White Innocence and Microaggressions in the Curriculum

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Disparities, Criminalization, and Microaggressions: The Struggles of Minority Youth in U.S. Schools

Abstract

White innocence is described by Ross (1990a) as “the insistence on the innocence or absence of responsibility of the contemporary white person” (p.3) while simultaneously representing the person of color as antagonistic to this innocence. People of color become perpetrators through the understanding of the perpetrator as a “natural opposite” (Ross, 1990b, p. 310) to White innocence. This case study explores the curriculum of a high school U.S. History course for its use of racial microaggressions in the form of White innocence. Using document and content analysis, the rhetoric of White innocence is made transparent in the curriculum by way of its positioning of Whites as virtuous agents of U.S. historical episodes while also abstracting and omitting people of color.

Author

• Richard A. Orozco, The University of Arizona