White reign: deploying whiteness in America
Abstract
What does it mean to be white in today’s society? Is whiteness an ethnicity? White Reign tackles questions like these by examining whiteness as a cultural concept that our society has created and exposing systems that teach us how we think about race. Whiteness permeates every aspect of our society and commands a role in almost every social issue from intelligence testing to affirmative action. The scholars in this collection show us how whiteness is learned and deployed via a variety of social forces, including schools, media, and even cyberspace. These essays examine the construction of white identity and the possibility of reshaping whiteness in a progressive, non-racist manner, presenting a culture of whiteness that can be employed by educators, parents, and citizens concerned with racial justice.
... These relate to terminology, the origins of racialization, and levels of individual, institutional, social, and collective responsibility for racial inequality. A key debate is whether whiteness should be reformed as an identity or abolished as an assumption of privilege (Roediger 1994;Ignatiev and Garvey 1996;Kincheloe et al. 1998). Many scholars have called for interdisciplinary studies of this concept, which has shown significant contemporary saliency as a topic for investigation. ...
... Several edited volumes provide interdisciplinary, multilayered analyses about whiteness in local and global settings and allow for multi-vocality. Some emphasize the need to reform whiteness into something positive (White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, Kincheloe et al. 1998), while others more clearly seek to dismantle structures of inequality through a deepened understanding of power and privilege (The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, Rasmussen et al. 2001). Most include essays that express a range of perspectives such as in Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Society (1997), by Fine, Weis, Powell, and Wong. ...
... Times in 1965, with the formation of the group calling themselves "SPONGE: The Society for the Prevention of Negroes' Getting Everything" (Wilder 2000, 242). This topic has been extensively explored in works such as Fine et al. (1997), Frankenberg (1997), and Kincheloe et al. (1998). 3. Grasz, Jennifer (2009). ...
Breaking the Code of Good Intentions places the current-day white experience within a political, economic and social context by exploring the perceptions of students about identity, privilege, democracy, intergroup relations. It documents how the everyday thinking of ordinary people contributes to the perpetuation of systemic racialized inequality and identifies opportunities to challenge these patterns, with particular recommendations for the educational system of the twenty-first century.
... Specifically, Mitchell (2015) found that sustained community engagement connected to the curriculum (but beyond the classroom) and a multi-semester cohort approach, allows students to grapple with social justice questions and challenge one another, have a lasting impact on students' capacity to create social change and understand themselves as change agents. Additional literature on anti-racist and critical approaches have considered the power relationships that maintain dominant educational systems, normalizing Whiteness (Kishimoto, 2018;Kincheloe et al., 2000). ...
This article argues that current approaches to civic learning tend to normalize whiteness and describes how a team in Massachusetts developed a framework for civic learning through a lens of racial equity and provided professional development opportunities based on this framework. Civic learning for a multiracial democracy cannot be done in a manner that fails to embrace the cultural wealth and lived experiences of all students. The approach described in this article offers an alternative way of thinking about civic learning that can inform other efforts or be replicated in other locations.
... Thus, as social work doctoral students will be responsible for teaching the next generation of social workers, they play an important role in advancing the spirit of the Code, including dismantling oppressive systems. In academia, the modern-era of white supremacy manifests through whiteness, a social concept that perpetuates systemic racism and ultimately benefits white people (Bonilla-Silva, 2006;Feagin, 2006;Kincheloe, 1998;Leonardo, 2009;Omi & Winant, 1994). Following many anti-racist scholars emphasizing the power of language and using literary advocacy to elevate racial inequities within social, economic, and political systems, the authors capitalize BIPOC social identities (such as Black, Women of Color, People of Color, Colonized/Indigenous People, and Students/Faculty of Color) and lower case white and whiteness to adopt this movement (Appiah, 2020). ...
Social workers must participate in ongoing anti-racist and culturally attuned approaches to disrupt white supremacy in our profession, institutions, and society. Our social work mission, values, and ethics demand that we engage in social work education, practice, and scholarship that seeks social justice for all people. In line with these expectations, social work doctoral education is tasked with training the next generation of social work scholars by providing doctoral education that is responsive to society's most pressing social problems. While disrupting white supremacy is an aspirational goal, we argue that white supremacy infiltrates social work education, manifests itself in diverse ways over time, often isolating Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). We use testimonios to explore these issues and describe four BIPOC women’s experiences navigating their social work doctoral programs. From these insights, we contend that social work doctoral education continues to uphold white supremacy by promoting Western epistemologies and theories above other equally valid forms of knowledge, including non-Western schools of thought created by and for BIPOC scholars. We provide recommendations for alternative theories and epistemologies for social work curricula and offer implications to support BIPOC students in social work doctoral education.
... With regard to people acting and reacting to each other, we recognize that part of how people act and react to each other involves not just the immediate, local social event they embody but also previous events, histories, and broader social and cultural contexts and ideologies. Both in our own personal lives and in our work with educators and young people, we are painfully aware of oppression, violence, and marginalization associated with racism, colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, sexism, and other forms of whiteness (e.g., Kincheloe et al., 2000;Sleeter, 2017). And simultaneously, we are painfully aware of the tendency to reduce the lives of those who have suffered such oppressions and violence to a single binary dimension of victimization/resistance, backgrounding or dismissing (if acknowledging at all) the joy, mutuality, caring, wonder, love, dignity, exploration, affection, and "worldbuilding" of their lives (cf., hooks, 2000, p. 2015. ...
... For this paper, I draw inspiration from the organization of Boldt's (in press) chapter that weaves together sketches of personal experience with relevant research and theory that allows for different lines of thought that remain individual but also come together as an assemblage of something new. I draw on critical Whiteness studies (Kincheloe, 1998) and second-wave White teacher identity studies to collectively explain my lines of thinking and experiences labeled throughout this article as a White person in the U.S. educational system. I write from a personal perspective as someone who has had the opportunity to transform the way I think about my racialized identity (a White woman), the identities of my students, and how that shapes what I believe about and do in the classroom. ...
Norms of Whiteness are pervasive throughout schooling in the United States (Tanner, 2017). Critical Whiteness studies (Kincheloe, 1998) and second-wave White teacher identity studies (Jupp & Lensmire, 2016) provides relevant insight into the thoughts and experiences of White
preservice and in-service teachers. This paper draws on the literature to explain the author’s varied personal experiences with Whiteness in education. It is the author’s hope that the experiences shared will resonate with readers and complicate racialized experiences in education, as well as provide a springboard for supervisors to develop White teachers’ capacity to create anti-racist, democratic classrooms. Keeping in mind the goal of supervision – improved learning for all students through the development of teachers – this paper puts forth the argument that in order for teacher supervisors to do such, supervisors should explicitly name Whiteness and facilitate conversations or open spaces for dialogue on the problematic nature of Whiteness in schooling.
... As one of the organizing principles of inequality in society that 'reproduce their own conditions of existence' (Cooper 2004, p. 59), race is deeply implicated in the (re)production of our understandings of the world around us. The concept of epistemologies of ignorance has obvious resonance with the theorizations of whiteness, which has been characterized as a structurally privileged positionality (un)informed by ignorance/blindnesses -taking for granted unearned entitlements that come at the expense of racialized others, and generally lacking insight into the normalized racial order that shapes life opportunities and conditions imperceptibly around the comfort, convenience and advancement of whites (McIntosh 1992, Kincheloe 1998, Steyn 2001. Leonardo (2009) goes as far as to identify whiteness itself as a 'collective racial epistemology with a history of violence against people of color' (p. ...
Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value. The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power.
... 4 These ideas are derived primarily from critical whiteness studies, the core works of which are now available in a number of readers and collections (e.g., Delgado and Stefanic 1997;Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003;Fine et al. 1997;Frankenberg 1997;Hill 1997;Kincheloe et al. 1998). Some of the classical sociological works include Frankenberg (1993), Feagin (1994), and Doane (1997). ...
Few words in the current American lexicon are as ubiquitous and ostensibly uplifting as diversity. The actual meanings and functions of the term, however, are difficult to pinpoint. In this article we use in-depth interviews conducted in four major metropolitan areas to explore popular conceptions of diversity. Although most Americans respond positively at first, our interviews reveal that their actual understandings are undeveloped and often contradictory. We highlight tensions between idealized conceptions and complicated realities of difference in social life, as well as the challenge of balancing group-based commitments against traditional individualist values. Respondents, we find, define diversity in abstract, universal terms even though most of their concrete references and experiences involve interactions with racial others. Even the most articulate and politically engaged respondents find it difficult to talk about inequality in the context of a conversation focused on diversity. Informed by critical theory, we situate these findings in the context of unseen privileges and normative presumptions of whiteness in mainstream U.S. culture. We use these findings and interpretations to elaborate on theories of the intersection of racism and colorblindness in the new millennium.
This paper examines the white normative figure under duress, through videogames that present a crisis in American narratives of progress: The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013), set in a melancholic post-apocalyptic U.S.; and Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics, 2013), a reboot of the now-classic Lara Croft narrative that recasts the heroine as desperate and far from invincible. Using key concepts from critical whiteness studies, popular panics around the demographic shifts in the U.S. away from a white majority, and Richard Dyer’s theorizations, I show how "making whiteness strange" can decouple it from the normative, and rescue it from unattainable ideals and self-annihilating tendencies. Running the gauntlet between representing universal humanity and traumatized victimhood, whiteness in games takes a beating within a fraught Post-9/11 and Post-Obama moment of national transition. Through critical analysis of identity politics around whiteness in video games, larger cultural stakes are revealed.
This article explores the evolution and critiques of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) and the emergence of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) as a broader perspective that builds upon CRP's foundations. CRP aimed to address culture and social justice issues in education by connecting classroom instruction with students' cultural backgrounds and experiences. However, CRP faced critiques regarding its static interpretation of culture and its unidirectional relationship between culture and race. In response to these critiques, CSP offers a more dynamic understanding of culture and recognizes the complexities of cultural identities. It broadens the definition of academic success, fosters critical consciousness, and promotes inclusive and empowering learning environments. The theories of CRP and CSP have implications for curriculum development, advocating for the inclusion of content that addresses race, racism, ethnicity, and culture, as well as promoting equity, justice, and a deeper understanding of historical and cultural contexts. By incorporating these principles, curriculum designers can challenge dominant narratives, foster critical thinking skills, and empower students to become agents of positive change.
Context:
The theory of whiteness in medical education has largely been ignored, yet its power continues to influence learners within our medical curricula and our patients and trainees within our health systems. Its influence is even more powerful given the fact that society maintains a 'possessive investment' in its presence. In combination, these (in)visible forces create environments that favour White individuals at the exclusion of all others, and as health professions educators and researchers, we have the responsibility to uncover how and why these influences continue to pervade medical education.
Proposal:
To better understand how whiteness and the possessive investment in its presence create (in)visible hierarchies, we define and explore the origin of whiteness by examining whiteness studies and how we have come to have a possessive investment in its presence. Next, we provide ways in which whiteness can be studied in medical education so that it can be disruptive.
Conclusion:
We encourage health profession educators and researchers to collectively 'make strange' our current hierarchical system by not just recognising the privileges afforded to those who are White but also recognising how these privileges are invested in and maintained. As a community, we must develop and resist established power structures to transform the current hierarchy into a more equitable system that supports everyone, not just those who are White.
Social scientists have long been interested in how intergroup contact or elite messaging can reduce or eliminate racial biases. To better understand the role of religious elites in these political questions, we show how a church location's income and racial characteristics interact with racial and economic ideologies to shape the political content of sermons. Testing our theories through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of an original data set of more than 102,000 sermons from more than 5200 pastors, we show that contact is only effective as a means of decreasing prejudice to the extent that actors—in our case, pastors—are ideologically capable of reconciling their potential role in economic inequality. White Evangelical pastors rarely preach about issues of poverty or racial justice overall, but the context of the preaching matters. We find that the greater the share of Black population there is in a church community, the less likely White Evangelical pastors are to mention issues of poverty or racial justice, and when they do mention it, they hold to ideological commitments that avoid blaming systems for racialized economic inequality.
