What Should People of Color Do? Education at the Edge of Race and the End of Whiteness

• In Event: The Edge of Race: Critical Examinations of Education and Race/Racism

Abstract

The edge of race is directly related to questions around the end of whiteness. The field of education has benefitted from the burgeoning literature known as ‘Whiteness Studies’ for roughly 20 years now (see Dyer, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Lipsitz, 1998; Roediger, 1991). The ostensive audience of this innovation targets Whites; from educators, to students, to scholars, Whiteness Studies peers into the lives of racial privilege and ways to disinvest in it (see Allen, 2002; Giroux, 1997; Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, & Chennault, 1997; Richardson & Villenas, 2000). It is summed up by Linda Alcoff’s (1998) essay that goes by the title, ‘What Should White People Do?’ (see also, Thompson, 2003). In short, what acts and decisions must
Whites commit in order to transform whiteness? One of the answers to this question includes the abolition of whiteness (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996; Roediger, 1994). In this presentation I ask an important and related question. If the abolition of whiteness is a provocative question for Whites, what is it that people of color should do? This is rarely, if ever, asked in Whiteness Studies. If abolishing whiteness includes, along with structural changes, an educational component that eviscerates a social identity, this process is not completely up to White subjects.

This presentation engages White abolition, or the end of whiteness, from the perspectives and lives of people of color. First, it will offer a brief review of the abolitionist strategy, particularly as it attempts to convince and compel Whites to ‘stop being White.’ Second, it relates these provocations with respect to racial minorities and what their participation would look like in the abolition of whiteness, which implicates identities of color in the process. In other words, the transformation of whiteness necessitates the transformation of ‘color’ and race relations in general. Third, if White abolition’s suggestion is for Whites to unthink their whiteness (after all what are Whites but people who think they are ‘White’, according to James Baldwin), this implies that people of color would also need to stop thinking of Whites as ‘White.’ What would this mean? Finally, the abolition of whiteness implicates identities of color, for there is no dismantling of White identity without simultaneously calling into question non-White identities. Because they are dialectical unities, White and identities of color were once created and now exist alongside each other. An education that affects the first causes a radical shift in the other.

Author

• Zeus Leonardo, University of California - Berkeley