Suturing White Wounds: Racialized Therapeutic Rhetoric as a Strategy of Whiteness

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay advances racialized therapeutic rhetoric as a framework for analyzing how whiteness mobilizes strategically in antiracist discourse. Racialized therapeutic rhetoric functions to center and soothe reactionary white emotions and promote white self-introspection and personal transformation over collective antiracist praxis. My analysis reveals that racialized therapeutic rhetoric operates through intertwined modalities of discursive suturing and temporality. Suturing works to ameliorate the emotional wounds of fragile white people as temporality bolsters white linear progress narratives. Together, suturing and temporality construct the present as an emergent moment of white racial awakening, absolve white people of guilt for the racist past, rationalize ongoing white inaction, and promote a (re)turn to post-racial humanness as a progressive solution for the future.