Community Autoethnography

Community Autoethnography: Compiling the
Personal and Resituating Whiteness

Satoshi Toyosaki
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Sandra L. Pensoneau-Conway
Wayne State University
Nathan A. Wendt
University of Kansas
Kyle Leathers
Wayne State University
Examining whiteness (in) education is a journey of identity and materiality.

In this article, the authors adopt an approach to research that highlights
the role of performance in constituting identity. They believe that theorizing
identity in this way is facilitated through autoethnographic storytelling,
which allows one to theorize material performances of identity, along
with the culture in which those performances are situated. In the following, the
authors dialogically theorize whiteness education through their stories.
They draw upon themselves as individuals and one another as partners in
humanity in order to make sense of education within a context of whiteness.
They develop community autoethnography as a method with which to engage
in such dialogical theorization.
Keywords: autoethnography; critical pedagogy; whiteness; community
Contemporary critical scholarship has placed much emphasis on the role of first-
person writing and theorizing. Ellis and Bochner (2000) claim that this emphasis
demonstrates researchers’ responsibility for, accountability to, and interrogation of
research processes, practices, and outcomes. Johnson (2001) writes, “Failure to
ground discourse in materiality is to privilege the position of those whose subjec-
tivity and agency . . . have never been subjugated” (p. 12). Autoethnography as a
method provides one outlet in which authors can write about the material experi-
ences that provide the discourses that construct their lives.
In the past 20 years, critical scholars have turned their attention to the concept
of whiteness. Villaverde (2000) explains whiteness as “a systemic ideological
apparatus that is used to normalize civility, instill rationality, erase emotion, erase
difference, impose middle-class values and beliefs with an assumption of a het-
erosexual matrix” (p. 46). Whiteness carries with it a twofold characteristic—it is
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 9 Number 1, February 2009 56-83

DOI: 10.1177/1532708608321498
© 2009 Sage Publications
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Toyosaki et al. • Community Autoethnography 57
often spoken about on a systemic level, whereas its effects and constructions often
happen on a very personal level. Furthermore, the role of education in creating
and shaping contemporary society makes it a prime context for examining white-
ness’s function within it.
Examining whiteness (in) education is a journey of identity and materiality. In
this article, we adopt an approach that highlights the role of performance in con-
stituting identity. Warren (2001b) argues that “a performative theory of identity
. . . understands the subject to be essentially unstable, never natural and thus
constructed through embodied actions” (p. 95). We believe that autoethno-
graphic storytelling allows one to theorize culturally situated material perfor-
mances of identity. In the following, we draw upon ourselves as individuals and
one another as partners in humanity in order to make sense of education within
a context of whiteness. We develop community autoethnography as a method
with which to engage in such dialogical theorization.
Community Autoethnography
We hope to explore and advance an understanding of whiteness education that

is local to both our academic and personal lives. Within classrooms, we have wit-
nessed the ways storytelling transforms and critically investigates culture. Cultural
scholars (e.g., Hecht, 1998; Orbe, 1998) and narrative scholars (e.g., Bochner &
Ellis, 2002; Langellier, 1989; Shaw, 1997) discuss narrative in the context of
teaching and learning of culture and communication. Hecht (1998) explains that
the study of narrative provides “an alternative, scholarly mode of expression for
the theories and concepts. . . . [N]arratives are . . . a way of knowing, under-
standing, studying, and expressing” (p. 17). Pineau (2002) recognizes the inter-
sections among storytelling, the performance turn, and pedagogy.
Each time that a student explores her or his presentation of self through an autobi-
ographical monologue . . . educators find . . . evidence that when students
engage their physical bodies they “come to know” things in a uniquely personal and
heuristic manner. (p. 50)
The performance turn in education is important here. Viewing our story-

telling as a performative act, we investigate the possibility of cultural criticism, via
community autoethnography, of our teaching and learning of whiteness. We
begin by elucidating autoethnography.
Autoethnography
Many of ethnography’s innovative variations advance an understanding of
ethnographers’ “in-the-field” body—the experiencing, feeling, border-crossing,
understanding, and knowing body. We consider Goodall’s (2000) Writing the
New Ethnography a most influential work in explaining recent ethnographic
innovations.
Paying special attention to the “writing/reporting” body, Goodall (2000,
p. 31) calls for a new set of criteria for new ethnography: evocative, empathetic,

58 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • February 2009
caring, therapeutic, emotionally honest, and compassionate. Conventionally

speaking, academic writers write to “report” discoveries; however, Goodall advo-
cates that in the new ethnography, writing itself becomes a site of discovery, and
hence, a research method. Such writing is a means to create intimate relationships
and to open up “a deeply personal space in your life from which to create
understanding” (p. 136). New ethnographic writing is a site of and method for
personal discovery; thus, it is transformative. Autoethnography honors this aspect
of writing.
Banks and Banks (2000) locate autoethnography methodologically by intro-
ducing it as “the autobiographical turn,” “narratives of the self,” and “the self-
reflexive shift in ethnography” (p. 234). They discuss that “the full accounting for
and utilization of the researcher’s personal body and felt experience as research
instrument [are] most revolutionary” (p. 234). Ellis (2004) explains the
autoethnographic gaze in defining this method.
Back and forth autoethnographers gaze: First they [focus] outward on social and
cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vul-
nerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resists cultural
interpretations. . . . [D]istinctions between the personal and cultural become
blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition. (pp. 37–38)
Ellis methodologically legitimates the personal location as a site of cultural criticism.1

Lockford (2002) elaborates on the critical potential embedded in this method.
She writes, “Ethnography, culture, and performance should be thought of as
processes, as events, in short, as acts rather than artifacts” (p. 91). Autoethnography
inherits this critical notion of “acts rather than artifacts.” It embodies cultural
criticism, implicating authors’ bodies and their cultural locations in the world. In
other words, autoethnography “does” critical theory.
In the same vein, Stringer (1997) advocates that community-based ethnogra-

phy is “both academically rigorous and socially responsive” (p. 17). Community
autoethnography captures two merits of Stringer’s inclusion of community. First,
community-based ethnography is participatory. “Its products are not outsider
accounts, portrayals, or reports, but collaborative accounts written from the
emic—or insider—perspective of the group” (p. 17). Second, community-based
ethnography nurtures the sense of community. “It is, in essence, a community-
building or team-building activity as much as it is an approach to the production
of knowledge” (Stringer, 1997b, p. 18).
We discuss several autoethnographers’ (see Bochner & Ellis, 1995; Ellis,
Kiesinger, & Tillmann-Healy, 1997; Ronai, 1995) influential contributions to our
methodological development. Community autoethnography inherits these scholars’
multifaceted advancements in autoethnographic efficacy and uniquely develops
them into a practice of community-building as a fundamental research goal.

First, we value autoethnography as an intimate research methodology for self-

discovery and self-construction. We appreciate Ronai’s (1995) layered account,
her candid sincere effort to study (her) child sex abuse. She makes
use of systemic introspection and emotional experience (Ellis, 1991), various con-
ceptions of self as subject and object, fantasies, abstract theoretical thinking, and
statistics to create a layered account and make accessible to the reader as many “ways
of knowing” as possible. (p. 397)
In so doing, she effectively blurs the line between the academic and the personal.
We enter our community autoethnography from multiple perspectives, purpose-
fully blurring such a line, in order to provide our layered accounts.
Second, our community autoethnography captures Bochner and Ellis’s (1995)
intention of studying relationship construction as joint action. They propose a
narrative coconstruction method to revitalize the study of interpersonal communica-
tion/relationship studies. They write,
We not only live in the same world as our partner but also participate in
each other’s existence. To a certain extent we must not only understand
each other’s views of the world but also to make them our own. (p. 205)
We intend community autoethnography to be a relationship-making activity

among researchers who participate in and coconstruct each other’s existence.
Third, community autoethnography resembles Ellis et al.’s (1997) interactive
interviewing, “an interpretive practice for getting an in-depth and intimate
understanding of people’s experiences with emotionally charged and sensitive top-
ics” (p. 121). Community autoethnography, as well, is a topic-centered and inter-
pretive approach, which helps its participants create a “safer” environment for
gaining in-depth and intimate understandings of the topic (in our case, white-
ness). In interactive interviewing, “one person’s disclosures and self-probing invite
another’s disclosures and self-probing. . . . [A]n increasingly intimate and trust-
ing context makes it possible to reveal more of ourselves and to probe deeper into
another’s feelings and thoughts” (p. 122). Community autoethnography centers
such interactions around a given social/cultural issue, possibly to resituate it
through community building.
Our method culminates these autoethnographic researchers’ innovative efforts
in their research practices. Maintaining and combining these characteristics, it
invites its participants to envision and engage in “critical” community building
that works to resituate identified social/cultural and sensitive issues. Thus, com-
munity autoethnography becomes realized as a community-building research
practice that provides an opportunity for cultural and social intervention.
I (Satoshi) invited a student from my intercultural communication class
(Nate), my colleague from my former doctoral program (Sandy), and her student
(Kyle) to participate in this autoethnographic endeavor as “coauthors” or “community

members.” This present community autoethnography is twofold in its goals. First,

we hope to advance an understanding of whiteness education. Second, we hope to
scrutinize the importance of critical participation and community building in
research processes. We do these by locally examining how community
autoethnography transforms our participation in whiteness (in) education.
Community Autoethnographic Procedure
The bulk of this investigation consists of multiple autoethnographic pieces, all

written within the experience of whiteness education. As an initiator of this pro-
ject, I (Satoshi) write an autoethnographic piece and share it with my coauthors.
If someone finds a theoretical, conceptual, or performative connection to his or
her lived experience, then that writer expresses to all coauthors an interest to write
next, and does so dialogically to my piece. Then, this coauthor reveals the whole
thing—both autoethnographic pieces—to all coauthors. This process goes on.
There is no specific order by which the writing turns are organized except the
connections we each bring to advance an understanding of whiteness education.
Rather than supplying themes to which we write, we champion the emerging
connections that we embody through community-autoethnographic writing and
reading. Our experiential connections drive our investigation.
The Importance of Your Audiencing
Readers play an essential role in community autoethnography. Banks and

Banks (2000) argue for the importance of the audience: “The contexts for inter-
preting and applying an autoethnographic text should be—perhaps can only be—
supplied by readers, not by the author” (p. 233). They explain that Pelias’ 2000
autoethnography “invites readers to reflect on asymmetries of power . . . per-
haps to help us better recognize the obstacles to creating more effective commu-
nities” (p. 236). Thus, we recognize you as engaged audience members, and invite
your contextualization and reflection.
Satoshi: Recovering My Self in Whiteness Education
Whiteness studies hit me hard about six years ago in my doctoral program. I was
that Japanese person who wished for blond hair and blue eyes instead of black hair
and brown eyes (Toyosaki, 2007). I don’t know how many times I burned my scalp
with hair bleach. I wanted to peel my Japaneseness off of my body like an annoy-
ing burn scab. And that was painful. All I wanted was to become and be seen as an
“all-American” individual—well, an “all-white” individual. My body that took the
chemical bleach was an easier fix compared to my funny English, marked as

“different” from the “mainstream/white” English and, therefore, “stupid.”

Emptiness. My Japanese soul and body were dislocated and lost in a foreign land. I
gave up my Japanese soul and I gave up my Japanese body. At least, I wanted to.
Whiteness studies took my body and shook it hard inside out. I felt empty,
vulnerable, and naked. I wanted to reclaim my Japanese identity, even though I
had not actively and consciously, on my own, claimed my Japanese identity
before, except in my passport. Whiteness studies unmuted the me that I learned
to silence, and continuously transforms me as a thinker, knower, and doer of crit-
ical cultural theory. It continues to push me around and challenge me. It works
for me. I introduce whiteness studies to my students, and I think I should. Do I,
as a teacher of color, make a hasty connection and careless decision?: Since it
works for me, I should teach it.
My dedication as a critical pedagogue and my marginalized statuses collide
in my commitment to whiteness education. I identify myself with Freire’s crit-
ical pedagogy. His 1970 signature book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has influ-
enced my life.
Pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has

two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression
and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the
second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been trans-
formed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a
pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation. (Freire,
2000, p. 54)
His teaching empowers my marginalized statuses from something to lament to

an impetus for social change for me as a critical educator and citizen of a demo-
cratic society.
Critical educators believe that intervention is needed (the language of cri-

tique), that renewal is possible (the language of possibility), and that our
privileged position as educators makes us personally responsible for enacting
both at every level of our professional lives (the commitment to action).
(Pineau, 2002, p. 43)
I take this responsibility seriously as a critical educator.2
Sandy: Becoming Anchored
I swam for a long time through the muddled ocean of graduate school. As I
moved along, I hoped to find a coral reef or a rusty anchor to mark my way. I
swam through the important terms—identity, methodology, performance,

ethnography, and the like—occasionally re-encountering them in more familiar

ways in this class and that. I came upon one rusty anchor in “Readings in Critical
Ethnography in Communication and Education”: whiteness. Funny . . . I
think I’ve encountered this anchor before. And I seem to find it at every turn.
Satoshi: “Othered” Entry to Whiteness Education and My Choice
In one graduate seminar, the professor introduced McIntosh’s (1995)

famous article containing a list of 46 items of white privilege. A few perceived
white students discussed what a great teaching tool this article was. Picturing
my students in mind—white faces with a dash of faces of color—and pictur-
ing myself—a racially marked body—in front of the students, I learned the
structural issue of whiteness education. I felt extremely uncomfortable with
my culturally marked body, “requiring” students to read, “I can take a job with
an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect
that I got it because of race” (p. 191), or “I can choose to ignore developments
in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or
learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected
from negative consequences of any of these choices” (p. 191). My racially
marked body does not teach these privileges “effectively” without appearing as
“an angry minority teacher,” fingerpointing at his students’ white privileges for
his racial struggle.
The “I” in McIntosh’s list doesn’t work for me; I am not the “I.” I invented my
“I” in classrooms by unveiling my lived experiences, many times contradicting my
pedagogical intentions. One semester, one white male student threw a question
at me. “What are you trying to do?” With a grimace, he expressed his frustration
toward my teaching of whiteness, and, probably, how I delivered it. Not only did
this student deny my teaching, I, with my cultural identity, became something to
be refuted. The silence lasted a long time. “What else do I have to offer?”
Kincheloe and Steinberg (2000) explicate,
In the context of this repositioning of end-of-century whiteness, many Whites,
white youth in particular, have defined themselves around the denial of the ben-
efits of whiteness. Employing a belief in a just world with equal opportunity,
many white students have claimed victim status in the new racial configurations.
(p. 186)
Gut-spilling talk of my everyday lived experiences with whiteness made my
white young students feel victimized. “What else is left in me as a critical peda-
gogue of color?”
I am currently at a mid-sized Midwestern university with predominantly
white students. Here, “effective teaching,” measured by student bubble-sheet
evaluations, speaks volumes in my retention and promotion meetings. The
student’s phrase—“What are you trying to do?”—haunts me. His facial

expression—belittling and uncaring—haunts me. Should I introduce whiteness?

I ask myself, sitting in front of my computer, revisiting my intercultural com-
munication syllabus. Scared and uncertain, every semester I insert the topic of
whiteness into my course schedule, almost apologetically.
Nathan: Exposure
My parents always told me to study abroad if I ever got the chance. Going to a
strange place, especially one outside of the United States, seemed out of the ques-
tion. “It would cost too much,” I would argue. But really, something about being
outside of my own geographical and cultural space scared me. I feared that the
invisible curtain around me would rise, leaving me exposed to many different
others. My exposure to whiteness studies in college now, in retrospect, gives me
insight into my choice not to journey into another’s land and culture.
As a white male living in the United States, I had the benefit of choice. I could
choose to experience another’s culture; I could choose not to. I am at the center. I
feel as if I am in control. I feel safe. I have no need for multiple centers (Starosta
& Chen, 2003). I freely chose not to ever really “deal” with other cultures. And
that is exactly how I felt, and many others still feel, about other cultures—they
are dealt with or tolerated. Instead of interacting with other cultures, I was only
willing to deal with or tolerate them—critical semantic differences. One depicts a
kind of social equality; the other depicts an apathetic duty in order to achieve
some kind of self-centered goal.
Studying whiteness exposed me. This oppression that was “not . . . anything
in particular” (Dyer, as quoted in Lipsitz, 1998, p. 1) was something that I per-
petuated for quite some time. The role I played in this oppression was neither
hard nor noticeable. I had been practicing for years. I would perform powerful,
successful, popular, and wealthy to “display and create [myself ]” (Pelias, 1999,
p. 6), to be these things that I pursued. External messages showed me how to do
this. Even without being explicitly prejudiced, racist, or oppressive, my very
actions and attitudes supported the perpetuation of whiteness. I was not part of
the solution; therefore, I was part of the problem.
After all of that, I saw myself as no more than a passive body being created by
something other than his self. If this oppressive, nebulous concept called “white-
ness” could have such an impact on me, who knows what else could be at work
molding me into someone I may not even want to become? I was now afraid for
different reasons. It was not the outside world that scared me so much anymore,
but my own inner self. Was I just another white, “colorblind” student? Do I ask:
“What are you trying to do?” The answers are irrelevant. I do not have to be either
“colorblind” or a defensive, resistant student. I was challenged not only to learn,
but to reform—myself and my society. Instead of me questioning the motives of
the professor, the professor critically engaged me and asked: “What are you trying
to hide from?” Whiteness and I could no longer hide from one another. I did not
want to be exposed to the world, but in the end I was exposed all the same.

Learning whiteness has been difficult. Studying has given me new insight into
interaction with those of marginalized statuses. I can have a brief and blurry
glimpse into what they go through. This view is perhaps the best I can muster,
but it allows for an open dialogue between me and cultural minorities—a catalyst
for future positive changes.
Kyle: Exposure3
Prior to high school, I attended three schools in two states. Each left me with an
array of experiences that shaped my whiteness. The nomadic me still exists in my
pursuit of education. I have attended six universities covering four states. This cycle
began at the age of seven when we crossed from Indiana to California in a Chevette
hatchback. This border crossing marks my early identification with the mass medi-
ated culture of rock-n-roll. Mom let us take two cassette tapes, The Eagles Greatest
Hits ’71-’75 and The Alice Cooper Show. We sang to these albums as a family.
In California, the Ontana4 brothers moved to our town from L.A. They were
cool and it was exciting to have some friends from the city. They said they were
in a gang, and they taught me the whole graffiti alphabet. The designs of youngest
Ontana inspired the way I sign my name. I sign the “K” so that the upper stem
is bent in the middle and angled toward the top of the page. Just envision adding
a line to the “K.” Start at the top of the angled upper stem and make a small line
toward the top of the page. The small things matter. The Ontana brothers left a
symbolic representation in my signature that frequently reminds me of those
friendships.
After the courts forced me and my brother Clay back to Indiana, we went to
a high school that had black people bussed in from Box Town on the other side
of the Pigeon Creek. I don’t remember any other races. One black dude became
my friend.
Sinch’s family was also separated. He got Social Security benefits and he had
his own apartment. I went there a lot when I ran away. We had a ton of freedom
for sixteen. He was into heavy metal, too, and we wallowed in exile. As time went
by we got more into illicit activity and often donated plasma for money, but bum-
mer, me and Sinch eventually parted ways. I was home on leave from the Navy
and we partied. The next morning my step-mom woke me up. “There’s someone
at the door.” My face turned white when I opened the door. I was hung-over as
hell and there were two Pigs staring at me. I put my hand on my head to block
the sun. “Yeah?” “Were you at the Esquire Inn last night?” My tone was disre-
spectful. “Yep.” I squinted. “Did you know the TV is missing from the room?”
Those assholes! It reminded me of why I went into the Navy.
Because our relationship was steeped in rock music, I dedicated the song
“Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)” (Mötley Crue, 1989) in the midst of that
conversation.

In hindsight, my whiteness was forged through relationships with “others” that

formed in educational settings, but was honed in the context of the mediated cul-
ture that placed us somewhere outside the system of education.
Satoshi: Access
“You just don’t understand,” one self-identified African American student qui-
etly said to me. He stayed after class, and questioned these comments of mine:
“Not reflexive enough. Dig deeper.” My “choice” to teach students to be more
self-reflexive in their learning was inspired by the self-reflexive turn in intercul-
tural communication. The assignment was something like: “How do you identify
yourself racially, and what does it mean to ‘you’?” This African American student
paper exhibited withdrawal. As a naïve and hatching teacher, I just did not under-
stand the withdrawal from a culturally marginalized student. I thought, “This
assignment was written for you to empower and reclaim your marginality.”
Almost associating his withdrawal with “laziness”—instead of questioning my
own teaching—I evaluated: not reflexive enough, not personal enough, not emo-
tional enough, and just not enough.
Quietly, almost apologetically, and without eye contact, he said to me some-
thing like: “How can you ask me to be personal and vulnerable when you are
not?” He criticized my teaching as hooks (1994) would. “Professors who expect
students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to
share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive” (p. 21). Maybe he
was upset with my “safer” educational place, practicing my power unknowingly
and coercively. He continued to describe his childhood school experiences.
Horrible and unspeakable. I could not stop imagining a little African American
boy walking to school, lonely, uncertain, and scared. Listening to him speak, I
repressed my tears. “I should not be crying in front of my students. In addition,
I am male.” I wanted to place my hand on his shoulder with hope that human
touch would do something. Then, I thought to myself, “I should not be touch-
ing my students when they are upset”; the strange rules of powerful, orderly
teachers. While I struggled with my pouring emotions and awkwardly situated
body in the classroom, he said, “You just don’t understand.” His sentence punched
me, shook my identity as a critical pedagogue. I stood there. I stood there for a
long time. He walked out on me, leaving my mind spinning fast. Being a teacher,
I am usually the last one to leave classrooms. This time, it was different. I was left
behind in the empty classroom, with my empty pedagogy.
This student didn’t direct his criticism towards my knowledge as a whiteness
scholar; my education equipped me with “knowledge.” He directed his gut-
spilling criticism toward my incapability of “empathetic understanding.” Pineau
(2002) insists “that when I invite my students to discuss their experience of
prejudice, I must be prepared for a full-bodied response” (p. 46). “How do I

prepare myself for a full-bodied response when my student spills his guts describing
my pedagogy as a site of racism or abused power?” And I stood there, alone, in
the classroom.
Sandy: The Critical Pedagogue Flunks
I begin teaching at the college level as a graduate assistant at a research insti-

tution in the heart of the corn fields of Southern Illinois. A baby both in the
world and in the classroom, I have high hopes of my normative brand of social
justice. On the first day, I sit with the students right when I walk in just on time.
About five minutes later, I get up. They look surprised that I am the teacher. I
stand barely five foot tall, and have been told that I have young looks. I’m 23 on
this day. I’m just like them, I reassure myself. “Talk about your experiences,” I
implore. “Share your self with us,” I encourage. “Sexual orientation,” I say.
“Gender, race, culture,” I repeat. “Share your self with us, and make your world
a better, more informed place.” Tom’s experiences this semester will be invaluable
as the only African-American in a class full of White.
“I have many homosexual friends who have very different challenges than I
do.” “I haven’t really faced sexism, though I know it exists.” The class is learning
from my stories, I know, so I continue. “I have a friend who is from Japan, and I
have a story about the first time I ate sushi.” “I am multicultural.” “Here is how
we do outlining.”
Tom never really speaks up in class when he attends. I hear many excuses. The
assignments he turns in are poorly done (by my standards). He flunks both tests.
Writing an “F” next to his name on the final grade sheet feels bigger than just
writing an “F.” What does this mean for Tom? For me? Something deep anchors
this feeling that grounds the “F.” I write it without question. I spend most of my
life looking like everyone else. I’ve never walked into a classroom and saw no one
that looks like me. I am met with sympathy and understanding by my colleagues
when I say, “I’m uncomfortable talking about race in the classroom.” I went to
prom with a Black guy. These things anchor me. My very being, situated within
a particular ubiquitous context, has the potential to strongly force and encourage
silence. These anchors feel familiar.
Satoshi: Critical Impetus, the Deep Personal Place
I don’t remember a lot about my childhood. I don’t remember a moment when

my parents stared at each other with gentle smiles. I don’t remember laughter in
my family. Many nights, my parents’ fights woke me up, and my mother came
into my room to sleep. Many nights I forced a pretend sleep. This became so nat-
ural that I did not have to force any more. Many nights I made myself invisible.

I became invisible. I performed invisibility. I performed well-rehearsed sleep with

confusion, loneliness, and rage under my comforter. Under my comforter, I visu-
alized and silently practiced, “Hey, stop it,” many times. Many times, I wanted to
scream, but I didn’t. I couldn’t because my body did not get enough practice.
HopKins (1995) writes, “A performance . . . is always a kind of repetition,
often the final repetition in a series” (p. 231). My repeated body conquered my
want. The next morning always started as if nothing happened. The smell of my
mother’s cooking traveled to my bedroom and woke me up.
Members of socially oppressed groups are close to me, like my mother was in
my bedroom. Everyday, I travel the fine line between oppressor and oppressed—
whether consciously or not. But, it is this personal location, my body, and my
silence that help me choose to teach whiteness studies. I cannot choose not to
teach it. The three-word phrase, “Hey, stop it,” might have changed the course of
actions between my parents or my own self-identity as a child. Maybe; maybe
not. I repeatedly rehearse and perform this silence, oftentimes with rage, and
other times without consciousness. Fighting against whiteness is like the three-
word phrase I didn’t get to perform. I acknowledge it, never learn to say it, and
retrieve into silence through a series of cultural (un)rehearsals. I am done silenc-
ing myself. I am done performing invisible.
Kyle: Did You Say White Oppression?
In Reno, where I received my Master’s degree, I had an epiphany regarding my

white, academic identity. I was hanging out with two feminist friends one night.
“Tell her what you said.” Her elbow dug into my ribs. “Tell her what you said!”
My face reddened as I explained that I felt in order to be a critical scholar, as a
white man, I have to align myself with oppressed groups. They agreed with smiles
and nudges between them, but told me that I needed to take responsibility for my
whiteness. I resisted. They retorted saying that I am white so I need to consider
my white privilege. “People may dislike or fear you, regardless of how you feel
about it.”
In that moment I felt as if had been doing something wrong, as if I needed to
walk on eggshells for the rest of my life. My guilt turned to fear. I don’t want the
responsibility of being white. My fear turned to anger. I do not, nor have I ever
had, privilege! I am a delinquent; a dropout; a blue-collar man!
I have discovered that my definition of white and the cultural definition of
white are two vastly different things. Whiteness is ethereal (Nakayama & Krizek,
1995). As a white man, I have always felt misplaced; I never quite fit in. This
started with my family and was cemented through institutions. Courts, educa-
tion, the military, and rock-n-roll, make me feel my whiteness is outside the para-
meters of privilege. I am not surprised by Kincheloe and Steinberg’s (2000)
observation that white youth define themselves around the denial of the benefits

of their whiteness. However, my experience beckons a question; can I consciously

position myself outside of that privilege?
I was in our fifteen-foot trailer doin’ homework. Bildo, that’s Mom’s husband,
got it so we couldn’t go in the house after school until he or Mom got home. He
said we ate too much. Suddenly, the door burst open and the doorknob banged
against the outside wall. Bildo barged in yellin’, “I told you to pull weeds until
dark and then do your homework.” My mouth hit the table. “You said do my
homework first.” I stood up and got my back against the stove opposite the door.
Bildo stood close, a six-foot-three, 220-pound demon, licking his lips. I looked at
the floor. Bildo stood with his hands at his sides, flicking his thumb across his fin-
gers. He was getting more pissed. I stood quietly. “You never listen.” He punched
me in my head. “You think you make the rules?” I stood silent. I knew he was
lying! Smack!; he hit me again. And again. I put my arms behind me. He hit me
again. I leaned back on the stove and shoved both feet into Bildo’s stomach as
hard as I could. He stumbled backward just long enough for me to escape. I leapt
over the wooden steps, and ran—teary-eyed—to my closest friend’s house. “Too
bad he didn’t fall down the steps and break his neck.” Later, I called Mom and
told her I wasn’t ever comin’ home again.
I had rehearsed emotional silence for five years in the face of Bildo. He would
lie to Mom so that he could beat us. I lived either numb, or in withdrawal. The
only acceptable performance was no performance at all. “A performance . . . is
always a kind of repetition, often the final repetition in a series” (HopKins, 1995,
p. 231). The cycle of abuse repeated, culminating in my silence. I contradicted
this silent performance by fleeing. I created a new position. I understood very
young that things are ephemeral. Chaos reigns. You fight for your right to peace.
This experience with abuse is a form of oppression that instills in me empathy for
other oppressed groups and motivates me to negotiate my identity into a position
that will allow me to affect change through teaching.
Satoshi: Faceless Bodies
A couple of years ago, I had a young male student who always left the class-
room with me. His heavy, Ebonics-like accent marked him, like my accent
marks me. One day, he said, “I ain’t white, but I am.” He explained he wasn’t
rich enough to be white. Seemingly with excitement and pride, he told stories
about his father and girlfriend, and his low-economic hometown that did not
qualify him for the label of white. He also told of his dream of becoming a hip-
ster band person. He passionately told me that he would rather be playing and
traveling all over the country. I asked, “Why aren’t you?” He responded some-
thing like: “My dad won’t let me. He always tell me that, being poor white, we
don’t get nothin’ from our government or society any more. My dad tole me to
get education.”

