Deflective Whiteness weaves together an anti-essentialist analytic across mediated rhetorics; its transmedia methodology is a novel and notable approach to thinking through the intertextual nature of racial formation in the era of “new racism” by studying the ideological functions of decontextualization, the superficial representation of Black and Latinx identity politics used to secure White dominance.

This makes me wonder, isn’t the whole point of having easy access to healthcare to enable human beings to live a better life, irrespective of their race, religion, gender, nationality, class, or economic status? Isn’t healthcare a basic human right provided even to the minority ethnic populations, like myself, so that we can live a life of dignity and good health?

“Diversity is not an End Game: BIPOC Futures in the Academy” marks the final installment in a conversation across multiple journals that examines the injustices behind crisis-driven diversity initiatives within the academy and how these initiatives impact BIPOC across the fields of rhetoric, composition, and communication. Following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Amhad Aubrey,1 and too many others—as well as the incompetent and often hypocritical responses by institutions across the nation—we deemed it necessary to highlight the myriad ways that BIPOC are forced to experience duress, navigate threatening spaces, and leverage precious resources within the academy. These unjust conditions reflect the harms that we must already strive to survive in everyday life and disprove the myths of meritocracy and academic “safe spaces.”

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

To clarify our opening, we don’t resent this essay. We resent that to make Indigenous space with a bunch of well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning folx is to brace ourselves for an act of settler colonial violence and white nonsense. Whether we are trying to do our own work and just need some damn permit approval, are staging institutional interventions, or invested in long-term collaboration, our everyday work feels like one meeting to get the task done and three meetings to educate settlers on Indigenous beliefs, practices, and communities. Or, we learn that people are trying to do this work on their own in the name of not putting more emotional labor on BIPOC and then they’ve gone and pissed off the elder they are working with or didn’t practice the right protocols for consultation and input and someone—whether it’s an Indigenous person or not, has reached out to us to come and fix it. Even aunties don’t got time for that shit. What follows are a series of statements, practices, and observations on how we want to move forward in regard to working or not working with settlers in our institutions and professions.

This text explores our work as Women of Color (WoC) nurturing spaces and practices in response to the mirages of support, the inadequacy of resources, and the tepid responses to systemic oppression within the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts of our university, a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) in the Midwest. Via reflective vignettes, we discuss developing a community art collaboration as a counterspace, defined by various scholars as “social spaces … which offer support and enhance feelings of belonging” (Ong, Smith, and Ko 2018, 207) for minoritized students. Throughout this text, we discuss the potential of art-based projects shaped by an anti-racist praxis as resistance to the “check-the-box” institutional diversity efforts, and as transformative spaces to imagine alternative academic futures for Women of Color staff, faculty, and students.

Dream, Ricardo. Dream, knowing this world is meant for individuals like me and you. At times, the hardest part of Life is living, my father would say to me. When it all feels like too much, find your core and reach back: we’ll be here for you, always. I love you, Dad.

Scholarship in rhetoric and composition explores intersections between race and gender, especially within writing program administration (Craig and Perryman-Clark “Troubling the Boundaries; Craig and Perryman-Clark “Boundaries Revisited). While exploring intersections between race and gender, particularly in conjunction with BIPOC experiences, the focus often shifts to microaggressive experiences, pain, and hopeful processes for healing (Carey “A […]

NCTE/CCCC Cross-Caucus Present Tense Special Issue: “Diversity is not an End Game: BIPOC Futures in the Academy.” Edited by Ersula Ore, Kimberly Wieser, & Christina Cedillo. This issue pursues answers for how BIPOC in the academy can build towards futures while on foundations of precarity. To this end, we seek 150-300-word abstracts from BIPOC scholars that address the question. All abstracts must be accompanied by an 25-75 author’s bio that includes institution, rank, department, and research interests. Please email abstracts and author bios to Ersula Ore at ejore@asu.edu by April 20, 2021 no later than 11:59 MST. Accepted submissions are due July 18, 2021.

“In this Spanish-English film set in the near future, a high-tech border wall seals off the US from México. Mexicanos no longer enter the US to work and instead use virtual labor technologies to perform services from afar, which serves as a techno-futuristic play on the twentieth century bracero program.”

“At La Escuelita, culture consists of everyday practices shaped by collective traditional beliefs and attitudes passed down from generation to generation and expressed organically by members of a community. Members participate in activities and events that reclaim, embrace, and promote shared cultural experiences that solidify traditions.”

Present Tense would like to congratulate Patricia Fancher for being accepted into The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric & Composition, 2018 (Parlor Press). Patricia’s article, “Composing Artificial Intelligence: Performing Whiteness and Masculinity,” was published in Vol. 6 Iss. 1. Congrats!

“This analysis suggests that, in order to interrupt the injustices that flourish in Silicon Valley and in tech culture, we must rhetorically and systematically disentangle masculinity and whiteness from intelligence.”

“The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) tells us a story through which we can more closely examine how the law has functioned in both constructing and affirming certain cultural discourses about human trafficking.”

“What I have offered is less an employable set of texts, lessons, or advice, and more the performance of a teacher coming to terms with race in pedagogy both during and after the course. What I have done is (re)turn to rhetoric.”

“Clarifying the rhetorical potential for hashtags as an organizational tool demonstrates the caution with which protesters must approach the task of organizing online.”

“What galvanizes our aim is the increasing call by scholars across disciplines to critically engage violence and repression committed by and on behalf of the state. We seek to explore the ways in which the structures of the state explicitly and implicitly normalize violence against communities of color.”

“In what ways does Indigenous social justice work differ from other kinds of social justice work? And what are some of the complications in building solidarity between social movements that focus on a diversity of issues?”

“Through the rhetoric of brownwashing, the Obama administration embraces heterogeneity by including acceptable and exceptional migrants into US civic life.”

“Acts of “vandalism” and activism alter the perception of history, contesting our past and present, and illustrate that systemic racism pervades American culture.”

“Can rhetoric teach us to “read” White supremacy? Can it teach us why Roof murdered nine people?”

“Citizens and immigrants alike consume racial ideology on an almost daily basis, and we are repeatedly forced to think of ourselves in racial terms even if we did not do so before.”

On August 27, 2015, Multimedia Editor Alexandra Hidalgo and Guest Editor Donnie Johnson Sackey discussed special issue 5.2 on race, rhetoric, and the state on Twitter. The Q&A has been curated with Storify below in hopes of continuing conversation on states’ questionable treatment of people of color until the issue’s release in late fall. See: […]

“The editors of Present Tense are pleased to announce a new issue focused on a range of topics, from race and law to the politics of higher education. Volume 4.2 includes articles that explore rhetoric as it exists in many different places, especially as it is employed by disempowered and disenfranchised groups in politically contested locations.”

“racism is an ongoing discourse that both gives rise to and emerges from many rhetorical moments—it is a continuous force requiring continuous opposition. The discourses of racism are as much visual as they are textual and oral”

“Senator Obama was faced with a complex problem: how to explain a longstanding friendship with a suddenly infamous figure? He had to do this, moreover, within the context of the most delicate issue of his campaign: race.”