Nice white ladies: Decolonizing identities of white women in education in Africa

• In Event: Decoloniality in Afrikan Education

Proposal

This paper engages the complexities of protesting from privileged positionalities. What is the relationship between protest and racialized, gendered power? How can educators with decolonial intentions both recognize and resist their well-worn roles under conditions of ongoing coloniality (Mignolo, 2011) in order to contribute more generatively to social justice movements?

Through ethnographic study, this paper explores how individuals with privilege can both acknowledge and start to move beyond the ways in which they are implicated in larger systemic injustices through identity work. Using the archetype of Lady Bountiful as heuristic (Ford Smith, 1997; Meiners, 2002), the study examines the ways in which the author acted in complicity with colonial power throughout the course of a collaborative project in education in Tanzania. A Lady Bountiful can be understood as a “nice white lady,” a white female figure who graciously participates in the civilizing work of colonization, often via education, and this archetype is a useful tool for articulating the coloniality perpetuated at the intersection of whiteness and femininity. However, this role can also serve as a point of departure from which to resist colonizing forces such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism by engaging different conceptualizations of identity, or alternate ways of understanding self and Other, through increased attention to relationality and communal wellbeing as a form of protest in both theory and practice (Author, 2023; Chilisa, 2020; Sarr, 2020).

This paper draws on qualitative data collected as part of a wider, two-year ethnographic study examining the dynamics of international collaboration in English language teaching. In the wider study, the author as participant worked with twelve Tanzanian instructors of English at a Tanzanian university on a pedagogical research project. The project was a separate study focused on instructors’ strategies for teaching large classes, formulated and carried out collaboratively by the author and instructors and aimed at benefiting instructors and their professional goals. The project then also served as the scene of the wider study to examine how participants negotiated the identities available to them in the course of working together and implications for decolonizing international collaborations, especially those between Global North and South. The ethnographic analysis is based on key themes across data sources with a critical focus on relations and structures of power (Madison, 2005; Merriam and Tisdell, 2016) as well as theories of positioning and identity in discourse (e.g. Appiah, 2018; Fairclough, 1995; Van Langenhove and Harré, 1999). In examining the author as participant, this study also utilized autoethnography alongside the wider ethnography as a decolonizing methodology to reverse the colonial gaze and exercise critical reflexivity (Hughes and Pennington, 2017). This paper then focuses on the identity negotiations of the author, a white female researcher from the Global North, from a critical, decolonial perspective.

Looking across interviews, group meetings, key documents and artifacts, author’s personal research journal and field notes from participant observation, this paper reveals the ways in which the author as participant both reified and resisted coloniality. Through being positioned as “Principal Investigator” of the shared research project and co-constructing with collaborators roles for herself as “benevolent giver,” “well-resourced,” and “foreigner who knows,” the author draws uncomfortable yet striking allusions to the Lady Bountiful archetype and elucidates how white women can exert colonial power in educational settings in spaces structured by ongoing coloniality such as those in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the author’s efforts to center relationality and community within this role, in negotiation with co-collaborators, simultaneously served to resist coloniality. This finding ultimately provides an alternative framing for identity, identity-in-community, as inspired by African Ubuntu (e.g. Chilisa, 2020; Sarr, 2020) and made possible through collaboration and continued grappling with these ideas towards decolonizing collaborative relationships.

This paper contributes to ongoing conversations around racial justice in comparative and international education (e.g. Strong et al., 2023) and international development (e.g. Pailey, 2020) by examining ways in which white supremacy and other colonial values manifest in the words, actions, and assumptions of white, Western, so-called “partners.” It also echoes recent critiques of the rhetoric of partnership in international education (Menashy, 2019) and specifically within Africa (Grieves and Mitchell, 2020; Ishengoma, 2017) which presumes equity but often reifies economic and social injustices which constrain those relationships. This paper extends this work by offering a more intimate, personal, on-the-ground perspective which explores the intersectionality of race and gender (c.f. Appleby, 2010) in ways in which similarly positioned educators and collaborators may see themselves and be invited to grapple with their problematic pasts and fraught futures.

In so doing, this paper engages questions around how to contribute to large-scale protest movements through small-scale everyday actions as individuals working across social difference, ultimately advocating for critical self-reflection and personal accountability to communities with which one wishes to act in solidarity. However, to circumvent the naval-gazing which may reify white moves to innocence in decolonial movements (Tuck and Yang, 2012), this study also finds opportunities for protest through increased relationality in both theory and practice which, as this study illuminates, can act as a destabilizing force to unsettle colonially-rooted conventions.

This paper concludes with implications and suggestions for “nice white ladies” and others with privilege engaged in education research and collaborations in and with the Global South. These include developing and cultivate a sense of identity-in-community as a collaborator from the Global North as well as other ways to acknowledge and resist ongoing coloniality in global education.

Author

• Renee Lynch, University of Washington