Racist Labor: Troubling White Allyship in a Herrenvolk Society

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Responsive Schooling Across Cultural and Teacher-Prep Contexts

Abstract

This paper is about the work of creating spaces to allow the lived experience of race to breathe and the processes it takes to do so. It comprises three parts: theorizing the experience, writing about what we see, and speaking to how we affectively experience the process. For the theoretical framing, we use three different theorists, Charles Mills (1998), Leonardo and Zembylas (2013), and Anne Anlin Cheng (2001) simultaneously to devise a new theoretical tool to make sense of white supremacy in our current time: Racist labor. The material consequence of this foundational epistemology is the maintenance of an Herrenvolk ethic, wherein the Western tradition of morality only applies to people who count as full persons as delineated by race.

Authors

• Ryan Oto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Noah Isaiah Sims, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities