The Tree of Oppression: Mapping Out the Ideologies That Sustain Unexamined Benevolent White Allyship

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Whiteness: Territoriality, Oppression, and Niceness

Abstract

In alignment with this year’s conference call for inquiry that deconstructs and reimagines societal systems that have maintained structural inequality, this manuscript traces and analyzes historical ideologies linked to contemporary understandings that frame white allyship as presumably benign and disconnected from structural oppression, in and beyond educational contexts. The authors illustrate how the concepts of white savior industrial complex, white savior mentality, unquestionable personal experience, and unexamined white complicity with structural oppression, perpetuate modern framings of allyship. While doing so, authors present possibilities for white allies to build capacity in their advocacy with and for minoritized communities.

Authors

• Delma M Ramos, University of North Carolina Greensboro

• Jesse Randall Ford, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Cathryn Bennett, University of North Carolina - Greensboro