‘But you’re white’: An autoethnography of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian universities

Abstract

It is well established within the field of Critical Whiteness Studies that white privilege routinely materialises in Western universities. Yet, even though a third wave of Critical Whiteness Studies is increasingly focussing on whiteness in non-Western contexts, there has been insufficient attention toward whether white privilege also exists in East Asian universities. This article seeks to explore this issue by offering an autoethnography in which the author, a mixed-race academic who is racialised as white on some occasions and as a person of colour on others, critically interrogates whiteness in East Asian higher education. It is argued that those who are racialised as white are privileged in East Asian universities and may even seek to actively sustain this. In departing from the dominant understanding of whiteness as always-and-only privileging, this article also explores the extent to which white academics in East Asia may also be disadvantaged by their whiteness.

Introduction

This article builds upon the Critical Whiteness Studies literature that has emphasised the salience of white privilege in Western higher education. Although there is a well-established field of impressive scholarship about race and ethnicity in East Asia, this literature has rarely examined whiteness in East Asian universities. In order to explore this relatively unchartered territory, I offer an autoethnography as a mixed-race academic who has lived and worked in East Asia for the past 9 years. Before continuing, it is important to recognise that ‘East Asia’ is a contestable and superdiverse region that is reluctantly used in this article to refer to Northeast Asia (e.g. China, Japan, the Korean Peninsula, etc.) as well as Southeast Asia (e.g. Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.). There are notable differences across East Asia in relation to racial diversity, with some countries, such as Japan and North Korea, being relatively more racially homogeneous than others, such as Malaysia and Singapore, which are more racially heterogenous. Similarly, East Asian countries have markedly different colonial histories which have been instrumental in shaping racial hierarchies, with Thailand and Japan having never been formally colonised, whilst most other East Asian countries experienced distinct forms of colonisation at the hands of either Britain, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Spain or the USA. As a result of the diversity of East Asia, one finds that even within one of East Asia’s smallest countries, Singapore, there are elaborate debates about the complex web of racial tensions that may persist in this unique society (Barr and Skrbiš 2011 [2008]; Ho and Kathiravelu 2021; Ortiga 2015; Rocha and Yeoh 2021). Like Singapore, other East Asian societies have their own local racial nuances that may have a direct bearing on how whiteness is viewed and treated in each society.

Despite the diversity of East Asia, this article still proposes that, just as it is common to make generalisations about whiteness in ‘the West’, and just as other scholars make generalisations about other aspects of race across East Asia (Mukherjee 2021; Rocha and Fozdar 2017), a degree of generalisation about whiteness in East Asia is warranted due to the commonalities that exist across multiple East Asian contexts. This approach echoes that taken by Bonnett (2002: 70), who has recognised that, while there can be ‘geographical particularity’ in the meaning of whiteness in different societies, ‘the whiteness of modernity’ means that whiteness is often a symbol of power, success, prestige, superiority, salvation, sexiness, beauty and civilisation in many contexts. In short, even though local variations in East Asian societies may subtly shape the meaning of whiteness, this article will avoid methodological nationalism by demonstrating the remarkable consistency in the function of whiteness across East Asian societies. I continue this article by, firstly, situating the discussion within third wave Critical Whiteness Studies. Thereafter, I interrogate the utility of autoethnography as a valuable research method. Subsequently, I discuss the way in which I am often racialised as white in East Asia despite this not being the case in the West. I then draw upon my own lived experience to argue that white academics enjoy ‘the wages of whiteness’ in East Asian academia and to explore how some white academics may even sustain white privilege. Finally, I unsettle the common perspective found within Critical Whiteness Studies that whiteness is always-and-only privileging by also exploring the limits of white privilege in East Asian universities.

Critical Whiteness Studies

While Critical Whiteness Studies is occasionally said to originate in the pioneering contributions of WEB Du Bois (d. 1963) and Frantz Fanon (d. 1961), it was solidified as a coherent field in the 1980s and 1990s (Dyer, 1988; Frankenberg, 2000 [1993]; Hill 1997; McIntosh 1988; Roediger 1997). This first wave of Critical Whiteness Studies was characterised by five common themes. Firstly, it recognised that whiteness is a malleable and socially constructed category rather than a biological fact. Secondly, it suggested that white people rarely have to confront their whiteness which results in being oblivious to how their race shapes their lives. Thirdly, it argued that those who are racialised as white are afforded advantages and opportunities due to the positive associations that are made with whiteness. Fourthly, it explored how white people may become anti-racist allies and avoid complicity with overt and subtle forms of ‘white supremacy’. Fifthly, it was conscious that Critical Whiteness Studies risks descending into a recentring of whiteness but saw the alternative option of ignoring whiteness as even more detrimental.

