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This article critiques a classroom encounter between a Black student, Richard, and a white student, Nick, that complicated the white English teacher, Mr. Turner's, attempt to facilitate a discussion about racial progress in America. Students positioned their bodies on a continuum between 1, no racial progress since the 1930s, and 10, full racial equity. When Richard positioned himself at the low end of the continuum and Nick located himself on the high end, a disruption occurred after Mr. Turner moved his body toward Nick while verbally validating Richard's perspective. I argue that the classroom's affective register was altered by racial melancholia, reopening racial wounds and reproducing whiteness, evoking emotions I call "melancholic affects."
So we may walk into the room and "feel the atmosphere," but what we mayfeel depends on the angle of our arrival. Or we might say that the atmosphere is already angled; it is always felt from a specific point. The pedagogic encounter is full of angles.
-Sara Ahmed (2010), "Happy Objects"
Responding to Baker-Bell, Butler, and Johnson's (2017) call for a critical race English education and following the theme of this special issue, critical whiteness in English education, this article explores how whiteness disrupted an English teacher's attempt to facilitate a dialogue about racial progress in America since the 1930s. Stemming from a larger yearlong critical ethnographic research project that I conducted in a high school English classroom, this study uses racial melancholia (Cheng, 2001; Eng & Han, 2000) and affect (Massumi, 2015) as theoretical tools to uncover the subtle and insidious ways that whiteness operated when students engaged in this dialogue concerning racial progress (or a lack thereof) and as a result exposed the persistent reality of racial violence in contemporary American society.
Often, when we evoke the connections between past state-sanctioned racial violence and how this violence continues to haunt Black, Brown, and indigenous people, it produces racial melancholia, the reopening of racial wounds that have festered for centuries, having never fully healed. Tensions arise when exposing this wound, highlighting the complex relationship between history and racism. An imperceptibility often surrounds this tension; feelings slowly emerge within us or sometimes suddenly appear, seemingly in ways that we cannot explain. These tensions manifest in the feeling that people of...