Critical Whiteness Studies and the Role of Religion in Antiracist Education

• In Event: Naming the Elephant in the Room: Considering Multiple Frameworks for Researching Religions in Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
In this paper, I draw from a larger long-term parent-child autoethnography that examined antiracist curriculum enacted in the home. The study provided an intimate and in-depth perspective on the ways in which two white children, aged five to eleven years during the three year and seven month study and who identified as Unitarian Universalist by the end of the study, constructed understandings of race in the context of the home, church, and community. Here I use critical whiteness studies to explore the ways in which religion might reinforce or counter ideologies of white supremacy in the context of an antiracist curriculum.
Theoretical framework
As a white scholar and parent seeking to enact and examine antiracist curriculum, I employ critical whiteness studies (CWS) as a theoretical framework. CWS is a movement to de-normalize and examine whiteness as “an absent racial category” (Rogers & Mosely, 2006, p. 466) and social construction that continuously reinforces “the power of white identifications and interests” (Gillborn, 2005, p. 488). Critical whiteness scholars point out white supremacy is currently maintained primarily through concealed and coded discourse. In other words, “racism is perpetuated in subtle, symbolic, and discursive ways – through talk and everyday text” (Rogers & Mosley, 2006, p. 467), and revealing and naming these discourse norms serves to disrupt whiteness.
While definitions of what it means to be white are constantly changing and context specific (Alim, 2016), whiteness in America is often associated with Christianity (Levine-Raskey, 2011) and both identity markers are privileged in the society (Adams & Joshi, 2016). Further, Christian images including the depiction of Jesus as blue-eyed and blond-haired promote an ideology of whiteness as divine. Complicating the relationship between race and Christianity, African American culture has deep roots in Christianity, and the American Civil Rights Movement was a Christian-led movement (Theoharis, 2018). Taking these complexities into account demonstrates the importance of a religious analysis when examining race and vice versa.


Modes of Inquiry and Evidence
Parent child autoethnographies “provide insights into the life experiences of their child-participants and the complexity to which daily activities are constructed through a cultural framework” (Kabuto & Martens, 2014, p. 2). Data for this study was collected over three years and seven months and included artifacts, audio recordings and field notes from the home, community, and church.
Conclusions and Significance
Grounded in the understanding that children learn by“experimenting and developing their own meanings and understandings from the materials presented to them and from their internal resources” (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001, p. 41), two major findings of the study are that my children understood religious iconography to be raced and gendered and they utilized religious literacies from their socialization in the Unitarian Universalist church to alter dominant images of God and take action for racial justice. CWS proved helpful in a racial analysis of the role of religion in the curriculum, but is limited in scope to analyses of racial and other normative discourses.

Author

• Rhianna K. Thomas, New Mexico State University