You have to name the problem to fix it: White supremacy in Communication Education

Abstract

I was a graduate student at a time when Communication Education was still actively and aggressively hostile to any form of critical scholarship about race. I vividly remember the 2009 National Communication Association ’ s conference panel, “ Five Years Out in the Instructional Development Division: It ’ s Always Something! ” when one prominent posi-tivist scholar stated social science was “ real research ” and, after the panel, that it “ pissed [him] o ff ” to share the panel with “ those idiots ” (referring to the two critical scholars on the panel). This sentiment was met with a nervous laugh and an eye roll — not because many in the audience disagreed with him — but because he was gauche enough to say the quiet part out loud. It was clear that he, and those like him in the room, were embol-dened because they had almost complete sway over the editorial direction and tone of the fi eld and its most prestigious outlet. Their e ff orts to guard the journal against critical in fl uences were largely successful. As Myers et al. (2016) showed, only nine pieces of critical scholarship were published between 1976 and 2014 — as opposed to 505 pieces of positivistic scholarship during the same span. 1 graduate color see the pages the journal; mid/late fi ’ s