Interpreting Race: A Critical Hermeneutical Approach to Raising Race-Conscious White Children

• In Event: 16.030 - The Parent-School-Community Nexus: The Role of Critical Race Parenting in Racially Just Education

Abstract

This conceptual piece contributes to theories already established through and by Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), raising awareness for parents and teachers of young children who are looking for critical ways to deconstruct whiteness. Forefronting a Critical Race Parenting (CRP) (Matias, 2016) analysis to this work, it will be an important assumption that racially-just work must be done with children outside of formal schooling, but also in conjunction with it. This is asserted as a praxis of CRP, but is also a response to the need for more engagement with white parents and children (Hughes et al, 2006) as the white identity is formed (Thandeka, 1999).

Racism, as Tatum (1997) posits, is as ubiquitous and nefarious as a “smog” we all breathe in. If there is hope of doing anything about this smog, this paper will assert that it must first be identified and interpreted for what it is. Thus, a critical hermeneutic approach, in the tradition of Paul Ricouer, will be applied as a methodology for deconstructing racism and whiteness with white children. Most succinctly, this follows Leonardo’s (2003) usage of Ricouer’s work, who asserts that “if ideology is the problem of domination, then studying it is the problem of interpretation” (p. 329). As Leonardo (2016) describes elsewhere, whiteness itself is coterminous with domination. And so this paper engages in a critical hermeneutical approach for the explicit purpose of deconstructing whiteness with the author’s white children.

In a formative work that explores a theoretical framework for Critical Race Parenting (CRP), Depouw and Matias (2016) acknowledge that such a discipline is not “new”, for truly, parents of color have long been centering race in the education they provide to their own children. This has been a matter of necessity given the oppressively racialized context of the U.S. It is additionally certain that some white parents have been talking about racial and social justice with their children for years. However, there are two primary concerns with this latter note. For one, it is a sign of privilege for many white parents to ignore issues of racial inequality--often in the form of preferencing a “colorblind” approach (Bonilla-Silva, 2006)--whereas this is not afforded to parents of color. Secondly, there is little work that has been done in theorizing the facilitation of explicit racial dialogue with white children. In the field of CWS, much of the pedagogically-focused literature that grapples with the inherent difficulties of deconstructing the white racial identity do so with a teaching audience that presumes a demographic consisting of college-aged and/or adult whites (see Leonardo, 2002; Allen & Rossatto, 2009). Concurrently, other literature propagating an antiracist focus in such dialogue with white children (see Tatum, 1997) takes a noticeably different approach than CWS in that it does not explore the white identity as set against a history of institutional advantages (Leonardo, 2016). Thus, this paper explores what happens when we insist on facilitating (rather than ignoring) race dialogue with children in the tradition of CWS.

Authors

• Pete Newlove, University of Colorado - Denver

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver