Interrogations of Whiteness by White Faculty: Making Black Lives Matter in the Classroom

• In Event: 53.075 - Making Black Lives Matter: Transforming Pedagogy and Curriculum at Traditionally White Institutions

Abstract

More of an inevitability than a spontaneous uprising of discontent (McGill, 2015), Black students at more than 75 institutions nationwide are demanding that curriculum and teaching be reformed to address the systemic and structural racism that racially minoritized students experience in and outside of the classroom. Their shared outrage inspired a Civil Rights Movement that has Black students, and their allies, insisting that faculty be equipped to bring race into the classroom. The findings from a constructivist grounded theory study that explored the relationship between racial consciousness and the behaviors of White faculty in the classroom (Author1, 2013; Author1, in-press) is used, in this research paper, to deconstruct the pedagogical choices of faculty who meaningfully incorporate race and Black culture into their non-race-based curricula, demonstrating that all courses have racial implications. This research is the first of its kind, in the education literature, to utilize critical legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1988) restrictive and expansive views of equality framework to empirically evaluate excellence in college teaching. The analysis presented reveals that to substantively address the social issues that bear disproportionately on the lives of their racially minoritized students, White faculty had to interrogate how whiteness has shaped their lives and teaching.

Author

• Chayla Haynes Davison, Texas A&M University - College Station