A Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism

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

Abstract

Purposes
This session aims to place recent books in conversation with one another to articulate new and future directions for critical whiteness studies and white teacher identity studies in the field of educational research. The book central to this section, A Pedagogy of Anticapitalist Antiracism: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and Resistance in Education (SUNY Press, 2016) argues that too many of our present attempts to combat racism fail to interrogate the ways that the capitalist economic system itself perpetuates oppression.

Perspective(s)
The theoretical perspectives and approaches in this book can be thought of as the comingling of the fields of critical pedagogy and critical whiteness studies. In particular, the work of Paulo Freire (2000; 2006) to articulate a vision of educational praxis (action and reflection in equal measure on the world in order to transform it) is taken up in conversation with critical findings from critical whiteness studies around the ways that race and racial identities have been intentionally manipulated for the needs of capital (Roediger, 2007; Jacobson, 1999; Thandeka, 2006). Reading the word to read the world takes on additional meaning and context for particular space(s) of white antiracism in the United States.

Methods and Data
Methodologically this work is an example of Freirean Critical Study, an interdisciplinary approach to theoretical and conceptual analysis of texts and contexts. Emphasizing Marxian (1981) conceptions of ideology, Lakoff’s (2002; 2004) notions of “frames” and “framing,” and the Freirean (2000; 2006) conception of democracy as lived engagement, Freirean Critical Study seeks to link critical inquiry with critical approaches to teaching and learning more broadly. Data in the book are drawn from the research literature in white teacher identity studies, critical whiteness studies, critical pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, and anti-oppressive education.

Results
The book works to articulate an approach to white racial identity that does not fall into the conceptual traps of white privilege pedagogies and race treason, demonstrating how such approaches misunderstand the intersectional conditions that produce white supremacy in capitalism. Analyzing popular constructions of race ranging from educational spaces to national politics, these moments are read alongside the history of white supremacy and racial identity in the United States. The book concludes with chapters on the culpability of teacher education with/in neoliberalism and white supremacy before a framing for anticapitalist antiracist approaches to curriculum, consciousness, learning, and teacher education.

Significance
It has been 30 years since Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) thesis of white privilege functioning as an invisible knapsack of unearned advantages became the dominant approach to conscientizing white teachers and teacher candidates about race, racism, and their own relative privilege. The limits to this approach are especially clear upon close engagement with the ways that race and racism are entangled and enmeshed with capitalist exploitation. Robust ways of engaging the full complexity of our oppressive social order are needed and too often lacking in antiracist scholarship and action. This book offers new ways of “reinventing” (in the Freirean sense) white antiracism on the side of anticapitalism.

Author

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College