BUZZ
Responses to the murder ’employed the legacy of the agreement to misinterpret the world’
A York University professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies and self-described “anti-racist activist within the university” recently issued a paper claiming George Floyd’s murder resulted in a “whitewashed acknowledgement of anti-Black racism” and “reinforced white epistemic authority.”
Enakshi Dua’s “Social Ignorance in Times of Conspicuous Racism” draws on her own experiences in higher education, a so-called “autoethnography” which in her words “produce[s] a temporal history of anti-racist action between 2001–2023.”
Dua, who teaches courses on feminist theory, anti-racist feminist theory, and postcolonial studies according to her faculty page, claims her “temporal tracing” of events in that timeframe “crucially allows” readers to see how higher ed’s anti-racist efforts ultimately were “disregarded, rejected, and brushed aside.”
Following Floyd’s murder (the professor appears to take issue that some called it a “death” prior to the actual court verdict), Dua says predominately white college administrators requested “asks” from anti-racist activists and academics which “ignore[d] the long history of anti-racist activism” and “thereby reinforc[ed] an epistemology of ignorance.”
The resonance of the rhetoric of ignorance to recuperate discourse of anti-Black racism points to the ways in which the responses to Floyd’s murder employed the legacy of the agreement to misinterpret the world, (re)producing a fanciful history that reestablishes a whitewashed acknowledgement of anti-Black racism while simultaneously reconstructing white epistemic authority.
In the post-Floyd aftermath, Dua claims the (continuing) denial of racism extended beyond that from white nationalists, that the acknowledgment of “unconscious bias” subsequently allows for it to “push[ed] away,” and that the use of “we” — as in “we” were all affected by Floyd’s death — is a “recentering [of] whiteness.”
“By tracing the ways in which anti-racism was articulated after George Floyd’s murder, when the social world was making the reality of anti-Black racism hypervisibile [sic], I have illustrated how the very rhetoric of ignorance allowed for the rearticulation of the saliency of the epistemology of ignorance—the agreement to misinterpret the world,” Dua writes.
“[C]ommitments to dismantle anti-racism work side-by-side with the politics and ideologies of maintaining racism,” she concludes in part. “I suggest that the expansion of EDI (DEI in the U.S.) and the critique of EDI may be more aligned than it would first seem. As my analysis suggests, EDI can work to maintain epistemologies of ignorance, both through knowing racism and through repressing anti-racist knowledges.”
Earlier this year, Dua was the recipient of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations’ “Equity and Social Justice Award.”
Under Dua’s leadership, the York Centre for Feminist Research undertook projects such as “Negotiating Sexualities: A Study of Youth and Development in Guyana,” “Rethinking Feminist Interventions in Urban Studies,” and “‘Worked to Death’: Gendered-Racialized Dimensions of Economic Security for Later Life Canadians.”
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