White Co-Opting of Critical Whiteness Studies: Authentic Disruption or Maintenance of Whiteness?

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

Abstract

The framework of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) has permeated throughout American history dating back to writers and scholars of Color such as James Baldwin, W.E.B. Dubois, Ralph Ellison, Franz Fanon, and Toni Morrison (Allen, 2004; Doane, 2003; Matias & Mackey, 2015). These writers question the pervasiveness ways in which intentional maintenance of whiteness is at the core of racism in America. Thus, CWS moves beyond interrogation of one’s white privilege (McIntosh, 1988) towards recognizing a historical legacy of whiteness tracing back to Western European ways of being that were introduced to the United States to build a nation rooted in white supremacy (Frankenberg, 1993). Accordingly, CWS departs from a prior focus on people of Color’s racialized experiences and towards “a transdisciplinary approach to investigate the phenomenon of whiteness, how it is manifested, exerted, defined, recycled, transmitted, and maintained, and how it ultimately impacts the state of race relations” (Matias, 2015, p. 3).

Despite a historical rooting of CWS within the work of scholars of Color and an abundance of current scholars of Color engaging in critical whiteness work (e.g., Hayes, Leonardo, Matias), the framework has recently seen an influx of white scholars. Simultaneously, while there is a current plea to remove the burden of dismantling whiteness from people of Color and onto white folks, there is also question as to whether white people can and will engage in the vulnerable, dangerous traumatic process of unhooking (Hayes, 2013) or un-suturing (Yancy, 2017) from their whiteness. Thereby, in the newfound co-opted white space of CWS, questions surface surrounding whether authentic disruptions of whiteness, white supremacy, and white racism can occur among white scholars.

However, authentic disruption is necessary as education professionals are overwhelmingly white and thereby have an educational responsibility to understand, analyze, and interrogate their whiteness and to intentionally disrupt the ways students of Color are pushed to the margins abd experiencing physical, emotional, mental violence, harm, and exclusion from access to learning opportunities. Without this disruption, public schools will continue to act as politicized mirrors reflecting societal inequities (Nouri & Sajjadi, 2014) reproducing a larger societal context of white supremacy. Consequently, whiteness must be at the center of critique and transformation (Leonardo, 2009), otherwise doors remain open for individuals to participate in white racism without their conscious or subconscious actions being called into question. Moving past denials of whiteness, white racism, and white supremacy is an important first step, but not enough. White people must learn to live within their newfound discomfort and the burden of unlearning a lifetime of problematic white “subjectivity, ideology and behavior” (Allen, 2004, p. 130). What this looks like is white educators recognizing the best they can ever be is an anti-racist racist (Allen, 2004). This disheartening, but stark truth, once accepted can be freeing into authentic, critically conscious, equity focused change aiming to disrupt and dismantle the system of white supremacy.

Author

• Erin Sanborn, Indiana University - IUPUI