White Fatigue: Pedagogical Considerations for an Empowering Pedagogy for Struggling White Students

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

Abstract

This speculative essay (Schubert, 1991) explores White fatigue (Author, 2015). Distinct from other concepts of White resistance (Goodman, 2011), like White guilt (Leonardo, 2004) or White fragility (DiAngelo, 2011), White fatigue identifies the experience of White students who grasp the moral imperative of anti-racist work but show frustration with learning about racism. Educators encounter a broad range of students in their ability to engage in discussions about racism and resistance is a common hurdle that manifests in a number of ways (Goodman, 2011). However, it is difficult to know the underpinnings of those responses. Hence, common forms of resistance may not accurately capture students’ struggles with anti-racism, resulting in oppositional and dismissive rhetoric from educators. How then do we talk about resistance in students that understand racism is morally wrong but also struggle with understanding the complexities of race and racism? After all, what we teach is personally, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually challenging, and oppositional language in the face of those challenges potentially alienate those who may actually be allies. Using the speculative essay approach to curriculum theorizing is useful here as “it is a kind of meta-analysis or research synthesis that uses the informed and insightful scholar (rather than a set of statistical rules) as the instrument for synthesis and illumination” (Schubert, 1991, p. 64). To explore White fatigue, this presentation will draw upon the above-mentioned concepts of resistance, stereotype threat (Aronson, Lustina, Good, Keough, Steele, and Brown, 1999; Steele, 2011), White Racial Identity Development (Helms, 1993), and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1993) for analysis of vignettes modeling White fatigue. The presentation will conclude with recommendations that encourage racial literacy (Stevenson, 2013) at all levels of education.

References

Aronson, J., Lustina, M. J., Good, C., Keough, K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When white men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35, 29–46.

Author. (2015) White Fatigue: Naming the Challenge in Moving from an Individual to a
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Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3, 54–70.

Goodman, D. J. (2011). Promoting diversity and social justice: Educating people from privileged groups (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Leonardo, Z. (2004). The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege.’Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36, 137– 152.

Schubert, W. (1991). Philosphical inquiry: The speculative essay. In Edmund Short (Ed.) Forms of curriculum inquiry, pp. 61-76. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Steele, C. M. (2011). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do
(Reprint). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Stevenson, H. (2013). Promoting racial literacy in schools: Differences that make a
difference. New York: Teachers College Press.

Author

• Joseph E. Flynn, Northern Illinois University