“I ain’t white but I am”—this student’s image perplexed me. It was not those
of white male people that Dyer (1997) describes in his book, White. Powerful
white male images fill his pages. Engaging in whiteness discourse, all white people
started appearing the same to me in my teaching. Some whiteness scholars might
argue that this is what whiteness studies is about, marking white people as a cul-
tural group. All white people started sounding and acting the same to me. But this
is not about how they are all the same. This is about how I constructed white
people in my own engagement in whiteness studies. My white students became
merely white bodies—physical replaceable bodies. Our bodies are important in
theorizing race, but not as a reduction. I came to characterize white people into
lifeless social machines that mindlessly produce white supremacist society. My
learning of whiteness studies negates Kyle’s childhood, making him appear a
happy and privileged white boy without any problems in his life.
Sandy: Anchors Away
Scholars point out the fact that whites often have the “unearned advantage” of
unquestioningly opting out of whiteness and racial discussions. I feel responsible
for finding a way to enter into discussions of race in the classroom, no matter how
uncomfortable. It means doing whatever I can to dismantle the systemic racism
present within these classrooms. It means acknowledging my privilege, looking
for ways to lessen it, calling me and my family out for our racist comments,
accepting responsibility for my history, and knowing that going to prom with a
Black guy makes me no less accountable than others. (These are the things I’m
supposed to say. I’m not supposed to say that sometimes, I don’t want to have or
accept this responsibility, because it’s easier for me not to.) It’s time to bring the
anchors to shore and examine their functions.
It is my first semester of teaching outside of my graduate program. I’m in the
liminal space of student and teacher, not having yet defended my dissertation but
teaching a PhD class. I question my own capability and credibility. The class is
for those learning to teach communication at the university level. I look forward
to this opportunity to have a critical classroom and talk about whiteness and stuff
like that. We read bell hooks, George Counts, Peter McLaren. We read Ronald
J. Pelias and Lisa Delpit and Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. It’s very critical and
very cultural. I’m confident that I’ve replaced my rusty anchors with shiny, new,
stronger ones. I am the proud and perfect multicultural pedagogue, walking into
the classroom with head held high and books in hand. But these anchors are still
unsteady. Students make racist comments, and I miss them. One of the students
doesn’t miss them. The chair of the department tells me so. Aside from the
encouraging comments he offers about the difficulty of teaching graduate school,
he lets me know that he taught for 15 years before he could even say the word,
“race,” in the classroom. Flushed, I appreciate his encouragement and support.

My new anchors aren’t holding me steady. I assume that I can let the adults in the
class mediate the tense conversations on their own. I forget my role. How can I
assign these readings that contain new ideas for many of the students, but not
help them process those ideas in the contexts of a plurality of often conflicting
and contradictory experiences? How do I handle the dissonance? How do I han-
dle the potential destructiveness? The one student—who had been told she would
never amount to anything; who had been discouraged from moving into higher
education, largely due to perceptions about her race; who found that teachers
expect less of her—finds her negative schooling experiences reiterated in this class
that I thought was so progressive in tackling issues of whiteness and education.
My new anchors have already rusted.
Nathan and Satoshi: Circle of Pedagogy, Missing the Mark
Satoshi: I entered my dark apartment at almost 2 am after working on my

paper at an all-night restaurant. My dog, Ayame, awakened from the couch and
greeted me. I was tired. However, as I did every night, I checked my email mes-
sages. I found a message from one of the class participants in the intercultural
communication class. Subject: “venting.” Curious, I opened and read it. She
explained that she had had a fight with her friend. Her friend, a white male indi-
vidual, denied whiteness, and accused her of being a victim and puppet of liberal
education and her teacher’s—my—personal agenda.
Nathan: I’ve been told that the questions we ask are more important than the
answers we get. That is what it was to me to critically analyze social structures and
to study whiteness. Critical theory and education were about actions as a result of
answers (Miller, 2002), but critical scholars would ask some of the more bold
questions to arrive at such answers. A question that I asked during my intercul-
tural communication class led to some frustrating answers.
Satoshi: The class participant asked me for help. “How can I make him under-
stand that whiteness exists?” I felt unsettled. Being a teacher, I don’t usually “see”
how my teaching travels beyond the classroom walls. As a critical pedagogue,
I celebrated her struggle. Freire (2000) writes, “Education as the practice of
freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that
[persons are] abstract, isolated, interdependent, and unattached to the world; it
also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people” (p. 81). To me, her
struggle embodied Freire’s critical educational philosophy. This celebration
reminded me of the reality that my teaching was becoming a big part of class
participants’ lives, and was overshadowed by my questions: “Am I being ethically
responsible in teaching whiteness? Does teaching whiteness make the class
participants’ lives more difficult?” Part of me said, “It should.” Part of me asked
me, “How do you justify her suffering?” I feared my own teaching. How do I
respond to: “How can I make him understand that whiteness exists?” I shut down
my computer. Unable to fall asleep, I shifted in my bed.

Nathan: “What can I do, then?” I asked near the end of the semester. This was
the best I could come up with after many hours of contemplating what whiteness
meant to me. Despite this whole new wealth of knowledge about whiteness, the
next step still perplexed me. Critical theorists and you, Satoshi, helped to raise my
consciousness about the issue, but I still felt bewildered.
Satoshi: I still remember your face in the classroom that day, Nathan. Many
class participants appeared “fired up.” With a frown, you listened to others criti-
cize the status quo of racial issues. You looked at me directly and asked, “What
can I do, then?” You were usually quiet. You kept looking at me. You saw me
speechless. Others stared at me. I was trying to fulfill the stereotypical teacher
role—answers and not silence. In silence, I remembered the email that I couldn’t
respond to that night. In silence, I slowly realized that my teaching promoted
class participants to criticize the status quo. Where does the criticism lead them?
Part of me said, “That’s good.” Part of me questioned, “I cannot even contextu-
alize and materialize my own teaching. Is this OK?” I recycled what one profes-
sor once said, something like: “Maybe it is not a good idea for us to discuss ‘doing’
or action when we don’t know the problem. So, right now, contemplation is a
good thing. And contemplating is something we ‘do,’ right?” I wanted to escape
from your question, and I think I did that effectively with a “teacher” face on.
Nathan: I don’t remember your answer.
Satoshi: Probably because I wanted to escape your question. I didn’t see it as a
fatalistic attack; I took it as your sincere desire to know and participate in social
change. Your question prompted me to ask myself, “What does it mean that I
don’t have an answer to your sincere desire?” It was a learning moment for me as
a whiteness educator and critical pedagogue. This is how I audienced your ques-
tion, internally. But I manipulated my performance “of ” and “as” a teacher when
you asked me the question.
Nathan: The question was filled with many other questions I have asked many
other professors. I didn’t know how you audienced my question. Now it takes on
new meaning. You say that my question gave you insight into something that may
be problematic. You told me you learned something from me. Learned something
from me? Such a concept is foreign. You are a teacher with letters behind your
name. You have the advanced degree. But this whole study of whiteness is about
similar phenomena—resituating relationships.
Satoshi: You and your question provoked my thinking as a critical pedagogue
of whiteness. This is a big part of my identity. Your question challenged me to
interrogate my performance of this identity. When you asked that question, I
manipulated and forged out my teacherly performance. I performed “teacher”
and you probably performed “student” as you returned to silence, completing the
circle of our socialized performances. This circle assumes that students are “plants
or blank slates or pegboards for teacherly hammering” (Shor, 1996, p. 12) and
teachers are knowledge holders. I feel more empowered as a facilitator/teacher
now as I tell my audiencing of your question, not the manipulated version of it.
Amodeo and Wentworth (1995) discuss self-revelation and vulnerability.

Those who have discovered the hidden power of vulnerability realize that
being vulnerable does not mean being weak. In fact, a special kind of inner
strength is required to “hold our own” as we experience and assert out gen-
uine feelings, as opposed to aggressively reacting with blame, attacks, mor-
alizing, or other forms of manipulation that create an adversarial position.
(p. 208)
I feel empowered, not powerful. I feel your presence, not alone.

Nathan: It seems our relationship has been resituated. Our learning and under-
standing are reciprocal. We have something to offer to each other. These resitu-
ated educational performances answer the question, “What can I do, then?” I can
participate in resituating relationships. The catalyst is communication—dialogue,
“two voices.” The ambiguity of your answer was only made clear through our
newly situated educational relationship—dialogue, reciprocal learning, and
understanding.
Satoshi: Breaking a circle of everyday performativity mobilizes our question,
“What can we do, then?” Not coming full circle prompts us to question what we
know and how we perform our identity roles. Roach (2002) introduces the idea
of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) and describes it as “‘making new, even
amazing’” (p. 39), insisting that the most appropriate English equivalent is
defamiliarization.
Defamiliarization . . . interrupts habit by insisting on the strangeness of familiar

things and then demanding an explanation of their newly discovered unfamiliarity.
I relate it to action because, if everything is working as it should in a performance,
defemiliarization is what happens as a result. (p. 39)
Breaking the circle possibilizes “dialogue” that transforms our identities and their
performances. Educational reforms are “dialogic in their form and democratically
collective in their process” (Roman, 1993, pp. 82–83). I feel that we are “in”
this—social reform—together. Pineau (2002) explains Freire’s legacy:
His method of critical collaboration between teachers and learners explores

pragmatic solutions to everyday oppressions even while it facilitates a met-
alevel critique of the process of education itself. This dialectical emphasis
on critique and possibility, the pragmatic and the epistemological, the
abstract and the embodied continues to characterize critical theory and
practice in education. (p. 43)
Maybe the feeling of “we are in this together” demonstrates critical theory and
practice in education. It makes room for co-emerging voices, resituating and
democratizing power in educational relationships.

Kyle: Oppression and Liberation Through Education
Just as in California, I was made fun of back in Indiana because people thought
I was from Texas. I spoke differently, so people poked fun. The neighborhood
parents were lawyers and doctors, not electricians and bookkeepers.
It was 11 PM on Friday night. Clay, James, Chris, and me were drinkin’. Chris
was 21. It was cool, booze anytime. I was bitchin’ about school. “Eighth grade
sucks, especially Highland School. It’s full of snobby ass-hole preppies.” Through
big teeth and a sideways smile, Chris spoke. “Well let’s do something about it.”
We drove to his house, got the fluorescent paint, and then drove through the
playground next to the red-brick school. Me and James stood in the back of the
truck while Chris drove. Clay watched out. We would paint, and Chris would
pull forward so we could start fresh. I spent twenty minutes tagging the school
with a mural of pentagrams, cuss words and band names. “OZZY,” “Die Preps,”
and “Fuck You” shined in multiple colors. It felt really good.
Monday, I stood in the principle’s office before Dr. Barr. “Are you responsible
for the spray painting that occurred this weekend?” Silence. Dr. Barr sat down
behind his desk as I stared at the floor. “Is that paint on your shoes?” Silence.
Papers rustled as Barr looked through my file. “For young person, a lot of bad
things have happened to you. I want to do something good for you. You like bas-
ketball?” What!?! I graffitied the school and I’m gettin’ off! The good doctor
placed me on the basketball team. It was a cool feeling; I had a chance to fit in.
The coach, who had witnessed the painting, sabotaged me by putting me into
play with no practice and I looked like a dumb-ass. I know the ass-hole did it on
purpose.
Now, I would forge my identity on the anvil of heavy metal in the hallowed
halls of alienation. I was white trailer trash and I was becoming a “troubled” teen.
I was labeled, I acted out; I was labeled, I acted out. It was obvious that this cycle
of labeling was gaining momentum.
Once in high school, things got better socially. There were plenty of fellow
“burnouts” bussed in from Box Town. I went wild because my father gave me free-
dom and money. Eventually, truancy often kept me on home restriction. This gave
me time alone in my bedroom with my cassette tapes so I transcribed, memorized,
and analyzed heavy metal songs. Little did I realize that, at the time, I was per-
forming a content analysis that shaped my skeptical view of institutions and set the
stage for my academic future, both of which have proven to be lonely positions.
We were chillin’ at Brad’s, smokin’ and bullshitin’. His parents were out of
town. Brad spoke, “Man, you’re not gonna believe this shit!” “I’ll believe any-
thing.” He lit a cigarette. “My cousin lives in Kent’s neighborhood and he told
me that Kent’s dad keeps a stash of money!” “So, what?” Brad’s eyes sparkled. “So?
You’re Robin Hood and I’m Little John, man. We rob from the rich and give to
us.” I smiled and opened another beer. “You can bail outta here! They’re outta
town this weekend, too!”

My Greyhound ticket out of Princeton ended with me getting busted in

Kingman, Arizona. I was extradited and the Pigs paraded me through Las Vegas
airport in shackles and cuffs. I did not speak or make eye contact with anyone,
including Dad. I have never been so humiliated.
After Indiana Boys School (IBS) I was moved to the general education track
and held back a year. I dropped out about six months later. This violated my
parole and I went back to IBS where I earned my GED and later went into the
Navy.
After the Navy I enrolled at the University of Southern Indiana where I took
a sociology class because I didn’t know what the word meant. I was hooked. I
found my means of liberation. I finally found a way to claim a white identity that
would not leave me stigmatized, although there was resistance. Near graduation
my father voiced his opinion concerning the things I was learning. He said,
“Them’s theories.” The message was clear—I was wasting my time.
I share these stories, at the risk of a stigma, to illustrate that my whiteness has,
at different points in my history, been defined in the educational system both by
the people I have met within it and by the act of either embracing or rejecting
that system. Friere (2000) points out that “the oppressed suffer from the duality
which has established itself in the inner most being” and that “they are at one and
the same time themselves the oppressor whose consciousness they have internal-
ized” (p. 48). This may be the reason that Freire never mentions the word race or
ethnicity in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Sandy: Author and Performer
To what anchors do we refer when we use the word “whiteness”? How do par-
ticular performances come to be known as performances of whiteness?
It’s not that we do something that necessarily matters in many cases, but rather,
how. We wonder how we get from one place to another. We wonder how we over-
come obstacles in our lives. People don’t ask us, “Why did you muddle through
those tumultuous times?” They ask, “How did you muddle through those tumul-
tuous times?” We learn in the how.
Our performance of something makes life a process rather than a product.
Conquergood (1983) reminds us that human beings can (and should?) be viewed
as “homo histrio, a definition of human beings as essentially performing creatures
who constitute and sustain their identities and collectively enact their worlds
through roles and rituals” (p. 27). Conquergood (1986) further reflects on human
beings as “homo performans, humanity as performer, rather than author, of her
[sic] own identity” (p. 38).
How things happen, how we come to be the people we are and understand
ourselves and others in the ways that we do—that is performance, and happens
in concert with others, even in moments of contradiction. It is in the perfor-
mance of contradiction that perhaps makes us most aware of the performance

(the process) of becoming. My Christian upbringing reminds me of Paul’s self-

disclosure to the Romans: “What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide
one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise” (Peterson,
2003, p. 2042). There are things I do that guilt me into wishing for alternative
performances.
Mom and Dad recently visited me. We drove up to Port Huron, MI; the web-
site made it look quaint and charming. We stopped off along the coast guard sta-
tion to visit the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse, the oldest working and standing
lighthouse in Michigan. It was the perfect lighthouse day: warm, a bit humid, and
overcast. I pictured the lighthouse lighting the lake once the sun took rest. As Dad
and I walked back to our car from the beach, a stranger walked toward us from
the parking lot. The stranger chuckled and said, “Stephen King should make a
movie here.” A bit uncomfortable, Dad acknowledged with an awkward “yeah.”
I ignored the stranger as Dad and I walked on. The stranger continued, “The
squirrels eat blow-pops and the guys are all queer.” I felt awkward and did not
find this funny. In fact, I’m shocked that someone would think this, much less say
it out loud to complete strangers. Dad’s general nature is one of calmness and
smoothness. Neither of us acknowledged the comment to one another. I have no
idea what Dad was thinking. I ignored the stranger. “What I don’t understand
about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I
absolutely despise.” I want to relive this Port Huron moment to perform the
simple reply, “That is not funny, and I’m offended that you would say that. What
is it you fear about yourself that makes you say that to strangers? How is it that
you chose to think and to say that to us?” How is it that I didn’t give this reply?
What is it I fear about myself that stirs restraint?
We learn in the places of visceral contradiction, which gives rise to knowledge
as process. I would have certainly authored that story a different way if I was
simply the author of my identity—but I am performer, not author. Is the perfor-
mance of whiteness only about performance of racial privilege? Garza (2000)
explains that, rather than an attributable thing or trait,
whiteness . . . seems to be the compulsion to ascribe things or traits or

attributes to different races or ethnicities or ideologies or sexual preferences,
and so on, or sometimes to the seemingly same race, ethnicity, ideology, sex-
ual preference, and so on. (p. 61)
I feel a compulsion to “ascribe things or traits or attributes” to whiteness so that

