(Y)Our Problem is Y(Our) Work: Disrupting Embodiments and Enactments of Whiteness within Institutions

• In Event: Toward an Archeology of Collective Solidarity: Co-conspirator Leadership as Racial Healing, Justice, and Liberation

Abstract

Objectives
Within social justice spaces, affective technologies and ideologies of whiteness (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013; Picower, 2009) and antiblackness (Dumas, 2016; Zaino & Bell, 2021) serve to hyper intellectualize white people’s aversion to race and (anti-)racism discourses. This contributes to white saviorism (Okun, 201) and paternal benevolence (Zaino & Bell, 2021), maintains the body-mind split, and hinders movement towards addressing social (in)justices and racial healing. Addressing the impact of white supremacy culture (Okun, 2021) is our problem and work as white people, and white women in particular are uniquely positioned within the intersections of privilege, power, and oppression to forward this work. It is within the above context that my paper explores how I embody co-conspirator leadership in service of abolition democracy (Dubois, 1935; 2007), by detailing my engagement with an Archeology of Self™ (Sealy-Ruiz, 2022) necessary for interrupting white supremacy culture (Okun, 2021) within my doctoral program at a medium sized university.

Theoretical Framework
As a white woman who believes that prisons, jails, all forms of incarceration, and our general reliance on carceral logic need to be abolished, I combine Abolition Democracy (Dubois, 1935; 2007) and Critical Whiteness Studies (Matias & Boucher, 2021) to ground and examine the work of facilitating a white affinity space. By anchoring the white affinity space—as well as my necessary self-excavation (Sealy-Ruiz, 2022) as a white woman—within Abolition Democracy (Dubois, 1935; 2007), I seek to avoid recentering whiteness, go beyond white racial epiphanies, avoid drawing from a white epistemological standpoint, and give scholars of color their due (Matias & Boucher, 2021).

Methods and Data
Methodologically, I employ meta-autoethnography (Yoon, 2019), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), and the Archeology of Self™ (Sealy-Ruiz, 2022) framework to analyze the iterative, reflexivity needed to create, facilitate, and sustain healing-centered (Ginwright, 2022), white affinity spaces that move beyond merely making modifications or changes to current systems. Using reflective journals, meeting slides, electronic and personal communications, and pre/post-meeting notes as data, I demonstrate how I created, facilitated, and supported the self-excavation white people need to engage in so that we can be co-conspirators who support abolitionist (re)imaginings and and collective liberation.

Findings and Significance
My findings demonstrate the necessity of the third central concept of abolition, building and sustaining community within educational institutions, because embedded in the community work is addressing how whiteness hinders collective solidarity and coalition building. As a white woman in this work, this includes showing up as a co-conspirator and calling out my fellow white educators, while also being deeply reflective of my own words and actions. Given the pervasive nature of whiteness (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013; Matias & Boucher, 2021; Picower, 2009), co-conspiring in service of school abolition works to end the conditions that maintain white supremacy (Stovall, 2018), as it forces educational institutions to evaluate the root causes of injustice but also for how we, across diverse social identities, use collective community power to (re)imagine the radical, (re)humanizing possibilities of what our society can look like without antiblackness (Dumas, 2016) and white supremacy culture (Okun, 2021).

Author

• Ashley Rae Koch, Five Keys Schools and Programs