Activation of Perpetration: White Innocence and the Representation of People of Color as Threats

• In Event: 69.057 - Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: 69.057-9 - Race, Resistance, and Relationality: Teachers and Students Navigating Inequitable Educational Terrains

Abstract

This presentation proposes white innocence as a concept through which investigations of inequitable schooling practices may be analyzed. Borrowing from legal studies, the author proposes analyses of the rhetoric of white innocence and its simultaneous opposite, person of color as perpetrator, as an investigative frame in the schooling context. White innocence is reviewed as a social representation that when used as an investigative frame may assist in making more transparent the unmarked standard of white supremacy and its schooling application. A methodological framework of social cognition through discourse and its (re)production of social representations is offered and utilized to exemplify the manifestations of white innocence in a social studies context.

Author

• Richard A. Orozco, The University of Arizona