From the article titled "#CommunicationSoWhite" by Chakravartty et al, there is a decisive breakdown of what racial inequalities look like in the field of communication and public discourse. The concepts of race and gender are presented in this piece by actively reflecting upon more specifically underrepresentation of black and brown authors in academia. I found this writing to be interesting because it allows for more understanding regarding the past and present of what we have known this to have looked like, but also encourages implementation of principles that will allow us as a whole to challenge whiteness (or rather lack of non-white scholars) in academia going forward.
The lack of citing non-white authors is something that I don't believe I have ever actively thought about due to the privilege that I hold, however, now that I am aware of the disparities black and brown authors in particular face in relation to this issue, I hope to try and pay closer attention as a scholar. I think that overall, this problem as a whole can go back to privilege. It is clear this is just another example in which those with intersectional identities are seemingly being looked past.
Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, Charlton McIlwain, #CommunicationSoWhite, Journal of Communication, Volume 68, Issue 2, April 2018, Pages 254–266, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003
I also failed to recognize the lack of non-white authors in academia due to my privilege. I had only recently thought about the lack of representation within literature because of my Reading Literature: Theory and Practice class that I am currently taking. In the class, we read “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden” by Alice Walker. In the reading, Walker talks about how important it is to have ‘models’ within art, specifically literature. While talking about ‘models’ in literature, Walker points out the importance of having multiple perspectives, and how we lose those perspectives by only having literature that was written by white men. The lack of representation within written works of literature is severely problematic because it creates different narratives. A white man that writes about Black folklore holds a different narrative than if it were a black man that was writing about Black folklore.
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