This art icle was downloaded by: [ Universit y of Massachuset t s, Am herst ] On: 01 Sept em ber 2011, At : 14: 36 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Communication Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rcst 20 Voicing Silence and Imagining Citizenship: Dialogues about Race and Whiteness in a “Postracial” Era a a Liliana L. Herakova , Dij ana Jelača , Razvan Sibii a & Leda Cooks a a Depart ment of Communicat ion, Universit y of Massachuset t s, Amherst Available online: 15 Aug 2011 To cite this article: Liliana L. Herakova, Dij ana Jelača, Razvan Sibii & Leda Cooks (2011): Voicing Silence and Imagining Cit izenship: Dialogues about Race and Whit eness in a “ Post racial” Era, Communicat ion St udies, 62:4, 372-388 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 10510974.2011.588072 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Full t erm s and condit ions of use: ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, re- dist ribut ion, re- selling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warrant y express or im plied or m ake any represent at ion t hat t he cont ent s will be com plet e or accurat e or up t o dat e. The accuracy of any inst ruct ions, form ulae and drug doses should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem and or cost s or dam ages what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h or arising out of t he use of t his m at erial. Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Communication Studies Vol. 62, No. 4, September–October 2011, pp. 372–388 Voicing Silence and Imagining Citizenship: Dialogues about Race and Whiteness in a ‘‘Postracial’’ Era Liliana L. Herakova, Dijana Jelača, Razvan Sibii, & Leda Cooks Narrating and reflecting on our experiences as organizers and facilitators of campus dialogues about race, we perform the possibilities of silence to speak about, with, and to matters of race and citizenship in the United States today. Starting with our own experiences of silence in the context of dialogue, we open them to readings and responses. This article offers our reading, but ends with the silence of a punctuation—a dash— leaving the space for readers’ responses to contribute to exploration of how pedagogies of silence can work toward social justice. Keywords: Colorblind; Dialogue; Performances of Citizenship; Race; Silence; Transformation Following the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States, many politicians and pundits, along with average citizens, declared the end of racism. We were now in a postracial era, they proclaimed: Race as a marker of difference and inequality no longer mattered. President Obama himself, in perhaps his most famous line to date, declared that ‘‘there is no Black America, there is no White America, there is only the United States of America,’’ thereby seeming to sanction a colorblind approach to the topic of race and citizenship in the United States. Candidate Obama’s message of hope and unity around policies that elevated the whole country also worked in the minds of many voters to reinforce messages of Liliana L. Herakova, Dijana Jelača, and Razvan Sibii are doctoral candidates in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where Leda Cooks is a Professor. Correspondence to: Leda Cooks, Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, U.S.A. E-mail: leda@ comm.umass.edu ISSN 1051-0974 (print)/ISSN 1745-1035 (online) # 2011 Central States Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2011.588072 Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Silence and Dialogue 373 individualism and meritocracy. Proposed reforms in health care, jobs, and education promoting universal uplift ignored structural experiences of racial discrimination (Wise, 2010), while emphasizing individual responsibility to making a difference as a marker of citizenship. President Obama’s understandable ambivalence around issues of race during his candidacy and after his election resulted in his elevation among many as the ideal type—a model minority (and a model citizen) who could prop up the exception (overcoming considerable racial barriers through, among other things, ethnic, class, and education privileges), while ignoring the rule (systemic structural inequities that black and brown bodies face in this country). As educators, we often found this colorblind sentiment echoed in our classrooms. At a predominantly White university, where, in our experience, most White students had for years resisted discussions of their own racial identities, silence now had the perceived blessing of the most powerful position of the land. The trained incapacity to acknowledge racial inequity was—and is—a moral position as well as a social group privilege. On our campus the predominant sentiment was that the acknowledgement of race as a marker of inequality was in and of itself the enactment of racism, as it obliterates faith in everybody’s individual capacity to succeed. Such logic produces a morality that absolves systemic racism while pointing a finger at those individuals who acknowledge racial inequality as racists. Ironically, the election of the first Black president helped to solidify this moral position—if a man of color could become president on a platform of unity and universalist policies, then race was=is a nonissue. Our response to the rise of these discourses of colorblindness and (im)moral silences around topics of race was to organize large-scale dialogues on just these topics on our campus. Calling race to the center of the conversation was important to our vision of citizenship as transformative of society, ‘‘fueled up by the double-edged assumption that citizenship relies both upon regulations that mandate exclusions and the participatory agency and mobilized imaginations [emphasis added] of activated individuals’’ (Mitchell, Kuftinec, & Brod, 2009, p. 201). Thus, citizenship as transformative is unpredictable but requires critical and active engagement with one’s own and with others’ stories, conditions of life, hopes, and imaginations. We were hoping to foster such continuing engagement in=through dialogues, making the conversations themselves performative of a process of citizenship. The dialogues, which focused on whiteness as an organizing structure for racial and ethnic identities, took place during the Fall 2009 semester1 and involved 430 students and 25 