Another Kind of Cultural Match: Discourses of White Supremacy in an Immigrant-Origin Classroom

• In Event: Teachers and Immigrant Youth: Expanding and Complicating the Social Context of Migration in Teachers’ Classroom Work

Abstract

Dominant discourses in educational research and policy assume that teachers and students of shared social backgrounds will have a “cultural match.” In the context of education of immigrant-origin students, this means that more attention is focused in the research literature on working with white non-immigrant teachers on understanding the unique backgrounds and experiences of their immigrant-origin students. However, recent research has begun to challenge the notion that “diverse” teachers will automatically “understand” and be “understood” by students who share their backgrounds (e.g., Atkinson & Aguirre, 2008). This paper is situated in this newer vein of research. In particular, it examines how “cultural matches” between a Latina immigrant-origin teacher and her students served to reinforce deficit discourses about their shared ethnic/immigrant background.
This paper examines two purposively sampled exchanges between Mrs. Rodriguez and her 10th grade biology class, which are drawn from a year-long ethnographic study in an urban Southern Californian high school. During these exchanges everyone in the classroom is of immigrant-origin and there are no “white people” present. In this context, white people are Anglophone Americans of European descent who were born and raised in the United States. These two exchanges were selected because they were situations in which the teacher initiates a classroom discussion that explicitly references “white people” as intellectually and culturally superior to Latinos. After I transcribed these exchanges, I examined how discourses of white intellectual and cultural superiority were introduced and taken-up in the classroom (Gee, 2011).
The findings of this discourse analysis indicate that in both exchanges the majority of the class affirms the teacher’s positioning of non-immigrant whites as superior culturally and intellectually. However, in the second exchange a lone student presents a counternarrative that is not acknowledged by the teacher or other students. In this sense, there is a “cultural match” between the teacher and her students in the ways that they understand race and academic achievement. Using the terminology of Solórzano and Yosso (2002) the teacher and the students subscribe to and participate in reproduction of “majoritarian tales” which are situated in a deficit perspective of Latinos. These findings go beyond acknowledging the possibility that “diverse” teachers can hold deficit views but explicitly call attention to how “cultural matches” can create a space where deficit discourses remain unchallenged. These findings highlight the importance of teacher education addressing the unique needs of immigrant-origin teachers who work within their own communities, rather than assuming they “get race” or “get immigration” because of their personal experiences.

Author

• Maneka Deanna Brooks, Texas State University