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Black Woman Professor, by T. O. Patton; published 2004 in The Howard Journal ofCommunications 15(3), 185-200

Reflections of a Black Woman Professor: Racism and Sexism in Academia

By Tracey Owens Patton

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the interdependence of racism and sexism in academia. To frame the

discussion, the theory of articulation coupled with hegemony was used. The narrative examples

cited in this article illustrate a White supremacist hegemonic structure supported in academe. The

essay explicates and illuminates issues of marginalization in academia because it increases

awareness about interlocking systems of domination in academia at the microlevel, and in doing

so, exposes important meanings of marginalization at the macro level. Further, salient

intersections between discourse and hegemony are critically analyzed because the role

communicative interactions play in articulating the experiences of marginality become primary.

Key words: Articulation, Borders, Hegemony, Marginalization, Racism, Sexism, White

supremacy

Dr. Tracey Owens Patton (Ph.D. University of Utah) is Assistant Professor of Communication in

the Department of Communication and Journalism at University of Wyoming. Her main interestsinvolve critical intercultural communication, interracial representation, and rhetorical studies.Her research focuses on the interdependence between race, gender, and power and how these

issues interrelate culturally in education, media, and speeches. The author thanks the editor, Dr.

Jill Bystydzienski, and Samuel Patton for their helpful comments.

The outsider-within position (P. H. Collins, 1986) is often an appropriate descriptor

and phrase for women in general and non-Euro American women in particular who work in

academe. The outsider-within descriptor aptly denotes and calls attention to the continued

prevalence of interlocking systems of domination in academia and the multiple ways dominance

is enacted on university campuses. During the last decade numerous scholars have written about

their dis/enchantment with the academy, and Communication Theory (1999) devoted a journal


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issue to the subject, yet dis/enchantment continues to exist in academe. The most disturbing facet

of this acknowledgement is that marginalization continues to flourish despite attempts to

transform the academy.

In this essay, I discuss the interdependence of racism and sexism in academe. To frame

the discussion, I rely on the theory of articulation coupled with hegemony. I recount some of my

experiences in academe to explicate and illuminate issues of marginalization in academia. The

examples cited in this manuscript illustrate a White supremacist hegemony at the University. My

recounting of my experiences is not intended to represent or reflect the experiences of other

Black women or non-white women at largely Euro American universities. Rather, this analysis

seeks to dig much deeper; this article adds to the ongoing conversation other scholars have

undertaken thus far. I seek to contribute to this area of research by turning scholarly attention

toward the hegemonic reproduction involved in the maintenance of marginalization regarding

racism and sexism in academe. I hope to advance a productive critical analysis through critically

analyzing constructions of disenchantment in academe.

The significance of this analysis is that it increases awareness about interlocking systems

of domination in academia at the microlevel, and in doing so, exposes important meanings of

marginalization at the macro level. Further, salient intersections between discourse and

hegemony are critically analyzed because the role communicative interactions play in

articulating the experiences of marginality become primary. To this end, I begin with an

overview of the importance of the theory of articulation. The remainder of the article is divided

into three sections: enchantment, disenchantment, and re-articulation. Narrative examples (found


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in the disenchantment section) are from my experiences as a multiracial Black1

woman in

academia and are critically analyzed through the lens of the theory of articulation and hegemony.

The Theory of Articulation and Hegemony

The theory of articulation provides us with the means of critiquing language, discourse,

and power. The theory of articulation is inextricably linked with and wedded to hegemony. As

Asante (1998) notes

Speech is itself a political actWhenever one categorizes society in an effort to make

concepts functional, one makes a choice among possibilities. Making a choice among

possibilities creates cleavages that benefit some to the disadvantage of others. Through achoice in language and action, maintenance of the current white supremacist hegemonic

order becomes intertwined in the most intricate patterns of our conversation andlanguage. (p. 87-88)

The enactment of agency with regard to language choice and action becomes a subjective

choiceto maintain the status quo or use language that produces actions that challenge the

current hegemonic order. The reproduction of hegemony is itself not solely a problem of color,

but also a historical conceptual framework based upon values granted to particular racial

categories (Asante, 1998) and values granted to particular language and action choices.

Therefore, while White supremacy may be a function of the institutional structure, it maintains

its naturalization because individuals through their articulation and enactment of hegemony

perpetuate marginalization. This enactment of hegemony can take the form of the dissemination

of symbols and acts or speech itself (p. 89). In other words, a conception of so-called reality

takes place within the institution whether it is through action, language, or thought. Therefore, an

institutionalized social framework becomes naturalized, reified, and unquestioned. As Slack

(1997) explains,

1Black is used as an encompassing term to include both Africans and African Americans. This term is particularly

important because not all Black Americans claim African ancestry.


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Epistemologically, articulation is a way of thinking the structures of what we know as aplay of correspondences, non-correspondences and contradictions, as fragments in the

constitution of what we take to be unities. Politically, articulation is a way of

foregrounding the structure and play of power that entail in relations of dominance and

subordination. Strategically, articulation provides a mechanism for shaping intervention

within a particular social formation, conjuncture or context. (p. 112)

The theory of articulation requires an examination of the configuration of power in any social

condition, and through which people or institutions advance or defend their interests and devise

tactics and strategies appropriate to their aims (Fiske, 1996, p. 67). In other words, people must

examine the complicitousness through which they defend their action and language choices.

Language is intertwined with articulation because socially constructed knowledge,

language, and action shape the present situation and the status quo which, in turn, have the power

to shape the individual and the institution and to reinforce the hegemonic order (Hall, 1997). In

higher education, as W. R. Allen (1992) argued, there are numerous barriers that, collectively,

ensure that a status quo rooted in an unfair system of racial stratification is reproduced within

the university (p. 42). Among these barriers are culturally and economically biased standardized

tests, administration and faculty that is largely White male, high tuition costs and low financial

aid programs, an emphasis on competition, and little cultural pluralism and diversity. W. R.

Allen stated that the nations colleges and universities seem to be not only content with, but

committed to, the current system of structured inequality, a system in which African Americans

[and other ethnic minorities] suffer grievously (p. 42). Change in higher education and in

pedagogy, W. R. Allen noted, will only come when universities feel more responsibility to

change and challenge the current status quo:

If we fail to respond creatively and effectively to this challenge, not only will

history judge us harshly, but this country will also continue to suffer the negativeconsequences, such as the loss of its competitive edge in the world market, that

have resulted from its failure to develop fully and utilize the talents of all its

people, without regard to race, gender, or class. (p. 43)


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Whether intentionally or not, universities can signal their collusion with maintaining the

White supremacist hegemonic order even as it articulates itself as open and is often

polemically known as liberal due to complicitous language and actions that on the surface

appear to address hegemony, however, upon closer inspection, they ultimately maintain it

(Patton, 2004). Dziech and Hawkins (1998) believe that whether it is an extension of or a

reaction against its history, an institutions present always reflects its past, and that past

influences [marginalized bodies] profoundly (p. 560). To challenge hegemonic concerns,

academia must be ever evolving. Discourses are ways of constituting knowledge or truth.

Through discourse people make meaning and make sense of their everyday world. As people

communicate about their social world they create and construct truths. According to Deetz and

Mumby (1990), this process of communicating necessarily takes place in the context of power

relations. As these scholars showed, communication and how it is structured can reify and

restructure hegemony. In their view, communication can be said to function ideologically in

that it produces and reproduces (i.e., legitimates) a particular structure of power relations (i.e.,

systems of interests) to the arbitrary exclusion of other possible configurations of interests (p.

42). Thus a constant power struggle ensues because communication occurs in the context of

hegemonic relations.

Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1992), who first described hegemony, argued in his

1920 essay Notes on the Southern Question that, the proletariat in Italy could only become the

leading or dominant ruling class insofar as it, leads the allied classes [and] dominates the

opposing classes (p. 136). The notion of hegemony was expounded by Gramsci to include all

classes, not just the proletariat alone. As Gledhill (1997) explained,

Since power in a bourgeois democracy is as much a matter of persuasion and consent as

of force, it is never secured once and for all. Any dominant group has to a greater or


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lesser degree to acknowledge the existence of those whom it dominates by winning theconsent of competing or marginalized groups in society. Unlike the fixed grip over

society implied by domination, hegemony is won in the to-and-fro of negotiation

between competing social, political and ideological forces through which power is

contested, shifted or reformed. Representation is a key site in such struggle, since the

power of definition is a major source of hegemony. (p. 348)

According to Patton (2004),

Earlier constructions of the hegemonic order reified Euro Americans as the center (most

often Euro American males) and marginalized anyone who deviated from that

hegemonically supported standard. Currently, the racial hegemonic order continues to

support the belief of Euro Americans at the center. However, through the negotiation

process other marginalities have been recognized: class, gender, and sexuality. (p. 67)

Omi and Winant (1994) find that,

Race, class, gender (as well as sexual orientation) constitute regions ofhegemony, areas in which certain political projects can take shape. They share

certain obvious attributes in that they are all socially constructed, and they all

consist of a field of projects whose common feature is their linkage of social

structure and signification. (p. 68)

Fairclough (1998) believed that hegemony is socially constructed and supported. Hegemony, as

much as leadership, can also be thought of as domination across the economic, political,

cultural, and ideological domains of a society (p. 92). Fairclough echoed Omi and Winant

(1994), claiming,

Hegemony is a focus of constant struggle around points of greatest instability between

classes and blocs, to construct or sustain or fracture alliances and relations of

domination/subordination, which takes economic, political and ideological forms. (p. 92)

This hegemonic hierarchy as Omi and Winant describe seems to be supported through the power

of centered groups. Centered groups have the power to retain and maintain the hegemonic order

[and] have the power to mark, classify, assign, and represent those others (Patton, 2000, p. 62).


