Thinking Pedagogically With Foucault About Whiteness Studies in Education

• In Event: Bodies at the Intersections: Dreaming Through the Bloodiness

Abstract

We must understand white privilege as akin to the Foucauldian notion of power as circulating, with white social actors as the conduits, not the sources of this power. Such a realization, coupled with a desire for proletarian solidarity, calls on us as educational researchers to radically restructure our approach to white educators. Instead of focusing solely on the ways in which our white students have racial privilege, we would do better to focus on the ways in which they are simultaneously oppressed in capitalism, and made complicit in oppression via technologies of white supremacy – many of which are tied explicitly to what it means to be a teacher in public schools in the United States.

Author

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College