Making Our Stories Count

Abstract

> … it is not enough to simply tell our story. Telling a personal story in and of itself is not profound; it's what we make of that story. > > – bell hooks1 In their recent article “#CommunicationSoWhite” in the Journal of Communication , authors Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIllwain move to decenter white masculinity as the normative core of scholarly inquiry by coding and analyzing the racial composition of editorial boards, primary authorship, and citation practices in communication journals published by the National Communication Association and International Communication Association for the years 1990–2016.2 Their frustrating and unsurprising findings are that non-white scholars are “significantly underrepresented as published authors and under-cited as producers of value in the field of communication,”3 resulting in citational segregation and disparity and pervasive white masculinity in communication studies and in academia writ large. These statistics and others documenting the political nature of citationality4 lay bare the workings of academic knowledge production that reproduces and “reinforces Whiteness as its undisputed, unexamined frame,” one that is “incapable of asking what we might learn from the experiences of those who have been, for decades if not centuries, dispossessed of their lands, policed, bombed, detained, indebted and rendered illegal.”5 These statistics are, as bell hooks points out, part of a larger and longer trend of depoliticizing race and gender discriminations by eliding or silencing the theoretical frameworks and practices necessary for ridding ourselves of racism, sexism, and other damaging and violent exclusions. She writes: > Among those of us who have spent our lifetimes critically thinking and writing about …