A Literature Review of Critical White Studies 2000–2015: Second-Wave Critical White Studies and Whiteness Pedagogies

• In Event: 56.034 - Second-Wave White Teacher Identity Studies: Toward Whiteness Pedagogies in Teaching and Learning About Race

Abstract

My purpose in this literature review is to document a second-wave in Critical White Studies (CWS) that is just beginning to gain ground in teacher education and classroom teaching. Working within a broad historicized framework of first-wave CWS that emphasized hegemonic whiteness (Dyer, 1988; Hall, 1981), White privilege (McIntosh, 1988), and White race evasion (Frankenberg, 1993), this literature review focuses on peer reviewed articles between 2000 and 2015 documenting CWS’ second-wave that provides new thematic content in CWS (e.g., Leonardo, 2002; McDermott & Samson, 2005; Perry & Shotwell, 2009). Using the research method called the synoptic text (Schubert, Schubert Lopez, Thomas, & Caroll, 2001), I provide a systematic year-by-year sample of peer-reviewed CWS articles from human science journals (sociology, psychology, cultural studies, women’s studies, and other disciplines). Taking peer-reviewed empirically-based articles as “data,” I analyze CWS articles between 2000 and 2015 by theme and relative contribution to CWS. The findings provide the following emergent themes in CWS literature between 2000 and 2015:

1. Anti-essentializing identities emphasized non-monolithic identity complexity that refused to reduce White identities to one specific identity axis.

2. Contextuality emphasized that White identities like other racial identities are composed and performed within specific social and historical contexts.

3. Relationality emphasized that White identities are co-constructed in a field of identities in which White identities represent the hegemonic identity center.

4. Reflexivity emphasized researchers’ positionality and embeddeness in empirically-based work along with understandings of the social means of identity production.
Taken together, my findings document CWS’ second-wave that emphasize a new radical constructedness and contingency to White identities. This radical contingency and constructedness have important implications for whiteness pedagogies in teacher education and schools.
References

Dyer, R. (1988). White. Screen, 29, 44–65.

Hall, S. (1981). The whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media. In G. Bridges & R. Brunt (Eds.), Silver linings: Some strategies for the eighties (pp. 28–52). London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Frankenberg, R. (1993). The social construction of whiteness: White women, race matters. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies (Working Paper 189). Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Center for Research on Women.

Leonardo, Z. (2002). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘White privilege’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36, 137–152. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00057x

McDermott, M., & Samson, F. L. (2005). White racial and ethnic identity in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 245–261.

Perry, P., & Shotwell, A. (2009). Relational understanding and White antiracist praxis. Sociological Theory, 27, 33–50.

Schubert, W. H., Lopez Schubert, A. L., Thomas, T. P., & Carol, W. M. (2002). Curriculum books: The first hundred years. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Authors

• Samuel Jaye Tanner, The Pennsylvania State University - Altoona

• James C. Jupp, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley