Organizing an Education of White Violence: White Women Mothering White Supremacy in Oklahoma

• In Event: 51.031 - Contested Histories, Contested Spaces: Education in Oklahoma

Abstract

After the election of the most recent president of the United States, many media outlets and clusters of white Democratic voters seemed surprised that over 50 percent of white women in the US cast ballots for the winning candidate. Communities of color, however, could not feign such surprise. White women have been racism’s “constant gardeners” since the beginning, and much of their/our cultivation of racism, white domination, and white violence has centered on discourses and struggles over education and schooling.

Through an archival exploration of the Oklahoma Women of the Ku Klux Klan’s educational curriculum for members, philosophy, and involvement in public education in the state, I outline a gendered curriculum of white supremacy as enacted by the Women of the KKK. I trace this curriculum and its attendant discourses of gender, race, and education through the 20th century to the present. The curriculum outlines roles of public schooling, citizenship education, relationships between parents, churches and schools, and white women as mothers of “Americanism” in private/home, public/political, and professional spheres. I argue that although white women’s involvement in organized white racial terrorist groups has shifted since the 1920’s, the gendered curriculum of white domination developed within the Women of the KKK continues to shape public discourses of education and education policy. I particularly trace how white women’s organizing for curricula of white domination continue to result in anti-Black, anti-Native, and anti-immigrant education policy and curricula within Oklahoma, and in the US more broadly.

This archival research not only contributes to our knowledge about the physical, educational, and epistemological violence that white women sow within the context of education and schooling. It also contributes to what Dunbar-Ortiz calls a project of “un-forgetting,” or truth-telling, that counters epistemologies of white ignorance and uncovers the violent work that white women continue to organize within schooling processes, curricula, and education policy. Ultimately such “un-forgetting” lays groundwork for alliances toward transformation and liberation. As Dunbar-Ortiz emphasizes, “organizing working-class whites” is necessary, and historical truth-telling is paramount: “If you’re trying to change a society and you don’t know its history, you will never get anywhere.”

Author

• Moira Ozias, University of Oklahoma