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These hegemonic dualities or dichotomies operate at such a deep level as to appear

normal or naturalized. The dualisms that dominate Western tradition started with

the Enlightenment and coincided with European expansionism [and] it is correlated

precisely with new forms of oppressionPlato and Descartes both built theirepistemologies expressly to deal with the pressures on local belief brought to bear by

contact with other culturesto find permanent, objective truths that would counteract theinflux of truths from alien cultures. (Sartwell, 1998, p. 118)

The European and American use of Enlightenment epistemologies have been used to rationalize

and justify colonialism, expansionism, exploitation of third world labor, the slave trade and has

been used to sustain and relocate rather than eradicate an order of racial difference inherited

from the premodern era (Gilroy, 1996, p. 49). Dualism threatens the university, because it is

framed by the dominant hegemonic paradigm that we have inherited from European and

American history.

Hegemony, therefore, can only be understood in its constant attempt to restructure and

refigure its strengths and weaknesses, and in its continual attempt to recuperate forms of

resistance that are as ongoing as they are different (Giroux, 1993, p. 37). Academicians who

struggle against current constructions of hegemony, particularly as they concern the

interdependent representations of racism and sexism, may find that these three regions of

oppression culminate into interlocking systems of domination that provide for a chilly climate in

academe. According to P. H. Collins (1991), race, class, and gender may not be the most

fundamental or important systems of oppression, but they have most profoundly affected

African-American women (p. 227).

Interlocking systems of domination refer to the fact that systems of oppressionclass,

gender, race, and sexual orientationare interdependent. Often it is the current U.S. hegemonic

order which insists upon the either/or beliefyou are either oppressed because you are a woman


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or because you are an ethnic minority. Interlocking systems of domination take into account the

interdependent nature of oppression through a both/and or dialectical perspectiveyou are a

woman andan ethnic minority anda lesbian who may be oppressed. Depending on the situation,

all groups have varying amounts of privilege and marginalization afforded to them.

Additionally, a person can be both an oppressor and oppressed (e.g., a poor White woman; an

upper class Asian woman, etc.). Therefore, through interlocking systems of domination

hegemony is challenged. However, despite these interlocking systems of domination, resistance

to ones marginalization, multiple identity, and oppression is often discounted and reduced to an

either/or dichotomy. At the borderland of womanhood stand women of color, the double bind2

,

and the outsider-within. A. C. Collins (2001) contended that at the intersection of race and

gender stand women of color, torn by the lines of bias that currently divide white from non white

in our society, and male from female (p. 29). As I attempt to challenge the hegemonic structure

by critiquing it, I am using language that reifies it through the terminology of border, center,

and margin. I implicitly re-privilege hegemony because I am trapped by a discursive cycle that

makes it difficult to de-center the status of the privileged class. I am using this rhetorical

contradiction to navigate a world that does not often include me.

Enchantment

Academe has at least statistically become a more ethnically diverse institution. For

example a slight increase in ethnic minority professors has occurred. In 1992, 13.5 percent of all

2According to Frye (2001) one of the most ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is

the double bindsituations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty,

censure, or deprivation (p. 49). In this paper, the double bind specifically refers to women who are also ethnic

minorities. Because of this double marginality ethnic minority women are often put into a bind, particularly within

discussions of race and gender because of an either/or mentality that is produceddoes a woman fight against

sexism or racism? Is it possible to fight against both successfully? Often one issue is prioritized over the other

(Patton, 2004, p. 86).


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university professors were of ethnic minority (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2000b).

In 1999, about 14% of U.S. faculty in colleges and universities were minorities. Less than 1%

were American Indian/Alaskan Native; 5.8% Asian/Pacific Islander; 5.1% Black; and 3.3%

Hispanic (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2000a). Sixty-four percent of faculty were

males and 36% were female (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2000b). African

American female professors comprised 2.6% of all faculty (National Center for Educational

Statistics, 2000c); this is an increase from 1% in 1994 (Sadker, 1994). Overall there was a slight

increase in ethnic minority professors in general, however, there has been a 0.1% drop in African

American professors. Despite the small increase with African American women, I am an

outsider-within. As an outsider-within, I am often the only Black person in the department, and

usually the only Black female in the department. I am the most visible invisible person in my

department. My presence, however, does more than check a few boxes for administrators.

Mypresence signals that in this ivory tower there are and always have been pioneers in

academia who have come before me. My presence paves the way for other women and women

of color who will come after me. Further, I am given the chance to give backto give back to all

of those who encouraged me. I am given the opportunity to work for the betterment of all. I am

enchanted with the idea that academe is a harbor, a place to pursue ones research. Academe is a

place to exchange ideas in the pursuit of ontological and epistemological development. My

enchantment is not different from that of others. B. J. Allen et al. (1999) noted the enchantment

of others: We were or are enchanted with the promise of the academy as a market place for the

exchange of diverse ideas, and sometimes we have experienced such exchanges, with exciting

and affirming consequencesOur discipline holds the omnipresent potential to have long-term,

positive effects on peoples lives regarding matters of difference (p. 403).