The second wave of Critical Whiteness Studies emerged in the first decade of the 21^st century and was characterised by a refinement of Critical Whiteness Studies into a sophisticated theoretical paradigm (Garner 2007; Leonardo 2002; López 2005; Seshadri-Crooks 2000). This second wave was also characterised by the foregrounding of ‘white privilege’, which ultimately became Critical Whiteness Studies’ most influential concept within and beyond academia (Amico 2017; Applebaum 2016; Bhopal 2018; McIntosh 1988; Sullivan 2006). White privilege was understood as being premised on a belief that where racial disadvantage exists, racial privilege is inevitable, which means that white people are often granted preferential treatment regardless of whether they wish for this to happen. While white privilege may benefit individual white people in a range of everyday scenarios, it can also be found in broader structural forms that benefit white people as a ‘community’. In some instances, white privilege may materialise as positive interactions or beneficial opportunities, while in other instances, it may appear as an absence of negative interactions or in the form of opportunities not being denied. It has often been suggested that white people are unable, unwilling or uncomfortable to concede that they benefit from white privilege, preferring instead to imagine racism as a thing of the past, or to view themselves as inclusive and anti-racist. Although Critical Whiteness Studies largely tends to presume that whiteness is always-and-only privileging, some have recognised that white people should not be totalised as a monolithic group who all enjoy white privilege in the same way due to other facets of identity being important alongside race (Bhopal, 2018; Frankenberg, 2000 [1993]; Garner 2007; López 2005). Thus, although all white people may be privileged by their whiteness, some white people may be more privileged than other white people due to other aspects of their identity (e.g. gender, class, sexuality, language, etc.). Thus, white males, and perhaps more specifically upper-class heterosexual white males who speak English, have been understood as the epitome of ‘ultimate white privilege’ (Steyn and Conway 2010: 285). Accordingly, when exploring privilege and disadvantage, it is important to avoid what Crenshaw (1989) refers to as ‘the single-issue framework’, which makes the mistake of focussing on ‘a single categorical axis’, and instead, to take an intersectional approach. This enables us to realise that, just as black women are ‘multiply-burdened’ and suffer ‘double discrimination’ (Crenshaw 1989: 149, 152), white men may be ‘multiply-privileged’ and enjoy ‘double advantage’ due to the convergence of their whiteness and their maleness.

While there were some early attempts to recognise how ‘global white supremacy’ (Mills, 2016 [1997]) and ‘multinational whiteness’ (Leonardo 2002) have resulted in commonalities in how whiteness continues to be privileged around the world (Bonnett 2002), the first and second waves of Critical Whiteness Studies were mostly characterised by an overriding Westerncentrism which focused almost exclusively on the USA and the UK. When attempts were made to offer a more international perspective on whiteness, this often only extended to countries such as Canada and Australia (Levine-Rasky, 2002; Lund and Carr, 2015 [2007]). A third wave of Critical Whiteness Studies seems to have become established in the past decade with the increase of scholarship examining whiteness beyond Western contexts. In East Asia, Fechter (2007) produced a somewhat accidental forerunner of third wave Critical Whiteness Studies in her study on white expatriates in Indonesia. However, as third wave Critical Whiteness Studies was still in its infancy, Fechter’s study did not prioritise whiteness as a key component of her analysis, nor did she engage with Critical Whiteness Studies scholarship or the notion of white privilege to any great extent. This was partly addressed a few years later when Fechter and Walsh (2010) began to tentatively call for a greater focus on whiteness in East Asia. Soon after, impressive scholarship that was more clearly indicative of third wave Critical Whiteness Studies started to blossom, beginning with important works about the unique experiences of white migrants in Taiwan (Lan 2011), Singapore (Lundström 2014) and Japan (Debnár 2016), and followed more recently by other valuable studies that have continued to intricately dissect whiteness in East Asia (Hof 2021; Kim and Lee 2017; Miladinović 2020; Schultz 2020; Thompson et al., 2020; Tong et al., 2018; Tzeng 2019). This literature has demonstrated that, although white people in East Asia are heterogenous and have an assorted range of experiences, whiteness is largely valorised in East Asia and white people are often granted multiple privileges that are not extended to others. Moreover, it is often suggested in this literature that white people may avoid the racism that is faced by racial minorities and migrants of colour in East Asia.

Although third wave Critical Whiteness Studies may finally be facilitating the internationalisation – or perhaps even the decolonisation – of Critical Whiteness Studies, some of the popular areas of contention within Critical Whiteness Studies are still mostly only explored within Western contexts. For instance, scholarship about white privilege in higher education is still predominantly Westerncentric (Bhopal, 2018; Lund and Carr, 2015 [2007]; Preston 2013). Within this literature, ‘Western universities are often understood as places of normative whiteness and white privilege, which is to say that within them, whiteness is normalised and white people are afforded greater opportunities’ (Moosavi 2021: 3). Yet, this literature has rarely had anything to say about whether this also applies in non-Western universities. Even third wave Critical Whiteness Studies scholars who do attend to non-Western contexts rarely focus on whiteness in non-Western higher education, with notable exceptions coming from Koshino (2019), who argued that whiteness is privileged in Japanese universities, and Rivers (2019), who argued that whiteness leads to disadvantage in Japanese universities. Clearly, greater discussion is required to make sense of whiteness in East Asian higher education.

