Suturing White Wounds: Racialized Therapeutic Rhetoric as a Strategy of Whiteness

ABSTRACTThis essay advances racialized therapeutic rhetoric as a framework for analyzing how whiteness mobilizes strategically in antiracist discourse. Racialized therapeutic rhetoric functions to center and soothe reactionary white emotions and promote white self-introspection and personal transformation over collective antiracist praxis. My analysis reveals that racialized therapeutic rhetoric operates through intertwined modalities of discursive suturing and temporality. Suturing works to ame