So What's It Really Like? A Critical Race Motherscholar of Color's Confessions of Combating Whiteness in Teacher Education

• In Event: Cutting Out Your Tongue: Scholars Under Fire in the Age of Neoliberal Education and White Nationalism

Abstract

Hopeless endeavors
Yet never giving up hope
Possibilities
 
 When it comes to engaging in racial justice amidst the overwhelming presence of whiteness (Sleeter, 2001), it is important to recognize that life inside teacher education is either living a hopeless hope or hoping for audacious hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009). Yet within these dimensions of hope are a range of emotionalities like pain, endurance, sacrifice, isolation, fortitude, ostracism, and callousness.  This paper will paint a verbal picture; so to speak, of how one critical race motherscholar scholar of color navigates the intoxication of whiteness inside a self-proclaimed urban-focused, culturally responsive, and socially just teacher education program.  And despite the deleterious impacts such intoxication has on her racial identity as a the only tenure-lined faculty of color (let alone the first ever tenure-lined faculty in the program) she describes how she continues to engage her own emotionalities—that is, her heart—to remain steadfast in the pursuit of racial justice.  Written in story form and doused with periodic poetry to encapsulate emotions felt, this chapter frames how a brown-skinned Pinay—an identity that others assume will nurse the needs of whiteness—combats the emotionalities of whiteness that so embed itself inside teacher education.  Suffice it to say that, although white emotionalities such as guilt, defensiveness, anger and sadness are often described as hysterical (Gonsalves, 2008), resistant (Rodriguez, 2008), resolute (Picower, 2009) and/or instructive (Matias, 2013), they are ones that berate the heart of those trying to enact projects of racial justice.  Ultimately, this paper will expose the barriers—namely, the emotionality of whiteness—that curtails the advancement of racial justice inside teacher education while showcasing some of the counter-maneuvers racial justice workers must have to advance racial justice inside teacher education courses and program assessments, faculty meetings, school partnerships, and with their own teacher candidates and colleagues.

Author

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver