Critical Whiteness Studies in Teaching Practice

As tools that seek to explain and foster resistance to processes of racial domination, critical pedagogies of race and whiteness have long inhabited a diversity of learning spaces – from classrooms and free schools to homes and prisons. Within the academy, education scholars interested in critically analysing race have long sought to reframe dominant understandings of race that often work to essentialise race or claim a ‘colour-blind’ stance. They have insisted upon addressing what Joe Kincheloe has referred to as ‘power illiteracy’: the tendency amongst students and teachers to collapse power relations when assessing contemporary racial realities (Kincheloe 1999: 8). The pedagogical potential of critical whiteness lies in its capacity to challenge such ‘power illiteracy’. Indeed, at the heart of critical whiteness pedagogies is the study of racialised power, especially the ways whiteness gets reproduced, negotiated and resisted in historical and contemporary, local and global contexts. Students and educators of all ethnicities buy in and out of whiteness through different pedagogic practices; people are positioned in all sorts of relationships to white and black ethnicities. Thus, it is important to emphasise that a critical pedagogy of whiteness is not just about the creation of (white) anti-racist learners.

Attending to the highly contextual nature of whiteness means that critical whiteness pedagogy spans disciplines and operates from an intersectional framework. Whiteness is taken up as a point of departure in historical, sociological, cultural, political and literary studies, and it is also studied in relation to social policy, music, feminist and queer theory, and even STEMs. Increasingly, this pedagogy works from a transnational perspective that, as Zeus Leonardo says, works to ‘link knowledge of whiteness to global processes of (neo-)coloniziation’, for instance global debt peonage, structural adjustment policies, free trade agreements, and immigration restrictions (2002: 31)

While critical whiteness studies teaching practices may, and often do, prompt learners to rethink their own racial identities and relationships to processes of racialisation, such reflexivity is generally neither a starting nor finishing point. This isn’t to say that this pedagogy is unconcerned with the creation of anti-racist learners, but rather that, as with research into whiteness, the teaching of critical whiteness studies must transcend questions of identity (especially about white, anti-racist subjects) and incorporate multidimensional analyses of whiteness’s reproduction, negotiation and resistances. If it doesn’t, as Leonardo says, ‘racial understanding proceeds as the snail’s pace of the white imaginary’ (2004: 141).

References

Joe Kincheloe (1999), ‘The struggle to define and reinvent whiteness: a pedagogical analysis’ College Review 26 (Fall)

Zeus Leonardo (2002), ‘The souls of white folk: critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse’ Race, Ethnicity and Education 5(1): 29-50

Zeus Leonardo, (2004), ‘The color of supremacy: beyond the discourse of “white privilege”’ Educational Philosophy and Theory 36(2): 137-152