DIVESTING WHITE RACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS : A RHETORIC OF COALITIONAL WHITE RACIAL UN/LEARNING

Divesting White Racial Consciousness: A Rhetoric of Coalitional White Racial Un/learning interrogates the literate and rhetorical dimensions of how white people with actionable commitments to racial justice disrupt white worldviews and practices to coalitionally advance antiracist futures. I use the term “un/learning” (punctuated with a forward slash to emphasize its dialogic and iterative nature) as a rhetorical and coalitional framework to describe how white people with actionable commitments to racial justice interrogate, deconstruct, and dismantle their socialization into white worldviews, policies, and practices. Informed by anti-racist feminist, queer, and multimodal methodologies, I forward a pedagogical and administrative method to trace un/learning through key tenants of reflective, coalitional action, narrative reconstruction, and structural criticality. I designed what I coin a critical of whiteness multimodal methodology that offers a structured pedagogical experience for research partners to recover moments of un/learning and set goals for responsive coalitional action. I collected data through a three-phased process consisting of (1) artifact-based interviews, where research partners selected three material objects to story moments and reflections of their own un/learning, (2) multimodal artifact reconstructions, where partners create a multimodal artifact to reconstruct a key moment in their un/learning, and (3) and reflective interviews, where partners reflected on the meaning of their experiences of un/learning through an analysis of their multimodal artifact to articulate commitments for future coalitional action. Findings illustrate (1) how research partners un/learn whiteness through literate acts that shift to embrace pluralistic consciousnesses, such as listening to decenter, interruption in spheres of influence, and reflective, coalitional action and (2) partners sought out concrete and abstract apprentices to develop, and eventually problematize, heuristics for white racial un/learning that often moved from simplicity to complexity in their emerging orientations to antiracist knowledge and action. I offer implications for administrative work that specifically onboards white people toward pluralistic worldviews and practices through an emphasis on complicating apprenticeship models and enacting literate and rhetorical practice. This study offers a framework to approach antiracist pedagogy, teacher development, and community engagement that centers criticality and invites students, faculty, and community members to develop critical habits to transform their practice. Such an analysis into un/learning can inform antiracist infrastructure- and capacity- building across higher education, and more specifically, in rhetoric and composition, that explicitly positions white people to develop un/learning infrastructures for divesting whiteness toward institutional transformation.