Poetics and Pedagogy of Whiteness at a Distance: Reflections from Korea

In my recent undergraduate seminar on whiteness in modern American literature at a university in Seoul, most students, aware of America’s history of racial violence and repulsed by Trumpian rhetoric, initially assumed “whiteness” to be something that operates openly and visibly, a deliberate strategy to support white supremacist ends. At a distance, within a largely racially homogenous society, this marked, legible understanding of whiteness impeded students’ recognition of its precarity and evasions, its unacknowledged investments in manufacturing innocence and coherence. To disclose the crucial difference between analyzing whiteness and analyzing race, I want to argue for the critical and pedagogic efficacy of centering African American recontextualizations of white modernist distancings and racial silences, particularly in their capacity to stage the concealment of whiteness’s operations within declarations of “racelessness.” With Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and James Baldwin’s essays providing conceptual scaffolding, my example comes from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a text which motivated students to attend less to overt instances of racism and more to the unacknowledged and disavowed force of whiteness. In unveiling a poetics of whiteness, its uses of distancing to enable illusions of universality, coherence, and innocence, such texts may also induce students to reflect on their own positionality as readers and global citizens.  

I approach this piece with some trepidation, for though I am “othered” in Korea, a white male American professor still possesses significant privilege here. Moreover, the relatively hierarchical atmosphere of the Korean classroom predisposed the students, most from privileged backgrounds, to see me as an unquestioned expert on whiteness. To disabuse them of this idea, I stressed that I have not experienced the pernicious effects whiteness inflicts on people of color; having only been conferred its benefits, I explained, the seminar was conceived as an opportunity, for them, for me, to “shift locations,” to see and read differently, to learn how whiteness “impede[s] understanding of the way racism works both in the larger world as well as the world of our intimate interactions.”[1] In the midst of Covid-19, meeting via Zoom, I thus emphasized whiteness’s power to construct an extremely partial worldview, one which, bestowing uninterrogated privilege for some, has real and harmful effects for everyone else.

Depressingly, there was no shortage of real-world events in the news to concretize these effects, with the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. There were also several visible, non-fatal acts of racial aggression, most notably the false accusation of menacing behavior by a white woman against Christian Cooper, an African American birder. The cell phone videos capturing most of these incidents generated substantial, sometimes impassioned, seminar discussion. But in viewing videos from a distance, interpreting them through digital media, the students’ attention tended to focus on the visible, individual acts of policemen, white vigilantes, or an overwrought white woman, rather than the systemic whiteness making such acts of racial aggression possible. A crucial task, I gradually realized, was steering students away from the individual “scandal,” which, being “so satisfying, so clear, so easy,” facilitates reassuring binaries of victims and perpetrators and obscures the unmarked and unremarked conditions permitting such acts of racial violence.[2]

Forging relationships between textual analysis and real-life events, positioning whiteness as a category of analysis capable of making these underlying conditions legible, proved quite challenging in the classroom. In readings of white writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath, students were quite adept at identifying racist language and tropes, stereotypical representations of Black characters and caricatures of their speech; they were largely silent, though, on how, as Morrison puts it, “a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to [the writers’] sense of Americanness.”[3] It was only near the end of the semester, when we read Citizen, triangulating it with Morrison and Baldwin, that I felt we successfully bridged the social and literary, stepping back from overt acts of racial aggression or racist representations and discerning the transparent structure generating them. This triangulation also facilitated engagement with the dialectical quality of whiteness, how, as Baldwin writes, “by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.”[4] Such knowledge, Baldwin shows, is gained through experiencing the force of whiteness’s hegemonic knowledge-making; the lesson for critically analyzing whiteness, my students in Korea seemed to realize, is in the imperative to expose the unacknowledged power and partialness fostering its manners of knowing. 

Morrison’s Playing in the Dark was a central text, but it was only when we revisited it with Citizen that its pedagogic efficacy fully emerged, enabling students to meaningfully register the power of white invisibility. In the chapter “Black Matters,” Morrison compares the workings of whiteness to a fishbowl; this transparent structure, she explains, forms and contains a miniature ecosystem, even as its presence is seldom acknowledged. The analogy suggests that whiteness, unmarked and virtually invisible, constructs a world, whether literary or social, and provides a pretext for attending solely to the particulars and arrangements that give pleasure, comfort, or peace of mind:

It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world. (Morrison, Playing, 17)

Morrison’s attention to scale is significant, for the difference between the smallness of “the ordered life” and “the larger world” reflects the inevitable partialness of the mind that apprehends, the imagination that creates, an ordered reality. Her critique of how whiteness, with its disavowed dependency on an Africanist presence, has “invisibly” structured much of American fiction, also constitutes an appeal for dual attentiveness, to the “scales,” “gills,” and “flecks” and to the container enabling their (aesthetic) apprehension within a larger world. The fishbowl, Morrison asserts, has always been before readers’ eyes; the difficulty remains persuading these readers to overcome guilt, fear, or politeness to notice it and what it does.

When we turned to Citizen, Morrison’s “fishbowl” provided a generative figure with which to, in Ruth Frankenberg’s terms, “displace” or “color” the transparency and evasiveness of American whiteness (and its lyricism), revealing its social meanings and privileges.[5] In Citizen’s script “Hurricane Katrina,” Rankine, instantiating what Miriam Thaggert calls the “praxis . . . of a new black modernism,” melds lyricism, visual images, intertextuality, and quotes from CNN’s reporting to reveal the whiteness structuring the white (lyric) gaze.[6] In particular, Rankine deictically reiterates the “aestheticized distancing” with which most white Americans beheld the unfolding humanitarian disaster.[7] While we didn’t directly address her recontextualization of Wallace Stevens’s lyric “difficulty,” several students, in class discussion, noted that her experimental poetics yokes aesthetic apprehension to the mediated manner in which most Americans experienced the hurricane’s appalling aftermath. One student cited this tercet: “Then this aestheticized distancing from Oh my God, from / unbelievable, from dehydration, from overheating, from no / electricity, no power no way to communicate” (Rankine, Citizen, 85). How “Hurricane Katrina” might poetically enact Morrison’s insights was my next question, and students began suggesting New Orleans itself became like a fishbowl, the disordered interior, largely inhabited by desperate, suffering African Americans, contained by a structure transparent to millions and millions of Americans watching on television. When I pressed students to articulate the systemic forms and material practices that created this fishbowl, they mentioned poverty, racism, segregation, and, eventually, whiteness.

We didn’t fully elucidate Rankine’s insistence that occluded histories of racial injustice continue to shape systemic forms of social neglect; nevertheless, whiteness’s invisibility became more legible, and students recognized an investment in misreading social reality. Their sense of this investment was enhanced when we parsed the phrase “the fiction of the facts”: “The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, / lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions / of a certain time and place” (Rankine, Citizen, 83). With the fishbowl analogy, several privileges of whiteness were focalized, particularly the power to construct social reality solely from what one sees, “factually,” before one’s eyes and, relatedly, the recourse to innocence and ignorance, which, here, “naturalizes” social neglect by attributing the racialized, human catastrophe to “randomness and indeterminacy.” Ultimately, reading Rankine with Morrison cultivated heightened attentiveness to how the “fishbowl” has been created and how, poetically and socially, it can be represented and contested.

During our discussion of Citizen, we also returned to “The White Man’s Guilt,” in which Baldwin asserts: “One can measure very neatly the white American’s distance from his conscience . . . by observing the distance between White America and Black America.” The crucial question, he continues, is “who established this distance, who is this distance designed to protect, and from what is this distance designed to offer protection?” (Baldwin, Essays, 725). With Citizen’s “aestheticized distancing,” students gained concrete understanding of the processes of whiteness establishing this distance, protecting white America from guilt, responsibility, and historical reckoning. For their part, the students’ distance from American whiteness enabled them to investigate its operations without defensiveness or reluctance, but I worried this distance might preclude them from reflecting on its relevance to their own modes of reading, attentiveness, and positioning. It was reassuring, then, that their final essays shared a common thread in stressing the racialized nature of positioning, be it Abner Snopes’s “insecurities about the security of his own white positioning” or Citizen’s exposure of how “microaggressions affect the minds of people subject to them” and “the weight of hypervisibility on Serena Williams.”[8] Several essays on Poe and Faulkner effectively dealt with whiteness’s effacement of histories of slavery and Jim Crow, elucidating the evasiveness of white characters unable “to bear the guilt of the past.” Others had varying degrees of success articulating the “effects of disavowing a black presence,” primarily for individual white identities. Overall, Rankine provoked the most discerning analyses of whiteness, with students identifying an imperative to “change one’s positioning when reading a text.” Most importantly, they realized, as one student wrote, that “the denial of the existence of whiteness is itself a form of aggression.”

Shortly after the killing of George Floyd, a student posed the question: “Professor, what can we do?” Fumbling for a response, I suggested they take the critical frame developed through reading for whiteness in American literature and reorient it as a form of reflectiveness on their own positioning and modes of attention. With only one literature major in the course, I said they might begin by considering the social meanings of their status as students in one of Korea’s elite universities, which bestows outsized benefits in this country. It may also be valuable, I added, to reflect on the patriarchal and hierarchical structure of society and their place in it. Lastly, noting the slow, but steady, increase in immigrants to Korea—most from elsewhere in Asia—I proposed confronting the unmarked status of Koreanness and its role in conditioning the (in)visibility of the country’s non-native residents. Whether they were motivated to do so is unclear; what they taught me is that persistently thinking and rethinking unmarked positionalities is an essential step in beginning to reinvent our globalized world.