By utilizing autoethnography as a research method of a reflective self-examination set within the author’s cultural context and experiential world, this essay elucidates the nuanced positionality of Asians/Asian Americans at the intersection of the model minority myth discourse, colonial narratives, and the black–white binary paradigm of race relations by the employment of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS). While the recent global movement toward racial awareness pushes us to consider the use of CWS, probing into the positionality of Asians/Asian Americans from the perspective of the aforementioned intersection helps us understand the carefully constructed racial paradigm that sets up the complex of the racial status quo. The paradigm has not only created the precarious space for those whose racial identities do not fit in the binary—inclusive of but not limited to Indigenous people, Asians, Latinx, and multiracial people—but has also polarized whites under the white supremacist system.
W. E. B. Du Bois often appropriated and deployed the metaphor of “Prometheus,” drawing from Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Goethe’s poem “Prometheus,” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Throughout Du Bois’s career, he employed this figure in order for the reader to better understand the racialized social order in general and White supremacy in specific. In what follows, I cover the eighteenth and nineteenth century use of the Prometheus metaphor in regard to critiques of racism and slavery. I then establish how Du Bois stepped into this tradition to advance a multifaceted critique of global White supremacy that continues to resonate today. Precisely, Du Bois rendered this character in six patterned forms: (1) as an embodiment of de jure and de facto segregation; (2) as newly conscious Black people that would soon revolt against White supremacy; (3) as the paradoxical capture and harm of White people by their own design; (4) as the prejudice, discrimination, and racism born of White supremacist politics; (5) as the struggle of Black folks against White supremacy; and (6) a Black-centered spiritual worldview of eventual liberation. Together, these six deployments signal the early manifestations of both critical race theory and Afrofuturism—two modes of inquiry that help us to reconsider not only the material repercussions of racial inequality but the pathways and roadblocks toward racial utopia.
This groundbreaking study introduces and explores Lacan’s complex theories of subjectivity and desire through close readings of canonical children’s books such as Charlotte’s Web, Stellaluna, Holes, Tangerine, and The Chocolate War, providing an introduction to an increasingly influential body of difficult work while making the claim that children’s textual encounters are as significant as their existential ones in constituting their subjectivities and giving shape to their desires.
This chapter describes both theoretical and empirical concepts and activities utilized in a diverse, but predominantly-white, classroom to facilitate knowledge development of processes replicating racial inequalities. Central to this chapter is an in-class activity, suitable for classes specializing in race/ethnicity as well as courses related to education, social class, and inequality broadly, which draws on students’ experiences with education to create a “perfect school.” This provides students with the opportunity to articulate a wide array of resources, facilities, student-teacher interactions, and curricular components that often exist in white middle-class schools but are absent from low-income minority schools. This exercise explicitly addresses the important links between race and social class in America resulting from historical legacies of contemporary inequality (i.e. segregation created and enforced by FHA housing policies, the reliance on property taxes to fund local schools, and No Child Left Behind’s punitive aspect the punishes failing schools by decreasing funding). By the end of this unit, which can range from one day to a week or more, students will be able to clearly articulate multiple educationally-based racializing mechanisms, that often exist as hidden curriculum and exclude minority youth from a quality education, upward socioeconomic mobility, and access to full citizenship rights. Students will become aware of how their former lack of knowledge about these inequalities is not only purposeful and intentional, but also perpetuates large-scale inequality both in the educational system, and society-at-large.
Scholars of young people and sexualisation have noted an omission of studies that attend to race and whiteness. In the main, a white-Anglo middle-class child is placed at the centre of media, policy and academic debates about the effects, production and consumption of sexualised media. In light of this, it is important to ask: how can research in this area disrupt the tendency to place normative white subjects at the centre of debates, and position ‘raced others’ at the sidelines? Drawing on postcolonial and critical race and whiteness theory, this paper presents the findings from a study undertaken in South Australia with young people and young adults from a broad variety of cultural backgrounds. Through a series of focus groups designed to explore participant views of sexualised media, a powerful set of resistant narratives emerged. Firstly, participants discussed how their views on sex and sexuality are often read ‘through difference’. They revealed how ‘difference gets in the way’, frustrating conversations they want to have about sexy media, along with moments when they felt stereo-typed and type-cased. Secondly, by presenting perspectives of sexualised media on their own terms, participant narratives were not constrained or bounded by fixed cultural viewpoints. Through a series of ‘transitional moves’, participants employed notions of freedom, individual choice and rights, expressing an urgent desire to speak ‘outside of difference’.
Antiracist pedagogy is an intellectual and political practice aimed at decolonizing racially exclusive institutional curricula and teaching practices in college and university classrooms. As such, it represents a radical incursion into the hegemonic knowledge bases and belief systems of racially privileged North American students whose previous educational and social experience has positioned them in the epistemically disadvantaged position of the “power-illiterate” (Kincheloe and Steinberg). White, middle- and upper-class students who have been taught to understand their social advantages as “natural,” and “merit-based” most often reject the central assumption in an-tiracist work, namely that U.S. society is marked by relations of domination in which some groups are targeted for oppression on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality and others are conferred unearned advantages. Thus, at private liberal arts colleges where the student population is predominantly white and ruling-class, the U.S. Latino studies classroom becomes a space that generates white defensiveness and white resistance in an overtly politicized, counterhegemonic context. Theorizing and understanding white resistance is fundamental to the task of antiracist pedagogy, since this phenomenon (1) reflects the intellectual and ideological effects of the histories of domination that the course seeks to deconstruct, and (2) calls for a pedagogy whose methodology is attentive and responsive to the workings of white power and unexamined white identity in the classroom.
In the very recent history of the academic institution where I have taught for the greater part of the last decade, a group of students of color and their white allies took over the president’s office to protest institutional racism. The official response from the president, delivered at a Campus Community Committee meeting, was a written document, which addressed the students’ demands primarily by reframing them within the college’s “history” of successes in the area of diversity. Both before and after the occupation of the president’s office, student protestors organized informal forums, open to the entire community, to discuss institutional racism. These meetings were packed with students, whose competing identities, interests, needs, and desires came roiling to the surface in the form of often heated and contentious debate. The fact that no administrator, let alone the president, attended any of these discussions constitutes a disavowal of both the pervasive presence of racism on campus, and the experiences and knowledges that informed the students’ actions and efforts toward social change. At the same time, it raises serious questions, many of which have been raised by the editors of this anthology, about the place, or lack thereof, for critical and dissenting voices within the educational institution.
The son of ardent democrats, Joe Lyons Kincheloe (Kingsport, Tennessee 1950 – Kingston, Jamaica 2008) was always politically active, showcasing a personality that was so oriented towards autonomy and critical sense that at the age of twelve he was already renowned for his ability to unnerve teachers with his speeches in defence of the weakest citizens and against all forms of segregation.
Mit den folgenden Thesen wird nahegelegt, dass weiße Grundannahmen, ob sie nun bewusst artikuliert sind oder nicht, unsere Epistemologien, Methodologien und Politik(en) bestimmen. „Unser“ richtet sich hier an weiße Akademikerinnen (wie mich). Trotz jüngster theoretischer (postkolonialer) Bemühungen, die epi-stemologische Herrschaft ethnozentrischer Standards einer post-aufklärerischen Tradition aufzuheben, bleibt „unsere“ akademische Subjektposition festgelegt als „default position“. Eine Festlegung, die sich in einer exklusiven Perspektive auf die Welt zeigt, im Ausweichen vor wirklichem Dialog mit Intellektuellen, die nicht von westlichen akademischen Zentren aus sprechen, in universalen Repräsentationsansprüchen und in einer weitverbreiteten Unfähigkeit, nichtweiße Autorität als Ausgang und Maßstab für die eigene anzuerkennen. Ich sehe dieses nicht nur als Problem des akademischen Mainstreams, sondern auch als Herausforderung für die Gender Studies. Meine Thesen sind ein Ansatz, keine Lösung, zur Erarbeitung einer anderen Ethik.
In all the chapters in this book, there are a few overarching and profound commonalities in ELT practices in the countries such as China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Sri Lanka. First, the depoliticization of English and English teaching in the pretext of securing national economic development and also for personal success is deeply entrenched in every corner of these countries. Amid dominant discourses which link ELT to globalization for the last two decades, English is no longer a school subject but has become a hard currency, which mobilizes peoples’ desire and national interests in particular, but surprisingly similar ways in these countries.
In the mid 1990s I published The Recovery of Race in America (Gresson, 1995). There I argued that much of the social, political, and cultural struggle between 1970 and 1990 could be read as an effort to address losses—real and perceived—spawned by the social activism of the 1960s. I called this cultural struggle “recovery work.” Joe Kincheloe was among the most insightful and persistent scholars engaging this recovery discourse.
We live in nasty and perilous times. Those of us in critical pedagogy cannot help but despair as we watch the U.S. and its Western collaborators instigate imperial wars for geopolitical positioning and natural resources, and mega-corporations develop and spend billions of dollars to justify economic strategies that simply take money from the weakest and poorest peoples of the world and transfer them to the richest people in North American and Europe.
We are unable to ignore how power operates and the social, cultural, political, and economic forces that shape each person and/or how that person is perceived, when entering into a conversation about critical diversity and multiculturalism. As educators entered into the multicultural curricular trend in the late twentieth century, the mainstream intent was to include everyone – somehow. Early multiculturalists didn’t discuss equity, or even social justice; the first work done in the area simply added on bits and pieces of information about other people while primarily discussing the white, dominant culture. As multiculturalism became more associated with the politics of education and not just another content area subject, teachers and scholars began to call for an examination of multiculturalism as a discipline unto itself. Calling it into question allowed us to all ask what exactly we (and schools) meant by diversity and multiculturalism. One of our favorite spots on the Late Show with David Letterman is the “Is this anything?” segment. Dave and Paul Schaeffer are given a short narrative, and then are asked if it is anything. They quickly discuss the issue, then each of them pronounces if, indeed, it is anything. Just because something is called multicultural or diverse, indeed, doesn’t mean it is anything.
This dissertation explores the indexicality (the ideological process that links language and identity) of ???standard??? edited American English (SEAE), revealing common patterns that associate privileged, white students with standardness and disassociate marginalized???especially African American???students from SEAE. Importantly, this project argues that SEAE both signals identity and is rhetorically constructed as linguistically neutral. Throughout this project, I examine the presence, perpetuation, and production of ideologies related to language, standardness, and privilege???specifically standard language ideology (SLI) and whiteness???in instructors??? talk about student writing. These ideologies simultaneously justify the indexicality of SEAE and work to position SEAE as linguistically neutral, a positioning that masks the troubling indexical patterns described in this dissertation.
Drawing on interviews with composition instructors about their readings of anonymous student texts, this project suggests that indexicality and standardness are mutually informative: the non/standard features of student texts operate as indexicals for student-author identities just as perceived student-author identities influence the reading of a text as non/standard. Additionally, this dissertation analyzes standard language discourse, the discursive production and manifestation of SLI, in order to better understand the rhetorical construction of linguistic neutrality. I argue that identifying and interrogating SLD allow for a critique of not only the perceived neutrality of SEAE but also SLI.
Ultimately, this dissertation offer inroads to challenging SEAE???s indexicality and perceived neutrality, both of which offer unearned privilege to some students at the expense of others and, in the process, perpetuate race- and class-based privilege.
The ethnographic experience is an indelible venture that continuously redefines one's life. Bringing together important cross-currents in the national debate on education, this book introduces the student or practitioner to the challenges, resources, and skills informing ethnographic research today. From the first chapter describing the cultural foundations of ethnographic research, by George Spindler, the book traces both traditional and new approaches to the study of schools and their communities.
Incorporating data from two years of ethnographic teacher-research, this article explores how a curriculum of “professionalism” resonates with teachers and students in a small New York City school of choice. Using the literature on Critical Whiteness Studies and philanthrocapitalism in the context of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education reforms, the paper critiques the ways that the increasing privatization and corporatization of schools in the US reinforces racism and inequality. The discussion concludes by outlining instances where students and teachers resist market-based pedagogies of professionalism, and discusses the importance of critical intellectualism and humanizing pedagogy in a climate of market-based reforms in education.
This article seeks to expand upon Blumer's "Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position." I argue that Blumer's group position model invites us to critically consider the role that dominant group identity and "threats" to identity play in reproducing racial inequalities. Identities seat both material and ideal concerns, and white identities, in particular, may provide "ontological security" that whites will defensively protect. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in 1994–96 in two demographically distinct high schools. Young whites in both schools expressed identities that positioned them as "universal," and they responded reactively, even prejudicially, when their universal group position was threatened.
The article synthesizes and critiques the social science, education, and adult education literature related to the examination of Whiteness and White privilege and offers recommendations for the field of adult education. By examining the historically changing nature of Whiteness, the major themes in this literature are discussed, along with the relevance of these themes for adult education research and practice. In reviewing the current efforts to name and challenge White privilege, the article provides recommendations for moving beyond naming and critiquing White privilege and racism in the field of adult education to challenging and transforming their impact.
This article discusses the results of a study examining the role of spirituality in developing a positive cultural identity among a multicultural group of 31 adult educators and what the findings suggest for a spiritually grounded and culturally relevant approach to pedagogy. Findings of the study focus on the role of spirituality in (a) dealing with internalized oppression and reclaiming cultural identity, (b) mediating among multiple identities, (c) crossing culture to facilitate spiritual development, and (d) unconscious knowledge-construction processes that are connected to image, symbol, and ritual that are often cultural. Implications for practice include the importance of (a) the authenticity of teachers and students; (b) an environment that allows for the exploration of the cognitive, the affective or relational, and the symbolic or spiritual domains; and (c) the limitations of the adult learning environment and that transformation is an ongoing process that takes time.
We perceive “race” as a feature of the natural landscape, fixed in the unchanging realities of biology, but racial categories change markedly in response to shifting political, economic, and social circumstances across historical time. In the United States conceptions of “race” function as idioms of power, mediating the conflicting imperatives of a capitalist economy and a porous, democratic political culture: where labor demands generate demographic diversity, “race” is deployed to describe the civic virtues or shortcomings of the many peoples on the American scene. The racialization and reracialization of European immigrants across three periods in U.S. history (1790–1840s; 1840s‐1920s; and 1920s‐1960s) demonstrates the mutability of racial constructions and their political character. The racial languages and logics of Laura Z. Hobson's 1947 novel Gentleman's Agreement demonstrate the instability of “whiteness” as a monolithic category and the unevenness in racial “certainty” as one regime of racial knowledge gives way to the next.
This paper employs data from a recent national survey to offer an empirical assessment of core theoretical tenets of whiteness studies. Using survey items developed explicitly for this purpose, we analyze three specific propositions relating to whites' awareness and conception of their own racial status: the invisibility of white identity; the understanding (or lack thereof) of racial privileges; and adherence to individualistic, color-blind ideals. Consistent with whiteness theories, we find that white Americans are less aware of privilege than individuals from racial minority groups and consistently adopt color-blind, individualist ideologies. However, we also find that whites are both more connected to white identity and culture as well as more aware of the advantages of their race than many theoretical discussions suggest. We then combine these results to estimate that 15 percent of white Americans exhibit what we call "categorical whiteness," a consistent and uniform adherence to the theoretical tenets that are the focus of this body of theory. We conclude by suggesting that these findings provide the basis for a more nuanced, contextualized understanding of whiteness as a social phenomenon.
White racial identity is central to whiteness studies. In order to further explore this key concept, this research uses new
national survey data to model determinants of white racial identity. This article analyzes how prejudice, views on diversity
and beliefs about America impact the importance of racial identity for whites. The data I use come from the American Mosaic
Project Survey, a nationally representative, telephone survey (N = 2,081). This research adds to previous work in whiteness
studies by using national survey data to measure and analyze white racial identity. This research also makes an important
methodological contribution to race relations research by bringing concepts from whiteness directly into the arena of large-scale
survey research. Finally, I discuss the duality of white racial identity in terms of its defensive and progressive components
and the implications of this duality for future research.