Autoethnography as a research method

Autoethnography is an increasingly popular research method in the social sciences. One of the earliest attempts to define autoethnography was offered more than 40 years ago, when Hayano (1979) sought to define autoethnography as a unique research method which involves a researcher undertaking an ethnography in a community that they belong to. Although Hayano (1979): 103) explicitly mentioned in a footnote that autoethnography is about researching one’s own community rather than one’s own life experiences (which he referred to as ‘self-ethnographic’), the contemporary understanding of autoethnography has evolved into primarily focussing on an author’s own life experiences. While it is common for scholars’ life experiences to inspire their scholarship, autoethnographies take this a step further by enabling scholars to explicitly put their own life experiences into conversation with academic literature, concepts and theories. This amalgamation of expertise with introspection allows scholars who have nuanced theoretical awareness and sophisticated conceptual vocabulary the opportunity to rigorously fuse one’s own personal troubles with broader public issues. In this regard, autoethnographies are akin to interviewing and quoting oneself, which is why it has been described as ‘the researcher being researched by themselves’ (Gaitanidis and Shao-Kobayashi 2020: 5). Autoethnographies are informed by personal observations and experiences that are captured in memories, memoirs and memorabilia, which culminate in a synthesis of autobiography and ethnography (Ellis et al., 2011).

Some commentators have dismissed autoethnography as an illegitimate research method. For instance, Delamont (2009: 61) has suggested that ‘autoethnography is an abrogation of the honourable trade of the scholar’ due to her belief that it is a lazy and self-indulgent method which does not offer valuable insights. More recently, Walford (2020) has similarly denounced autoethnography as a narcissistic and highly subjective research method which does not generate meaningful contributions to knowledge production. The derision shown toward autoethnography can mean that writing an autoethnography can generate trepidation, fear and a degree of trauma owning to the expectation that publishing gatekeepers (i.e. editors and peer reviewers) will uncompassionately dismiss one’s personal account as trivial and superfluous (Toyosaki 2018: 34–36; Wall 2008: 47). ² Those who reject autoethnographies may underestimate the committed effort, emotional vulnerability and individual sacrifice that producing an autoethnography about one’s personal life may involve (Egeli 2017: 11; Wall 2016: 7). They may also overlook the numerous instances when scholars have successfully deployed autoethnographies to arrive at rich understandings of various social issues. In particular, autoethnographies have been a valuable form of ‘counter-storytelling’ for exploring sensitive topics which are either difficult to observe or difficult to talk about, such as race and racism. Although there are legitimate critiques to be made about the limits of autoethnography’s emancipatory potential (Toyosaki 2018), to some extent, they assist in resolving the methodological conundrum of how to document ‘everyday racism’ by placing greater trust in the personal testimony and intuition of those who confront racism. This potential, particularly in relation to higher education, has been well explained by Arday:

In breaking with methodological convention, one could consider auto-ethnography to be a dangerous, rebellious and potentially creative instrument to destabilise the normativity and centrality of Whiteness within the Academy. To this end, autoethnography is, indeed, essential for faculty of colour in challenging, decolonising and liberating the current academic culture (2018: 151).

This may be why, in recent years, a significant number of autoethnographies have been published which specifically explore the ways in which racism operates in Western higher education (e.g. Grant 2019; Kim 2020; McCoy 2018). These autoethnographies typically involve racial minority academics bravely recounting the ways in which they are subjected to racialised microaggressions within Western universities. It is less common to find autoethnographies about race and racism in higher education that are written by white academics, which may be because white people do not have to confront race and racism in the same way that racial minorities do, or because white academics do not need the ‘self-healing’ and ‘epistemic therapy’ that autoethnographies are said to provide (Grant 2019: 127, 136; Kim 2020: 503). However, in more general terms, Critical Whiteness Studies has often utilised autoethnography, perhaps because it is the surest way of revealing something that is so often stubbornly invisible. For instance, McIntosh’s (1998) pioneering text on white privilege was demonstrably autoethnographical and other examples have occasionally appeared in which white academics reflect on the white privilege that they have within Western educational contexts (e.g. Hobson et al., 2018; Shelton 2019). Until now, there has been an absence of autoethnographies about whiteness in East Asian higher education, with the exception of the provocative contribution made by Rivers (2019), whose approach is markedly different from this article given his insistence that white academics, particularly white male academics, are largely disadvantaged by their whiteness. In order to address this absence, in this article, I examine whiteness in East Asian higher education by adopting an autoethnographical approach which encapsulates methodological rigour in the manner advocated by Anderson (2006) and Wall (2016), who call for ‘analytic autoethnography’ and ‘moderate autoethnography’, respectively. These approaches suggest that autoethnographies should be attuned to existing academic literature, theory and concepts, and aim for a realistic degree of objectivity and accuracy in the research process. At the same time, this autoethnography may also be considered as a ‘decolonial autoethnography’ (Shakthi 2020: 3), in that it is not just for the sake of satisfying nostalgia or curiosity, but rather, it is an attempt to unsettle the coloniality of higher education.

The autoethnography that is to follow is based on my experiences of living and working as an academic in East Asia between 2013 and 2022 as a relatively young, mixed-race, British man, with Iranian and Irish heritage, and the added complexity of being a Muslim with a European forename and a Middle Eastern surname. Inspired by Egeli’s claim (2017: 6) that autoethnographies are particularly well suited for mixed-race people like myself who eschew simplistic binary categories and have what he calls ‘cultural fluidity’, in this autoethnography, I attempt to extrapolate a nuanced understanding of whiteness in East Asian higher education. During my time in East Asia, I have taught close to 500 East Asian students in Singapore and participated in numerous academic activities in China, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Cambodia, Brunei and Singapore. This has resulted in countless interactions with East Asian academics and students which have informed my analysis. The examples that are offered are selected because they are indicative of numerous other experiences that I have had, and which I believe are reoccurring themes within East Asian contexts. Many informal conversations that I have had with white academics in East Asia have also informed my analysis. I have endeavoured to maintain an ethical approach by ensuring that none of the accounts that I have shared reveal anyone’s identity, even though this has meant forfeiting the telling of some poignant stories (Egeli 2017: 10; Ellis et al., 2011; Wall 2008: 49–50).

Becoming white in East Asia

It was the summer of 2018. I had been living in Singapore for 5 years. During one of my annual trips back to the UK to visit family, I found myself at a farmer’s market in Cambridgeshire. When I approached the elderly, middle-class, white woman who was selling vegetables, I didn’t expect her to ask me if I was familiar with lettuce. I knew my diluted Mancunian accent may reveal that I was not a local, but I was surprised when she said, in a slow and elevated tone: ‘THIS-IS-LETTUCE. DO-YOU-HAVE-IT-IN-YOUR-COUNTRY?’. I froze, taken aback by the way that she had instantly categorised me, and remembered all the times when I had been labelled as an outsider in a country that I thought was my own. I had encountered similar interrogations of my racial identity and belonging countless times before, from being ‘politely’ asked questions such as: ‘where you really from?’ and ‘do you have black blood in you?’, to being more aggressively called a ‘Muslim terrorist’ and a ‘(fucking) Paki’. But this time I was caught off guard because, since moving to Singapore in 2013, I had become accustomed to being viewed and treated as a privileged ‘expat’, an ascription that exudes whiteness. Acquaintances, friends, and students in East Asia had often indicated that they saw me as white through passing comments like, ‘White people like you…’ or through fondly describing me as an ‘Ang Moh’, ‘Buleh’ or ‘Mat Salleh’. ³ On one memorable occasion, when I needed to register my ‘race’ with the authorities in an East Asian country, the official behind the counter was taken aback when I declined her suggestion to record my race as ‘Caucasian’. Eventually, we settled on ‘British’, a compromise that, to me at least, sidestepped the dilemma of having to reify ‘race’, but which was probably a synonym for white for the official who knew how to define me better than I knew myself.

The encounters above capture the way that I am typically racialised as a person of colour, or at least ‘not-quite-white’, in the UK, whereas I am typically racialised as white in East Asian contexts. This may occur because East Asia has what Garner (2007) has referred to as a unique ‘racial regime’ in which racialisation varies depending on the influences of local histories, demographics, politics, terminologies and cultures. While Garner mostly talks of ‘national racial regimes’ to reflect the tendency for race to be mapped onto national identity and nation building projects, his recognition of more transnational ‘regional racial regimes’ in places like the Caribbean and Latin America (2007: 80), points toward a similar prospect in East Asia. Moreover, Garner (2007: 83) also recognises that travelling between racial regimes can result in a reclassification of one’s racial ascription. The reclassification of myself as white in the East Asian racial regime closely echoes the account offered by Fisher (2015), who, as a mixed-race academic like myself, is racialised as a person of colour in New Zealand but white in the Philippines. Our experiences of becoming white in East Asia reveal the way in which people may be granted or denied whiteness depending on context, which is possible because the malleability of whiteness means that who is racialised as white can change over time, place and context (Leonardo 2002: 41–43; Moosavi, 2015a; Sullivan, 2006: 3). Being racialised differently in different racial regimes may be especially pronounced for those who traverse racial boundaries, such as myself, but it can also happen for those who are more firmly racialised as people of colour in Western contexts. Thus, I have witnessed Western citizens with South Asian heritage being racialised as white in East Asia even though this would be unthinkable in Western contexts. In such instances, whiteness may be related to English language fluency, accent, nationality and cultural habitus which are imagined as proxies for whiteness (Lan 2011; Tong et al., 2018). This easier access to whiteness in East Asia contrasts with the tendency in the West to strictly separate whiteness and non-whiteness due to a perception of non-whiteness as contaminated, dirty and impure (Morrison 2004: 393; Sullivan 2006: 73). Yet, in East Asia, the boundaries of whiteness may be policed to a lesser extent which means that those who are people of colour in the West may become white in East Asia. Furthermore, those who may encounter racism in one context may encounter racial privilege in another context, depending on ‘specific racial-spatial configurations’ (Shakthi 2020: 1). Thus, just as Fisher (2015) had to make uncomfortable admissions about enjoying greater research access and being viewed positively (e.g. attractive, wealthy and modern) in East Asia due to her newly ascribed ‘whiteness’, I similarly have to concede that, in East Asia, I am routinely viewed and treated in favourable ways due to being perceived as a white ‘expat’, as will be discussed further in the next section.

The privileging of whiteness in East Asian universities

I had just arrived at a conference at an East Asian university in 2017. It didn’t take long before some of the students huddled around me to ask me where I was from, what I thought about their country and if I needed any assistance. They stared at me with admiration and this culminated in them asking to take selfies with me. It wasn’t the first time in East Asia that strangers had asked to take selfies with me and each time it happened it made me feel like a celebrity. When I gestured to my friend, a scholar from India, to join us, there didn’t seem to be the same level of enthusiasm toward him, despite his cheerful personality. There were no requests for selfies and no eagerness to hear his opinions. The incident reminded me of a conversation that I’d had with students in another East Asian country when they told me that they felt short-changed when they were taught by East Asian academics. These students candidly admitted to believing that white academics are more competent, more knowledgeable and more open to debate than East Asian academics. The same sentiment seemed to exist amongst some East Asian academics too, who I’d observed inviting white academics to be keynote speakers at academic events in East Asia, even when those white academics had no expertise, or even interest, in the East Asian context. A similar thing even happened to myself in an East Asian country, when I was promptly invited to be a keynote speaker at a conference after the organisers heard I was in town, even though they were unfamiliar with my scholarship, and even though I lacked any substantive expertise in the topic of their conference. The same issue seemed to be present in conversations that I’d had with an East Asian scholar who was frequently determined to distance herself from her East Asian culture, her East Asian language, and her East Asian religion. She seemed to seize every opportunity to declare, especially to white colleagues, that she was ‘not very Asian’ in her lifestyle, her thought and her taste. When I mentioned to her that I was writing a paper about the negative perceptions of East Asian students in Western academia, she was puzzled owning to the fact that she believed the negative stereotypes about East Asian students to be true and wished that East Asian students could be as open-minded, hard-working and honest as she imagined white students to be.

The above narrative highlights the way in which East Asian students and East Asian academics may venerate white academics. My account parallels the experience of Schultz (2020) who was ‘fetishised’ in Malaysia due to his whiteness, which led to him being imagined as symbolising progressive values, prosperity and hope. It appears as though, in East Asian universities, whiteness may be similarly desired due to being imagined as symbolising the epitome of advanced intellectual ability. As a result, the white academic in East Asia may become a ‘celebrity’ who is viewed as a precious entity in ways that are not extended to academics of colour. Such white privilege may translate into white academics being shown greater respect and being given greater opportunities than others in East Asian universities, such as being overrepresented in syllabi and citations, both of which I have witnessed multiple times. The privileging of white academics in East Asian universities may also occur at an institutional level in instances when East Asian universities glorify white academics. This may be witnessed when East Asian universities are more inclined to establish partnerships with ‘white universities’, when East Asian universities have a preference to use images of white people on their websites and promotional materials, or when East Asian universities prefer to employ and promote white academics regardless of their qualifications or competency (Koshino 2019). I have been informed by several academics who work in East Asian universities that such preferential treatment of white academics in East Asian universities is readily apparent and an ‘open secret’. This not only highlights the importance of going beyond McIntosh’s (1988) conceptualisation of white privilege as an individual benefit, but it also implies that East Asian universities may be characterised by an ‘institutional whiteness’ (Cabrera et al., 2016: 50).

The veneration of white academics in East Asian universities relates to a broader veneration of whiteness in East Asian societies. Cotemporary reverence of whiteness in East Asia originates in an ideological discourse that European colonisers concocted and imposed on East Asian societies in order to justify their imperialistic domination (Leonard, 2010; López, 2005; Mills, 2016 [1997]). This resulted in white people being extolled as ‘colonial masters’ who should be granted status, advantage, authority, concessions, access, benefits, opportunities and rights that were not afforded to East Asians. While the glorification of fair skin in East Asia predates colonialism, it was in the colonial period that the contemporary understanding of whiteness in East Asia was cemented. In the academic domain, this colonial-era racism still materialises as a mantra that implies that white people are best equipped to produce and convey knowledge due to supposedly being superior in creativity, innovation and critical thinking, which has not only privileged white scholars, but has also devalued the intellectual contributions of scholars of colour in the past and the present (Go 2020; Moosavi 2020). What is most significant to note here is that tenets of white supremacy appear to have been subscribed to by a significant number of East Asians. In fact, an incessant desiring of whiteness may be so deeply etched into some people of colours’ psyches that, according to Seshadri-Crooks (2000), some may subconsciously believe that proximity to whiteness is the only way to realise complete humanness. In East Asian universities, this ‘internalised racism’ results in some East Asian students, academics and universities potentially subscribing to lingering colonial assumptions about the superiority of whiteness (López 2005: 17–18; Moosavi 2020: 10–13). In this regard, the East Asian academic who was eager to distance herself from her East Asianness may be an example of someone who possesses the fantasy of ‘de-ethnicizing’ in the hope of becoming an ‘honorary white’ who can access ‘white prestige’ (Young 2009: 179–181). When read alongside Schultz’s (2020: 876–878) and Thompson’s (2020: 54–55) identical observation that some East Asians may value photographs with white people that they meet as a way of signifying proximity to whiteness, the selfies that the East Asian students wished to take with me are transformed into a potential symbol of this quest to access whiteness.

