White Racial Ignorance, Whiteness as Property, and Teacher Education in Wisconsin

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

Abstract

In the wake of national protests for racial justice, conversations about racism and education are increasingly prominent. However, it’s unclear whether this signifies long-term commitment or a short-term interest that stops at virtue-signaling for white people. The surge in white interest in challenging racism now (as opposed to 2014 when racial violence also dominated national attention) illustrates the self-consciousness of white racial innocence claims; that one can decide when to know and when to claim ignorance, and that both depend on power, context, and perceived interests at the time.
This conceptual paper uses critical race theory (CRT) in education to consider the interplay of white racial ignorance (Cabrera & Corces-Zimmerman, 2017; Mills, 1997) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) in teacher education programs in Wisconsin. We draw upon Cabrera & Corces-Zimmerman (2017) to define white racial ignorance as willfully misunderstanding or ignoring whiteness and race, which allows ongoing benefit from and perpetration of systemic racism. Harris (1993) defines whiteness as property as the material, psychological, and social protections afforded to whiteness by law and by custom within the United States. We examine the investments in whiteness that are present in teacher education, and how institutional and interpersonal white racial ignorance both secure and obscure those investments.
White racial ignorance is not lack of self-awareness; it is foundational to white supremacy (Applebaum, 2010; Cabrera & Corces-Zimmerman, 2017) in teacher education and its organization, processes, and program climates (Cabrera, Watson, & Franklin, 2017). This is a key reason why approaching racial justice from the lens of white racial ignorance is problematic – it reinforces white narcissism (Matias, 2016a) while obscuring the violence that racial ignorance claims enact upon communities of color. Anti-Blackness, for instance, depends in part on whites’ willful misunderstanding of how white supremacy works and how their (in)actions are choices to support racial oppression.
The State of Wisconsin has significant Black/white racial gaps across indicators like health, housing, and education (Gordon, 2019). Racial disproportionality in discipline referrals for Black students are particularly severe (Hernandez, 2018), highlighting the role of teacher subjectivity in institutional racism. However, these data rarely inform policy or process in teacher education. Instead, the main response to racial gaps is professional development for practicing teachers, thereby ignoring the entities who trained teachers to do this and assuming white racial ignorance as causation. Beginning with white ignorance also naturalizes “teachers” as white, ignoring the reality that many people of color experience teacher education and teaching as oppressive and racist environments (Pizarro & Kohli, 2020). White racial ignorance provides programs with plausible deniability, treating systemic racism as external and individual. The resulting institutional initiatives then take the form of “fixing” teachers, thereby leaving institutions unnamed and reinforcing whiteness as property. Teacher education programs need to be accountable for the racial harm they do and work to remedy these wrongs through systemic moves toward racial justice. We need to decenter white racial innocence and instead commit to placing communities of color (including educators of color) at the center of efforts for racial justice.

Author

• Christin A. DePouw, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay