White Women and White Supremacy in Teaching: Ending Hero and Victim Identities

• In Event: 43.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 43.078-5 - Educational Justice in Higher Education

Abstract

This theoretical paper engages Critical Whiteness Studies with a gendered lens in order to examine the historical and continued identities of hero and victim portrayed by white female teachers, the United States’ established K-12 teaching majority, and structurally supported by the institutions surrounding them. This paper argues that positioning white female teachers in these roles aids in the reproduction of historical racial-relationships and structurally supports investment in whiteness. Examining the current rhetoric and manifestations of these roles in context of their historical construction as tools of white supremacy and the racial contract, I demonstrate the problem of their persistence both on students of color per their oppression as well as on white students per their enrollment into whiteness.

Author

• Joy Esboldt, University of California - Berkeley