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The primary source of news and information about California State University, Dominguez Hills, its students, faculty, and staff.

Whiteness

New Book Challenges Antisemitism in Academia

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Mara Lee Grayson portrait
Mara Lee Grayson

In discussions of race, racism, and identity, Jewishness is a contested category. Particularly in the U.S., Jewish people are often considered white; they are framed as a religious group, rather than an ethnic one. However, this categorization can make antisemitism–and Jewish people themselves–invisible in both academic and popular discourses.

Associate Professor of English Mara Lee Grayson’s new book, Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric (Peter Lang, 2023), explores that erasure and its impact on Jewish scholars. As a Jewish woman, Grayson says the ideas within the book had been “percolating” within her for years, and that she wanted to write the book to better understand her own experiences.

“A lot of discrimination happens on covert levels that are difficult to identify,” Grayson says. “I didn’t feel there was a space in my discipline to talk about that.”

Throughout 2021, she conducted phenomenological research–which uses individuals’ perspectives in order to understand or describe a specific phenomenon–by interviewing 13 Jewish-identified faculty members about their lived experiences. Many said that Jewish discourse, and the way they learned to read, write, and talk in Jewish cultural spaces, is what led them to the field of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies.

“Yet when these same faculty members and students entered the discipline, they didn’t see any explicit representation of Jewish discourses in the field,” Grayson says.

“One participant called the absence ‘bizarre.’ There is, in fact, a substantial history of Jewish influences on rhetoric and composition, from collaborative pedagogy and critical analysis to writing center practice. But it’s made invisible.”

In addition to detailing how Jewish scholars’ influence has been erased within her discipline, Grayson’s book also documents the resistance that Jewish scholars face when they engage in cultural ways of communicating. Examples include direct speech, emotion-focused storytelling, “cooperative overlapping”–people speaking at the same time to make meaning of the same thing–and the questioning of the status quo.

“In predominately white or Christian spaces, these practices are conceptualized as rude or impertinent,” Grayson says. “I found in my interviews that Jewish faculty do not find communication with colleagues as smooth or accessible as they would like.”

Grayson is a prolific researcher, writer, and teacher of racial literacy and critical whiteness. Her scholarship has largely centered on antiracism practices, particularly in teaching writing and composition. With her new book, Grayson hopes to bring Jewish experiences to the forefront of her academic discipline. 

“When we think of multicultural approaches in education, Jewish people have been left out,” Grayson says. “Despite our experiences, dominant narratives associate Jewish people with privilege and power. The problem is displacement. We become this convenient ‘other’ that can be fit into whatever categorization is needed.”

She emphasizes that Jewish experiences must be included in educational settings, and that more work is needed to make academic spaces safer for Jewish people. Grayson also points out that academics in the fields of rhetoric and composition are particularly equipped to help dismantle antisemitism.

“Most antisemitism happens on rhetorical levels–through language, codes, and symbols,” she says. “Our discipline has the tools and the frameworks to actually understand how antisemitism is constructed and disseminated. We have a responsibility to take the lead on some of that work.”

Grayson further points out that elevating Jewish perspectives is only half of the equation. The other necessary part, she says, is examining the entities that perpetuate inequities.

“I want people to realize that Jewish people exist in a society not constructed for them,” Grayson says. “Our society purports to be secular, which allows it to avoid having to take any accountability or responsibility for Christian hegemony.”

“We have to be able to identify these things before we can address them fully.”

Robin DiAngelo Challenges White People To Be Anti-Racist

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Robin DiAngelo onstage under a slide reading "In 2023, we must be able to engage in issues of race with openness and nuance."
Robin DiAngelo onstage in the University Theatre.

To help dismantle systemic racism, white people need to first acknowledge that it exists–and how they personally benefit from it.  

That was the central argument delivered by Robin DiAngelo to an audience of CSUDH students, faculty, staff, and community members at the University Theatre on February 1. DiAngelo, a bestselling author and academic specializing in whiteness and racism, was invited by the CSUDH Mervyn M. Dymally African American Political and Economic Institute for its Distinguished Speaker Series.

Dymally Executive Director Anthony Asadullah Samad kicked off the event by acknowledging that having a white featured speaker on the first day of Black History Month might seem counterintuitive.

“This is our way to invite our brothers and sisters of European descent into the conversation,” Samad said. “Who better to lead the discussion than an anti-racist scholar who has written about the vulnerability of white people?”

Vice President and Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer Bobbie Porter also provided opening remarks. She called for the remembrance of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man murdered by police officers last month, as well as the “urgent need to do the necessary work of racial justice.”

DiAngelo then took to the stage to deliver her lecture, which outlined a framework of systemic racism and the strategies white people use to exempt themselves from accountability. She offered herself as an “insider to whiteness” with the stated goal of helping people of color navigate conversations, situations, and institutions led by white people, and of helping white people to critically examine their own beliefs and biases.

She began by speaking about her personal history, revealing how she was brought up to view racism as something that “bad” white people did to people of color, and therefore was irrelevant to her life and responsibilities.

“Racism is a relationship,” DiAngelo said, “and I was not raised to see myself in racial terms.”

She went on to explain that systemic racism affects everyone–and that by not considering their own race and its accompanying privileges, white people excuse themselves from being part of an unjust system.

To demonstrate one aspect of systemic racism, DiAngelo presented data from the “halls of power,” which revealed the disproportionately high percentages of white people in government, media, academia, and leadership roles. All of the categories were at least 80 percent white, and more than half surpassed 90 percent.

“We see ourselves as unique individuals,” she said. “We need to suspend our focus on how different we are and be willing to grapple with collective experience. No one in this room was or could be exempt from the forces of this system.”

After carefully analyzing and debunking many of the common ways white people tell themselves they are not racist–including by having Black friends and family or “not seeing color”–DiAngelo offered concrete ways to become actively anti-racist. Strategies included continual self-education, ensuring inclusion of people of color in group dynamics, intervening in racist situations, being open to criticism, and staying accountable.

“This work requires courage and commitment to a lifelong process,” DiAngelo said. “Niceness is not anti-racism. Niceness is not courageous.”

Following her lecture, DiAngelo took questions from audience members on topics ranging from the intersectionality of class and racism, to racism perpetuated by people of color, to the reactions of white people to her book.

“If white people can hear it better when it comes from me, then I’m going to use this voice to help them hear it,” she said. “Then, hopefully, they start to listen to people of color.”

Robin DiAngelo is the author of Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.