Whiteness as Chaos and Weakness: Our "Abnormal" White Lives

• In Event: 63.049 - Whiteness at the Table: Whiteness and White Racial Identities in Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This talk uses an artifact that my high school student, Victoria, created as a point of departure to examine abnormal white racial identity. Analyzing my own abnormal white identity in relation to my students work complicates static understandings of white racial identity.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

This talk is located within what Jupp, Berry, and Lensmire (2016) have called second-wave critical whiteness studies.” This talk accepts their definition of whiteness as a social reality that perpetuates “racialized inequalities and injustices” (p. 5). This talk extends their claim that a second wave does not “totalize, reduce, or essentialize white identity” (p. 5). Indeed, a “second-wave” whiteness offered me a more complex way to think about my autobiography as a white people in relation to the work of my high school students. Whiteness was not a simple, essentialized category during my teaching project. Therefore, it was possible for me (and us) to consider our own abnormal whiteness(es).

Yet even with complex theory, it feels impossible, on some level, to interrogate whiteness, to suggest that it is something less violent than it is. But I wonder if perhaps Thandeka (1999) was correct when she said the very formation of white identities necessitated a careful policing of anything that might disturb internalized, inflexible ordering of racial reality. Perhaps such internal reference points for race exist so as not to permit either an analysis of our white identities or to resist what Thandeka (1999) described as the “lockstep discipline” of our whiteness. Said another way, white supremacy could be upheld when white identities are imagined as singularly constituted.

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry and Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

Nearly forty, mostly white 9th-12th grade students voluntarily participated in The Whiteness Project during the 2012-2013 school year. I facilitated their involvement in this complex endeavor as an ethnographic teacher-researcher. At the time, I was a high school English and drama teacher at the site of the study—Primville Area High School (PAHS). In the fall, students participated in critical inquiry into whiteness. During the winter, students presented their findings to the group. This thinking became the inspiration for a collaboratively written play. This play was performed five times during a weekend in May of 2013. I directed this project as the school’s spring play. This performance received both local and national media attention. Victoria was involved in all phases of this play. Victoria examined the relationship between whiteness and depression during the project. She created a Venn diagram that inspired this talk.

Scholarly Significance

This talk will theorize and describe abnormal white racial identity with the aim of provoking the audience to imagine more nuanced ways to engage white people in anti-racist education.

References

Jupp, J. (2013). Becoming Teachers of Inner-City Students: Life Histories and Teacher Stories of Committed White Teachers. Rotterdam: Sense.

Thandeka. (2001). Learning to be white: Money, race, and God in America. New York: Continuum.

Authors

• Samuel Jaye Tanner, The Pennsylvania State University - Altoona

• Audrey Lensmire, Augsburg University