White Fatigue: Rethinking Resistance for Social Justice

• In Event: 28.036 - Four Recent Books' Contributions to White Teacher Identity Studies: A Discussion With the Authors

Abstract

Objectives and Purposes
White fatigue is a quasi form of resistance in which White students who feel racism is wrong yet struggle with understanding how systemic, institutional, and structural forms of racism function (Author, 2018). If we are to advance our national conversation on race, educators must be willing to define reactions to conversations about race with more nuances, lest we alienate potential allies, accomplices, and leaders in the fight against racial injustice.

Perspectives(s) or Theoretical Framework
The book employs White Racial Identity Development (Helms, 1993; Tatum, 1994, 2003). Depending on one’s own racial identity development, the nature of resistance can shift. This recognition is essential for differentiating who is flatly resistant and who is simply in the midst of struggle – each requiring different approaches and strategies. The text also draws on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Nash, 1999). Grossly simplified, habitus can be thought of as the sum total of experiences of an individual. Since one’s habitus has been so well crafted and reinforced over time, it is difficult to change one’s worldview. What complicates this is if one’s habitus is reflective of larger hegemonies (Apple, 1990; Reay, 2004). Hegemonies privilege and reinforce certain forms of cultural capital and by extension habitus. This is further aggravated by the lack of critical multicultural and social justice education in K-12 education that challenges status quo ideologies. Finally, central to White Fatigue are oppression and liberation (Freire, 1970). In the process of liberation we cannot simply reverse the poles of power; rather, we must radically rethink how we engage and that includes how we think about resistance. Essentially, social justice educators must humanize all students.

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources
This book applies the speculative essay approach (Schubert, 1991). The speculative essay approach “is a kind of meta-analysis or research synthesis that uses the informed and insightful scholar (rather than a set of statistical rules) as the instrument for synthesis and illumination” (p. 64). As such, data sources and evidence is culled from key theories explicated above. Additionally, the book employs an auto-ethnographic approach that explores my own racial history and identity to both situate my positionality and draw out essential questions about how we construct White students in their struggle to understand racism.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
As a result of the synthesis of both the conceptual framework and auto-ethnographic reflections, the book concludes that racism manipulates and affects all individuals. Therefore, as we further social justice education curricula and approaches we must vigilantly pursue perspectives that seek the humanity and struggle of all learners and see the complexity of behaviors traditionally defined as resistant.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance of the Study or Work
This work is important to curriculum and social justice education since it adds new language that complicates the idea of resistance. In our troubled sociopolitical moment, finding pathways that avoid unnecessary alienation in learning about race and racism is essential.

Author

• Joseph E. Flynn, Northern Illinois University