facilitators in a series of three dialogues (with a total of 105 dialogues taking place). The dialogues blended social justice dialogue models (Adams, Berquist, Dillon, & Galanes, 2007; Pearce & Pearce, 2001; Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, & Cytron-Walker, 2007), so that structured activities (Intergroup Dialogue [IGD]) were added to a close focus on storytelling and the use of language (Public Conversations and Learning Circles). The model included both presenting information about structural inequities and engaging participants, including dialogue facilitators, with their own stories of racial identity. Models of dialogue, however, take shape based on the definitions we hold for the process of communication. For us, dialogue (borrowing from the Bohnian ideal) can Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 374 L. L. Herakova et al. strive to be a container or safe space for mutual risk-taking and respectful listening set apart from the realities of status inequities (the goal of IGD) but is most often about what is created in the spaces in between our ideals of equality and social justice and the dynamics of race that position bodies discursively before a word is spoken. In these spaces, we find possibilities for making meaning in between standing on our own ground, our stories, and experiences and being open to the varied and different stories of others. We approached the dialogues with a belief that the process can be ethical: acknowledging ‘‘multiple goods that give rise to and emerge in ongoing conversations, protecting and promoting the good of learning’’ (Arnett, Fritz, & Bell, 2009, p. 55). Learning (and the good promoted therein) cannot be pre-given by the declaration of a space for dialogue but rather arises in moments of connection within difference, silence, and awe. Learning happens when we choose not to fill those moments with our own endings and judgments but see them as posing questions in spaces where we previously had answers. As part of connecting individual dialogue meetings into a dialogue process, after each dialogue ‘‘session,’’ students wrote reflections and these responses framed conversations about race and whiteness in the next round of dialogues. The figure of President Obama emerged as central to all of the dialogues as a place from which to interrogate the connections of meritocracy, individualism, and colorblind (in)equality. In the second round of dialogues, for instance, students were asked to reflect on their peers’ (written) statements such as ‘‘We have a Black President now, so race is no longer an issue’’ and to discuss the impact of the statements for themselves and the connection to their social group identities. While the specter of candidate Obama’s Blackness (Johnson, 2010) loomed large in the mainstream media and our dialogues, the contributions of his candidacy and presidency to solidifying the oppressive silence of whiteness went largely unremarked. As Wise (2010) argued, with a rise of postliberal universalism that culminated in the election of President Obama, there has been little public discussion about a ‘‘postracial’’ colorblindness, resulting in a renewed emphasis on individualism and meritocratic social policies. We take this colorblind discourse of universality to be part of the contemporary U.S. performances of citizenship; performances in which President Obama not only participates but that he, in his leadership position, models. In this essay, speculating about the possible consequences of such colorblind performance of citizenship is not our primary goal—but it is this phenomenon that frames our own performances of and reflections on citizenship. We saw organizing, facilitating, and participating in the campus dialogues as performances of citizenship, in which we perceived citizenship to mean an active move toward societal transformation, rather than a nationally bound and fixed identity (Mitchell, Kuftinec, & Brod, 2009). ‘‘Dialogue’’ and ‘‘transformation’’ have come to imply sensible activity, the results of which can be heard, seen, described, and evaluated. Yet, as dialogue facilitators, we each found ourselves in moments of silence, simultaneously stunned and moving both within and outside this stunned-ness. We hoped to facilitate a dialogic process on the topic of racial identities, and in doing so to perform our vision of engaged citizenship; we found that in our moments of unexpected silences we did perform, Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Silence and Dialogue 375 but (in) what processes of citizenship did we perform was a more problematic and complex issue. How did our silences in campus dialogues about race in the United States carry out (or didn’t) our ideals of citizenship? How are these silent performances of transnational transformative citizenship bordered and bound by our bodies, our accents, our disclosures of being non-U.S. citizens talking and facilitating talk about race in the United States? We chose to write about our silences and reflections as data, not about others’ silences. Thus, we feel we can include, on our own terms, the complexity of the affective experience of belonging to (racialized) citizenship. Of course, our experiences of silence were relational, and in this we all participated in audiencing (giving meaning to) others’ performances during the dialogues. In this process, we participated in the comparative coconstruction of the meaning of citizenship (McKinnon, 2009) and of silence around issues of race in the United States. From a performance ethnographic (Conquergood, 1995) perspective, we know that our performances were also audienced and citizen-ed—and this knowledge, in our roles as facilitators and teachers, contributed to a sense of pedagogical accountability that added to the affective complexity of our silences. With and in our silences, what=how did we teach and learn about the links between race and citizenship in the Obama-era United States? Were our silences of and for privilege? Oppression? In-between? In motion? Colorblind Citizenship and the Work of Silence and Dialogue Citing Sommers, Louis (2009) wrote that citizenship in the United States has ‘‘long been judged by the citizen’s enactment of the ‘Personal Responsibility Crusade’ and the ‘Perversity Thesis,’ both of which are ‘public discourses that reassign responsibility and blame for social problems from structural conditions to alleged defects of individual moral character’’’ (p. 282). We hear echoes of this ‘‘Personal Responsibility Crusade’’ in President Obama’s hopeful assertion that we can be the change we want to see in the world. As educators, we hear those echoes of citizenship in his 2011 State of the Union call, ‘‘If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child—become a teacher’’ (White House, 2011). In our organization of and participation in the race dialogues on our campus and in our hopes for the transformative potential of these dialogues, we perform our personal responsibility of citizenship. On some level, we are inspired and moved by President Obama’s modeled citizenship, whereby unity does seem possible. Yet, embodying a paradox, we also find it problematic that such personalist and individualist ideologies (Hill, 2008) of citizenship, emphasizing agency, obstruct a view of the structural (e.g., racialized) borders of U.S. citizenship. In President Obama’s discourse, we find that such borders are somewhat easily named and identified, when they can be related to borders of nation-states, as in the 2011 State of the Union: Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers, 376 L. L. Herakova et al. Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense. (White House, 2011) Some of the authors of this essay are those ‘‘others’’ who ‘‘come here from abroad.’’ In and from this position, it makes sense to us that our citizenship needs to be constantly renegotiated and relegitimized according to the norms of legitimate citizenry. But if this troubling of the fixity and legal transgressions of national borders is declared as a strategy to ‘‘winning the future,’’ why aren’t the same structural barriers part of the presidential discourse on citizenship within the borders of the United States? Explorations of the performance of citizenship by New Orleaners (Louis, 2009), for example, clearly suggest that legitimate citizenship (and by this, agency) in the United States, among U.S. nationals, has structural, racial, and gender dimensions. Critical approaches to race (Orbe & Harris, 2008) have long seen race as a socially constructed category, a master discourse, participating in the construction of social hierarchies. Silence on matters of race has also been analyzed as contributing to whiteness as a system of dominance in the United States. Covarrubias (2008) found that students of color experience not only talk but also silence as racist. In her ethnographic study, students of color perceived teachers’ lack of response to racist comments in the classroom as just as discriminatory and supportive of White privilege as the comment itself. Silence was a statement of belonging. Silence about race has pedagogical functions, working to teach us about race in the United States and to locate us in the system of racial identifications and relations (Orbe & Drummond, 2010). Silence and talk about race work and matter together (Covarrubias, 2008), and as teachers and dialogue facilitators, we wonder, as does Simpson (2006), what is to be said and what is to be silenced, so that racism does not go unnoticed, but viewpoints are not excluded from the democracy of dialogue. We think of President Obama’s silences similarly as pedagogical and, thus, charged with accountability. We think of our own fragmented silences as pedagogical and as moments of learning and belonging. As such, silences are not foreclosed to an interpretation of passivity. We wonder how they work to make ours and others’ racialized identities, to make (possible) ours and others’ belongings, alliances, and divisions. In discussions of dialogue as a democratic endeavor, voice and speaking are often one-dimensionally cast as participation, while silence is seen as oppression, as voice’s opposite (Jaworski, 1993). Reflecting the ideals of a participatory democracy, the dominant cultural values placed on voice have led to the assumption that equality can be achieved (or at least measured) through the degree to which one is heard. The popular AIDS campaign slogan, ‘‘Silence equals Death,’’ for instance, has widely been embraced and extended by social activists and civic-minded citizens alike. But being in our moments of silences (shared below) with others, we find such interpretations of silence to be insufficient and inadequate in making a statement about (how) race matters in the United States today. As we find and live silences as present in Silence and Dialogue 377 master discourses of race and citizenship in the United States, we find it timely and important to perform and (co-)reflect on those silences, to cocreate and continuously rethink their meanings and potentials, because, as Duncan (2004) notes: Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 There are qualitative distinctions between being silent and being silenced. Similarly, as I have suggested, it is a quite different process to be silent than it is to be unheard. [. . .] Thus even speech is structured around already existent relations of power. Not all silences are the same. (pp. 13–14) Exploring silence’s potentiality in relation to race and citizenship in the United States, we share fragments of our own silences in dialogues about race. In our experiences and reflections, we combine performance and dialogue as both methods and objects of our analysis. Performance Ethnography as Intervention Despite variation within and across disciplinary boundaries, performance studies are generally concerned with the (critical) theory and practice of (thinking, feeling) bodies in motion. To study performance is to study people, objects, etc. in relation to one another, as action, interaction, and relationship (Schechner, 2002). We are interested in performance as kinesis—‘‘as movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that transgress boundaries,’’ a ‘‘politically urgent view of performance as breaking and remaking’’ (Conquergood, 1995, p. 138). Performance ethnography, as an extension of this view, takes bodies-in-performance as basic to ethnographic work and therefore central to its re-presentation in academic venues (Conquergood, 1995; Pelias, 2007). We adopt this methodology as we attempt to embody our voices=silences in the dialogues conversing here. While we cannot replicate our voices and silences physically, we attempt an aesthetic approximation in the hope of capturing