Since the beginning of the 1990s Joyce Carol Oates's fiction manifests increasing interest in the issues of race and ethnicity. Her novel Blonde (2000), a fictional depiction of Marilyn Monroe's life, reflects critically the construction of white self, and displays racialization as a complex dialogue between social practices and individual subject constitution. Inspired by critical whiteness studies and feminist theories of intersectionality, this article examines how Oates's novel represents effects of racialization to a white female identity and aims to decipher questions about power and discursive conceptions concerning ideas of race and gender. By giving emphasis to the concepts formation and interface in the US context and American literary tradition, the analysis shows how the construction of the protagonist's gendered and racialized identity is represented as a complex and anxiety-ridden negotiation. The representation of the protagonist's engagement with the white ideal highlights both her desires and anxieties about the idea of race. In so doing, Oates's novel elicits how racialization works both as defining and limiting to white female identity.
This study explores how preadolescents engaged in different interactional approaches to whiteness in racially distinct summer camps. Kids in the predominantly white and predominantly black contexts created peer cultures that differed in the following ways: (1) how they marked and defined whiteness, (2) how they made subject positions toward whiteness problematic, and (3) how they maintained different racial hegemonies. Mere numerical majority/minority relations, as well as differences in racial hegemony, caused kids to vary the meanings of whiteness, especially as the value of maintaining color-blind and color-aware orientations fluctuated. The findings suggest that the racial composition of a context may be key to encouraging recognition that white racial subjectivities are as subject to multiple interpretations, expressions, and embodiment as are racial subjectivities of color.
In this article we describe an educational leadership facultys collective efforts to improve its curriculum by examining meanings, implications, and challenges of sociocultural identity differences for its graduate programs in educational leadership. We employed a case study method to examine the process and interim effects of faculty engagement in a diversity across the curriculum project. This study was completed after the second academic year of a multiyear process. The analysis and interpretation of data revealed themes of identity privilege, silence relative to privilege, and organizational and curricular change. Implications and resulting recommendations derive from an analysis of the enabling and inhibiting factors involved in this curricular change process.1
I have never been particularly impressed with teacher education in the United States during its relatively short history.
Make no mistake, there have been moments of brilliance with John Dewey, George Counts, Harold Rugg, the countless other luminaries
that followed them, and the inspired teacher educators who operate with little appreciation in the contemporary era. At the
same time that I make a sweeping indictment of too much of what has passed as teacher education, I would say the same thing
about the history of American higher education in general. For many of the same reasons, teacher education and the liberal
arts and sciences have often failed to engage their students in a rigorous and complex education that prepares them for professional
and civic competence in a democratic society.
How do we explain the contradiction between the centrality of African-American culture in the U.S. and the simultaneous marginality
of African-American people in contemporary American society? Pursuing an answer to this question through my ethnographic work
on the Lindy Hop led to a radical rethinking of current approaches to cultural appropriation. This article serves as an intervention
into ethnographic research on race and ethnicity by synthesizing Wacquant's carnal sociology with hiscall for the formation
of an analytical theory of racial domination. This synthesis, in which theory and method work reciprocally, offers a new model
for undertaking research in the areas of race and ethnicity by which we are able to differentiate and dissect the material
and symbolic mechanisms that generate racial domination in particular historical contexts.
A âChoiceâ Outstanding Academic Title This groundbreaking study introduces and explores Lacanâs complex theories of subjectivity and desire through close readings of canonical childrenâs books such as Charlotteâs Web, Stellaluna, Holes, Tangerine, and The Chocolate War, providing an introduction to an increasingly influential body of difficult work while making the claim that childrenâs textual encounters are as significant as their existential ones in constituting their subjectivities and giving shape to their desires.
Over the past two decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have increasingly focused on « whiteness » as a new way of exploring race and racism in America. These two articles evaluate the way historians have approached the subject. The first article, originally published in the Journal of American History in 2002, examines the development of whiteness studies in the 1990s, and the second, which appears here for the first time, provides an update on more recent trends. The articles find considerable potential in whiteness studies, but also point to serious conceptual and methodological problems that deserve attention.
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