Caring Solidarity: A New Framework to Dismantle White Supremacist Structures in Educational Spaces

• In Event: 53.064 - New Research on Challenging White Supremacist Educational Structures to Achieve the Promised Equal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Teachers’ attitudes about racially different students are important when thinking about the relationships that are formed across racial lines in the classroom. McGrady and Reynolds (2012) found that White teachers generally perceived Black and Hispanic students as less capable in both the academic and behavior categories than their White and Asian counterparts and are more susceptible to judging students based on stereotypes. White supremacism is the most divisive, cancerous, and self-defeating mental and social construct of our time and yet it has largely gone unnoticed for much of our history. The term “White Supremacy” conjures racist hate groups, and most educated people disavow that version of White supremacy. However, if we cloister White supremacist thinking into that small box of uneducated and unenlightened reactionaries, we miss the larger context of societal White supremacism that infects everything in our culture and defines the reasoning for policy and personal decisions that affect White people and people of color on a daily basis.
hooks (2013) explained that while people usually associate racism with overt “acts of aggression by whites against blacks,” White supremacy, as a way to understand social structures, “addresses the ideological and philosophical foundations of racism” (p. 177). Even in the way we discuss diversity in schools is based on the construct of white supremacy, “Structural racial integration with no fundamental change in white supremacist thinking and values has simply meant that black people, though ‘integrated’ into various areas of mainstream life over time, were and still are seen as inferior” (hooks, 2013 p. 178). Even for schools where students share the same space, the social construction of White supremacy is a primary hidden curriculum for most students of color.
This paper will use the construct of caring solidarity (Author, 2017) as a framework to challenge the current White supremacist frameworks of schooling, curriculum, and discipline in American schools. Caring solidarity, as a framework, combines the political standpoints of solidarity with caring as described by Noddings’ ethic of care (1984). The concept is applicable to White teachers, in that it combines culturally responsive pedagogy as defined by Ladson-Billings (1995), Gay (2010) and others with the concept of the “warm demander” as defined by Kleinfeld (1975), Ware (2006) and others with perspectives on solidarity, as in De Lissovoy and Brown, (2013), combined with Noddings’ (1984) ethic of care. It also challenges schools and other learning environments to shift their allegiance from White supremacist power structures to caring solidarity structures that nurture, enable, and empower students of color.

Author

• Michael L. Boucher, Texas A&M University - San Antonio