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Voicing Silence and ImaginingCitizenship: Dialogues about Race andWhiteness in a “Postracial” EraLiliana L. Herakova a , Dijana Jelača a , Razvan Sibii a & Leda Cooks a

a Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts,Amherst

Available online: 15 Aug 2011

To cite this article: Liliana L. Herakova, Dijana Jelača, Razvan Sibii & Leda Cooks (2011): VoicingSilence and Imagining Citizenship: Dialogues about Race and Whiteness in a “Postracial” Era,Communication Studies, 62:4, 372-388

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Voicing Silence and ImaginingCitizenship: Dialogues about Raceand Whiteness in a ‘‘Postracial’’ EraLiliana L. Herakova, Dijana Jelaca, 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 dif-

ference 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 sanc-

tion 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 Jelaca, and Razvan Sibii are doctoral candidates in the Department of Communicat-

ion 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

Communication Studies

Vol. 62, No. 4, September–October 2011, pp. 372–388

ISSN 1051-0974 (print)/ISSN 1745-1035 (online) # 2011 Central States Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2011.588072

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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 stu-

dents 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; Zuniga, 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 struc-

tural 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

Silence and Dialogue 373

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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 con-

versations, 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 con-

versations 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,

374 L. L. Herakova et al.

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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 perfor-

mances 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 affect-

ive 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 audi-

enced 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 com-

plexity 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 responsi-

bility and blame for social problems from structural conditions to alleged defects

of individual moral character’’’ (p. 282). We hear echoes of this ‘‘Personal Responsi-

bility 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 dis-

course, 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 whoare not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers,

Silence and Dialogue 375

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who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up asAmericans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet they live every day with thethreat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our collegesand universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them backhome 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 con-

stantly 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 privi-

lege 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 view-

points 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 interpreta-

tions 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

376 L. L. Herakova et al.

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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:

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 beunheard. [. . .] Thus even speech is structured around already existent relationsof 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 soin a rather uncomfortable and unique way. It asks that we give over to curiosityand . . .welcome risk by moving into different, even strange and unknown experi-ences without pretense. (p. xiii)

Silence and Dialogue 377

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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 recog-

nized 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 con-

text 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

378 L. L. Herakova et al.

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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 mun-

dane character of racism and had encouraged the students to explore it at length dur-

ing 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 pas-

sion: ‘‘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 ‘‘struc-

tures’’ (such as ‘‘structural racism’’) without discussing them one by one? Is the sol-

ution 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 perver-

sity 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 account-

able 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.

Silence and Dialogue 379

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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 . . .

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 shecame 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: A¼Asian, L¼ Latino,

Latino, A¼ I don’t know what this A stands for . . . ‘‘and?’’ NA¼Native 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

380 L. L. Herakova et al.

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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 experi-

ences 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 parti-

cipating.’’

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 inter-

esting 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 mino-

rities, 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

Silence and Dialogue 381

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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.

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 dia-

logues 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 belong-

ing. 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 justsay the same stuff, and it doesn’t really change anything [. . .] like all this talk aboutWhite privilege, we all talk about it and we all know it’s there, but no one doesanything about it.

White male: I’m not going to go out of my way to befriend someone just becausehe’s of a different race, but we otherwise have nothing in common, ‘cause that willbe 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

382 L. L. Herakova et al.

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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, (seem-

ingly) 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 ques-

tion 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 Viswes-waran (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 whowe are. Because who we are is always inseparable from the theory we create. Andthe 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

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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 perform-

ance of citizenship by exposing our own, as well as the dialogue participants’ iden-

tities 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 con-

structing 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 poli-

tics 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 cer-

tainly 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 student¼ exercising his=her privilege of not having to think=talk about

race; silent student of color¼ 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?

384 L. L. Herakova et al.

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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 con-

versation 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 alter-

native 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 appar-

ently 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 identifica-

tions 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

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many directions—some transformative, others reiterative of the status quo (some-

times 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 exist-

ing 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 priva-

tized: national symbols (such as patriotic monuments) and ostensibly private beha-

viors (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 sup-

ports 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 ‘‘postra-

cial’’ 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’ per-

formances 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

386 L. L. Herakova et al.

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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’’ (Mitch-

ell, 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 complex-

ities 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.

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