"Might as Well Be What They Want": Whiteness, Schooling, and Resistance

• In Event: 53.064 - New Research on Challenging White Supremacist Educational Structures to Achieve the Promised Equal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

This paper is the result of a year-long sonic ethnographic (Gershon, 2013) study that focused on how students of color resisted normalized, negative sociocultural ideas and ideals of their ways of being and knowing in a large, predominantly white Midwestern high school. The negotiation of predominantly white spaces and places for students of color in this study showed the ways that students used their “conditional cultural capital” (Author, 2015) as a means to resist the pervasive oppression of whiteness in their daily lives. This was often played out through several performances of self (Goffman, 1963) that became crucial in resisting raced and racist verbal and physical actions taken against them by their peers, teachers and administrators. However, as is the focus of this paper, students of color were often victims of “educational choking and lynching” (Author, 2015), despite their resistance and resilience.

Students of color have had much of their ways of being and knowing suffocated through the process of schooling. Some students in this study, primarily girls, have knowingly traded a suffocation of their African American female selves for success at school, an understanding that tends to carry with it a distain for the Blackness that furthers their sociocultural ability to “act White,” which is in itself ultimately an impossibility. This is significant because as they continued to trade suffocation for the conditional cultural capital of “acting White,” their own ways of being ceased to exist.
Other students in this study, most often boys, have been funneled into school and social disciplinary structures that set the stage for their entire lives. As demonstrated in this paper, many of these students have fallen in to ways of being, everyday actions and interactions that reified stereotypical norms of Blackness. That they have done so by choice does not in any way negate either that this is a mechanism to negotiate being in school or very likely not the series of choices they wished to make. They have been ontologically choked. While their ways of being may have resisted and survived, the feeling of being choked into an ontological straight jacket of sociocultural expectations has already become a part of how they are in the world.
This paper is significant because it documents presences and absences in school that simultaneously normalize broader social ontologies and work to fix sociocultural ideas and ideals of Blackness onto yet another generation of young black bodies and minds at school. For this and other reasons presented throughout this paper, this work yet again calls for greater understandings of the everyday contribution of schooling to ontological choking and educational lynching of young women and men of color. If these reifications of culture continue unabated, as Woodson (1933) noted, there will be no end to the violence against Black bodies in school or in society.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Loyola University Maryland