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It is this attractive seduction that academe holds for me: the opportunities to pursue my

passion, disseminate knowledge, and engage with my students, peers, and colleagues. However, I

am not immune to the negative or disenchanting aspects of academe. During my lifetime pursuit

of education, I have experienced attempts at racial tracking, invisibility in the classroom, and

many other common experiences of the ethnic minority student. As a professor I continue to

experience a chilly climate, isolation, prejudice, racism, sexism, silence, and lack of mentorship

and lack of supportive colleagues. As B. J. Allen et al. (1999) foun d, the source of our

disenchantment lies within the idealism associated with institutions of higher learning. We are

attracted to a profession and discipline that inherently promises an openness to studying and

teaching difference, yet more often than not falls short of this promise (p. 403).

Disenchantment

A slight increase in women and ethnic minority female professors does not remedy issues

of racism and sexism in academe; particularly if there is no challenge to current marginalized

issues and concepts surrounding hegemony (e.g., lack of discussions of current U.S. racial

hegemony). Often it is believed that universities are institutions that embrace diversity in terms

of different beliefs, ethnicities, lifestyles, and perspectives. However, this rhetoric is only true so

long as it serves to protect the White supremacist patriarchal hegemonic order (hooks, 1984).

Rather than the university being a place to explore diversity and to embrace diversity,

universities often become complicitous in domination and oppression. According to Wellman

(1999),

Border academics are troublesome to university culture because their crossings reveal

borders that are otherwise invisible. Border crossers expose borders that universities

refuse to recognize and deny guarding. Boarder academicians are double-trouble for theuniversity. When they are not revealing borders, they expose the conflated character of

other categories. (p. 90)


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My presence and experiences along with other marginalized voices shift the experience of the

marginalized to the center. It is through this shifting that the effects of hegemony become visible.

Race, Racism, Womanhood and the Borderland

Boundaries differ from borderlands in many significant ways. Boundaries define the

borders of nations, territories, imaginations, and communities (Cottle, 2000). Boundaries mark

out the limits of place, space, and territory. Boundaries serve to maintain hegemony because

boundaries by design are to include or exclude, and have the ability to shape social relations.

What makes boundaries even more insidious is the fact that because of the Black/White binary

one is either an outsider or an insiderboundaries can become deeply entrenched and thus

common sense. Cottle (2000) described the process through which boundaries become

entrenched:

Once institutionally sedimented and taken for granted, these boundaries all too often

harden into exclusionary barriers legitimized by cultural beliefs, ideologies and

representations. In such ways, the marginalized and the excluded can become

ontologically disenfranchised from humanity, misrecognized as Other, exploited andoppressed, in extremis, vulnerable to systematic, lethal violence. (p. 2)

We have seen these boundaries enacted in numerous ways: American Apartheid (segregation),

education, glass ceiling, golf courses, internment camps, and office boardrooms to name a few.

Borders, on the other hand, can be crossed.

The fact that borders are crossable, does not mean that hegemony is not employed.

Rather, sometimes people on the margins are allowed to cross if it serves the needs of those in

the center. One common example of this is the U.S. feminist movement. Numerous scholars

studied the feminist movement in detail. However, it is fair to say that even though most women

experienced some form of gender discrimination not all were allowed to participate in the

feminist movement in the same way. For example, some women felt that the feminist movement


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was only concerned with the problems of bourgeois, well educated, White women. hooks (1984)

illustrated this border-crossing when she stated,

The condescension they [white women] directed at black women was one of the means

they employed to remind us that the womens movement was theirsthat we were ableto participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to

legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. They did not treat us as equals. Andthough they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experiences, they felt it

was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic (p. 11).

This example illustrates that while the feminist movement was constructed as a movement for

the betterment of all women, Black women were allowed to cross a socially-constructed White

womans movement so long as their border-crossing benefited the needs and desires of the

centered groupfinancially secure White women. This is similar to how women academicians

were allowed to border-cross into the ivory tower. But the experiences for non-White women

are not the same in academe. According to Gregory (1999) in her book detailing Black womens

experiences in academe, African American women faculty continued to be concentrated among

the lower ranks, primarily non-tenured positions, promoted at a slower rate, paid less than their

male and white female counterparts, located in traditional disciplines, and primarily employed by

two-year colleges (p. 11).

Turner and Myers (2000) examined the experiences of African Americans, Asian Pacific

Americans, American Indians, and Latino faculty, with those of White faculty at eight

Midwestern universities located in Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska,

Ohio, and Wisconsin. In addition to documenting the continued underrepresentation of faculty of

color in American colleges and universities, their data revealed the subtle but insidious influence

of a decidedly chilly work environment. Moreover, the study identified a number of barriers

including, racial and ethnic bias, that results in an unwelcoming and unsupportive work

environment. Undoubtedly, such an environment impacts the productivity and career


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satisfaction of ethnic minority faculty in the academe and discourages others from trying to enter

the professoriate (Turner & Myers, 2000, p. x).

Introduction to the Narratives

Women scholars of color, working as others do within interlocking discourses of

oppression, face significant challenges in attempting social change within the institutionor in using (borrowing?) institutional privilege to effect social change beyond the

institution (Williams, 2001, p. 89).

The three narratives critically analyzed in the remainder of the paper describe the

marginalization that I have faced in academia. My narratives show that marginalization

continues to flourish despite attempts to transform the academy. In addition, my narratives signal

that at any institution we are both transformed by and transform the organization. Even though I

am no longer at the institutions in which these narratives have taken place, I have been

intentionally vague about the particular details (i.e., context, location, and situation) in order to

protect the identities of those involved and myself from backlash. I have altered the narratives to

obscure identities. However, it should be noted that despite the necessary ambiguity, each

situation can be thoroughly understood and critically analyzed.

Narrative One: Sister Solidarity

The first narrative is an example of the division of among women, borders, hegemony,

and the double bind. I was at a meeting where the various benefits that some colleagues received

were discussed; i.e., graduate or undergraduate assistant, graduate teaching stipend, research

money, salary raise, and course reduction, as opposed to the lack of benefits other colleagues

received. In this meeting I felt privileged to be included among those who should receive such

benefits. Never before had my position and situation within the department been rewarded. I

quickly learned my feelings were nave.


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I sure hope we will receive benefits comparable to Ryans3

(a Black male). I wonder, didRyan really deserve the benefits he received? Did they really deserve the benefits they

received?

As Susan, a White female, speaks, she looks at me, as do others who are attending the same

meeting. In an instant I am transformed from being included to being Black, and therefore,

excluded. Did they really deserve the benefits theyreceived? (italics mine). I am an outsider-

within.

In analyzing the above experience, if we problematize the notion of racism and sexism

through the idea of belonging; i.e. border crossing, we are left with the paradox of the outsider

withinboth belonging and disenfranchisement simultaneously. The notion of outsider within

becomes a hegemonic category for organizing the institutional and cultural apparatus with its

regulations and cultural functions for maintenance of the status quo. I am caught up in the

politics of domination and colonizationthe same politics that allow my skin color to become

more visible than my gender. In this moment, I am not only an outsider within, but I am

ultimately an essentialized being. I am marked and fixed into either/or categories. According to

Hall (1996), The essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes

difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic

(p. 472). Because essentialization has been allowed to occur through the maintenance of

hegemony, my skin color now supercedes any female bonding or so-called sisterhood. I have

been rendered the visible invisible.

The politics of domination and colonization allow me to be reduced, my unique

characteristics obscured, and differences concealed. As P. H. Collins (1998) pointed out

3All names in this essay have been changed.


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Relying on the visibility of African-American women to generate the invisibility ofexclusionary practices of racial segregation, this new politics produces remarkably

consistent Black female disadvantage while claiming to do the opposite (p. 14).

According to hooks (1989), as subjects, people have the right to define their own reality,

establish their own identities, name their history. As objects, ones reality is defined by others,

ones identity created by others, ones history named only in ways that define ones relationship

to those who are subject (p. 42-43). Patton (2000) finds that those who define only mark

themselves by what they are not, which contributes to the normalization or naturalization of

whiteness as something not diverse and invisible. Non-whites become the marked, visible other.

Further there is retention of power because the definer is never marked (p. 38).

The power to mark the body comes from those who have the power to represent. Groups

who are able to retain and maintain the hegemonic order have the power to mark, classify,

assign, and represent those others. According to Hall (1997), Power, it seems, has to be

understood here, not only in terms of economic exploitations and physical coercion, but also in

broader cultural or symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a

certain waywithin a certain regime of representation (p. 259). Thus, the politics of

domination and representation become played out on the body in favor of retaining the current

hegemonic order. It is this naturalization of domination whether in terms of classism, racism,

sexism etc. that allows hegemony to not only be widespread, but a lso appear natural and

inevitable (Hall, 1997, p. 259). Therefore, by its very nature, the university recreates the

hegemonic order and contributes to the reification of disenfranchised persons because it operates

by constructing and has constructed an impassable boundarythe outsider within.

The power of this impassable boundary seems to come not only from the current

construction of hegemony, which privileges Whiteness above all else, but also from the


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ideological construction of the naturalized privilege of whiteness. It is this ideological

construction that makes the imagining of academe as accepting and welcoming a place

fraught with disenfranchisement, marginalization, and adherence to the status quo. Thus, like the

colonizers gaze, attempts to fix and mark, and naturalize the difference between the centered

and the disenfranchised occur frequently.

