Learning, Loss, Confusion, and Commitment in White Antiracist Work

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

Abstract

Purposes: This paper takes up and problematizes the question “What do we want white people to do?” Too often, we answer it. We describe additional readings, suggest looking into community organizations already engaged in antiracist projects, and so on. We act as though white supremacy, as a conditioning logic, as a totalizing system of dehumanization, is something that the white person asking the question might actually be able to act on. Yet what happens when we conceptualize structural racism as something requiring particular actions that are already known, actions that a singular individuated social actor can undertake, as such? This paper explains why such approaches to white antiracism must be abandoned.

Perspective(s): This work is rooted in a second-wave whiteness approach (Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016) to critical whiteness studies: an interdisciplinary field that mobilizes insights from history (Roediger, 2007), sociology (DuBois, 1992), psychoanalysis (Thandeka, 2006), and critical pedagogy (Author, 2017; Freire, 2000) (among others) to understand and theorize white racial identity in the context of structural white supremacy. The Freirean emphasis on praxis and the radical capacity of people to act on and transform their/our social realities has all-too-often been missing from many popular theories of whiteness (e.g. white privilege pedagogies and race treason (Author, 2017)).

Methods & Data: Methodologically, this paper makes use of what I have called “Freirean Critical Study” (Author, 2015; 2016; 2017) – a conceptual form of analysis and inquiry that works to articulate ideologies, frames, and politics as they impact and intersect in educational spaces and debates. My engagement with critical whiteness studies and critical pedagogy produce particular ways of “reading the world” that become the analytical frame through which I analyze texts and contexts, rooted in a commitment to Kincheloe’s (2008) conception of bricolage.

Results: The paper discusses ways of rethinking the problem of “what to do” through analysis of three key areas: the citationality of oppressions; the materiality of racism; and the costs for engaging in counter-hegemonic work.

Significance: In the era of Trump’s white nationalism and “post-truth,” we must work to articulate new and more complex ways of understanding white racial identity and the work of white antiracism. This paper, and the book it is drawn from, seeks to do just that.


References:

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1992). Black reconstruction in America. New York: The Free Press. (Original work published 1935)

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Jupp, J. C., Berry, T. R., & Lensmire, T. J. (2016). Second-wave white teacher identity
studies: A review of white teacher identity literatures from 2004 through 2014. Review of Educational Research. 86(4), 1151-1191.

Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer. New York: P. Lang.


Roediger, D. R. (2007). The wages of whiteness race and the making of the American working class. New York: Verso.

Thandeka. (2006). Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. New York: Continuum International Group.

Author

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College