Revealing the Vicious Cycle: Intergenerational Racism Toward Minoritized Students

• In Event: Disrupting Racism, Supporting Teacher-Educators, and Enacting Ecological and Social Justice

Abstract

This critical ethnographic study examines White teachers’ habits of mind and patterns of acting toward minoritized students. Analysis revealed that White teachers demonstrated habits of mind characterized by deficit views toward minoritized students, and demonstrated patterns of acting that dehumanized and criminalized them through practices of interrogating and policing, threatening, labeling, and body controlling. These dehumanizing and criminalizing practices were passed down from White teachers to their White students, forming a vicious and self-fulfilling loop that perpetuated intergenerational violence against minoritized students. On the basis of these findings, this paper provides data-based strategies to interrupt these problematic habits of mind and patterns of acting.

Authors

• Katrina Liu, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Richard C. Miller, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Michael K. Thomas, University of Illinois at Chicago