Shooting the elephant in the (prayer) room

Abstract

“The elephant in the room” is an idiom that summarises a particular way of handling social and cultural problems. Elephants in rooms are social taboos that are affectively charged: even though everybody knows the elephant is there, they ignore it. In this paper, we grapple with disappearance acts related to race and racialisation in a white-dominated Danish context, the university. Race is, we argue, simultaneously there and not there: a ghostly matter that haunts organisational policies and practices which are preoccupied with governing diversity. Using a debate over ‘prayer rooms’ in educational institutions, we aim at building a methodology that is sensitive to the issues of race and racialisation in Northern European contexts, which are dominated by a particular kind of “innocent” whiteness (Wekker, 2016). We turn to, but also twist, the methodology of diffraction, because diffraction concerns things which disappear but continue to haunt. We use the idiom “the elephant in the room” and the position of elephants in colonial archives as our diffractive devices in order to foreground race and racialisation. Therefore, we name this methodology idiomatic diffraction. This twist towards the idiom is helpful in investigating how, more precisely, racial relations materialise in and haunt affectively both in universities and in Denmark as a whole.