I know when I do it, and so that I can avoid doing the things I despise. I walk on.
Satoshi: Critical Community
I vividly remember my first day at my doctoral program, and the day I met you,
Sandy. I remember the week-long graduate teaching assistant orientation. The

department is known for its critical intellectual activities. That week, the Graduate
and Basic Course Directors emphasized “community.” I did not get the whole com-
munity stuff. I missed the mark. I was more concerned about my learning, my degree,
and my teaching assignment. The Basic Course Director said something like,
“Community and communication don’t sound alike by accident.” He looked around
and paused a bit, almost inviting his students to take in and unpack his utterance.
I had many boxes to unpack in my apartment. My mind drifted away from
this “community” talk, wondering when these teachers—advisor and director—
were going to get to the important stuff that I needed to know. The emphasis on
“community” carried on throughout departmental activities. Now, I am a critical
researcher/pedagogue of culture and communication. I engage in this intellectual
line of work with a critical perspective garnered from my graduate training, a per-
spective I readily embrace, and a perspective through which I find my reason and
purpose. The notion of “community” now influences me and my teaching and
research: “critical” and “community.” I understand a bit more why the advisor
and director emphasized “community” so much. In my own teaching and learn-
ing of whiteness, I have experienced the importance of critical community.
Critical theory has been described as “performative,” “praxical,” and “commu-
nicative.” Possibilization of critical theory requires community.
Unpacking Our Community-Autoethnographic Process
There are practical implications for engaging in a project that encourages crit-
ical community building. These implications include the resituation of educa-
tional relationships, the process of perspective taking, and the notion of critical
pedagogy as/and therapy.
Resituation of Educational Relationships
We resituated three relationships in our community-autoethnography. First, recent

educational research shows the need for revising teacher identity performances
(e.g, see hooks, 1994; Stringer, 1997a). A starting point for hopeful educational
reform may be “the solution of the teacher-student contradiction . . . reconcil-
ing the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and
students” (Freire, 2000, p. 72). Hooks (1994) asserts the importance of develop-
ing dialogical and relational teacher-student constructions in the classroom. In
valuing everyone’s presence in this community autoethnography, we have become
members of this open-learning community. Hooks further writes, “Any classroom
that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow,
and are empowered by the process” (p. 21). To do so, she explains, teachers must
take the same risks they ask students to take. By foregrounding our cultural iden-
tities and performances here, we willingly take risks in resituating the teacher-
student relationship, and treated this project as a site of growth and empowerment.

Nathan’s question to Satoshi positioned Nathan to audience Satoshi’s explicit

actions. As they dialogued, Nathan moved closer to being an equal participant in
Satoshi’s pedagogical performances. As this occurred, Nathan learned of his ques-
tion as a criticism of whiteness studies. It turned him into a teacher to the teacher.
Satoshi witnessed a question and the context from which the question emerged.
Second, our community autoethnography resituated a researcher-participant
relationship. We were simultaneously writers and readers. Toyosaki and
Pensoneau (2005) explain coauthoring narratives as a transformative research
practice, foregrounding intersubjective knowing through emphasizing the act of
“writing stories together” as an embodied epistemology. “The dialogic narrative
recognizes . . . the presence of the Other in partners’ individual lives. . . .
[T]hus, they can begin to think of their relationship not in terms of ‘me’ and
‘you,’ but in terms of ‘us’” (p. 68).5 Similarly, our engaged writing and reading
inscribed social nexuses among community autoethnographers.
Third, our community autoethnography is an aesthetic communicative event
that resituated a performer-audience relationship with the aim of cultural criti-
cism. “We may define aesthetic communication as a culturally specified act in
which a speaker structures language in a unified and expressive manner, trigger-
ing audience response” (Pelias, 1999, p. 19). As community autoethnographers,
we wrote with two “intended” audiences in mind: our coauthors and the general
public. Our project enabled empathy and understanding, two qualities Pelias
(1999) argues are essential to “true dialogue” (p. 17). It also enabled an “embod-
ied response” as a form of research (Stucky & Wimmer, 2002, p. 3). The inter-
changeable roles between a performer (autoethnographer) and audience member
(community-autoethnographic respondent) signifies an extremely relational and
intimate form of performance process in our research practice.
The Perspective-Taking Process
Hale and Delia (1976) defined social perspective taking as “the capacity to assume
and maintain another’s point of view,” and credited perspective taking as “the basic
social cognitive process in communication” (p. 195). They point out that not only
do persons have to know rules of language use in order to communicate with others
but must also be able to understand another’s perspective. The ability and desire to
take on another’s perspective is critical for building communal relationships.
Community-autoethnographic writing is a way to increase one’s perspective-
taking abilities because it rests upon the process of reflexivity, which recognizes
the effect of the self on a context as a necessary constituent of the context, and
vice versa. Sandy identifies strongly with Nathan’s perspective—both grew up in
a context of choice. Kyle’s pieces helped her to understand a different perspective.
The notions of privilege and oppression and whiteness aren’t objects caused by
any one thing on its own but are built through systems and relationships among
various entities, including performances, discourse, and historical and political

moments. She can come to see how she is not responsible in whole for the patri-
archal system of whiteness, but she can accept and acknowledge her responsibility
as a person who lives within that system.
Furthermore, through community autoethnography, one can reshape one’s own
perspective. At a basic level, Sandy comes to understand her identity as a friend dif-
ferently. She reads Satoshi’s story of childhood silence and asks how, in their 8-year
relationship, she perpetuated that silence for him. Kyle’s heartfelt narrative about
his relationship to his stepfather and his internal sufferings encouraged Satoshi to
question himself and his assumption that “all Whites are privileged.” The dialogue
between Satoshi and Nathan was an exemplar of perspective taking, as it enabled
them to understand each other’s actions and thoughts.
We have also taken different perspectives of our own selves. When Nathan wrote
about his exposure to whiteness, the “I” that was writing in the present was able to
take the perspective of the “I” who was being exposed to whiteness. Sandy and Satoshi
were able to retrospectively investigate their contradictory performances through
Satoshi’s “Hey, stop that!” moment and Sandy’s encounter with a rude stranger. Both
had rehearsed performances that may have positively changed each situation, but
when given the opportunity, they seemed to come down with stage fright.
These four perspectives on whiteness and education provide new experiences
within which to situate our “individual” perspectives as all of those markers we
may use—White person, teacher, working-class individual, female, university
professor, graduate student, Japanese international resident, (sub)urban resident,
U.S. American, and so forth. Reflexivity provides resources with which to con-
ceptualize where our in-process perspectives may take us and possibilizes the ways
in which we might shape our perspectives differently.
Community Autoethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and Therapy
As authors, our self-disclosures raised our consciousnesses to the behind-the-

scenes of another’s performance. Through this process of dialogic self-disclosure,
a change process occurred. Critical pedagogy fosters dialogic self-disclosure that
facilitates a therapeutic-like change process that moves people from inaction to
action. Critical education and psychotherapy are not at all dissimilar.
In terms of whiteness, Nathan spoke of the pain felt by the alienated and
oppressed as well as those who have discovered their performance of whiteness.
Poster (cited in Miller, 2002) explains critical theory as generating from three
assumptions: (1) Pain exists in the world, (2) this pain can be assuaged, and
(3) theory is imperative to the process of assuaging that pain. These three
assumptions of critical theory are congruent with those of psychotherapy. Any
given theory of psychotherapy posits that pain is caused by specific factors in a
client’s environment, and there are methods for reducing that pain. Critical
theory diagrams how to facilitate change within ourselves and others.

Change is an important part of both critical theory and critical pedagogy.

Those “in the critical theory tradition feel a responsibility . . . to work as
active agents of reform and radical change” (Miller, 2002, p. 60). The same can
be said for psychotherapy, where raising the consciousness of a client is “one of
the prime processes of change” (Prochaska & Norcross, 1999, p. 12). How?
Certainly, from the raising of consciousness. Traditionally, the student-teacher
relationship is one in which the teacher is charged with raising the consciousness
of the student on a particular subject; the psychotherapist gives information to
the client in order to raise consciousness to a particular aspect of the client’s life.
The acquired information produces behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and char-
acter changes. With critical pedagogy, the changes are reciprocal and ongoing.
Information is continuously constructed from teacher to student so that the line
separating the two is disrupted. We see that this is a similar process with com-
munity autoethnography, and a clear demonstration of the resituating of the
three earlier mentioned relationships.
Consciousness raising is especially essential to the change process when there
is no awareness (or acknowledgement) of the problem. As was noted in our
autoethnographies, most of us were completely unaware of whiteness because of
its hidden nature (Dyer, as cited in Lipsitz, 1998). Overt expressions of prejudice
may have diminished (see Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, & Krysan, 1997), but covert,
prejudiced attitudes still persist (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, &
Howard, 1997; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Greenwald, McGhee,
& Schwartz, 1998). Problems that are outside of our awareness cannot even begin
to be repaired. This invisible nature of whiteness creates quite the same predica-
ment found in therapy: Those who are precontemplative have no real desire to
change within the near future (Prochaska & Norcross, 1999). Awareness is key in
moving someone who is precontemplative into action as they need to “acknowl-
edge or ‘own’ the problem [and] increase awareness” in order to move forward
(Prochaska & Norcross, 1999, p. 496). The resituation of the mentioned
relationships and perspective taking, facilitated in community autoethnography,
nurtures such critical awareness.
Critical pedagogy creates a place in which therapeutic processes occur to cause
change in educational participants. Likewise, community autoethnography cre-
ates space for therapeutic processes to encourage change in authors. It is all made
possible by the common modality of change, communication—specifically dia-
logic self-disclosure. In our community autoethnography, we all situate ourselves
within a therapeutic process that raises our collective consciousness.
Conclusion
We clearly see the work of community building as an inherent by-product of

and process endemic to community autoethnography. Educationally speaking, this
method can be an essential part of building a classroom community. It will give
educational participants, who often come from very different places, access to one

another without feeling the need to conform to a standard educational identity. It

can help participants understand the sorts of perspectives present and provide
access to experiences that might not otherwise have space to take shape.
We all began the process of this project each from very different places chrono-
logically, racially, ethnically, geographically, educationally, familially, relationally,
genderly, sexually, and so on and so forth. But we each find common ground in
and through both the telling of our own stories and in the audiencing of one
another’s stories. Common ground in the space of difference, and difference in
the space of common ground, makes projects such as these of utmost importance.
Community autoethnography is a method that can be used both by academics
and those outside of the academic community. Collective and dialogic story-
telling functions to create a critical community in that it breaks silence, resituates
relationships, encourages perspective taking, stores a therapeutic relationship, and
works toward social change. Our project demonstrates the power in storytelling.
We offer ourselves up for perusal in order that our audience might respond
accordingly. We invite you to share perspectives with us. We invite you to examine
your own identities. We invite you to resituate your own relationships, including
your relationship with us. We invite you as you invite us.
Notes
1. For example, Pelias (2000) from a perspective of a critical academic, Warren (2001a)
from a perspective of whiteness studies, and Toyosaki (2007) from a perspective of a Japanese
critical pedagogue, all demonstrate autoethnography’s potential for critical cultural criticism.
2. I will oscillate between components of my identity (Ronai, 1995), choosing language
that flavors my writing. I also change person to indicate “zooming in” to a particular event
or emotion. I attempt to reflect various young, time-specific, White identities. In my
arrival to higher education, it is very important for me to remember my roots while mold-
ing my academic identity. This project is such an exercise, allowing me to merge the past
and the present, to reconcile the working-class identity with a “white” collar identity. I also
use some lyrical quotations to convey personal perception and demonstrate culture.
3. All references to persons, other than the authors, use pseudonyms.
4. Though Toyosaki and Pensoneau’s (2005) dialogic narrative differs from community
autoethnography, both emphasize the act of “writing stories together” as an embodied
epistemology. Thus, dialogic narrative is applicable to community autoethnography.
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Kyle Leathers is a doctoral candidate in communication at Wayne State

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University of Southern Indiana and an MA (2004) in speech communication
from the University of Nevada, Reno.

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Community Autoethnography

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Community Autoethnography: Compiling the

Personal and Resituating Whiteness

Examining whiteness (in) education is a journey of identity and materiality.

Keywords: autoethnography; critical pedagogy; whiteness; community

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 9 Number 1, February 2009 56-83

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We hope to explore and advance an understanding of whiteness education that

The performance turn in education is important here. Viewing our story-

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caring, therapeutic, emotionally honest, and compassionate. Conventionally

Ellis methodologically legitimates the personal location as a site of cultural criticism.1

In the same vein, Stringer (1997) advocates that community-based ethnogra-

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First, we value autoethnography as an intimate research methodology for self-

We intend community autoethnography to be a relationship-making activity

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members.” This present community autoethnography is twofold in its goals. First,

Community Autoethnographic Procedure

The bulk of this investigation consists of multiple autoethnographic pieces, all

The Importance of Your Audiencing

Readers play an essential role in community autoethnography. Banks and

Satoshi: Recovering My Self in Whiteness Education

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“different” from the “mainstream/white” English and, therefore, “stupid.”

Pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has

His teaching empowers my marginalized statuses from something to lament to

Critical educators believe that intervention is needed (the language of cri-

I take this responsibility seriously as a critical educator.2

Sandy: Becoming Anchored

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ethnography, and the like—occasionally re-encountering them in more familiar

Satoshi: “Othered” Entry to Whiteness Education and My Choice

In one graduate seminar, the professor introduced McIntosh’s (1995)

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expression—belittling and uncaring—haunts me. Should I introduce whiteness?

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In hindsight, my whiteness was forged through relationships with “others” that

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Sandy: The Critical Pedagogue Flunks

I begin teaching at the college level as a graduate assistant at a research insti-

Satoshi: Critical Impetus, the Deep Personal Place

I don’t remember a lot about my childhood. I don’t remember a moment when

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I became invisible. I performed invisibility. I performed well-rehearsed sleep with

Kyle: Did You Say White Oppression?

In Reno, where I received my Master’s degree, I had an epiphany regarding my

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of their whiteness. However, my experience beckons a question; can I consciously

Satoshi: Faceless Bodies

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Sandy: Anchors Away

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Nathan and Satoshi: Circle of Pedagogy, Missing the Mark

Satoshi: I entered my dark apartment at almost 2 am after working on my

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I feel empowered, not powerful. I feel your presence, not alone.

Defamiliarization . . . interrupts habit by insisting on the strangeness of familiar

His method of critical collaboration between teachers and learners explores

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Kyle: Oppression and Liberation Through Education

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My Greyhound ticket out of Princeton ended with me getting busted in