Flagging White Supremacy in the South: The High Cost of Justice Pedagogy

• In Event: 66.062 - The Place of Race in the Cracker State: Regional Identities and Whiteness Pedagogies in Context

Abstract

Purpose
The final commentary in our town hall focuses on a series of attacks against social justice pedagogy and protests against racial injustice at a predominantly White university in the South when a group of five Black cheerleaders took a knee during the national anthem at a football game and when a university administrator forced teacher education faculty to remove “social justice” in a job advertisement. Utilizing Christina Sharpe’s conceptualization of “in the wake” for the present moment of racial violence, I analyze these attacks within a larger national context of hatred, and I explore what impact such attacks have on justice pedagogy and my teacher education students. I then propose a black feminist “bearing witness” (Boler, 1991) pedagogy as a form of resistance to white supremacy.

Theoretical Framework
My analysis draws on Christina Sharpe’s (2016) theory of the “wake” as a frame to understand the rise of anti-Blackness campaigns nationally and anti-social justice attacks in teacher education. Christina Sharpe conceptualizes the present moment for Black people across the Diaspora as living “in the wake.” Borrowing on various connotations of “wake” to conjure what it means to live in constant fear of death and dying, Sharpe explains that Black bodies are terrifying and must be contained within White supremacist systems. I use Sharpe’s framework to analyze attacks on Blackness, the privileging of Whiteness, and the myth of White fragility in the context of the events at my university.

Methods/Data Sources
I utilize the qualitative autobiographical research method of critical race/feminist currere (Baszile, 2015) to analyze and problematize past and present lived experiences as data sources. Through the methodology of critical race/feminist currere, I present a series of autobiographical narratives of my lived experiences as well as artifacts of the events (regressive step of currere), and then I analyze these narratives through Sharpe’s lens of the “wake” (analytical step of currere methodology). Finally, I propose a future pedagogy of resistance based on this analysis (synthetical step of currere).

Results
Because of my analysis, I propose a pedagogy of bearing witness (Boler, 1991) that prioritizes five essential components: 1) focus on the self in the context of the collective, 2) the dialogic, 3) the voices of historically marginalized groups, 4) action, and 5) revolutionary love (hooks, 2001). I suggest this pedagogy would allow teacher education students to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, encourage them to be their authentic selves, prepare them with frameworks to help them make sense of interlocking systems of oppression, and support them to develop their own praxis for change against White supremacy.

Significance
This work is significant because at this national moment, where the context for hate seems to be getting worse, not better, teacher educators have a responsibility to analyze the complex ways the privileging of Whiteness impacts who we are in relation to others.

Author

• Nichole A. Guillory, Kennesaw State University