Journey to Critical Whiteness in Higher Education

• In Event: The Hate U Give "F" Us All: "Race" and Racism in Student Evaluation of Teaching

Abstract

In this presentation the author will consider the role of African American women in academia through the lens of her relationship with a black professor who was her supervisor while she was a graduate teaching assistant at a large state university in the southeast. Critical Race Theory scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings has long made the case that race “continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States” in educative contexts. While often this is manifest in overtly negative actions towards people of color, even if white students have good will towards POC in institutes of higher learning, the author’s experience affirms the claims of Ladson-Billings, even in the light of attempts to view POC in a positive regard, race remains a stumbling block of awkward reverence and distant politeness blocking free exchange of ideas and appreciation of unique abilities and contributions.
Through the use of a mixed methods approach the author unpacks the social phenomena found at the intersection of race, gender, and power through the utilization of archival study, interviews, and relevant personal experiences. The author considers the adaptation by so-called white ally of Connie Titone’s concept of being aware of positionality and to continue to engage the subject of race no matter how clumsy or downright harmful these efforts might be. Data sources include registrar archives, university newsletters, department meeting minutes, miscellaneous memorandums and reports, obituaries, personal correspondence, and personal recollections.
In light of ally’s reinstating inequality by re-centering whiteness with their Black professors, academic colleagues, and students, white people in educative spaces have to proactively work to combat inequity and actively work to be antiracist. Dominant community member power precludes white people from being an insider within the marginalized community or claiming to understand the experience of POC in academia, but the author suggests that they can position themselves as willing to be involved when invited and to consciously acknowledge their privilege and attempt to deliberately uncouple themselves from it.
Titone urges a commitment to “combat pathological whiteness and eradicate racism accompanied by all of its negative academic effects.” In this difficult journey of seeking to respect faculty of color for their merits and not because of white guilt, white people in academic spaces have to let go of white fragility (Robin DiAngelo) and move from exclusion, suppression, self-interest, and white privilege, through the swamp of over-compensation, to the bright day of a post-systemic racist future in academia.

Author

• Yvette Freter, Tennessee Technological University