At the intersection of rhetorical studies and critical race/ethnic studies, The Benevolent Gaslight analyzes cultural and political discourses that recharacterize acts of racial violence as teaching moments and learning opportunities. Naming this phenomenon “benevolent gaslighting,” Louis M. Maraj and Pritha Prasad explore its application across academic disciplines/epistemologies, educational history, and university race management, while also diving into how popular culture and political figures use benevolent gaslighting to reinscribe normative operations of race, gender, and sexuality.

Although this rhetoric usually presents as progressive, when used for the purposes of advancing “antiracism,” the benevolent gaslight re-centers the very whiteness it supposedly critiques. It prompts peoples of color to question their histories, memories, and realities by suggesting their pain has been necessary for positive social change and by situating racial trauma as opportunities for public learning. Specific examples include antiracist teaching initiatives and the sudden proliferation of apologies for past acts of racism by public figures. Both trends saw an uptick from 2020 onward as a result of publicity crises and public “reckonings” necessitated by Black Lives Matter protests in response to widely reported, hypervisible anti-Black violences like the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.

These discourses deflect blame for past or present racial violence by narrating it as an opportunity for “antiracist” growth and intervention. Utilizing conventional academic and creative/narrative methods to examine examples of the benevolent gaslight across US histories of education during the First Reconstruction, the post–Civil Rights management of student activists in the university, and the progressivist discourses of humanities disciplines and popular culture, this book reveals the insidious ways in which peoples of color are routinely (re)traumatized through mechanisms of “pedagogy.”

Caribbean-born Louis M. Maraj, PhD, is a multi-award-winning scholar and multimedia artist and author of Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics. His critical/creative projects environ (anti)Blackness and expressive form. Currently, he is an associate professor in University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing & Media. Learn more at loumaraj.com.

Pritha Prasad, PhD, is an assistant professor and Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. She is an award-winning interdisciplinary scholar and teacher specializing in rhetorical studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and feminist and queer studies. In 2023, Pritha Prasad and Louis M. Maraj were recipients of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Richard Braddock Award for their coauthored article “‘I Am Not Your Teaching Moment’: The Benevolent Gaslight and Epistemic Violence.”