Queering Whiteness Studies: Exploring the (Im)Possibilities of Antiracist Teaching as Imagined by White Educators

• In Event: The Responsibility of Dismantling Whiteness in Higher Education

Abstract

What do pedagogical efforts to disrupt white supremacy look like? What tensions must such efforts engage, given the foundationally racist structure of U.S. higher education? How do instructors’ intersecting race, gender, and sexual subjectivities make antiracist teaching (im)possible? This paper explores the possibilities and paradoxes of antiracist pedagogy through an empirical analysis of white postsecondary educators’ conceptualizations of antiracist teaching.

Situating queerness at the core of this paper is an epistemological and methodological intervention. Whiteness studies is a growing collection of discourses that center whiteness as the object of study in an effort to subvert white supremacy. Scholars of color (i.e., Leonardo, 2013; Matias, 2016a; Yoon, 2012) have identified the importance and the danger of such an effort; Ahmed (2004) warns that whiteness studies can become “a spectacle of pure self-reflection” (para. 6). This paper leverages queer theory to extend and complicate whiteness studies discourses through empirically exploring white educators’ conceptions of antiracist teaching. Love’s (2019) framework of ‘abolitionist teaching’ and Kumashiro’s (2002) notion of ‘anti-oppressive pedagogy’, which each incorporate queerness in conceptualizing educational environments, centrally inform this research.

Thematic analysis of interviews with 10 white postsecondary instructors suggest that, at the very minimum, white educators striving to enact antiracist teaching must understand that racism operates structurally and work to integrate this understanding in their curriculum and teaching methods. Participants elucidated numerous uncertainties and tensions in their conceptions of antiracist teaching, including questioning the very possibility of antiracist teaching in the context of foundationally racist educational institutions and as attempted by white instructors. Some participants problematized their motivation for pursuing antiracist teaching, pointing to the dangers of performative antiracism. Participants who claimed queer subjectivity, in particular, conceptualized their antiracist teaching efforts as, at times, paradoxical.

Paradox as a site of radical otherwise may be a much-needed and generative contribution that queer theory can offer white educators striving to practice antiracist pedagogy. While white educators might be able to bump up against the limits of our racialized perspective, such efforts will always be constrained by the limits of the white imaginary. Acknowledging this limit does have to not represent a dead-end for white educators committed to antiracism; an embrace of the paradox that white educators are always already limited in our capacity to enact antiracist teaching may be an effective strategy and a site of radical potential for working to destabilize white supremacy even as we collude with it. Binaristic thinking and either/or logics are characteristic of white supremacy culture. White educators’ responsibility-taking, then, might look like embracing the discomfort of paradox in efforts toward antiracist teaching.

Structural racism in education is not a new phenomenon and its effects are well-documented, yet antiracist teaching in postsecondary contexts is under-researched (Kishimoto, 2018). White educators must assume responsibility for white supremacy in order to reimagine Whiteness (Patton & Haynes, 2020). This paper is significant in that it extends emergent research (i.e., Linley, 2017; schneider & Nicolazzo, 2020) addressing whiteness and queerness in postsecondary antiracist teaching efforts with an emphasis on white responsibility-taking.

Author

• finn j. schneider, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities