Disrupting the Insulation of Whiteness: When/Where/How Scholars of Color Enter the Space of Critical Whiteness Studies

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Toward Intersectional Collectivity in Critical Whiteness Studies

Abstract

As Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) in education enters its “second wave” of theorization (Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016), questions remain on where it is headed as a field and the epistemological and ontological responsibilities it bears for antiracist praxis. In this paper, I discuss what I perceive as a sense of insulation that appears to be emerging around parts of CWS, such as the tensions that lie within calls for white-only spaces to unpack whiteness, even when that call is informed by a desire to ease the burden of antiracist work from and people of color. In his reflection on the emergent objectives of CWS, Roediger’s (XXXX) states:

“If, as I argue below, the defining intellectual move in the critical study of whiteness is to make that identity into a problem worth historicising and investigating, it stands to reason that those groups for whom white behavior and attitudes have been most problematic would have inquired most fully into the dynamics of whiteness. (p. 74-75)

I ask, when and where and how can scholars of color enter the space of CWS? How do they/we enter in productive ways that do not reinscribe the disproportionate labor placed on people of color in explicating race, whiteness, and white supremacy? I examine how the work of scholars of color who have been theorizing whiteness has been taken up by literature in CWS and seek to unpack the problematics of citational practice in the field, drawing from Ahmed’s (2013) note that the “reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematic core to the discipline, and others not even part”. In its commitment to the “power of the bricolage” in education research (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004), this paper also draws from narrative-based methodologies (e.g. Andrews, Squire, & Tambokou, 2008; Josselson, 2006) that necessitate the interrogation of my own biography. As a Hmong womxn scholar engaged in the work of teacher education, and I also discuss how I enter the space of CWS.

This paper builds upon current literature on race and whiteness through its loving critique of the field of Critical Whiteness Studies in education, and can help inform future research and theorization on CWS, race and education, graduate students of color, and the work of scholars of color who engage with race and whiteness. Although some questions raised in this paper remain emergent, they present spaces of possibility to engage the field of CWS more deeply.

Author

• Ariana Yang, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities