Toward a New Approach to Whiteness in Education: Foucault, Proletarianism, and Pedagogy

• In Event: Critical Studies of Whiteness in Education

Abstract

We must understand white privilege as akin to the Foucauldian notion of power as circulating, with white social actors as the conduits, not the sources of this power. Such a realization, coupled with a desire for proletarian solidarity, calls on us as educational researchers and particularly as scholars in the foundations of education to radically restructure our approach to white educators. Instead of focusing on the ways in which our white students have racial privilege, we would do better to focus on the ways in which they are oppressed in capitalism, and made complicit in oppression via technologies of white supremacy. This is intentionally provocative, yet I am compelled to make this argument given the relative lack of movement in the 30 years since McIntosh’s (1988) conception of white privilege became the basis for much of, if not most, of the antiracist work in education.

Author

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College