero-
sexual, nurturing women for whom wars are fought, reveals a consis-
tent strategy of mixing and matching sexist, racist, and classist
stereotypes for the purpose of silencing Moseley Braun's challenge to
whiteness' privilege.
An important implication of these first two claims is that rhetorical
critics must do the ideological work necessary to uncover silences that
conceal the contradictions of privilege in intersections among race,
gender, and class. Crenshaw's "intersectionality" thesis suggests one
way that we can avoid the dilemmas created by treating race and
gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.
She argues that the pervasive intersection of racism and sexism in our
culture means that critical race theories must include an analysis of
sexism, and that feminist theory must not fail to consider race, hooks
also argues for turning critical attention to this intersection, adding
that classism is an inherent part of the ideological mix (Talking;
Feminist). An intersectional approach that accounts for the roles of
racism, sexism, and classism in the perpetuation of dominance resists

the essentialism of single identity politics in which privileged, white
middle-class women claim to speak for all women (Minda 147).
Third, some anti-racism strategies can be complicit with the way in
which whiteness operates rhetorically, but enactment is one powerful
reflexive and personal form of resistance to racism. Moseley Braun's
initial invocation of the American flag as an alternative patriotic
symbol had its limitations because of the historical complicity of
nationalism with whiteness. Yet, by embodying herself as the patriotic
representative of her slave ancestors, the epitome of a racialized other,
and the representative of all contemporary Americans, she contested
the underlying historical assumption of both symbols: that patriotic
Americans are white. In doing so, she also undercut the strategy of
othering both by redefining a patriot as a person who rejects the
symbols of a racist past and by making visible the Confederate flag's
association with white supremacy by quoting the Confederate Vice
President. As a result, UDC members could not be benign feminized
patriots because they honor a symbol of white supremacy. She further
argued that making whiteness visible was not a political "ploy" because
the constituents she represents had already rejected our racist past and
its symbols in their very act of electing her. Thus, Moseley Braun's
enactment encouraged her audience to recognize that she was not a
racial bully who victimized powerless women but rather, a (representa-
tive) symbol of a change that was already taking place.
Moseley Braun's enactment was a powerful form of self-definition
which she used to combat the silence of white privilege. African
American women, faced with both gender and racial stereotypes,
frequently engage in the practice of self-definition because of the
dialectical nature of oppression and activism (Collins 95). Self-
definitional discourse involves a process of finding voice, a process
which empowers Black women to bring about social change, hooks has
described this feminist accent on voice, the move from silence into
speech, as a revolutionary idea, an act of resistance in and of itself
(Talking 12). Thus, the notion of bringing silence into speech as an
ideological act of resistance may be one useful way to think about
resisting racist discourse that operates through a rhetorically silent
whiteness. ^
Summer 1997 271
This idea does have its limitations, however. Consider that Moseley
Braun's argument contained an ideological contradiction in that she
was willing to embrace a nationalistic ideology even as she challenged
the historical assumption that patriotic Americans are white. Moseley
Braun's own class privileged position enabled her to challenge Helms'
silence about whiteness. Having access to the public forum of the
Senate was a condition of her class privilege. So, while challenging
silences may be an effective strategy for resisting racism, it is impor-
tant to keep in mind that ideological silences are not only formed by
active strategies of those who benefit from current power structures,
silence is also a condition of class/race/gender oppression. Even the
most well-intentioned intersectional rhetorical strategy designed to
resist oppression must carefully consider the implications of this fact.
Ideological Enactment as a Strategy for Self-Reflexivity

