Educating Into Whiteness: Citizenship Education Curriculum and the Consolidation of White Racial Hegemony in Post-WWII New York

• In Event: Unveiling Power, Privilege, and Resistance: Interrogating Whiteness, Internationalism, and Black Feminist Activism in the Context of Racial Capitalism

Proposal

White supremacy is inextricably linked with American history and national identity. But Whiteness in the US is malleable, ideologically loaded with various legal and social definitions that have been stretched to the benefit of different groups at the expense of others over time. In this research, I explore the consolidation of American Whiteness after World War II through the lenses of cultural and political hegemony (Gramsci, 2005), racial formation (Omi & Winant, 2015), pedagogies of the state (Pykett, 2010b), and Whiteness as both property (Harris, 1993) and active ignorance (Mills, 2007). I draw upon histories of White racial alchemy, immigration, and the intersection between housing and schooling to present Levittown, NY—one of the first and most famous model suburban communities—and communities like it as sites in which the postwar White middle-class ‘ideal’ found some of its earliest manifestation.
Moreover, I demonstrate through attention to the early days of Levittown and state-wide citizenship education curriculum how schooling and suburbia can advance racial-national projects materially, affectively, and epistemologically (Alicea, 2022). Using New York State Regents exams on citizenship education and print media coverage of Levittown and segregated New York suburbs, I excavate narratives of capitalist progress, patriotism and elite White patriarchy, territorial ownership and settlement, as well as ‘Whitewashing’ of both contemporary and historical American identity. I argue that these examples of formal and public ‘curriculum’ increasingly imagine a White, suburban, middle-class, mostly male audience and conflate this audience with the ‘ideal’ American citizen, in doing so advancing the ‘racial project’ of postwar White hegemony.

Author

• Connor Middleton, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge