Avoiding the Knapsack Approach to Critical Whiteness Studies: Toward a Critical Study of Whiteness

• In Event: Redeeming Whiteness Is Not the Goal: Toward a Black Critical Whiteness Studies in Teacher Education

Abstract

Though the field of whiteness studies was initially conceptualized to dismantle white supremacy and end racial oppression of people of color, work in the field has not always stayed true to this vision. Studies of whiteness started arguing that ideological whiteness in educators was due to racial ignorance or implicit racial bias (see Levine-Rasky, 2000; Marx, 2004; McIntyre, 2002; Picower, 2009), implying that white educators are simply not aware of racism and whiteness. In response, many more studies of whiteness in education focused on how to help white teachers understand their whiteness (see Flintoff, Dowling, & Fitzgerald, 2015; Galman, Pica-Smith, & Rosenberger, 2010; Grosland & Author, 2016). This moved whiteness literature in teacher education to become self-absorbed, focusing primarily on helping “unsuspecting” white teachers who “unknowingly” contribute to racist teaching practices (knapsack phenomenon), instead of on how whiteness is enacted towards students of color and its impact on them. Clearly, the study of whiteness becomes problematic when it focuses on self-aggrandizing discussions of who can “turn woke” and who cannot.
Whiteness studies has reached a fork in the road; one path leads us down a white whiteness studies (mainstreamed CWS) and the other a Black whiteness studies . This evolution has brought scholars to an interesting epistemological point in the research on studies of whiteness - one that epistemologically presumes that either racial innocence exists among white educators, which then can be rectified by re-educating them towards racial awareness, or another that does not presume that racial ignorance naturally exists. The latter, Black CWS, recognizes that claiming ignorance has been used as a deliberate strategy to maintain hegemonic whiteness and therefore refuses to recenter white ignorance.
This paper presents a Critical Study of Whiteness instead of the popularized terminology CWS, noting that the former does not presume a benign racial ignorance in its epistemological stance and has the following considerations that mainstream CWS does not:
1) Though presumed to be critical by virtue of word placement, CWS has also been used to theoretically undergird educational studies that still stem from a white epistemological standpoint (that of racial ignorance in simple need of racial awareness);
2) Oftentimes white scholars doing work in CWS do not cite or give any credence to scholars of color; and
3) CWS scholarship that too narrowly focuses on “helping” whites becomes so self-absorbed in white racial epiphanies that it overlooks the connection of whiteness to racist practices like anti-Blackness. Centering white racial epiphanies makes CWS all about one’s whiteness and not about the interpellation between one’s whiteness and its damaging impact on people of color (see Yancy, 2008). In doing so, whiteness studies becomes narcissistic.
To avoid this and to thwart whiteness in teacher education, this paper presents a Critical Study of Whiteness to critically engage in race scholarship that forever acknowledges the place, space, and sacrifice of scholars of color and to avoid the knapsack phenomenon that dominates whiteness studies.

Author

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Kentucky