While these three observations help us to understand how whiteness
functions ideologically in political discourse, this analysis would be
incomplete without an exploration of the implications they have for
resisting racism in our teaching and research. This is true in part
because research concerning race, gender, and class is plagued by two
major problems. First, an important challenge to scholarship emphasiz-
ing race, gender, and class is that it lacks any real impact on everyday
life. Roediger notes:
A telling joke that has made the rounds among African American scholars comments on
the distance between academic trends in writing on race and life in the "real world." "I
have noticed," the joke laments, "that my research demonstrating that race is merely a
social and ideological construction helps little in getting taxis to pick me up late at night."
The humor here is sufficiently ironic that the joke does not signal a rejection of the idea
that the social construction of race is worth talking and writing about, but it does focus
attention to the fact that race may be more easily demystified on paper than disarmed in
everyday life. (1)
This problem arises in teaching as well. Because race is a very
powerful ideology, the intellectual demystification of race as a social
construction will not eliminate its potency. However, as Roediger
observes: "More importantly, the insight that race is socially con-
structed is so sweeping that by itself it implies few specific political
conclusions" (2-3). Students exposed to the literature suggesting race is
a biological illusion may end up agitating for anti-racist policies, or
conversely, they may end up arguing that anything race-specific is
illusory and dangerous, that the implication of race as a fiction is that
we should embrace "color-blindness" to transcend racism. Thus, the
ongoing struggle over the meaning of race needs to be taken a step
further than the mere observation that race is socially constructed.
Ideological criticism is needed in both research and teaching.
Ideological criticism reveals that the "color-blind" alternative ig-
nores our historical locations, circumscribed by the very existence of
racism itself, and pretends that "transcedence" of racism is an alterna-
tive that is immediately available to us. The attempt to "go beyond"
race describes "its own move beyond race as part of reason rather than
of history" (Gordon and Newfield 738). The logic of this argument
follows this pattern: if our talk about race causes racism, then reason
dictates that we should quit talking about race. It equates race
consciousness with racism. Such an equivocation has many difficulties
(Aleinikoff; Crenshaw, "Race"; Fair; Gotanda; Strauss; Tribe), but
perhaps the most consequential one is that it assumes that silence is

not rhetorical.
It assumes that silence is not rhetorical because it suggests that race
talk ipso facto causes racism. The assumption that "racism will go away
if we quit talking about race" is questionable given what this essay's
critique of the Moseley Braun/Helms debate tells us about whiteness'
silence in public political discourse. Whiteness is protected by silence.
White people do not have to talk about whiteness or question the
personal dimensions of racism very often. If we silence talk about race,
we will perpetuate whiteness' silent privilege. Ideological criticism does
not claim to "transcend" racism. It meets racism head on in the crucible
of public policy making and personal interaction, in both the symbolic
and material spaces in which racism exists and where the personal and
structural dimensions of racism, sexism, and classism intersect. Ideo-
logical criticism turns racism over, looks at it from all sides, and asks
what vested material interests racism protects. Ideological criticism
challenges the privilege of whiteness' silence.
Another difficulty related to talking about race is what Alcoff has
called "the problem of speaking for others." White people's voices have
always been privileged, even if they are attempting to resist racism. If
one pretends one's own privileged social location has no impact on her
ability to make epistemic claims, the result may very well be the
continuation or (re)production of oppression. Indeed, one part of the
experience of oppression is to be (mis)represented by others who enjoy
the power to speak and to be heard by virtue of their social location.
Another is to go unheard in an overwhelming cacophony of privileged
voices (Alcoff 6-7).
On the other hand, a retreat from argument may constitute a kind of
privileged narcissism that abdicates political responsibility and social
interconnectedness in favor of political apathy. It is safer for a white
privileged person to walk away from these issues or to refuse the
discussion of racialized personal experience in abstract conversation
about racism. Even if the choice to be silent is principled, it can often
lead to political inefficacy. Refusing to talk about white privilege will
not make it go away. Worse still, a retreat may only serve to "conceal the
actual authorizing power of the retreating intellectual" (Alcoff 22), and
thus, constitute nothing less than complicity with whiteness' rhetorical
silence. The question we must answer, then, is this: can white scholars
Summer 1997 273
speak to the issue of racism without speaking for or crowding out the
voices of people of color? It is important to find a way to answer this
question affirmatively because otherwise, in the wake of white critics'
retreat into political apathy and social disconnectedness, all the moral
and political work of resisting racism is left solely to people of color.
Both of these problems, the impact of this scholarship and the
problem of speaking for others, reflect a concern for whether critical
race scholarship will become "white assimilated." White assimilation
occurs when critical race scholarship is coopted by privileged academics

who conduct research to further their own careers but do not question
the institutional structures that reflect the precise relations of oppres-
sion they are criticizing (hooks, Yearning 54-55). It also occurs when
our students coopt the recognition of the social construction of race into
arguments for color-blind models that maintain silence about white
privilege. The major difficulty is that most white people do not see
themselves as racist and, therefore, do not recognize forms of institution-
alized racism because of the ideological invisibility of both institutional-
ized racism and personal white privilege stemming from it.
As a result, many authors have argued convincingly that anti-racist
scholarship and teaching must be guided by a commitment to resist
both institutional and personal forms of racism (e.g., Brah; Gilroy;
hooks, Killing). Specifically, critical race scholars have advocated a
strategy of self-reflexivity in research and teaching as a way of
grappling with these problems (e.g., hooks, Yearning 51-55; Nakayama
and Krizek 303-305). In this study, I have suggested that Moseley
Braun's choice of an enactment strategy may offer one way to think
about self-reflexive ideological resistance to racism in our scholarship
and teaching.
Moseley Braun made one form of institutionalized racism visible by
radically localizing the dispute with an enactment strategy. The
thought of Moseley Braun, a representative of her slave ancestors being
treated as chattel under a flag waved by the Vice President of the
Confederacy made extremely clear the personal devastation perpetu-
ated by an abstracted racist history. The impact of her enactment was
substantial: the Senate openly reversed its vote, and tabled Helms'
amendment which led the newspapers to conclude that the vote was an
historic and successful challenge to racism in the U.S. Senate (Clymer;
Lee; McGrory). Moseley Braun's enactment was an effective strategic
resistance to the silences surrounding the intersection of racism and
sexism at the personal level.
Yet, also consider the limits of her enactment. She was able to voice
resistance to racism in part because of her class privileged status as a
member of the U.S. Senate. This led to a contradictory embrace of a
nationalist ideology and the classism it protects. Although her argu-
ment was an enactment of the impact of racist oppression, it lacked an
explicit consideration of how her privileged class position enabled her

to voice her argument in ways that other victims of racist oppression
could not. This points out a difficult contradiction: voicing resistance to
oppression stemming from ideologies designed to protect privilege from
a privileged position.
Given this observation, consider the question: What if we conducted
our teaching and scholarship as an ideological enactment of the
rejection of privilege? Specifically, what would be required of white
scholars/teachers who would enact their ideological rejection of white

privilege? First, it would require a consistent commitment to revealing
how ideologies that determine meaning "work" to conceal silences about
our own privileges, privileges that exist in what we take for granted or
think is "natural" not only in writing but also in our offices, hallways,
and classrooms, the places where we live, work, and communicate with
each other. It would also require the recognition that the ability to voice
resistance itself is a privilege and must be used to reveal how
oppressive ideologies work to preserve our own privilege.
In our research, this means that we must avoid the tendency to
stand apart from our ideological criticisms and, instead, include as an
integral part of our scholarly studies, a self-reflexive analysis of our
discursive and ideological limitations. It means grappling with the
contradictions and silences surrounding white privilege and using our
critical scholarly skills to produce studies that resist racism. In the
classroom, this means challenging whiteness as the norm or bench-
mark for comparison. In rhetoric, we must make sure that the status of
"famous rhetor" is not marked by whiteness through the inclusion of
whites only. In organizational communication, we must make sure that
our case studies are not marked by whiteness by excluding the study of
minority-owned businesses. We need to include the topics of anti-
racism and white privilege, but not only from a literary distance. We
must also engage our students in meaningful dialogue about these
topics' connection to our personal lives. For example, including critical
observations about how the academy privileges me because I am white
helps my students to see how white privilege "works" and challenges
them to think critically about their own experiences. Sharing the story
with which I opened this essay points out that part of my white
privilege exists in their very classroom when they assume that I am
more "objective" about race matters than my African American col-
leagues. It strikes a cord. I can see in some of their faces the sudden
recognition that they too assumed the very same thing without even
thinking about it. It provides a starting point for all of us to unpack how
white privilege operates in our own lives.
Revealing white privilege is an act of speaking resistance to the
silences that protect it. However, silence is not only an active strategy
used to preserve oppressive ideologies, it is also a condition of race/
gender/class oppression. Ideological intersections mean that the "so-
Summer 1997 275
called self underpinning ideological formations is not a unified con-

cept. The self is a socially constructed and often contradictory subject
(Hall, "Gramsci's"440) because we can be privileged and not privileged
simultaneously. Resisting personal privilege will be difficult because of
these contradictions. Such contradictions obscure the existence of
oppression and its partner, privilege. Silences about privilege allow us
to ignore or rationalize the material effects of racism, sexism, and
classism and our personal relationship to them. Hall saw the advan-
tage of Gramsci's observation about the socially constructed and
contradictory self as making room for oppositional consciousness, but

that oppositional consciousness will never be fully realized without a
willingness to even acknowledge, if not reject, privilege conferred upon
us.
Individual acts that repudiate white privilege may not eliminate
racism because "a 'white' skin in the United States opens many doors
for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been
conferred on us" (Mclntosh 35). Yet, it is at least theoretically possible
for white people to reject the politics of dominance since there is
nothing essential about whiteness (Nakayama and Krizek 293). Enact-
ment is one way to resist hegemony by refusing to consent to the
ideological privilege conferred by a white skin in the attempt to make
room for oppositional consciousness. Enactment as a specific form of
self-reflexive ideological criticism of racism functions as both proof for
the claim that white privilege should be resisted and an illustration of
how others might do the same. Enacting a critique of one's own
privilege is a way to teach and write rhetoric as a form of self-criticism,
hooks captures the utmost importance of such self-criticism:
If much of the recent work on race grows out of a sincere commitment to cultural
transformation, there is a serious need for immediate and persistent self-critique.
Committed cultural criticswhether white or black, scholars or artistscan produce
work that opposes structures of domination, that presents possibilities for a transformed
future by willingly interrogating their own work on aesthetic and political grounds. This
interrogation itself becomes an act of critical intervention, fostering a fundamental
attitude of vigilance rather than denial. (Yearning 55)
As for the exchange with my student, she and I are both white
women and both class-privileged, and as she exited my office, her verbal
expression of my white privilege hung all too easily between us. Upon
reflection, I realized later that what was unusual about it was not the
fact that a white student somehow thought that I was "objective"
because I am white. What was unusual was the fact that she actually
said it; it was a rare and explicit marker of white privilege. While I later
took the opportunity in my classes to share a critical examination of
this personal exchange as a clear example of white privilege, I lost the
immediate opportunity with that student. I should have asked her to
stay and encouraged her to think about white privilege's integral role in
racism. I should have asked her how and why she attributed what she
perceived to be a positive characteristic to me based on my whiteness,
how and why white people benefit from those unquestioned and usually
unspoken attributions, and how and why she, I, and all white people
are privileged unfairly because of racism. In situations like this one, in
our teaching and research, and in every part of our lives, we must resist
whiteness' silence by persistently engaging in self-reflexive ideological
criticism.
NOTES
1
To mark the fact that race is a cultural construction, some use quotation marks. Since
this essay embraces this position, I refrain from doing so. I use the terms white and
whiteness throughout this essay not as an indication of an essential biological character-
istic but to mark a usually unmarked and unnamed social location and its attendant
discourse.
2
The term anti-racist identifies a political commitment to racial justice but does not
naively claim to be completely free of racism because racism is so systemic and white
privilege is so difficult to escape (Frye 126).
3
Numerous studies document that racism is pandemic in our society. Derrick Bell has
noted that library shelves creak under the weight of books recording the extensive
existence and terrible consequences of racism. One of the best is Andrew Hacker's Two
Nations. The Rand Institute also released frightening evidence of the material impact
of white privilege. "Race and ethnic disparities are enormous, far outdistancing any
other income differences that exist among these groups. For example for every dollar of
wealth of a white household of those in middle age, black households have 27 cents
and Hispanic households have 30 cents on the dollar" ("Rand" n.p.). "The typical black or
Hispanic household has less than $20,000 in wealth. More than a fourth of the older black
households and a third of Hispanics have no assets at all" (Yip B1).
WORKS CITED
Alcoff, Linda. "The Problem of Speaking for Others." Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92):
5-32.
Aleinikioff, T. Alexander. "A Case for Race-Consciousness." Columbia Law Review 91
(1991): 1060-1125.
Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race. Vol. 1. London: Verso, 1994.
Appiah, Anthony. "The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race." "Race,"
Writing and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
21-37.
Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Blair, Carole, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter. "Disciplining the Feminine."
Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (November 1994): 383-409.
Brah, Avtar. "Difference, Diversity and Differentiation." "Race," Culture and Difference.
Ed. James Donald and Ali Rattansi. London: Sage, 1993. 126-145.
Brooks-Higginbotham, Evelyn. "African-American Women's History and the Metalan-
guage of Race." Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251-263.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, eds. "Form and Genre in
Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction." Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical
Action. Falls Church, VA: SCA, 1978. 9-32.
Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress. New York: Pantheon, 1982.
Clymer, Adam. "Daughter of Slavery Hushes Senate." New York Times 23 July 1993: B6.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Crenshaw, Kimberle W. "Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitima-
tion in Antidiscrimination Law."Harvard Law Review 101 (1988): 1331-1381.
Crenshaw, Kimberle W. "Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live
Crew." Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First
Amendment. Ed. Mari J. Matsuda et al. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. 111-132.
Summer 1997 211
Dutcher, Patricia N. "The Meaning of Whiteness." Straight/White/Male. Ed. Glenn R.

