The perm is a dismissal of black and queer scholarship as distractive and an instance of pushing black and queer bodies to the periphery, sustaining whiteness and heteronormativity as the subject of policy. We challenge the very orientations from which they approach and analyze the world.

As with the sticky alchemy of all disciplinary lines, the canon has power because it accumulates to produce formations of knowledge. Given that some lines more than others are lines of privilege, it becomes possible to write off race, gender, queer scholarship as that “identity politics” stuff and, in turn, to define identity politics as distracting, divisive, infuriating. Lumped together and made synonymous with fragmentations in the field, critical race studies of media and communication emerge as a problem created by practitioners who emphasize “peripheral” rather than “core” issues, whose unfamiliarity and disinterest in knowledge “beyond their particular niche” ossifies to form “hyperspecialized” areas of expertise that are “of interest, mainly, to scholars also located in the same niches” (Pfau, 2008, p. 599). No doubt, for some, it is convenient to have white people do the speaking for brown and black people, and best when they do what Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo identify as “drive-by race scholarship” (2018). But, as Gilroy notes, these economies also turn on reifications of “ethnic garb” that critical race studies of Communication must don—the more exotic and adventurous the cultural practices being studied, the more enthusiastic their reception within the academic institution (1993, p. 5; see also, Melamed, 2011). As institutional incentives for “diversity” and inclusion work in powerful ways to “determine whether we are hired or promoted” (Christian 1988, p. 67), some race or gender scholars now must be recognized as “experts” and “authorities,” rewarded with status and recognition. But within the terms of racial neoliberalism, it becomes possible to also say without facing much reproach: wait (...) we already have one of them. Do we really need another? I have been compelled, for most of my career, by questions about the architecture, politics, and power of knowledge. In various ways, my work tends to loop back to the ways that raced and gendered formations are baked into established grammars and canonical knowledges. Much of what I have written has focused on the ways that dominant discourses assume the characteristics and formidable power of “truth,” parading about as universal, even though they always speak from a particular point of view, centering a specific historical subject. Certainly, part of what the #CommunicationSoWhite preconference organized was a way to collectively refuse this racial order of things, these habits, as Kimberlé Crenshaw puts it, of wishful thinking and studied denials (1997, p. 97), that invariably imagine the historical subject as a white, western, hetero-patriarchal male, and which assume, with breathtaking certainty, that his experiences are always applicable and fully generalizable to the rest of us. Confronting the canon’s deliberate tendencies to not see race or to see race in only this or that way, part of our challenge is to find ways to unlearn the canon, to speak without constantly having to explain the formidable power of difference and alterity as it marks everyone’s lives—not just our own. Indeed, part of what I witnessed at #CommunicationSoWhite was a concerted collective effort to figure out how not to follow the official paths laid out for us. To quote Ahmed again, citation is how we leave a trail of where we have been and who helped us along the way. While writing her recent book, Living a Feminist Life (2017), Ahmed adopted a very strict citation policy. She did not cite any white men. By “white men,” she explains, she means “an institution, as well as the mechanisms for reproducing an institution.” In this light, the project that #CommunicationSoWhite highlights entails the critical work of decoding who is or is not part of this institution called “white men,” of being attentive to who we ourselves cite, which voices we let in and who we leave out. A sizable number of critical race scholars have spent years doing the work of tracking and correcting the continuing and conspicuous absence of Latinix, black, women of color, queer of color theories and historiographies within Communication and Media Studies.1 In just over a decade, we have seen set sail a veritable armada of special issues, published forums, and scholarly anthologies2 that attempt, precisely, to bring silenced voices in and, in so doing, to shake the canon up and out of its myopias and strategic ignorance. Let us remember that much of this work did not exist, indeed, it could not have existed, only a few years ago. These developing literatures have opened doors, bringing together a new generation of media and communication scholars invested, in a range of ways, in exposing the myth of whiteness, outing it as visible and specific, as one ethnicity among others and, thus, as a construct located in history, culture, and power. These efforts have also revealed how, as an institution, whiteness is quick to absorb, corral, and contain the impact of such outings and exposures. We see over and over again how the old guard slips back into old habits, easing itself, not by accident or mere oversight, to the comfort of the old boys’ club. We see, similarly, their persistence in positioning us as an add-on, an optional extra, a kind of appendage to the field. We are, as a consequence, always just arriving, and our arrival always precipitating one or another kind of disciplinary rupture—a ferment in the field, an epistemological crisis—always enacting a messy departure from what remains, steady and silent, at the center of the Communication canon. It is this eternal arriving, the “always newness” of race (Corey and Nakayama, 2012, p. 18), its alleged eccentricity and exogeny, that I wish to examine in this article. In light of the sheer volume of critiques that critical race scholars have offered against the whiteness of the canon, we cannot but conclude that the field remains so white because something/someone is deliberately keeping it so. In this light, I am interested in understanding the institutions as well as the mechanisms for reproducing those institutions, in the sense of Weheliye’s (2014) profoundly racialized and racializing assemblages, by which some works are assimilated into the canon and others left outside. I want to engage these questions through a counter-intuitive reading that takes us into the presumed white center of the canon. I offer an outline of a critical race archaeology of the field to consider some of the ways that questions of racism and prejudice are, in fact, inscribed into the DNA of the field. In order to work, this archaeology must connect points of motivated silence, deliberate moments of erasure, in order to reveal not the absence of race but, instead, what Charles Mills has termed “an epistemology of ignorance” (2007, p. 16). The idea, if you will indulge it, is to re-orient given accounts of the canon so that what comes into focus is a terrain of ethno-racial encounter, deliberate and strategic, which, I want to suggest, has marked the intellectual histories and institutional architectures of Communication as a field from the start. I do this heeding Chávez’s caution that “crafting intellectual history is always precarious” (2015, p. 162). Indeed, my training in Communication at a large midwestern research university in the late 1980s and early 1990s means that my take on intellectual history, any intellectual history, is necessarily whimsical, personal, arbitrary. There are things graduate school gave me and things it did not, lines of inquiry I stumbled into and others I did not. These accidents are part of what and how I know, and the particulars of my training mean that any intellectual history I am equipped to tell will gloss over some details and mangle others. I share the outline below, thus, in the spirit of a provocation, a starting point for a conversation, rather than a last word.