White Woman: or, The Abused Abuser's Role in Educational Stratification

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Whiteness and the "Workforce"

Abstract

This conceptual paper argues that a feminized form of racism exists in schools through the ideal teacher type in classrooms: “white woman.” Leveraging Thandeka’s (2000) generative framework of ‘white racial abuse,” the authors show that white women occupy a contradictory position as both oppressor and oppressed, abuser and abused in the historical construction of the white woman ideal type as well as in the contemporary structures of teaching. As targets of sexism and patriarchy even as they embody white privilege and enact racism in education, white women’s double role points out that an appropriate understanding of white women’s place in education needs to account for both dynamics of their subordination by gender and superordination by race.

Authors

• Zeus Leonardo, University of California - Berkeley

• Joy Esboldt, University of California - Berkeley