When Saying You Care Is Not Really Caring: Whiteness and the Role of Disgust

• In Event: Feeling Race: The Significance of Emotionality in Antiracist Education

Abstract

In the wake of the not guilty verdict in trial of Trayvon Martin’s killer, Juror B37 (white female) appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 to describe her deliberation process. Responding to the credibility of Rachel Jeantel’s[1] testimony, she states, “I don’t think it was very credible… because of her education and her communication skills she wasn’t a good witness.” She then described how sad she felt for Rachel, arguing that for people like “them” that is “just everyday life, the type of life that they live and how they're living, in the environment that they're living in.” This demonstrates a deep-rooted disgust for African Americans. However, instead of displaying disgust, an emotion that is socially unacceptable and tantamount to racism, she displays pity for them, a more socially acceptable emotion that still objectifies and sentimentalizes the Other while deflecting racist culpability. How are these racially-biased comments entrenched in whiteness ideology? And, how does this ideology misplace pity for feelings of disgust as it exerts racialized “ethics” of what is “good” and “bad”? Extrapolated further, how does whiteness ideology pervert emotions of disgust amid false claims of love, sympathy, and caring and then use this perversion to make racially-biased judgments about character?

Using critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and critical feminism, this theoretical paper explores the dimensions of emotions, specifically how whiteness erroneously translates disgust for people of color to false professions of pity or caring (see Boler, 1999; Valenzuela, 1999). This phenomenon is particularly interesting because care, sympathy, and love are emotions that are routinely performed by teacher candidates (who are predominantly white females) and embedded in teacher education (see Fay & Funk, 1995; Palmer, 2007). Yet, scant literature theorizes how these performative emotions are not exempt of the subjectivities and positionalities of their white identities (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013). Ultimately, to engage in a genuine process of antiracism, we explore the emotions that undergird teachers’ dispositions with respect to race, which often mimic Juror B37. Since there exists an overwhelming presence of whiteness (Sleeter, 2001), how does it work in emotional ways that position urban students of color poorly? Not interrogating the plausibility of disgust in teachers risks recycling their disgust for their students of color and their families and communities, a disgust that students of color may internalize (Brown, 2003; DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Pyke & Dang, 2003).

Since we seek to theorize the intersection of education, emotions, and race “that have a relatively heavy interpretive-theoretical emphasis,” we methodologically employ a humanities-oriented approach, providing an “exploration and understanding of forms of human existence” (American Educational Research Association, 2009). We include excerpts of responses from white teacher candidates matriculated in an urban-focused teacher preparation program and counterstories from the teacher educator of color, a co-author, who teaches in that program. We end with implications for teacher education, particularly with pedagogical ways of identifying and interrogating narratives of pity-as-hidden-disgust and cultivating critical compassion (Zembylas, 2012).


[1] An African American female teenager who used African American Language during her testimony.

Authors

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver

• Michalinos Zembylas, The Open University of Cyprus