Pushing Past Nice: White Women and Antiracism

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Resisting Niceness, Whiteness, and Political Neutrality (Table 39)

Abstract

How do we make sense of the seeming-contradiction of White female educators espousing commitments to antiracism and the continued perpetuation of racism in educational systems? In this paper, I attempt to name the cycle of disciplining White women using the tool of nice and the promise of social capital. Drawing on autoethnographic methods, I contextualize my experiences of moving through the lenses of niceness, social capital, and tempered radicalism into the lenses of feminist killjoy, principled struggle, and emergent leadership in order intend to assist other White women in naming their realities, developing strategies to manage their own contexts, and ultimately to persist in fulfilling their commitments to antiracism.

Author

• Brandelyn L. Tosolt, Northern Kentucky University