In Support of Critical White Supremacy Studies

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

Abstract

“Accepting educational responsibility” requires understanding that the US educational system and US society have been deeply interwoven with white supremacy since the Europeans came to this continent (Kendi, 2017), became engaged in an horrendous genocide that destroyed around 85% of the indigenous people (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014), and then enslaved over ten million Africans to build wealth and power (Feagin, 2014). After a short reconstruction era, Jim Crow replaced slavery, and after the long Jim Crow era was disrupted by the Civil Rights movement and new race equity legislation (Omi & Winant, 2014), the so-called drug war, which was mainly focused on Black men, and mass incarceration were instituted (Alexander, 2012), along with hangings, police murder, and discrimination and injustice in housing (Massey & Denton, 2016), health (Gee & Ford, 2011), employment (Marable, 2015), education (Leonardo, 2009), and media (Van Dijik, 1995) through national, state, and local laws, policies, and procedures and through widespread racist assumptions, stereotypes, and white norms (e.g., Goldberg, 1993; Haney-López, 2015; Harris, 1993; Lipsitz, 2006; Molina, 2014; Yancy, 2008).

In response to this long history of white racist horror, education-focused critical whiteness work by white scholars emerged in the early 1990s with the Author’s 1993 article, calling on white scholars to address their own involvement in white racism, though two articles by Sleeter (1992, 1993) at the same time addressed white racism among white teachers. Then, in 1997-1998, three critical whiteness edited collections emerged that included both scholars of color and white scholars (Delgado & Stefancic, 1997; Fine, Weis, Powell, & Mun Wong, 1997; Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, & Chennault, 1998). By this point, critical whiteness had become a theoretical frame that white scholars who wanted to do work on white supremacy could use, especially given that many of these white scholars thought that white scholars should not be using Critical Race Theory (CRT), which had quickly gained widespread usage by scholars of color, especially after Ladson-Billings and Tate published the first CRT article in education in 1995.

About twenty-five years later, many scholars of color, like Matias (2016) and Hayes (2016), have become leading critical whiteness voices. Though the question of whether critical whiteness studies re-centers whiteness was repeatedly raised in the 1990s, the more recent ascension of scholars of color in critical whiteness work has re-centered this question in a different historical context. However, what this critical whiteness history elides is the response of folks of color to the long history of white supremacy. Said simply, there never was any moment in US history that folks of color were not doing critical whiteness work. DuBois’ “The souls of white folks” (n.d.) is critical whiteness work as is Douglass’ Autobiographies (1994). Similarly, amidst the genocide of the Indigenous, many tribal leaders critiqued whiteness (e.g., Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). This is not to say that white scholars should quit working on ending white supremacy as that work is a necessity. However, perhaps it is time for critical whiteness studies to evolve into critical white supremacy studies.

Author

• James Joseph "Jim" Scheurich, Indiana University - Indianapolis