A Guise of Inclusion: The Survival of "Nonideal" Students in White-Supremacist Heteropatriarchal Systems of Education

• In Event: The Mess of Educational Leadership: Embracing Transdisciplinary Approaches to Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Class in Educational Leadership

Abstract

Since its inception, the United States (US) system of education has worked vigorously to stymie and subvert the needs of those deemed to be ‘non-ideal’ (Apple, 2006; Grumet, 1998). From maintaining exclusionary curricula to the manipulation of anti-racist approaches to practice, heteropatriarchal white supremacist structures of education ensure a label of ‘Other’ for those who fail to meet colonial ideals (Pinar, 1998). Marginalized students and practitioners—those who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual+ (LGBTQIA+), people with disabilities, and those with low socioeconomic status (SES), are, as Cathy J. Cohen (2005) suggests, queer outliers throughout systems of education. To address exclusionary practices, this article underscores the guise of diversity in schooling and its material impacts on those deemed not ideal. By implementing Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Crenshaw, 1995) and Queer of Color Critique (QOCC) (Ferguson, 2004) within counterstorytelling (Crenshaw, 1988; Morris & Perry, 2016), the authors of this manuscript—both cisgender women: (1) heterosexual and Black, and (1) queer and white—share their respective experiences with(in) academic violence(s). The authors’ narrative explorations serve to interrogate individual and aggregate relationships to educational heteronormative Whiteness (Ahmed, 2007; Love, 2019) and establish pathways for imagining anti-racist, pro-queer, wholly inclusive practices for education.

Authors

• Leslie Uchenna Ekpe, Texas A&M University - Commerce
  Presenting Author

• Whitney Neumeyer Roach, University of South Carolina
  Presenting Author