Of Experts and Tokens: Mapping a Critical Race Archaeology of Communication

Abstract

A disgraceful white boys' club persists within the field of Communication. Engaging key institutional structures and epistemic formations through which the field remains so white, this article considers the mechanisms by which critical race and gender scholars are positioned as eternally foreign, always just arriving, to the field of communication. Addressing the implications of these “epistemologies of ignorance” on the development of the discipline, this article outlines an intellectual and institutional archeology of Communication to reveal, instead, a field marked and shaped, from the start, by ethno-racial encounter. Communication, I suggest, remains so white because its experts and leaders continue to ignore its own institutional DNA, deliberately not knowing profoundly raced elements of its own intellectual history.