the dynamic, fluid, and fleeting qualities of moments our bodies experienced in the dialogues. In this sense, this text—as a reflection, as taking our experiences beyond the borders of our bodies and our campus—is itself a continuation of the performance of citizenship we began when we first started the dialogues about race. It is a performative continuation, because, as we move in and through our experiences and uncertainties, we attempt to also move the reader. We imagine an active, cocreative reader—not as an analytical cop-out, but as a political call and commitment. As we break and remake our silences in the particular contexts and relations from which we experienced them, we invite the readers to break and remake, to connect, to interpret, and to challenge our experiences of race and citizenship, as well as their own. As Martin (1993) wrote: [P]erformance offers an opening of the self to ourselves [and others]. But it does so in a rather uncomfortable and unique way. It asks that we give over to curiosity and . . . welcome risk by moving into different, even strange and unknown experiences without pretense. (p. xiii) Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 378 L. L. Herakova et al. We believe that such a movement performs citizenship as transformative of society (Mitchell, Kuftinec, & Brod, 2009) and that experiencing race as relational (Lucal, 1996) is an inseparable, albeit often silent, part of this performance in the United States. In the stories we share, our silences are meaningful, but undecided—they are moments of belonging to and learning about (our) racial locations and relations, of pedagogy and resistance to pedagogy. In suspending our silences, we try to break and remake U.S. colorblind discourses of universality, taking charge of Conquergood’s use of ‘‘performative’’ as an ‘‘action that incessantly insinuates, interrupts, interrogates, antagonizes and decenters powerful master discourses’’ (1995, p. 138). Stories: Fragments of Silence in Dialogues about Race In what follows, we share stories rooted in our experiences facilitating the dialogues on our campus in the fall of 2009. Each story is both a response to an unsettling event and an opening for further intervention. Thus, in our analytical bringing together of those stories, we explore possibilities for our teaching, learning, and facilitating in=of silence about race matters and citizenship in the United States. Raz: The Band-Aid Thingie The very last roundtable that I facilitated took place on a late Thursday afternoon. Together with my colleague, a popular professor in our department, I welcomed some 10 students and we got down to business: ‘‘So what stuck with you from the previous dialogue?’’ Several students spoke up at the same time; one’s voice rose over the din: ‘‘That band-aid example.’’ A brief moment of quiet and then two or three students seconded the remark: ‘‘Yeah, that band-aid thingie!’’ The looks of recognition around the table told me that virtually everyone around the table had discussed the band-aid example during the second round of dialogues. I too recognized the example, as I had used it myself during the previous dialogues. The second round of discussions had been devoted to the issue of ‘‘whiteness,’’ and, in the context of raising the participants’ awareness of the many ways in which whiteness organizes our everyday lives while remaining essentially invisible, I had brought up the fact that most commercially available band-aids come in that orange-y color that is exhibited by the skin of many so-called White people (McIntosh, 1998). ‘‘Why aren’t there any black or brown band-aids?’’ I had asked the students in my group. ‘‘Don’t Black people want band-aids that match their skin color?’’ For many of the students around me, this example of the taken-for-granted ‘‘normality=centeredness’’ of whiteness had obviously come as an eye-opening mini-shock; several students had responded with a variation of ‘‘Wow, I never noticed that about band-aids!’’ So I wasn’t surprised that my third-dialogue interlocutors vividly remembered the example as well. I smiled at the student who had first brought it up and said, ‘‘Yeah, I know, many people were struck by that.’’ I felt good about myself and I welcomed more Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Silence and Dialogue 379 discussion about racism and the band-aid. That’s when my cofacilitator threw me a curve ball: ‘‘Yeah, everybody remembers the band-aid example,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s probably because it’s such a simple example of racism that has an easy fix: ask the manufacturers to make dark band-aids too. Problem solved.’’ My cofacilitator’s pronouncement hung in midair for several seconds, as the other participants, including myself, stared at him, suddenly disoriented. I cannot guess at what went through the students’ minds during the brief period of awkward silence, but I remember the main thought that occupied my mind at the time: ‘‘Is he right?’’ I had found the band-aid example to be particularly good at exposing the mundane character of racism and had encouraged the students to explore it at length during the second dialogue round. Had I latched onto the all-too-simple example (as per my colleague’s critique) because my own not-so-innocent mind found it easier to ‘‘resolve’’? Was this a failure of pedagogy or did it just represent the recognition that one needed simple case studies to accompany such a complicated issue as structural racism? Maybe the band-aid was indeed but a convenient strawman, much like that other strawman that antiracist pedagogues have recently learned to hate with a passion: ‘‘But we have a Black president now, don’t we? Then why are we still talking about racism?’’ If the combination of Obama’s high political position, his black body and his colorblind universalist discourse seemed to offer many White students a justification for pronouncing racism dead, did my apparent equation of structural racism with an easy-to-comprehend (and easy-to-resolve) ‘‘band-aid problem’’ also pave the way for such a pronouncement? How is one to speak of the multitude of phenomena (and their incredibly complicated relationships) that make up all ‘‘structures’’ (such as ‘‘structural racism’’) without discussing them one by one? Is the solution here to always discuss all of them, or at least as many as possible? Or, as my colleague’s comment might suggest, should we always go with the most intractable instance of discrimination by way of exemplifying the complexity and sheer perversity of racism? I frantically searched for something to say to my cofacilitator. I had had a decisive role in creating the self-congratulatory atmosphere that had surrounded our ‘‘band-aid moment,’’ and I felt compelled to address my colleague’s challenge. I wondered: Do I tell him that I think we’d be better served to see the band-aid example as a baby step on the road to awareness=education rather than as a slick cop-out? But did I still believe that? I felt that I was, indeed, pedagogically accountable to the students to address my colleague’s challenge, but, given my inability to fully process my colleague’s remark, I honestly didn’t know what I could say to them. So I remained silent and let the moment pass. Was my silence of and for privilege? What type of citizenship did it perform? In retrospect, I’m thinking I should have shared these musings with the students— confessing my own confusion and ambivalence might have successfully subverted the discourse of ‘‘knowledge’’ (i.e., that which belongs to the ‘‘knowers’’), as well as the notion that structural racism can be mapped out in a dispassionate, rigorous, and methodical manner. 380 L. L. Herakova et al. Dijana: Silence(d) Aloud My cofacilitator: ‘‘Before we start with today’s topic, does anyone want to share their thoughts about the last round of dialogue, talk about something that stuck with you, that you learned and so on?’’ Student 1: I thought we had a good conversation . . . Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 A few students, quietly: Yeah . . . [some nodding]. Student 2: We talked about whiteness and how it affects our society . . . Student 3, abruptly: I thought my facilitator talked too much. My cofacilitator, surprised: Oh really? Who was your facilitator? Student 3: She was [points at me]. She talked a lot about the country where she came from [I come from Bosnia]. I didn’t come here to listen about her. I’m surprised, taken aback to be suddenly singled out like that. (But why should I be so surprised? Have I somehow simply assumed that my facilitator role puts me in a nonaccomplice position when it comes to the often abstractly discussed agents of silence, those who have the power to silence?) The rest of the group is also looking at me, waiting for a response. Student 3, seated on the exact opposite side of the circle from me, is looking at me accusingly (at least that’s how I see it). I am silent. Blinking. Thoughts quickly go through my mind. Should I defend myself? Should I apologize? But then, I would be countering Student 3’s claim that I talked too much by talking again. . . . And, I would come off as . . . defensive . . . I don’t want to alienate the group by seeming defensive. So I remain silent some more. But then again, I think, I could come off as ignoring Student 3, if I at least don’t acknowledge her remark. So (seeing that my cofacilitator opened his mouth to finally break this arguably awkward silence), I say to the girl sitting on the opposite side of the circle from me: ‘‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’’ Dialogue resumes its course . . . a lively conversation ensues. As was the case with the last round of dialogues (the one where we talked about whiteness), I notice that these ‘‘ALANA’’ students (I attempted to decipher the acronym: A ¼ Asian, L ¼ Latino, Latino, A ¼ I don’t know what this A stands for . . . ‘‘and?’’ NA ¼ Native American?) are eager to share their thoughts, experiences, fears and anger about being minority students in a predominantly White campus. I say virtually nothing for the remainder of the dialogue. Half listening to the lively dialogue, half in my own thoughts. . . Upset. I feel that I somehow squandered Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Silence and Dialogue 381 my chance to participate, by being perceived as an aggressive interlocutor the last time around. A part of me wants to turn to Student 3 and say: ‘‘But I didn’t talk too much, what are you talking about?! We were having a dialogue and . . . and I shared my experiences like everyone else . . . I . . . I . . . am innocent (Innocent? Is that really the word I am looking for?) of this crime inside the communication channel that you accuse me of.’’ But that self-pitying part of me is silenced right now. Silence. I am silenced because I silenced. To deny my accomplice role as the one who silences by silencing even more (interrupting this passionate dialogue to go back to talking about myself) would be so . . . wrong . . . (maybe the word I am looking for). It would be a ‘‘teachable moment’’ thrown to waste . . . (Teachable to me . . . I’m not supposed to teach them . . . just . . . facilitate). So, I have to accept it. I silenced. And now I am silenced. In silence. If those who once silenced now have to be silent as a way to redeem themselves, do we resolve or do we perpetuate? But wait, I’m losing track of what is being talked about in the dialogue . . . Someone says, ‘‘ . . . So, I don’t want to always be expected to speak on behalf of all minority groups,’’ followed by ‘‘Yeah’’ from many. My cofacilitator replies, ‘‘That’s a great point. But I’m afraid we’re out of time now . . . . This has been a wonderful dialogue, thank you all so much for participating.’’ And so we end. — As I am standing around, saying good-bye to the students, one of them comes up to me and says: ‘‘I just wanted to tell you that I didn’t think you talked too much in the last dialogue. I think your story about Bosnia and ethnic conflicts was very interesting and it was important for me to hear it’’ ‘‘Oh . . . thank you for saying that.’’ We smile at each other silently. I’m in an in-between position where my silencing of one, at least one, perhaps more than one student, simultaneously represented the voicing of meaningful echoes for one, at least one, perhaps more than one other student—voicing the echoes of our shared transnational, unstable, unreliable race=ethnicity narratives that can silence and be silenced all at once. And I can’t help but ask myself: How has my positioning as a non-American national framed this experience for both me and the student who felt silenced? I had initially introduced the story about Bosnia as a way to link my experiences of ethnic exclusions to the students’ stories of their own racial and ethnic status as minorities, hoping that together we would peel the layers off the concept of citizenship in both contexts, by showing that legitimacy through citizenship is not always granted to all in equal measure. Yet, as much as there could be parallels drawn between our disparate experiences of being variously delegitimized as citizens, so are there parallels in our respective silences — my student’s, brought on by my inadvertent privileging 382 L. L. Herakova et al. of my own story; and then my own, brought on by the realization that sometimes silence is what it takes for one to be able to hear (an)other. Both our respective silences speak volumes about the contingent legitimacy of (racialized, nationalized) experiences of citizenship in equal measure, even if, or perhaps especially because, they came to be in the context of mutual (silent) antagonism. Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Lily: Silent Opportunist? Looking for meaningful echoes, I was silent because I felt I belonged, I was phrased, created, performed as belonging. When my presence and my body in those two dialogues were articulated as raced by me and by others, it was theirs to claim, mine to retain, ours to relate to. In the 4 o’clock dialogue, I said, as I have done in previous dialogues, that in the United States I identify as White. No one said anything; there was a moment of exploring silence before we moved on to the next person, a silent movement that to me suggested an implicit acceptance of my self-identification as White. No questions, no clarifications, just nods. I was (declared) White and stayed that way. Two hours later, I cofacilitated another dialogue with students from a class that was specifically designed to help people of color transition to college life. I literally shook standing on the instability of my racial=ethnic identity, when one of the women in the group said, ‘‘How great is it that we’re all women of color here and we can talk about our experiences?! I know you, sisters, will understand.’’ No one said anything, we moved on. I was (declared) of color, and stayed that way. Like Raz and Dijana, I feel somehow suspended in those fleeting moments of silence as dialogue, in which I was (created and confirmed) with others in particular ways—the complex reflective world that unfolds in them unresolved, my ethics under question, my identity in flux but appeased by a sense of being recognized as belonging. Is there a transformative potential in the silences of these alliances? Dialogues are going on and we keep talking; the me in those silences suspended in a parallel and border-crossing copresence. White female: Talk doesn’t change anything. When we talk about it [race], we just say the same stuff, and it doesn’t really change anything [. . .] like all this talk about White privilege, we all talk about it and we all know it’s there, but no one does anything about it. White male: I’m not going to go out of my way to befriend someone just because he’s of a different race, but we otherwise have nothing in common, ‘cause that will be racist. Another White male: Yeah, all my friends are White and I have one Iranian friend. But I’m not friends with him because of his race, but because of who he is. ‘‘Talk doesn’t change anything.’’ And silence? The silence living inevitably in talk? The silent presence of a body different from yours sitting next to you? My silent body Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Silence and Dialogue 383 concealing the difference? In this whole dialogue trip, we’ve privileged talk, and we’ve transcribed it with the silence of the silent erased on the screen, but their bodies latched on to the spaces, to my memory. My memories of silences are fragmented, nonlinear, connecting in amorphous shapes as I try to make sense of how my own (and others’) racial identity has traveled during the dialogue trip. My memories of silence, unconfirmed by others the way a spoken word can be, travel and change with me, more of an unresolved analytical copresence than a fixed memory. Inviting the silent to speak is a skill we tried to learn in our training as facilitators. In that diversity seminar, Lee Mun Wah impressed us with his technique to elicit answers, getting White people to talk about race, to say the unsay-able, to face the taken-for-granted. Or rather to vocally perform that face-off for the others present to see and applaud. Lee Mun Wah asked something of a (seemingly) White, (seemingly) blond, (seemingly) middle-aged, suit-clad (seeming) woman that stood in an almost exact diagonal from me. She shrugged—a gesture so familiar to my own shoulders. ‘‘But if you did know,’’ he said, ‘‘what would you say?’’ And she answered . . . I don’t remember her answer, nor the question, but I do remember her, and next to her the (seemingly) diminutive Lee Mun Wah—darker skin, slender figure, smile, ponytail, facial hair, and all—dressed in the clothes of his culture, as he himself informed us, holding up a microphone. I have no transcription of the question and the answer, poor scholar that I am, but I do remember her silence before the answer, before his ‘‘But if you did know . . . ’’ and I remember the silence bloating my tummy as the room boomed with applause. ‘‘But if you did know . . . ’’ became our (facilitators’) weapon against silence, a way to bring in voice as an answer, as if the outward presence of a voice, of which we all— of hearing ability—can attest, means more than the inward process of silence, of which we—of hearing ability—can never be certain; as if voice has a body and silence does not. The possibilities of that silence, the confusion and struggle it might enshroud, the shame, the fear, the gratefulness, the pride, the circus of emotions that race may excite—reduced to knowledge, to being, in the singular—but if you did know . . . Meta-Meta-dialogues—or—Mixing Voices of Silence ‘‘Home, once interrogated, is a place we’ve never been before.’’ Kamala Visweswaran (1994) wrote this in her meditation on feminist ethnography as failure. She urges us to sit patiently with moments of failure to know more about who we are. Because who we are is always inseparable from the theory we create. And the theory we create allows us to live in new and more just ways. (Carillo Rowe, 2005, p. 15) From one angle, our silences can be read as failures—pedagogical failures of letting a perfect teaching=teachable moment go by, failures to identify ourselves in fixed ways and to make conclusive sense, failures to find just the right words . . . Our fragmented silences have this in common: We sit with those moments; in some ways, we have not let them go by at all; we still try on the ‘‘right’’ words to voice our silences, their deep Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 384 L. L. Herakova et al. unresolved meanings and potentials, their creative confusions. In their unresolved tensions, our silences are moments of learning and unlearning, of belonging and (be) longing (Carillo Rowe, 2005), of somehow participating in a dialogic performance of citizenship by exposing our own, as well as the dialogue participants’ identities as contingent in their fluidity. As told from the perspectives of our immigrant status in the United States, and, in the context of campus dialogues about race that we facilitated, our stories of silence are part of our experiences of learning about race in the United States (Orbe & Drummond, 2010). How we fit in, how we are made to fit in, how we make ourselves fit in. While Dijana is ‘‘put on the spot’’ by a student’s comment, her silence negotiates her belonging in the dialogue—how not to alienate; how to think of her experience in Bosnia as contributing to a U.S. conversation about race; how to be with others toward social justice. Similarly, Lily’s silences focus on her desire for belonging, for being understood in apprehensible categories, for being made sense in some sort of solidarity. And while her voiced racial identity sounds conveniently singular and fixed, the silent one is multiple and relational, still learning its place in the U.S. system of race relations (Orbe & Drummond, 2010). We know there are historically specific links between race, privilege, and oppression in the United States, but how can bodies together—in our shared silences and the conversations these silences enable or close—transform those links in constructing anew the meanings of race, of who can, and how one can talk about race in the United States. When President Obama calls to legally enable U.S.-educated ‘‘foreigners’’ to help America win the future (to perform, in other words, U.S. citizenship), when he calls, in other words, for reshaping ‘‘regulations that mandate exclusions’’ (Mitchell, Kuftinec, & Brod, 2009, p. 201), how does he account for politics and affect of belonging in a racially stratified society? Our silences, in the contexts of dialogues about race, perform our learning to belong. Furthermore, in the aftermath of our dialogic experiences, we realize that we’ve been taught to perceive (students’) silences as either deceptive or passive, but certainly not beneficial and not something to be encouraged. Not speaking up, we had thought, is a matter of staying silent, rather than going silent. And there was a value that marked silence in relation to talk. Indeed, after different sessions that we facilitated, we commonly answered each other’s questions about ‘‘how it went’’ by stating ‘‘Great! So many of them spoke up!,’’ or ‘‘Not so great . . . they were very quiet.’’ From this vantage point, it was often hard for us to resist relying on the identity politics that would give students’ silences straightforward meanings: silent White student ¼ exercising his=her privilege of not having to think=talk about race; silent student of color ¼ hard for him=her to suddenly find voice after having been silenced his=her whole life. But we also felt (knew?) that students, too, practiced identity politics linking our bodies to voiced or silenced performances of citizenship. How was Raz to respond to his cofacilitator’s comment? Did Dijana talk too much? Should Lily have set the record straight about her racial self-identification? Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Silence and Dialogue 385 Our silences negotiate our bodies—as visible, present, raced, accented—and our roles—as facilitators, students, foreigners, travelers, teachers. We deem the silences in our stories as anything but passive now. Dijana’s silence, prompted by a student’s accusation, performs both a pedagogical calculus (‘‘I don’t want to alienate the group...’’) and a more profound sense of ambiguity (‘‘Innocent?! Is that really the word I am looking for?’’). Pedagogically, defending herself robustly against the student’s accusation might have invalidated (Simpson, 2006) that student’s experiences and perceptions (something ‘‘dialogue facilitators’’ must not do). But affectively, Dijana’s silence was one of self-doubt, loss of control, of legitimacy. Similarly, Raz’s silence had both a pedagogical element (answering his cofacilitator’s challenge would have undermined Raz’s own authority and might have led to a fascinatingly boring conversation between two academics) and an emotional element, as he was suddenly made to wonder about the citizenship performed with the ‘‘band-aid thingie.’’ At the pedagogical level, we understood that silence can be used rhetorically—if not necessarily as a forceful tool in itself (for perhaps the most obvious forceful use of silence occurs in situations where someone intends to shame someone else, and we certainly didn’t want to do that in the dialogues), then as a convenient alternative to speaking one’s mind. Except that, as attested by the confusion we felt even as we performed the pedagogical calculus, we didn’t really know what to think. If part of Dijana wanted to meet her student’s challenge head-on, another part was apparently debating the righteousness of setting the record straight when that very speech act would only justify the student’s accusation. If part of Raz wanted to teach his cofacilitator a pedagogy lesson, another part was thinking, ‘‘Damn, he might be right. Now what?’’ If part of Lily understood that there is something to be learned in the experience of passing as both White and a woman of color within the time span of a couple of hours, another part of her longed for the acceptance these identifications performed. Going silent was simultaneously a conscious pedagogical act and an emotionally charged reaction. If our own silences can represent a space inhabited by confusion, doubt, ambiguity, by raw potential, and if being with others in these ‘‘in-between’’ spaces can indeed produce self-reflection and critical thinking, can we not hope for our students’ silences to perform the same transformative citizenship? How might this hope connect to race—what does silence and its pregnancy mean for race in the United States? How does it mean coming from us—facilitators, dialoguers, not-quite-Americans, teachers, students? We’ve asserted the need to resist a reductive understanding of silence as passive, simple, one-dimensional and so on. At the same time, we bring up questions around the danger of overvaluing silence. We are treading a tricky territory of negotiating analytical tensions—between looking for a more nuanced reexamination of silence as something other than passivity, voicelessness, oppression, or privileged denial and overvaluing silence, so it becomes a necessarily ‘‘good enough’’ way to participate in social relations as an unambiguously active (though silent) agent. Indeed, even our stories show that in one single instance, what might seem as passive silence to some, figures as a meaningful utterance to others; the vast potential of silence projected in Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 386 L. L. Herakova et al. many directions—some transformative, others reiterative of the status quo (sometimes in the very same instance). Although our interpretations of silence in this essay highlight its transformative potential, and the ways in which this directionality informs our experience of facilitating race dialogues, we do not suggest that understanding silence as an active process needs to completely replace attitudes that voice is agency and silence— passivity. Rather, we argue, silence, if listened to carefully, speaks volumes about the current state of race relations in Obama’s America. The questions of how and where silence occurs, what frames it, who embodies it, and in relation to whom offer as relevant of entry points into how race figures in society today, as do any words that address the matter seemingly more directly and overtly. Our dialogue experiences teach us that silence often indicates the intensity with which racial identity is lived and experienced in a way that is not easily translatable into words and fitted in existing and simplified racial categories in the United States (Orbe & Drummond, 2010). That this experience is not easily talked about only emphasizes the point that race is very much a lived reality, and not a thing of the past, no matter the proclamations of colorblind discourses. So what is to be gained by examining performances of silence and citizenship in dialogues about race and whiteness in the era of Obama? Writing about the battle over immigrant bodies and ethnic studies in Arizona, Soto and Joseph (2010), citing Berlant, argue that ‘‘citizenship under neoliberalism has been deadened and privatized: national symbols (such as patriotic monuments) and ostensibly private behaviors (such as being properly heterosexual) have displaced live citizenship’’ (p. 49); that is, an active citizenship as part of a political process with an uncertain outcome. Soto and Joseph noted undergraduates enact a dead citizenship in an environment where to speak of race is to be racist and where speech is political only when it supports a politics different from your own. Hovering outside of these dichotomous positions of public and private, dead and live, our examination of silences in-relation-to race as performative of citizenship makes space for a more complex reading. Here we see performance as evocative of the relationships in-between the (racial) symbolic and the (racial) behavioral. And so, even as we pose silence as multivocal and dialogic, we have (necessarily?) closed down other readings of race in the Obama era that have led us differentially to positions and performances of race in dialogue. The story of race in these ‘‘postracial’’ times=spaces here is merely punctuated with a comma—or a dash—as we insert silence into our attempts at dialogues about whiteness as an organizing structure for racial identities. Our inquiry has led us, through the exploration of silence in dialogues, to the examination of our performances of (foreign) citizenship in relation to race in this time and place in the United States, and to our voice and the voices of others posed in silence. We do so in the hopes that such an inquiry into our own and others’ performances of racial and ethnic identities offer up new routes into issues of whiteness and racial identities, social change, and the place and power of silence and voice in our pedagogies toward social justice. We invite silences and reflection on silences Downloaded by [University of Massachusetts, Amherst] at 14:36 01 September 2011 Silence and Dialogue 387 to actively enter our classrooms and the readings of this text. We can’t account for the direction of the transformation or even if it will happen (although we wouldn’t be doing=writing this if we weren’t hoping)—but ‘‘mobilized imaginations’’ (Mitchell, Kuftinec, & Brod, 2009, p. 201) are part of both citizenship and performance, as we envision them here. We believe that inviting silence, not as a sidebar to voice but as central and active on its own terms, mobilizes imaginations—in=for interpreting and relating to our silences, yes, but also, in the process of doing so, exploring one’s own frames and their cultural and structural shaping. In other words, the complexities of silences open up (new) spaces for critically engaging (with) the world, as it is lived, felt, and experienced—a move toward reflective and active citizenship, the call for which is by no means new but, especially with relation to race and social justice, is no less necessary in the contemporary U.S. context that is actively being constructed in dominant discourses of colorblindness and meritocracy. Note [1] The dialogues are ongoing and have continued in various venues on campus, with community-based organizations and in six area high schools as of this writing. Our focus in this article, however, is on the Fall 2009 semester. References Adams, C., Berquist, C., Dillon, R., & Galanes, G. (2007). Public dialogue as communication activism: Lessons learned from engaging in community-based action research. In L. Frey & K. M. Carragee (Eds.), Communication activism (2 Vols.pp. 109–132). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Arnett, R. C., Frtiz, J. 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