Theorizing White Fear and Redirecting Research on White Teachers

• In Event: What Can White People Do? Whiteness and Education in the Current Moment

Abstract

In this talk, I draw on two black theorists of whiteness—W.E.B. Du Bois (1935/1992) and the Reverend Thandeka (2001)—as well as stories from two white people from a rural farming community in Wisconsin (see Author, 2017), Delores and William, in order to theorize white fear and to suggest crucial directions for future research on white teachers and white future teachers. With Delores’s stories, I examine how part of who Delores was as a white person, especially when she was a young woman in college, was her fear of losing the love and support of her family and community if she stood in solidarity with black people. With William’s stories, I explore his fear of black men and how this fear was grounded in an enduring racist stereotype that has been used by white elites across time to persuade poor and working class white people like William that he should think of himself as pitted in a struggle for survival against black men.

With this theorization of white fear and an understanding of how it functions in white people’s thinking, feeling, and action, I argue for two directions that future research on white educators should take. The first is that, as a field, we need to start paying more attention to the relations of white people to other white people (Author, 2022). The second is that, in our research, we need to begin producing explicitly intersectional work on whiteness and white racial identities (see Hill Collins, 2019, for her account of intersectionality as critical social theory). Sometimes, as Cameron McCarthy (2003) argued many years ago, in order to actually take race and whiteness seriously, you also need to look elsewhere—to gender, social class, age, and place.

References

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1992). Black reconstruction in America. New York: The Free Press.
(Original work published 1935)

Hill Collins, P. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Durham & London: Duke University.

McCarthy, C. (2003). Contradictions of power and identity: Whiteness studies and the
call of teacher education. Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(1), 127–133.

Thandeka. (2001). Learning to be white: Money, race, and God in America. New York:
Continuum.

Author

• Timothy J. Lensmire, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author