Narrative Two: Gender and Race

This second narrative is an example of the intersectionality of gender and race in the

organization. Wayne, a White male, felt he could advance his patriarchal White supremacist

dominance without any repercussions because of the organizational structure that seemingly

condones such domination. In a casual hallway conversation with another colleague, Wayne

decided to tell me what he thought of my research: Clearly my research is counter to and

challenges his White supremacist patriarchal worldview. At the end of this confrontation Wayne

struck me with a heavy object. Nobody cares about race, racism. None of it matters. If you

want to succeed you better learn how to compromise your values. You had better sell your soul.

Your research contributes nothing. You need to lay low and just be silent.

I informed my department chairperson of what occurred and the fact that I was stuck and

she/he said, Thats just Waynes quirky sense of humor. He is a funny guy. When I sought

advice from the director of human resources and diversity, I was told to put up with it, because

youre new and no one at the university will support you. As Aparicio (1999) finds, due to the

underrepresentation of non-White faculty at universities, despite the glacial increase of their

numbers, many [faculty of color] face isolation, racial and gender-based antagonisms, the

devaluation of their research interests and achievements, insufficient mentoring and support

mechanism, and ambivalence about their academic authority (n. p.).


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The environment created is one that is hostile and degrading and one that supports White

supremacy and, in this case, patriarchy. It is an environment in which devaluation can be

dismissed as humor. It is an environment that is complicitous with Waynes call for me to just

be silent. It is an environment that reminds me that I do not belong. It is a university

environment that as Luz Reyes and Halcon (1991) argued, mirrors the same attitudes and

generalities about cultural/racial differences that plague larger society (p. 171). It is an

environment where faculty of color continue to report experiences of subtle discrimination in

the workplace, such as seeing their work devalued if it focuses on minority issues (Turner &

Myers, 2000, p. 22). Furthermore, subtle but pervasive discrimination indicates that I am a threat

to the status quo. According to A. C. Collins (2001), the academy provides a chilly environment

for Black women students, faculty, and administrators. The environment of the academy for the

most part, is unreceptive, unsupportive, and lacks in understanding and sensitivity to issues that

affect Black women (p. 38).

While any organizational member, at some level, will become acculturated or integrated

into the organizational climate and culture, one maintains her/his own identity as well as

interacts within the organizational climate and culture. The statement sell your soul in the

above quote refers most directly to assimilation. The assimilationist view as Yep (1998)

described directs the marginalized person to try harder and harder to adhere, obey, and follow

the rules of the dominant grouprules that he or she can never fully and completely participate

in creating (p. 80).

In addition, the strategy of assimilation invoked by sell your soul is deeply rooted in

White supremacy and advocates a negation of anything counter to the maintenance of the White

supremacist hegemonic order. Sell your soul refers not only to assimilation into the


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organization, but also is an attempt to mark, maintain, fix and naturalize the difference between

belongingness and otherness. Belongingness necessitates maintenance of the current hegemonic

order. Any challenge to the status quo, which might cause one to reflect upon her/his complicity

with the status quo, must be denied and the internalized gaze must be reflected, turned outward,

away from the self; hence the objectified gaze maintains the current hegemonic order. The

representations of other through the White supremacist lens not only maintain the White

supremacist hegemonic order, but also the representations render whiteness invisible. Whiteness

is deemed rational and acceptable, and non-whiteness irrational and non-acceptable. Thus, the

dance between the spectator and the spectacle continues.

Narrative Three: Modern Racism

This White supremacist discourse is one that is not new, but is one that is cloaked in

modernism. As Giroux (1992) explains,

Modernist discourse in various forms rarely engages how white authority is inscribed and

implicated in the creation and reproduction of a society in which the voices of the center

appear either invisible or unimplicated in the historical and social construction of racism

as an integral part of their own collective identity. (p. 116)

This invisible or modern racism is one in which the subtle manifestations of racism are covert,

and seemingly more difficult to prove because they are naturalized.

No longer are hate-filled faces a part of public displays at predominantly white

institutions, nor are pictures of elected officials barring the entrance of African American

students. Blatant rules excluding minorities from facilities of predominantly whiteuniversitiesas Harvard excluded the eminent W.E.B. DuBoisare no longer on the

books. Overt racism has gone underground, out of the glare of the journalists and the

television cameras that captured the raw emotions of the civil rights movement in the

1960s. (Turner & Myers, 2000, p. 11)


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A more expansive term for covert racism is inferential racism. As Fiske (1996) described,

inferential racism is ultimately more dangerous [than overt forms of racism], not only because it

is harder to identify, but because it is often exerted by liberals with an explicitly antiracist intent.

Inferential racism is the necessary form of racism in a society of white supremacy [or an

organization] that proclaims itself non-racist (p. 37). Therefore, underlying inferential racism is

the belief of power, privilege, and representation which reconfirms the White hegemonic order.

