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.

Flores’ key contribution to the field is to highlight the constitutive force of this figuration in sustaining racial national projects. She argues that the narratives characterizing Mexican migrants as temporary and cheap labor have constituted Mexicans as deportable, disposable, and racialized as illegal.

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.

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.

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.

“Pitting feeling rules against affective publics, and examining how student-athletes are placed at their center, raises future research questions about pressurized rhetorical bodies and social justice movements. How have student-athletes and professional-level athletes accorded with institutional feeling rules and engaged with the rhetorical-affective work of activists and oppositions?”

“Holmes provides a scholastic exploration and personal examination of what it means to revisit research, explore rhetors, and reframe history as a means to answer one’s own questions about identity, social justice, and change-making.”

“Collectively, these articles focus our attention on issues of identity, inclusion, and social justice in realms ranging from sites of education to historical signage, to bathroom placards, to music, and to television. Taken together, these articles offer a view of how rhetoric shapes and is shaped by the multifaceted world around us in profound ways.”

“In an era of increasingly vocal and political challenges to and distrust of education at all levels, what happened to MAS may be less of an anomalous tragedy than a harbinger of what’s to come. These teachers’ responses illustrate the splintering, echoing effects of political and judicial decisions on teachers, schools, and education.”

“Expanding on this link between the Southern Strategy and neoliberalism, I argue proponents of municipal schools in Shelby County, TN, deployed a small government rhetoric of freedom and a neoliberal framework of self-regulation to codify the boundaries of white flight in the geospatial and discursive realms of the new school districts.”

“Media support particular modalities over others, and formally shape and ideologically infuse products based on their affordances. Hence, students must be able to analyze rhetorical contexts while problematizing simplistic definitions of access and efficacy. The concept of a “multimodal home place” provides a tool to help students become more mindful about technology use.”

“This issue features a range of topics, but despite their diversity, the articles share a common thread of embodiment and affect, two areas toward which much current rhetorical scholarship is directed. While theories of embodiment and affect frame just a few of these essays, all of them reflect the centrality of bodies and emotion in discourse.”

“In this issue, we learn that what gets written into law is as important as what gets intentionally omitted and that campus timely warnings are likely neither timely nor warning. We also learn the value of hashtags in cultivating concerned publics, how cynicism can be productive, and how public rhetoric can be a symbolic and material activity.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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”

“The new equality does not claim the achievement of racial and social justice. Rather, it offers an ongoing explicit pursuit of personal and systemic change advanced daily—publicly and privately—among black, brown, red, yellow, and white allies…”