...Mohan J. Dutta In this essay, I interrogate the whiteness of the disciplinary claims of the emergent area of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). Critically examining the practices of erasure written into the disciplinary claims of RHM, I attend to the strategies of establishing white hegemony...

...) and my personal experience to address whiteness. Colorblindness and fragility are twin components of whiteness in post-racial America that animate alienation and allyship. Both embodied analyses of pop culture and personal experience describe white identity and white privilege at the interpersonal...

... are too “contextual” The eminent white male faculty (“Why does it always have to be about race?”) Scolded me for my use of “African feminisms” “The solution is not separatism And branching out from Western feminisms” Not just a single encounter               But another encounter...

... to recognize complacency among white scholars as its own kind of violence. © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http...

...Sean Charles Kenney This essay reflects on the walkout during the 2019 National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's Top Paper Panel. I draw upon queer theory to discuss the impacts of disciplinary norms and whiteness in organizational communication. In gesturing...

...Marina Levina This essay examines how, in the academy, the language of merit is used to discipline and conform bodies to the standards set up to uphold conditions that benefiting whiteness. Therefore, the violence of merit is one of the ways whiteness reasserts itself. All I can add is a personal...

...Julie-Ann Scott In this essay, I autoethnographically map my experience of pursuing and then denouncing the “religion” of merit into which I was indoctrinated in my white, second-generation immigrant household. I argue that my disabled body is marked as visible through medical discourse...

...Antonio Tomas De La Garza Scholars of color in white majority universities inhabit a zone of alterity, which forces them to make strategic choices about how they perform. Tactical essentialism is an alternative to the dichotomous ideologies of static and fluid ontologies. Rather than allowing...

... minister of New Zealand, whom my university (Massey University) is named after. The white Professor Emeritus, who I have never met, took it upon himself to email me, a Māori [Indigenous] junior faculty member, and chastise me for presenting my archival research to other faculty members. The Professor...

...Elizabeth F. Desnoyers-Colas The road a predominantly white institution (PWI) takes to maximize diversity, inclusion, and equity can be fraught with challenges. One midsize institution learned through an assessment of its campus climate that its institutional practices and arrangements impeded...

..., letters, and public posts to a discipline-specific listserv (CRTNET) emerged from many of the DS, as well as a vast array of scholars within the discipline. In this essay, I revisit John T. Warren and Kathy Hytten's “faces of whiteness” and propose a fifth problematic face of whiteness that I argue...

...Lionnell Smith In this essay, I discuss the overwhelming presence of whiteness within communication studies and its effects on Black/African American communication scholarship. This autoethnography reveals a juxtaposition of my initial experience with the National Communication Association and its...

... that pervades communication studies. In fact, the discipline has long had a racism problem, silenced by overarching structures that deploy the language of civility to erase conversations that call out this problem. This special issue, “Merit, Whiteness, and Privilege,” focuses on the racial, ideological...

... that were shaped or impacted by whiteness and US-centric ideals about merit and scholarship. Hence, I present a critique of the discipline from an international scholar perspective. © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce...

...Ronald L. Jackson, II; Ashley McDonald The immense set of sociopolitical privileges that insulate and protect white people teaches them in sometimes implicit ways that not only are they better than people of color, but also that racial others are subordinate. Despite how ridiculous this presumption...

... to marginalize and diminish our perspectives. Recognizing that academe is disciplined by whiteness, we provide personal reflections as a form of embodied connectivity in an attempt to decolonize communication studies. We use two metaphors—(draw)bridges and islands—to critically (re)imagine identity, difference...

.... Meritocracy intersects with other American values, particularly individual freedom and whiteness, to create the illusion that people succeed or fail based on their own individual merit and effort. This essay surveys examples of exclusion in higher education to show that the ideals of meritocracy...

... to privilege white and Eurocentric forms of knowledge making while devaluing others. Furthermore, attempts to challenge such supremacies are immediately countered by calls and charges of incivility. This is an essay about the costs of unmasking norms of civility as it bears upon constructions of both whiteness...

...Mohan J. Dutta This affective/sensorial performance, woven through with interlocking poetic and narrative expressions, voices the visceral wounds of racism that form the infrastructures of communication studies. It grapples with the merit games that make up White hegemony, seeking to render visible...

...Joquina M. Reed; Ashley Noel Mack Whiteness structures intimacy and belonging in institutional life. In this essay, we unpack how meritocracy relies on exclusionary networks of belonging structured by Whiteness. We argue that meritocracy can be displaced through a recentering of radical intimacy...