The Curriculum of White Supremacy: Teaching, Learning, and the Racial Politics of Schooling

• In Event: Racial and Gender Politics of Schooling

Abstract

This paper argues that racism in U.S. education is not only structural or ideological, but also curricular and pedagogical. Drawing on critical race theory, curriculum theory, and practice-based research on teaching, we analyze how white supremacy operates as a learned system—a curriculum of white supremacy. We trace its substance (the racial hierarchy it sustains) and syntax (the pedagogical rules that enact it), through both historical analysis and close examination of classroom teaching. Using the theory of “discretionary spaces,” we show how everyday teaching practices mediate systemic racism—either reinforcing or disrupting it. In naming teaching as a powerful site of both miseducation and liberation, we offer a reframing of racism in education as a fundamental problem of teaching and learning.

Authors

• Jungsoo Ahn, University of Michigan

• Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan