ABSTRACT
Author Cathy Park Hong (2020) ended her beautiful book, “Minor Feelings,” by worrying about the ways that whiteness works on her as an Asian American. She wrote that conscription into whiteness is “every day and unconscious” and suggested that “we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized” which characterizes “our conditional existence” and causes us “to monitor ourselves” (p. 202). Ultimately, Hong argues “if the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence” (p. 202). We want to be careful not to appropriate Hong’s brilliant theorizing of Asian Americanness, but we are moved by her writing as we consider our work of inviting people into considerations of whiteness and white supremacy. Hong’s claims resonate with our efforts to create improvisational pedagogies that work against the everyday and unconscious compulsions of whiteness produced in white supremacist societies. Hong's argument, in concert with our empirical research, leads us to think about ways compulsions of whiteness are at work on people of color as well as white people. Ultimately, as we relied on Thandeka to illustrate in Chapter 1, whiteness creates an inherently conditional existence for all of us living against the backdrop of an always-present white supremacy and we are the ones who can free ourselves from such a way of life. This is work that white people need to do. Thus the need for transformative critical whiteness pedagogies.
