Systems of Silence

This essay offers a continuation of the dialogue of desire proposed by Anna Deavere Smith and Cornell West to find a language that speaks the complexity of race while simultaneously creating supportive productive diverse communities. As a white performative autoethnographer, a methodological skepticism of language's ability to represent race seems a critically productive space to speak into this desire. In our racialized copresence with one another, how does language function to perpetuate racial hegemonies, and then, how can autoethnography performatively interrupt hegemonic practices for the purpose of reimagining and repositioning agency? What follows are fragmented responses to that question, refracted critical self-reflexions representing my own struggle to construct pieces of the language that Smith and West speak of.