Thus, the co-creation of identity cannot occur when there is an attempt on the part of one of the

communicators to, consciously or unconsciously, dominate the other physically or symbolically

(Yep, 1998, p. 81). Further, fictive ideas within the politics of identitythe idea that one ethnic

or racial group supercedes anotherbecome naturalized and normalized within White

supremacist hegemonic domination. A problematization of this magnitude can be explicitly seen

in the example below.

In a meeting Bill, a White male, decided to veer from the scheduled agenda to lecture

those in attendance about how he saw issues of discrimination in the department. Anyone who

thinks that there is discrimination in this department in wrong. Bill stops and stares and me. I

am the only Black person in the room. His face reddening, a finger waving and pointing at me,

he yells, There is no discrimination in this department! Nobody stopped Bills tirade. I was

silent and silenced. I was fearful of speaking. I did not want to lend legitimacy to anything that

was being said by Bill. I felt that if I said something, the others might think there is a kernel of

truth to what is being said. At the same time, I was complicitous in the maintenance of

hegemony because I did not speak out, thus legitimizing Bills discourse. McGee (1998)

referenced issues of silence in the political realm. Silence in this arena can signify assent or the

inability to answer an argument; his point can thus be applied to hegemony and the maintenance


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of the hegemonic order because the goal is to maintain the status quo. Furthermore, the internal

dynamics and regulations of a social system are apt to keep that system intact unless a conscious

effort is made to change that system (McGee, 1998, p. 216). Thus, I exercised my agency not

through my voice, but through actionI made my invisible/visible presence seen by standing up

and leaving the meeting. Nicotera (1999) also ponders the issue of silence.

Why couldnt I break the silence? Then it became clear: To break the silence is to becomplicit in the discourse that first created it; it reifies the practice of attack and

counterattack. I do not know how to break the silence in a way that breaks the discursive

cycle of casting myself as victim and my attackers as predator. My conception of

breaking silence as leaving myself open to a new attack was framed by the discursivecycle. It became clear why transcending a discursive cycle is so difficult: To be silent is

complicit; to break silence is complicit. (p. 450)

The above situation, as well as the others described, beg the question of how do we

undermine or challenge hegemony in a way that the White supremacist, essentialist,

marginalizing gaze is shifted without further risk to cultural, political, and socially

disenfranchised people. It is this shifting that is not condoned nor permitted, lest the Euro

American gaze which has been directed outward toward those who are not White nor male be

directed inward. Further, it is the resistance in shifting that may allow the experiences of

disenfranchised people to cross the border, but it does not mean that their experience will be

brought into full view or centered. As Davis (1998) questioned:

How much more informed are we of the ways of Black women and other oppressed groupssymbolically create and negotiate their worlds? How do our methods of critical inquiry resist

the appropriation of oppressed voices in scholarship? Are scholars willing to explore de-

centering our knowledge claims from a white, male patriarchal system to embrace the

multiple consciousness of knowledge from marginal groups and, thus, examine multipleepistemologies and ontologies? Will critics find ways to explicate the rhetoric of oppressed

people and their responses to dominant discourses? (p. 78)

Further, by what means does the White supremacist gaze turn inward? What makes this turn

happen? These questions can be best addressed by the theory of articulation.


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Re-articulating the Academy

It is of no use for us to sit with our hands folded, hanging our heads like bulrushes,

lamenting our wretched condition; but let us make a mighty effort, and arise; and if no

one will promote or respect us, let us promote and respect ourselves. (Maria W. Stewart,

as cited in Green, 2001, p. 208)

Through my personal experiences in academia this study revealed the ways in which

body has become the site of gender and race struggle in the academy. These micro experiences

allow for a macro discussion regarding racism and sexism in academe. The way these three

narratives have become articulated within the institution reinforce Dziech and Hawkins (1998)

claim that whether it is an extension of ora reaction against its history, an institutions present

always reflects its past, and that past influences [the institution] profoundly (p. 560). The power

of the articulated moment is seen in the on-going struggle of language used as a means of

gaining or maintaining power. According to Giroux (1993), language is situated in an on-going

struggle over issues of inclusion and exclusion, meaning and interpretation, and such issues are

inextricably related to questions of power, history, and self identity (p. 161). Therefore, the

manner in which gender and race are articulated in the academy has the ability to reify the

current hegemonic order or challenge hegemony. How marginalized bodies are articulated

depends greatly on whether normative behavior is challenged.

The theory of articulation speaks to the necessity in understanding the limits of our

language and the implications not only with regard to race/racism, but also as it concerns culture

and ethnocentrism, sexism, and socio-economic status. Giroux (1993) elaborated on the meaning

of the theory: It means understanding the limits of our own language as well as the implications

of the social practices we construct on the basis of the language we use to exercise authority and

power. It means developing a language that can question public form, address social injustices,

and break the tyranny of the present (p. 28). Because inclusion, exclusion, language and


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meaning are inextricably bound to questions of racism, sexism, and hegemony, what is needed is

a new, oppositional paradigm. An oppositional paradigm is created through the theory of

articulation because through this theory it becomes possible to deconstruct and challenge

dominant relations of power and knowledge legitimated in traditional forms ofdiscourse

(Giroux, 1993, p. 167).

According to Slack (1997) theoretically, articulation can be understood as a way of

characterizing a social formation without falling into the twin traps of reductionism and

essentialism (p. 112). Therefore, how is it that experience within the academy can be articulated

and expressed in such a way that challenges complicity and, at the same time, avoids the traps of

reductionism and essentialism? Interrogating or challenging White supremacist hegemony in

academe requires a critical examination of how the institution is dis/empowering based upon

how the status quo is articulated and how the institution might be re-articulated. In order to

remedy this, Giroux (1992) suggested examining the socially constructed boundaries of race and

power that would, make visible how whiteness functions as a historical and social construction

(p. 117). Similarly Patton (2000) maintained that in marking whiteness, society dismantles the

hegemonic order from the top-down hierarchical order in which Whites are on top and non-

Whites are on the bottom, and replaces it with a more horizontal order in which one racial group

is not privileged above the rest (p. 38). Hall (1985) found that thinking articulation thus

becomes a practice of thinking [of] unity and difference [as] difference in complex unity, without

becoming a hostage to the privileging of difference as such (p. 93). In hegemonic construction

we, therefore, must think of society as a) complex, but b) that while contradictory ways exist

they need not be thought of as better or worse than the otherthe so-called inferior other need


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not be invented to justify existence and survival; and c) it is not simply about unity because unity

can erase cultural differences. It is about solidarity, a common set of struggles.

Is solidarity possible? Is a shift in the center possible? A shift within the center is a direct

challenge to the current hegemonic order. This shift not only challenges the top-down

hierarchical order and replaces it with a more horizontal order, but it also allows us to realize and

recognize that culture is shared and the unquestioned center should be contested. With this in

mind, then, a critical examination of power can ensue. It also raises an important question: Is a

White supremacist patriarchal hegemonic institution interested in re-articulating? In light of

the oppression against women and ethnic minorities, will the institution throw off the cloak of

complicity in which the hegemonic order is invested? When struggle, perseverance, and

enlightenment is no longer made on the backs of women and non-White bodies perhaps that will

mean other standpoints have been or can be embraced. Just as an aspect of feminist standpoint

theory seeks to expose both acts of oppression and acts of resistance by asking disenfranchised

persons to describe and discuss their experiences with hope that their knowledge will reveal

otherwise unexposed aspects of the social order (B. J. Allen et al. 1999, p. 409), the theory of

articulation can be employed in the same manner. The theory of articulation links and examines

issues of disenfranchisement, as they are interdependent with the hegemony, language, and

action that articulated their subject positions. To establish a womans and ethnic minority

womans standpoint is to prepare to challenge academic hegemony. However, as Flores and

Moon (2002) correctly pointed out, so long as desires are imbued with notions of superiority

and domination, attempts to destabilize race [and other marginalizations] will fail (p. 200).

Articulation challenges hegemony through an oppositional gaze. Giroux (1993) noted that

oppositional paradigms provide new languages through which it becomes possible to


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deconstruct and challenge dominant relations of power and knowledge legitimated in traditional

forms of discourse (Giroux, 1993, p. 167). Oppositional paradigms create the possibility for

rearticulation to occur, thus shifting the current hegemonic order.

The issue of racism and sexism in academe gains heightened importance particularly as

positionality of the outsider-within not only remains entrenched, but also continues to produce

and present numerous challenges and consequences. We need to recognize that alternative

representations are necessary. Just as McLaren (1995) stated that pedagogical practice must be

reimagined, so too must academe be reimaged in terms of racism and sexism lest we complicitly

choose to remain adrift in the reproduction of dominant ideology. We must begin to produce new

ways of thinking that involve deconstructing and dismantling the current hegemonic order and

beginning to rebuild, reconstruct, and rearticulate the academy in inclusive and transformative

ways.

We are at a critical juncture in academe. The possibilities for reimagining and re-

articulating a radically different institution come both from the disenfranchised and from the

centered. It is through their standpoints, language, action, and oppositional gaze that we can

enable ourselves to challenge the current constructions of racism and sexism in academe in order

to embrace a critical, transformative, and liberated vision. Academia can be both enlightening

and oppressive. It is not enough to have the disenfranchised included in such way as to make

their contributions, their voices, and their perspectives ineffective and silenced because of the

maintenance of hegemony or allow them to border-cross when it benefits those in the center. Of

all places, academia should be a profession that is a marketplace for the exchange of diverse

ideas, diverse perspectives, and education in the value of difference.


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