Racial Epiphanies: My Journey Toward Becoming an Antiracist Educator

• In Event: Taking Responsibility: Autoethnography as Reflexive Practice in Social Studies Research and Teaching

Abstract

As a graduate student and future faculty member committed to improving educational experiences for all students, my work centers upon efforts to dismantle the structural and individual forms of racism that persist in society. One strand of my research specifically focuses on how the racial identity of teachers and students influences the teaching and learning of race related content in social studies classrooms. The social studies classroom should be home to critical investigations into social and structural injustice, however, barriers of the self often inhibit such work. In my work with preservice teachers, I seek to assist future educators in teaching for racial justice by creating counterspaces (Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000) in which preservice teachers are able to explore their personal privileges and identities and how they each relate to the systemic network of injustice in which classrooms and schools are located. In these counterspaces, preservice teachers are encouraged to engage in reflexive activities in which they recount the development of their personal racial identities in the pursuit of uncovering how the unexamined and unquestioned can play a critical role in the classroom. As Laughter and colleagues (2006) noted, "Once a teacher becomes aware of his or her racial identity, that awareness must expand to include the students who share the classroom" (p. 158). In order to best facilitate these introspective, and sometimes challenging, educational experiences, I must also engage in an interrogation of the self.

Grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT), this paper utilizes autoethnographic vignettes as a method to recount my encounters with race/ism. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011) contend that “when researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being a part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (n.p.). In this essay, I explore two such epiphanies that have shaped my understanding of race/ism. Although I do not characterize these recollections as counter-stories (Bergerson, 2003; Bell, 1992, 1999; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), as they do not center upon the experiences of people of Color, these autoethnographic vignettes can serve as a powerful narrative for White educators and researchers concerned with troubling the power and privilege associated with Whiteness. Additionally, I situate each racial epiphany within CRT to better understand the way in which these experiences aided in my recognition of the color of the water in which we all swim; the water of White supremacy.

Author

• Andrea M Hawkman, University of Missouri