An intersectional approach may problematise the claim that white academics are privileged in East Asian academia by noting that it is actually white male academics who are most privileged in East Asia. This would echo the broader suggestion that white women are not as privileged as white men in East Asia (Fechter 2007; Lundström 2014). Although there have been occasional suggestions that white women may be more privileged than white men in East Asian academia (Rivers 2019; Thompson et al., 2020), I have also been told by a white female academic that, based on her experiences and observations in East Asian universities, she feels as though East Asian students do not respect her as much as they respect male educators. If this is the case, it would reveal misogyny, but if it were also discovered that female academics of colour are even less respected than white female academics it would reveal that white female academics still benefit from white privilege. In this regard, white male academics and white female academics may both be privileged in East Asian higher education, even though white male academics may be privileged to a greater degree due to ‘the complexities of compoundedness’ (Crenshaw 1989: 166). Similarly, although Griffiths (2017) is keen to distance himself from benefiting from white privilege (or what he calls ‘Western privilege’) in the Global South due to his working-class heritage, it is likely that even if there are occasions when he is less privileged than upper-class white males in East Asia, he would nonetheless still be routinely privileged as a white man.

Sustaining white privilege

At an academic conference at an East Asian university in 2018, an East Asian academic delivered a poor presentation. A white academic in the audience belligerently lambasted the presenter’s lack of academic rigour during the Q&A and then proceeded to escalate his comments into a broader criticism of the alleged intellectual redundancy of social science in East Asia. While doing this, he maintained eye contact with me, the only other person racialised as white in the room. The white academic declared: ‘Social science in East Asia is of a shoddy nature which is why people like me are needed in East Asian academia’. His self-aggrandizing and patronising tone was familiar. It resembled the numerous instances when white academics had complained to me about East Asian students being deficient in their intellectual capabilities. I asked myself if I had ever positioned myself as superior to East Asian scholars and students. An incident came to mind, which still makes me cringe, but which was a turning point for me in thinking about how I take up space in academic settings. The incident occurred in 2016, when I was attending an academic colloquium in an East Asian country. The main presenter was a white academic, and all the other participants, except myself, were East Asian. I wasn’t fully aware at the time, but upon reflection, I realised that during that event, I had elevated myself alongside the status of the main presenter by dominating the proceedings, positioning myself as having a superior critical oversight and assuming the role of cultural interpreter by uninvitedly mediating between the main presenter and the other participants. Would I have had the same sense of entitlement to be heard had the racial demographics been otherwise?

If the previous section made clear that East Asians may privilege white academics, here it is suggested that white academics in East Asia may also embrace, sustain and perpetuate the glorification of whiteness themselves. This may involve white academics, including those who consider themselves to be anti-racist ‘white allies’, deploying subtle Orientalist and racist tropes by denigrating East Asians as less competent and less worthy than white people (Applebaum 2016; Moosavi 2021; Preston 2013). Thus, on numerous occasions, I have witnessed certain white academics in East Asia: (a) treating East Asian academics as invisible in academic discussions, (b) excluding East Asian academics from social activities, (c) making no effort to familiarise themselves with East Asian colleagues’ research agendas and (d) dismissing East Asian academics’ scholarship; all of which correspond with studies which have found that white academics in Western universities may hold condescending views about the worth of academics of colour (Arday 2018: 147–148; Grant 2019: 130; Mohamed and Beagan 2019: 339–340). Similarly, I have observed some white academics in East Asia: (a) showing a diminished level of commitment to the education of East Asian students, (b) refusing to adapt their teaching to the East Asian context, (c) dismissing East Asian students’ feedback as unimportant and (d) partaking in the same type of patronising stereotyping of East Asian students that I have previously identified in Western academia (Moosavi 2020; Moosavi 2021). Notably, East Asian academics and East Asian students may be cognisant of such belittling and discriminatory treatment, as was confirmed to me on two separate occasions when East Asian students and an East Asian academic confided in me that they felt dehumanised by the way in which certain white academics routinely treated them.

On occasion, white academics’ Orientalist and racist perceptions may extend beyond academia and also be applied to East Asian societies more generally. Thus, I have encountered numerous white academics routinely deploying what Oh and Oh (2017) have referred to as a ‘white expat discourse’ which involves white people constructing themselves as ‘progressive advocates’ who mock, ridicule and generalise East Asian societies and cultures in hostile terms compared to Western societies. At times, I have observed this escalating to the adoption of ‘a White saviorist ideology’ (Jenks and Lee 2020: 199). That is to say, some white academics in East Asia seem to elevate themselves as best placed to ‘save’ East Asians. For instance, although I have encountered white academics who see their time in East Asia as being little more than an exotic adventure in a ‘white playground’ (Meier 2016; Tanu 2016), there are also white academics – and perhaps even ‘white universities’ – who seem to believe that their purpose in East Asia is to make an altruistic and benevolent intervention in East Asian societies that only they can make. In such instances, ‘the scholar who identifies the inadequacies of the Other may position themselves as having the authority and attributes to diagnose and rectify the supposed deficiencies of the Other, or to put it another way, to civilise them’ (Moosavi 2020: 8). This belief that (white) Western academics and universities can help East Asian people ‘catch-up’ has been referred to as a clear example of ‘academic imperialism’ (Kim 2020: 502–503). In this regard, as has been suggested about other white people in East Asia, some white academics may deploy a ‘colonial imagination’, ‘the colonial gaze’ and ‘neo-colonial imaginaries’ in the way in which they talk about themselves, East Asia and East Asians (Leonard 2010: 1260; Maher and Lafferty 2014: 436; Tanu 2016: 438). This is why Fechter (2007) has suggested that white expatriates in Indonesia may be thought of as ‘neo-colonisers’ due to the way in which they may enjoy appropriating some aspects of Indonesian culture at the same time as segregating themselves from Indonesians who they may view as uncivilised, unclean and unintelligent.

Recognising that some white academics may uphold white privilege diverges from a common perception that white privilege is bestowed upon white people by others, or that it is ‘an unconscious habit’ (Sullivan 2006). Rather, white people in East Asia may feel that they are entitled to white privilege and seek to sustain it (Debnár 2016: 117–118; Hof 2021). Thus, greater onus may be placed on white academics in East Asia to become, what Amico has called ‘white people of conscience’ (2017: 111), which involves recognising the moral and pragmatic reasons for actively disengaging from white privilege and then dismantling the discourse of white supremacy. This need not go as far as the radical suggestion that white people must become ‘race traitors’ who commit to ‘unwhite’ themselves so as to ‘abolish’ whiteness and achieve ‘the end of the white race’ (Garvey and Ignatiev 1997), but it may lead to white people challenging instances when they are invited to enjoy white privilege. For instance, in relation to the examples mentioned it the previous section, perhaps I should have declined to take selfies with those who may have wished to achieve a proximity to whiteness, or perhaps I should have declined to be a keynote speaker when whiteness may have underpinned the invitation. While there are undoubtedly white academics in East Asia who admire East Asian societies, respect East Asian academics and care about East Asian students, those who are racialised as white in East Asian universities, including myself, still have a responsibility to begin ‘working through whiteness’ (Levine-Rasky 2002: 2), by not only recognising white privilege, but also potentially dismantling it within one’s outlook, behaviour and interactions.

The limits of white privilege

A friend of mine, a white academic, often complains to me about the racism that he believes he suffers within the East Asian university that he works in. This includes being ridiculed with jokes about his whiteness, being left out of social activities and not being promoted to senior roles. When I told him that I was writing an article about white privilege in East Asian higher education he was not impressed. I understood his perspective because in my own experience I’d seen what he was referring to when interacting with another friend, an East Asian academic who I often have discussions with. On more than one occasion, this friend has dismissed and mocked my views on a range of issues as ‘a white way of thinking’, such as when he became agitated after I criticised aspects of political governance in East Asia which led him to pronounce: ‘If you don’t like it in East Asia then go back home’. In other instances, he has told me that ‘white people are too outspoken’ and ‘white people should adapt to our way of doing things’. After informing another East Asian academic that I am writing a paper that argues that whiteness is privileged in East Asia, she insisted that East Asians actually find white people repulsive and unsophisticated, even if they conceal this from white people.

Although I earlier argued that I am typically racialised as white in East Asian universities, there remain moments when I am not racialised as white. For instance, white academics in East Asia routinely racialise me as a person of colour, and some have even subjected me to racialised microaggressions which left me feeling disrespected, undermined and excluded in ways that resemble encounters that I have had in the West. Similarly, as was the case for Fisher (2015: 466) in the Philippines, my mixed-race identity has meant that there have been occasions when East Asians have viewed me as having a ‘not-as-white-as-all-the-others-whiteness’. Yet, what I am more interested in here is the tendency for whiteness to provoke negativity in East Asian academia so as to offer a more nuanced understanding of whiteness by departing from the tendency within Critical Whiteness Studies to assume that whiteness is always-and-only privileged (Moosavi, 2015b). For example, it has been documented that although whiteness often has several positive connotations in East Asian societies, white people are simultaneously stereotyped as: arrogant, overpaid, immoral, selfish, sexually promiscuous, impolite and unassimilable outsiders (Fisher 2015: 465; Hof 2021; Liu and Self 2020; Ortiga 2015: 953–954; Rocha and Yeoh 2021). This means that even those white people who are the ‘whitest-whites’, or who have what has also been referred to as ‘accentuated whiteness’ or ‘hyper-whiteness’ (Lundström 2014: 163), may also lack access to white privilege in East Asian higher education due to the possibility that whiteness is understood in less positive terms than may often be the case. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge that in the East Asian context, even though whiteness may be valorised in a number in instances, there are also moments when whiteness is associated with negative connotations to the extent that white people in East Asia may be avoided, objectified, exploited, labelled, disliked, and generally seen as problematic (Debnár 2016; Maher and Lafferty 2014). Myslinska (2014) has articulated a similar argument by suggesting that even though whiteness is privileged in Japan, ‘anti-white racism’ remains common since white people are routinely seen as a strange and decadent Other who are a threat to maintaining tradition and social harmony. In some respects, ‘Japanese privilege’ may be more pervasive than white privilege in Japan then, which may be related to a unique phenomenon in the Japanese context whereby Japanese people may understand themselves as being even more entitled to claim ownership of whiteness than those who we usually think of as white (Bonnett 2002). Similar patterns have also been found in other East Asian contexts, such as in Hong Kong and Singapore, where ‘Chinese privilege’ may be increasingly superseding white privilege (Barr and Skrbiš 2011 [2008]; Groves & O’Connor 2020; Li and Liu 2021; Zainal and Abdullah 2019). Thus, it is evident that whiteness is not an unfettered key to unbridled privileged in East Asia which may mean that white academics may be resented, perceived as a nuisance, and may even be viewed as symbolising a legacy of imperialism.

