Ambivalent surveillance: Teaching in the times of anti-woke  

New Series, Vol. 2, No. 7

There is a long legacy of anti-literacy laws targeting Black communities in the U.S., with anti-woke legislation being only a recent iteration of these far right attacks on public education. In the piece, the author discusses the experiences and challenges of being a public educator amid a surge of state, municipal, and county legislative measures targeting Critical Race Theory (CRT; or rather topics that the Far Right deems as CRT) in public education between January 2021 and December 2022, a trend that is ongoing and now evident in federal policymaking as well. The author argues that anti-woke legislation has created conditions for racialized, ambivalent surveillance of public educators and mobilized whiteness to censor Blackness in the classroom. What educators are then forced to do under such constraints, is to work both within and against their institutions as they are scrutinized by (white) administration, parents, and students when they attempt to teach about race and racial issues.  

Surveillance is a practice deeply rooted in state-sanctioned white supremacy and colonialization with both structural and cultural dimensions that reproduce inequitable power relations to maintain social control. It is embedded into culture, ever-present, and sometimes so normalized that it even goes unnoticed. Although anti-woke legislation has certainly captured media attention, what does go largely unnoticed is the Far Right’s appropriation of the term “woke” which, in Black communities, refers to social awareness of inequity, injustice, and marginalization. Moreover, the author points out that the social construction of race itself is dependent of surveillance and epidermalization through the white gaze that imposes race on the body.  

Anti-woke legislation is legitimized as a matter of public safety, demanding that educators “protect” students from “wokeness” and requires human monitors to report educators in the absence of cameras and microphones in the classroom. Thus, it is no wonder that 65% (at the time of article submission) of educators have elected to self-censor in the classroom. For those who do critique whiteness and anti-Blackness in academia, they find themselves in ambivalent positions where they oppose whiteness in institutions that they both seek to dismantle and are complicit in. As a result, they experience affective tensions where they have to manage negotiating their morals and values with their fears of being implicated in terms of their employment, financial security, and public safety.  

The author also analyzes the post-racial rhetoric of key legislation in the state of Florida, notably House Bill 7 (HB7), and how it functions to center whiteness, amplify racial difference, and constitute the ambivalent surveillance previously discussed. “Post-racism” refers to an ideology that racism is a piece of history that has been eradicated and that race no longer matters in contemporary social issues that strategically perpetuates whiteness by implying that all racial identities are equal and that all individuals can experience the same injustices regardless of race. HB7 then, for example, implies that “anyone who views racism as a contemporary issue is impeding on someone’s individual liberty” as the six principles of individual freedom outlined in the bill privilege white emotions and permit the use of intangible emotions, such as guilt or shame, by white students to tangibly and materially implicate their teachers without any tangible evidence. As result, teachers have faced formal reprimands and discipline, termination, and national scrutiny on conservative news outlets for prioritizing Black voices in their classrooms.  

In many cases, educators do not even know if they are violating these laws, what evidence might be necessary to implicate them, or what consequences they might face for doing so. Thus, the surveillant power of anti-woke legislation is amplified by subjecting educators to the unknown as they are intentionally left uninformed, and even misinformed, about the content, timing, and consequences of teaching banned topics. Furthermore, when educators do not know who can implicate them, everyone is then constituted as a potential source of implication and educators must assume all their performances in the classroom are being monitored, even if only by student recall.  

However, characterizing the resultant surveillance of anti-woke legislation as ambivalent means that there are ways to resist it from within through counter-conduct pedagogies that undermine it despite aforementioned constraints. Specifically, the author recommends counter-conduct pedagogical strategies of opacity and everyday resistance. Opacity refers to strategies in which educators intentionally subject themselves to scrutiny, but with, and with the intention of gaining more, institutional support from individuals such as administrators and current or former students. One such strategy is making any potentially controversial topics or materials available for prior approval by parents and offering alternatives for students whose parents did not approve of certain pedagogies. Here, everyday resistance is defined as “politics through which ordinary people can express and mobilize their opposition to surveillance policies while at the same time achieving short-term gains that are important in their daily lives.” This might include using strategic language to still foster critical consciousness in students, but while avoiding use of censored terms, like “intersectionality,” as the author points out. The article concludes with this point of hope, encouraging educators to remain committed to critical values despite necessarily contending with their own complicity and invoke these counter-conduct pedagogical strategies to resist anti-woke legislation’s ambivalent surveillance in the classroom.  

Communication Currents Discussion Questions 

For additional suggestions about how to use this and other Communication Currents in the classroom, see: https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS  

Zane Austin Willard is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. 

This essay, by R. E. Purtell, translates the scholarly journal article, Z. A. Willard. (2024). Ambivalent surveillance: Teaching in the times of anti-woke. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2024.2439410  

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