White policy/Black victims: Individual actors, white women’s privilege and epistemologies of ignorance in education policy making

• In Event: 2351 - Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 9. Intersectional Perspectives

Abstract

This paper examines how educators acting within an education setting play parts in institutional racism by either suggesting racist policies, advocating for them, remaining silent or struggling to disrupt them. For white female teachers, it is not just their race, but it is how gender within the white racial structure intersects. A heteropatriarchal structure polices and constructs their bodies and behaviors in particular ways. As a result, gender and racial privilege that white women hold and their expectation of that privilege is grounded in white supremacist ideology. Using CRT and epistemologies of ignorance I examine how educators of color and white women educators who dominate the field are often in conflict about policy that reify the institutional harm to Black students.

Author

• Lynette Parker