In seeking to explain this seemingly contradictory observation that whiteness in East Asia is both privileged and disprivileged, Hof (2021) has suggested that white people in East Asia are increasingly only able to access a ‘passive whiteness’ with a ‘passive value’. This means, according to Hof, that while white people in East Asia still often accrue benefits due to their whiteness, this white privilege is often superficial, fleeting and limited in more significant domains. This understanding would help explain why, returning to the Japanese context, Miladinović (2020) found that although whiteness is often valorised in Japan, the perception of white people as ‘perpetual foreigners’ can result in substantial social exclusion and isolation on account of their whiteness. Similarly, the notion of passive whiteness would also explain why Rivers (2019) found that the supposedly positive stereotypes of white people in Japanese higher education may be accompanied by a detrimental fetishisation which cause white people to feel objectified, exploited and emotionally distressed.

While it is necessary to recognise the limits of white privilege, there may still be many more occasions in East Asia when whiteness remains privileged, especially when one compares white peoples’ experiences with racial minorities and migrants of colour. Furthermore, since white people in East Asia can be sure of receiving white privilege on many occasions, this may mean that the moments when their whiteness leads to them being disadvantaged are tolerable since they know that their whiteness will reimburse them on other occasions (Debnár 2016: 168). One may also speculate about whether some of the instances when white academics may feel disadvantaged are actually just a loss of white privilege rather than racial discrimination (Fechter 2007: 76–77; Oh and Oh 2017: 707). For example, a white academic has suggested to me that they are regularly subjected to anti-white racism when they are gazed at by strangers in East Asian neighbourhoods. However, this could also be understood as the loss of a common manifestation of white privilege of having unfettered access to spaces without being made to feel unwelcome. In this regard, when recognising the limits of white privilege in East Asian universities, one must be cautious not to perpetuate the discourse of ‘white victimization’ which suggests that the greatest priority is to tackle ‘reverse racism’. This would overlook the structural components of racism which may mean that it is actually more accurate to say that white academics in East Asia are subject to prejudice and discrimination, but not necessarily racism. ⁴ Rather, it would be more reasonable to say that one should avoid a simplistic conclusion that whiteness only affords privilege, or the reverse; that it only affords disadvantage, because racial hierarchies operate in more complex ways. Thus, whiteness in East Asia can paradoxically be an asset in some instances and a liability in others, all on account of the intricate ways in which whiteness is both desired and resented, celebrated and doubted, even though whiteness seems to retain its prestige in most instances.

Conclusion

This article has utilised an autoethnographical approach to contribute toward third wave Critical Whiteness Studies and to address the lack of research about whiteness in East Asian universities. It has illustrated that white academics across East Asia may experience and even sustain white privilege. In going beyond popular arguments found within Critical Whiteness Studies about whiteness as always-and-only privileging, this article has also recognised that, in some cases, being a white academic in East Asian higher education may result in marginalisation, even if it is more common for one’s whiteness to afford advantage. Overall, this article has demonstrated that whiteness remains an important vector for understanding comparative and international education beyond Western contexts to the extent that being racialised as white in East Asian academia can sharply influence one’s experiences. Future research may build upon this further by exploring the evolving ways in which whiteness manifests in various educational settings around the world. Here it should be noted that perceptions of whiteness in East Asia are not static and that the extent to which whiteness is privileged in East Asia today may not be the same in the future, particularly as we move further away from the era of formal colonisation (Fechter and Walsh 2010; Hof 2021; Leonard 2010; López 2005; Maher and Lafferty 2014).

When studying whiteness, it is important to deploy what Applebaum (2016: 3) has called a ‘critical vigilance’ against recentring whiteness at the expense of other racial identities and experiences. Thus, although this article has focused on whiteness in East Asia, this does not mean that urgent attention must not also be given to other modes of racialisation in East Asia, particularly the racial privileges that are given to majority races in East Asian societies. In this regard, future third wave Critical Whiteness Studies research must coalesce with other cutting-edge scholarship on race and ethnicity in East Asia which has deliberately sought to go beyond whiteness, such as that which examines the racial fault lines that underpin a number of political and violent conflicts in the region (Barr and Skrbiš 2011 [2008]; Mukherjee 2021), or that which explores the complexities of mixed-race East Asians (Rocha and Fozdar 2017; Rocha and Yeoh 2021), or that which focuses on the ways that East Asians may hold racist views toward those that they share the same race with (Ang and Colic-Peisker 2021; Ho and Kathiravelu 2021; Hough 2021; Ortiga 2015). While it may be tempting to subscribe to ‘the myth of academic tolerance’ that suggests that universities are especially inclusive spaces (Moosavi 2021), this article has sought to draw attention to the intricacies of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian higher education with the hope that it may provoke us to now ask what we do about the racial hierarchies that often exist within East Asian universities.