Enough With the Knapsack: Toward a Critical Study of Whiteness Not Rooted in White Narcissism

• In Event: When and How Does Critical Whiteness Work Become Too White?

Abstract

Though the field of whiteness studies was initially conceptualized to dismantle white supremacy and stop racial oppression of people of color, this has not always been the case. Studies on whiteness started reiterating how ideological whiteness in educators were due to racial ignorance or implicit racial bias (see Levine-Rasky, 2000; Marx, 2004; McIntyre, 2002; Picower, 2009). Meaning, white educators (who are the majority in education) are simply not aware of racism and whiteness. Responding to this, many more studies on whiteness in education then focused on how to help white teachers understand their whiteness (see Flintoff, Dowling, & Fitzgerald, 2015; Galman, Pica-Smith, & Rosenberger, 2010; Author & Grossland, 2016). This caused the litany of literature on whiteness 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 how whiteness enacts in racist ways towards students of Color and the impact it has on students. Clearly, the study of whiteness becomes problematic when it focuses on self-aggrandizement 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 whiteness studies: one that either epistemologically presumes that racial innocence or ignorance exists among white educators which then can be rectified by simply re-educating them towards racial awareness and the other which does not presume that racial ignorance naturally exists. Instead, the latter, Black whiteness studies, acknowledges how ignorance has been used as a deliberate strategy to maintain hegemonic whiteness ideology, and thus refuses to center white ignorance again.

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 become so self-absorbed in white racial epiphanies that it overlooks the connection of whiteness to racist practices like anti-Blackness. Meaning, this shifted focus 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 not too heavily draw upon the knapsack phenomenon that dominates whiteness studies.

Author

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Kentucky