Building the Capacity to Challenge White Supremacy: Redlining as Intervention

• In Event: Critical Race Theory and the Spatial Analysis: Cases of Praxis to Disrupt Racial Injustice

Abstract

Purpose: This paper describes how the concept of redlining—when used in a cariño-based research approach—can help teachers understand and challenge their complicity in white supremacy in their classrooms.

Conceptual Framework: Originally referring to red lines drawn on maps used by lending institutions, redlining now refers more broadly to any “lending (or insurance) discrimination that bases credit decisions on the location of a property to the exclusion of characteristics of the borrower or property” (Hillier, 2003, 395). It is a practice that racializes space, linking whiteness and race to notions of space. In U.S. society, redlining continues to justify racial segregation and the divestment of resources away from non-white spaces (Soja, 2010). Thus, it helps sustain white supremacy, “a political, economic, and cultural system” where “white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted” (Ansley, 1997, p. 592)

Redlining has been extended to refer to the way teachers use whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) and culture of segregation perspectives (Calmore, 1995) to divest educational resources away from students of color (Blaisdell, 2015). In this way, students of color are treated like the racialized spaces they come from. Therefore, even equity-minded teachers become dysconscious (King, 1991) of their complicity in white supremacy.

Modes of Inquiry/Data Sources: This paper reports on an ongoing study at City Elementary, a desegregated school in suburban North Carolina. Since the Spring of 2013, I have worked with the school’s equity team—a group of 15 teachers and administrators tasked with addressing the school’s racial equity issues. The team’s goal has been to “build the capacity” to disrupt the influence of white supremacy at the school. Therefore, I have been following a cariño-based research approach, which seeks to leave participants with the research tools to achieve their own equity goals (Duncan-Andrade, 2006). Specifically, I have been using tools from critical race theory (CRT)—e.g. whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), culture of segregation (Calmore, 1995), racial spaces analysis (Blaisdell, 2015)—to help the team analyze redlining at City.

Results: The project has helped the faculty better examine their complicity in white supremacy. The paper will share examples of teachers who identified their own redlining practices, a realization that also helped them develop more equitable practices. The project has also helped the equity team members become leaders in analyzing whiteness. As one team member explained, “Now, there is much less resistance to talking about whiteness…we have a language to use.” The paper will share examples of the team’s leadership. We certainly have not completely overcome white supremacy at City, but these early results will help guide us as the project continues over the 2015-2017 school years.

Scholarly Significance: The racialization of space in schools masks how teachers base curricular and disciplinary decisions on the race of their students (Blaisdell, 2015). Used in a cariño-based approach, the concept of redlining can help researchers and teachers uncover and intervene in that dysconscious process.

Author

• Benjamin Blaisdell, East Carolina University