Bucher. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. 85-98.
Dyer, Richard. "White." Screen 29 (Autumn 1988): 44-65.
Eisenstein, Zillah R. The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1994.
Ezekiel, Raphael S. The Racist Mind: Portraits of Neo-Nazis and Klansmen. New York:
Viking, 1995.
Fair, Bryan K. "Foreword: Rethinking the Colorblindness Model." National Black Law
Journal 13 (1993): 1-82.
Feagin, Joe R., and Hernan Vera. "The Souls of White Folk." White Racism. New York:
Routledge, 1995. 135-161.

Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-
American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Frye, Marilyn. "On Being White: Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race
and Race Supremacy." The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumans-
berg, NY: The Crossing P Feminist Series, 1983. 110-127.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. "Editor's Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It
Makes." "Race," Writing and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 1-20.
Gilroy, Paul. "One Nation Under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of 'Race' and Racism in
Britain." Anatomy of Racism. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1990. 263-282.
Goldberg, David Theo, ed. "The Social Formation of Racist Discourse." Anatomy of
Racism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 295-318.
Gordon, Avery, and Christopher Newfield. "Critical Response: White Philosophy." Critical
Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 737-757.
Gotanda, Neil. "A Critique of 'Our Constitution is Color-Blind.'" Stanford Law Review 44
(November 1991): 1-68.
Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. New York:
Ballantine, 1992.
Hall, Stuart. "The Whites of Their Eyes." Gender, Race and Class: A Media Reader. Eds.
Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 18-22.
. "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity." Journal of Communication
Inquiry 10 (Summer 1986): 5-27.
. "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-structuralist De-
bates." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985): 91-114.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as Property." Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993):
1707-1791.
Helms, Jesse. [Debate on Senate Floor]. Congressional Record 22 July 1993: S9251-
S9252, S9255-S9256, S9271.
Himelstein, Jerry. "Rhetorical Continuities in the Politics of Race: The Closed Society
Revisited." Southern Speech Communication Journal 48 (1983): 153-166.
hooks, bell. Ain't I A Women. New York: South End P, 1981.
. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End P, 1992.
. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End P, 1984.
---. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Holt, 1995.
. Talking Back: thinking feminist * thinking black. Boston: South End P, 1989.
. Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End P, 1990.
Houston, Marsha. "Women and the Language of Race and Ethnicity." Women and
Language 18 (Spring 1995): 1-7.
Houston Stanback, Marsha. "What Makes Scholarship About Black Women and Commu-
nication Feminist Communication Scholarship?" Women's Studies in Communica-
tion 11 (1988): 28-31.
Lee, Jessica. "Moseley-Braun's Dramatic Stand." USA Today 23 July 1993: A4.
Logue, Cal M. "Rhetorical Ridicule of Reconstruction Blacks." Quarterly Journal of

Speech 62 (1976): 400-409.
Logue, Cal M., and Thurman Garner. "Shift in Rhetorical Status of Blacks After
Freedom." Southern Communication Journal 54 (1988): 1-39.
Lorde, Audre. Sister/Outsider. Freedom, CA: The Crossing P, 1984.
McGrory, Mary. "Freshman Turns Senate Scarlet." Washington Post 23 July 1993: A2.
McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege." (Working Paper #189) Wellesley, MA: Wellesley
College Center for Research on Women, 1992.
Michaels, Walter Benn. "Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity."
Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 655-685.
Minda, Gary. Postmodern Legal Movements. New York: New York U P, 1995.
Moseley Braun, Carolyn. [Debate on Senate Floor]. Congressional Record 22 July 1993:
S9253-9263, S9269-S9270.
Nakayama, Thomas K., and Robert L. Krizek. "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric."
Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (August 1995): 291-309.
"Rand Study Finds Wide Disparity in Wealth, Raising Future Concerns." BNA Manage-
ment Briefing. Online. Lexis. 26 July 1995.
Rigsby, Enrique. "African American Rhetoric and the Profession." Western Journal of
Communication 57 (1993): 191-199.
Roediger, David R. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and
Working Class History. New York: Verso, 1994.
Ross, Robert, ed. Racism and Colonialism: Essays on Ideology and Social Structure. The
Hague: M. Nijhoff for Leiden U P, 1982.
Scott, Robert L. "Dialectical Tensions of Speaking and Silence." Quarterly Journal of
Speech 79 (1993): 1-18.
Shipman, Pat. The Evolution of Racism. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994.
Strauss, David A. "The Myth of Colorblindness." Supreme Court Review (1986): 99-207.
Trank, Douglas M. "The Negro and the Mormons: A Church in Conflict." Western Journal
of Communication 35 (1971): 220-230.
Tribe, Laurence H. "In What Vision of the Constitution Must the Law Be Color-Blind?"
John Marshall Law Review 20 (1986): 201-207.
Van Dijk, Teun A. Elite Discourse and Racism. Newbury Park, C A: Sage, 1993.
Wander, Philip C. "The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism." Central States Speech
Journal 34 (Spring 1983): 1-18.
. "Salvation Through Separation: The Image of the Negro in the American Colonization
Society." Quarterly Journal of Speech 57 (1971): 57-67.
. "The Savage Child: The Image of the Negro in the Pro-slavery Movement." Southern
Speech Communication Journal 37 (1971): 335-360.
Wellman, David T. Portraits of White Racism Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1993.
West, Cornell. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon, 1993.
Yip, Pamela. "Minorities Barely Saving for Old Age." Houston Chronicle 25 July 1995: B1.

Resisting Whiteness&#39; Rhetorical Silence

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Resisting Whiteness&#39; Rhetorical Silence

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [Queensland University of Technology]

On: 02 November 2014, At: 04:22

To cite this article: Carrie Crenshaw (1997) Resisting whiteness' rhetorical

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570319709374577

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE