Lemme

• In Event: Our Voices, Our Turn: Complexifying Critical Whiteness Studies With Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Scholarship

Abstract

Objectives
The main objective of this essay is to introduce and examine whiteness as a source of trauma for Black people. We explore Black authored scholarship to conceptually ground whiteness as the impetus for racism, while identifying it as an interpersonal, psychosocial, and contextual phenomenon that informs the race-based traumatic experiences of Black people. Some of the factors constituting whiteness are ethnocentric monoculturalism, White standardization, ontological expansiveness, White emotions, attitudes, and reactions to race, and White privilege. While racism operates through oppression and exclusion to produce trauma among Black people, we argue that whiteness operates similarly to produce race-based traumatic stress. With this premise, we offer and explain a conceptual model to promote empirical research that identifies and operationalizes whiteness and its components as observable contributors to the traumatic experiences of Black persons. This is the POWER model. A second acronym, SPOILs, is introduced to allow critical whiteness studies an opportunity to include intersectionality and liberation as central themes to any ‘critical’ work. To offer an overview of a proposed conceptual model that 1) identifies and heralds Black scholarship (e.g., scholar-activists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences) that has established the foundation for the field of Critical Whiteness Studies 2) identifies and describes the cultural values reflective of White philosophical orientations (i.e., ontology, axiology, cosmology, epistemology) that constitute whiteness and 3) discuss how these cultural values are driving forces behind individual and institutional racism enacted by White persons and predominantly White institutions against people of color, namely Black people. The work problematizes whiteness through exploration of standardized cultural norms that are often accepted rather than interrogated within whiteness literature.

Theoretical Framework
Black psychological and social science literature and existing theoretical frameworks (i.e., Ani’s Tripartite Model of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, Boykin’s Triple Quandary theory, Diop’s Two-Cradle theory, Jones’ TRIOS theory, & Kambon’s African Self-Consciousness Model)

Methods and Data Sources
Comprehensive literature review. Black scholastic and activism-oriented literature

Substantiated Conclusions
Literature by Black scholars identify cultural themes constituting whiteness as catalyst for racist behavior and history.

Scholarly Significance of the Work
First paper to consolidate multiple Black scholastic perspectives on White cultural values, identify these as significant elements of whiteness and problematize these values and their salience in the lives of people of color.

Connection to Conference Theme
Education equity for students of color will require pre-service and in-service teachers to become familiar and ultimately address their actions and dispositions that reflect whiteness components (i.e., White cultural values). While professional educators may be open to examining their own racism and White privilege, equity within schools serving students of color must be populated with teachers keenly aware of how whiteness shows up in their classrooms (i.e., curriculum, instructional practices, performance evaluations, classroom infrastructure, discipline policy, and guidelines, etc.).

Author

• Kenneth Maurice Tyler, University of Kentucky