"Who Are You Really Doing the 'Saving' For?" Interrupting the White Savior Mentality in Trauma-Informed Practice

• In Event: Accepting Our Responsibilities as Educators, Scholars, and Innovators: Reclaiming Educational Equity Efforts in a Color-Evasive World

Abstract

Our work rests upon empirical and conceptual frameworks of systemically trauma-informed practice (STIP) to examine how Whiteness, White liberalism, and White savior mentalities weaponize the concept of trauma-informed practice resulting in deleterious effects for students. More specifically, White liberalism is defined as a combination of attitudes and actions adopted by white educators (Gorski, 2020) that interfere with racial justice (Lalik & Hinchman, 2001) and protect existing White supremacist systems (Bloch & Meyer, 2019). White liberalism also includes intentional self-involvement, where being seen as “good” (Gorski, 2014; Hayes & Jaurez, 2009) takes priority over threatening racism (Gorski, 2020). We have called for STIP, which acknowledges the unequal and oppressive contexts within which trauma exists and which can manage prejudicial tendencies (Authors, 2020; Authors, 2020).

We analyze tweets authored during the COVID-19 pandemic, which represents a viral and a racial pandemic (Kendi, 2020), and illustrates how Whiteness feeds the blaming of children and communities of color for trauma endured. We evaluate tweets that (1) invoke and misuse trauma-informed teaching practice in ways characterized by White liberalism and savior mentalities to deficit-frame children and communities, to cast themselves (authors) as saviors, and/or blame children and their families for systemically constructed injustices, (2) push back on these distortions by disrupting and interrupting, and (3) propose systemically trauma-informed teaching practice, naming systemic elements of practice and employing asset frames to interrupt this violence and speak back to Whiteness. We uncover great nuance, highlighting how tweets fall on a continuum from White savior to systemically trauma-informed, as well as the ways in which educators respond to tweets and engage in dialogue around the topic of trauma-informed schools.

In our paper presentation, we use illustrative tweets to support participants in identifying and analyzing deficit-framing, while learning to recognize and interrupt Whiteness in their own practice in meaningful ways. We do this through practice-based exercises that draw directly from tweets to support readers’ practice. Our presentation will be usable and engaging, fortifying readers’ abilities to recognize Whiteness as it weaponizes the concept of trauma-informed practice. Considering disruptive instances will be important for providing models of how individuals can act in anti-racist, anti-Whiteness ways, holding up a mirror of what is possible, and how educators can critically examine their own trauma-informed work so that it does not pathologize and do violence to children and their communities.

Authors

• Simona Goldin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Addison Duane, Wayne State University

• Debi Khasnabis, University of Michigan