Troubling whiteness

Protest at Keiner Plaza, downtown St. Louis, November 25, 2014. (Lindy Drew) High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Perhaps at no other time in modern American history have white people been more fascinated (and anxiety-ridden) about their own whiteness. President Obama's election in 2008 appeared to confirm America's postracial future. Academic questioning of postracial ideology (in the 1990s and early 2000s) only corroborated the widespread acceptance that the nation had indeed overcome its dark racist past. This liberal white self-congratulatory mood, however, proved short-lived. Michael Brown's killing in August 2014 and the ensuing protests exposed the ugly truth of anti-Blackness and state-sanctioned racial violence. Trump's election in 2016, won in large part by appeals to white resentment (Anderson 2016), further threw many self-identified liberal white folks into confusion, guilt, and self-reflection. Whiteness has become a familiar topic in popular media, including podcasts, news articles, academic and nonacademic books, feature films, and television series. The tone of much of this material is didactic-what it means to be white, how to talk about race, and how to raise better children. In the St. Louis region, the eruption of protests incited by Brown's death triggered what I've come to understand as a "moral breakdown" (Zigon 2007; see also Kwon 2020) among liberal white people, specifically middle-class, educated women and mothers. Compelled to confront, for the first time, their white selves, they sought to understand the region's lasting racial inequity. There proliferated in the region formal and informal spaces of white self-criticality and self-improvement; these ranged from book clubs and study groups to new organizations for "intentional conversations" and social justice. There's clearly something happening with whiteness, or as one interlocutor exclaimed, "What in the hell is going on with white people?" Two of the region's more prominent racial education programs are represented by Mary Ferguson and Tiffany Robertson (both were presenters on the "Troubling Whiteness" plenary at the Ethnographic Futures AES/ABA/ALLA 2019 spring meeting). Ferguson (white) is a Racial Justice Consultant at the St. Louis Metro YWCA, and attended high school in West County St. Louis; she is a longtime practitioner and social justice educator. She works with Witnessing Whiteness, a white caucus and learning program based on the book of the same name by Shelly Tochluk. According to facilitators, it emphasizes the work that white folks must do. Nearly 3,500 white people, more than 100 cohorts, have participated in the program since the start of the protests in 2014. Robertson (Black) grew up in the Peabody housing projects and Shaw neighborhood in St. Louis and worked most recently in corporate banking. She founded Touchy Topics Tuesday (TTT), an interracial dialogue space. Starting as a small informal gathering, TTT grew into four groups of about 10 to 15 participants who have met weekly for the past five years. It aims to cultivate honest conversations across race that few have experienced before. Protest at Keiner Plaza, downtown St. Louis, November 25, 2014. (Lindy Drew) Hundreds of people participate in a die-in at police headquarters in downtown St. Louis during the fall 2017 protests against the Stockley verdict, September 17, 2017. I'm grateful to Mary Ferguson and Tiffany Robertson for their trust and time. Their work is often called a labor of love. We hope that it becomes more, and that they are valued as they should be. Damon Davis, Negrophilia #53, 2015. Mixed media, 6 × 6 in

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• Mothers' Hopes and Domestic Magic

  Open Access•Jong Bum Kwon•Journal for the Anthropology of…•2022

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