Refusing White Silence: Violence and Risk in Critical Race Dialogues

• In Event: Racial Identity and Sense-Making

Abstract

This collaborative auto-ethnography analyzes an attempt to read the work of Leonardo and Porter and create a “risky” classroom space in a diverse “Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy” course. We analyze students’ response to this work, focusing particularly on white students' desire for “safety,” which manifested in silence and in refusal to take the risk of speaking. We analyze this silence as a silence that speaks—a silence that communicates rejection, dehumanization, lack of trust, fear, and the ongoing protection of whiteness—and, as such, as a form of violence. We argue teachers have a responsibility to identify and engage with such silences and with the ways students of color resist, recover and rework classroom space in the context of white silence.

Authors

• Rebecca A. Alexander, DePauw University

• Kandyce A Amie, University of Wisconsin - Madison