White Schools, White Ignorance: How the "Best" Schools Fail Our Children

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Difference and Recognition in Education

Abstract

Drawing from Christopher Lebron’s framework that describes racial inequality as a problem of social value as well as Charles Mills’s socio-spatial epistemological diagnosis of “white ignorance,” this paper draws attention to the mechanics that reproduce and reinscribe white ignorance in predominantly white, affluent schooling spaces. While much of the neo-abolitionist and anti-racist literature in education focuses on the way White normativity operates to colonize schooling spaces occupied by children of color, comparatively little research aims to theorize ways that predominantly white educators and predominantly white schooling institutions support and nourish — rather than disrupt and eliminate — white ignorance. A socio-spatial epistemological framework serves to render these invisible processes visible, placing the white institution at the center of the critique.

Author

• Brandon Buck