KU professor co-writes award-winning 'Benevolent Gaslight' essay

LAWRENCE – Gaslighting – the act of invalidating another person's lived experiences and memories, particularly for interpersonal or political manipulation – is so well-established by now that two scholars of an award-winning essay have defined a subset they call “the benevolent gaslight.” That’s when a white, ostensibly progressive individual perpetuates racist violence but then plays it off as a necessary teaching or learning moment in service of anti-racism or as an aid to their own enlightenment.

“‘I Am Not Your Teaching Moment’: The Benevolent Gaslight and Epistemic Violence” was selected as one of two winners of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)’s 2023 Richard Braddock Award. The article is co-written by Pritha Prasad, University of Kansas assistant professor of English, and Louis Maraj, assistant professor in University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing & Media.

The Braddock Award recognizes authors of outstanding articles in rhetoric and writing studies. CCCC — the world’s largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition, writing and new media — confers the annual award based on a pool of articles published in the field’s journal. Prasad and Maraj’s article was published in the December issue of College Composition and Communication, a scholarly journal published by the National Council of Teachers of English (the umbrella organization under which CCCC is housed). The Braddock Award review committee’s remarks, which were read at the CCCC awards ceremony Feb. 17 in Chicago, praised the essay for both challenging the field to “confront how whiteness undergirds our discipline” and demonstrating that “even anti-oppressive work can create harmful repetitions that undermine social justice.”

In their essay, Prasad and Maraj define benevolent gaslighting as the act of re-narrating racial violences as disembodied currency or pedagogical inspiration for anti-racist and “social justice’ politics.” They wrote that this phenomenon denies racially marginalized subjects a situated recognition of their trauma, memories, anger and ongoing historical resistance work.

Prasad and Maraj point to the popular emergence of benevolent gaslighting especially evident in the post-Ferguson moment. In this cultural zeitgeist, high-profile incidents of racist violence and police brutality have seemingly inspired cultural and political trends towards social or racial justice in predominantly white universities, mainstream politics and major corporations and brands “in ways that leave little room for upholding, affirming and mobilizing the anti-racist work that has happened long before this moment and that will continue to happen after it.” This paradigm suggests, they wrote, that racial violence and trauma is the price that must be paid in perpetuity for future racial progress and invalidates the violence and trauma Black, Indigenous and peoples of color face and experience in the present.

The article, which is but one component of a larger book project Prasad and Maraj are currently co-writing, begins off by ascribing the phenomenon of benevolent gaslighting to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mea culpa when 18-year-old photos of him wearing blackface to a prep school costume party surfaced in 2019.

The authors focus on the rhetorical turn in responsibility Trudeau made in the following quotations: “I didn’t consider it racist at the time, but now we know better.” As a politician, he added, he has worked “all (his) life to try and create opportunities for people to fight against racism and intolerance.” Prasad and Maraj argued in the article that this narrative benevolently gaslights by implying that Trudeau’s individual act might become “a basis for collective learning” as well as an opportunity to position himself “as credible/authoritative on the subject of anti-racism,” despite evidence that could suggest the contrary.

Prasad said Trudeau was “a perfect example, because the project is principally a critique of white progressivism and some of the more implicit and insidious violences of white progressivism.” While the article begins by analyzing the example of Trudeau, it also discusses incidents of benevolent gaslighting by white scholars and disciplinary trends in rhetorical studies.

The article will serve as the introduction for Prasad and Maraj’s forthcoming book project, which is tentatively titled “The Benevolent Gaslight: A Technology of Whiteness.”

“One of the chapters is about the way that humanities disciplines often narrate their history — as a linear move towards progressivism,” Prasad said. “What's wrong with that narrative is that it erases the work that happened a long time ago by scholars of color who were raising some of the questions that the field is now interested in.

“We argue that if you look at the history of the field, scholarly shifts and turns always follow some instance of racial violence or unrest. We saw this in the post-Civil Rights era. We saw this in the post-Ferguson moment. The field, since Ferguson, explicitly identifies itself as being in a social justice turn. ... But I was doing this work before Ferguson. Scholars were doing this work long time ago.”

Other chapters of the book will cover examples from popular culture as well as historical examples like Reconstruction white abolitionist literacy materials, which Prasad noted “often used white saviorism and progressivism in a way that is like an early iteration of the benevolent gaslight.” Prasad said that the book also discusses “the way that university administrators respond to student protesters, often by depoliticizing and demobilizing them by putting into place institutional DEI initiatives that will take the more radical interventions that student activists are calling for and co-opt them into ... rhetoric that is very pro-university, even though students may have been protesting the university in the first place.”

As the Braddock Award review committee suggests of Prasad and Maraj’s article regarding genuine divestment from white supremacy: “We must read this work thoughtfully and carefully, and reflect on how we further the movement.”

Image: Lou Maraj (left, above) and Pritha Prasad have written about what they call “benevolent gaslighting.”