Racial Sensemaking and Constructions of the “Good White” Principal

• In Event: Confronting Whiteness and Promoting Antiracism

Abstract

This study investigates white public high school principals’ racial sensemaking and concurrent constructions of the “good white” (Sullivan, 2014) principal, demonstrating the challenge of cultivating antiracist and democratic practices among white principals whose conceptual resources are formed and configured according to whiteness. This paper will present findings from a discourse analysis of interviews with five white public high school principals of racially diverse high schools in California. Framed by Philip’s (2011) ideology in pieces and Foste’s (2020) enlightenment narratives of white complicity, findings describe the discursive strategies used by principals to make sense of and align with a framework for educating toward a multiracial democracy (“The FEMD”) (Rogers et al., 2022a), which also functioned to reinforce “good white” principal identities.

Author

• Samuel Corless Stern, University of California - Los Angeles