White Women, Racial Others, and the Complex Social Production of Identity

• In Event: Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Explorations of Identity

Abstract

Increasingly, researchers and educators have warned that inadequate conceptualizations of whiteness and white racial identity are undermining multicultural and anti-racist education efforts. My paper examines the complex social production of white identity. Drawn from a larger interview study conducted in a small, rural community, my text explores how three white women experienced being white, and how being white for them was very much intertwined with ways of thinking and feeling that they had learned growing up in rural Wisconsin. My purpose is to contribute to better descriptions and theorizing of white racial identity, as part of larger efforts to imagine and enact effective anti-racist and social justice pedagogies.

Author

• Timothy J. Lensmire, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities