THINKING THROUGH A PEDAGOGY OF · THINKING THROUGH A PEDAGOGY OF ... a pedagogy of whiteness is a crucial piece to the puzzle of ... epistemological racism warrant a more concerted

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THINKING THROUGH A PEDAGOGY OF WHITENESS Kathy Hytten

Department of Educational Administration and Higher Education Southern Illinois University

Amee Adkins

Department of Educational Administration and Foundations Illinois State University

In the United States the student population grows increasingly diverse, the teaching force remains predominantly white, and achievement of minority students continues to lag significantly behind their white counterparts.' Given these con&- tions, teacher educators should rethink how we prepare future teachers to teach effectively in &verse settings. And yet, many of us are not so compelled. This stems, we think, from a belief that sufficiently good intentions ensure the expansion of educational opportunities to all students. That is, if we mean well in our efforts as teachers, we will do well by our students. For example, school mission statements may read, "All children can learn," but consistently the same kids do not; university presidents may proclaim, "We are committed to diversifying our faculty," and yet the rate of minority faculty attrition remains high. The consequences of our actions and choices as white educators matter more significantly than our intentions. We have begun to think differently about the educational experiences of minority children, but we have only begun. We need to continue thinking differently, and we need to do so in cooperation with people of color.

Currently, while most teachers seem to have laudable intentions, we continue to fail our diverse students at an alarming rate and in &verse ways2 We need to look beyond our intentions to examine more carefully our assumptions, beliefs, practices, and their actual effects, especially on nonwhite students. In our own efforts to sort through these issues as white professors at large, public, Midwestern universities, what we consistently could not see was the ways in which our whiteness distorts our intentions. Not only does whiteness, a construct we will explain carefully, affect the way we interpret educational issues in a diverse society, it also leads us to think we can confront the issues without necessarily including the voices of others. In other words, our whiteness assures us that we know what we are doing and we understand what needs to be done. Only after numerous conversations with our nonwhite colleagues, and through an exploration of the emergent literature on whiteness, were we able to see whiteness at the root of our intentions gone astray. Now we engage our

1. Digest of Educational Statistics, 1997, National Center for Educational Statistics <http://nces.ed.gov>; L. Scott Miller, An American Imperative: Accelerating Minority Educational Achievement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

2. Roy L. Brooks, Integration or Separation! A Strategyfor RacialEquality (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1994).

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Fall 2001 / Volume 51 / Number 4 0 2002 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois

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preservice teachers and ourselves in a pedagogy of whiteness. This pedagogy addresses two important questions: First, how can we disrupt the normativity of whiteness, and second, how can this disruption help us to address diversity issues in predominantly white education systems?

In this essay we theorize about the possibilities for a pedagogy of whiteness in teacher education. This pedagogy is based on a critique of whiteness that aims to expose the conceptual, discursive, and institutional effects of cultural dominance in public, pluralistic spheres. We begin by discussing how the literature on whiteness informs our thinking about pedagogy, disrupts a tendency to take whiteness for granted and as “nothing-in-particular,” and problematizes the invisibility of whiteness in social dynamics. Then we provide a description of the possibilities for engaging a pedagogy of whiteness with our students (who we assume to be unfamiliar with such social analysis). We frame these possibilities in four dimensions: establish- ing a critical climate in the classroom; presenting the critique of whiteness; facilitating student engagement; and providing pedagogical direction. We conclude this essay with suggestions for rethinking diversity education in ways that respond positively to the whiteness critique.

We do not use the construct pedagogy of whiteness lightly. The term conjures up a wide range of images, everything from the most extreme sense of white supremacist discourse, to an expression of what we already do in schools by way of transmitting the dominant culture, to the need to reconstruct a “positive white identity” as an alternative self-image in an antiracist project.3 It could also be read as something that excludes people of color, marginalizing their self-interests and concerns for a pluralistic democracy and self-determination, and once again rcinforc- ing the privileged status of “white as central.”

What we have in mind is significantly different. We use “pedagogy of whiteness” to reflect our use of the critique of whiteness aspart of our curriculum in foundations of education courses. Working in university settings where the education students are predominantly white, a pedagogy of whiteness is a crucial piece to the puzzle of re-forging the relation between school and society. It is not the sole focus of our educational foundations classes, nor is it the most important aspect among others that ask our students to question the purposes and functions of schoolingin a diverse and democratic society. However, a pedagogy of whiteness is a crucial and necessary element in teacher education when we realize that we are preparing students to become the teachers of other people’s children.

3.HenryGiroux, Channe1Surfing:RaceTalk and theDestruction of Today’s Youth [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

KATHY HYTTEN is an Associate Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Administration and Higher Education, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901 -4606. Her primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education, social theory, and cultural studies.

AMEE ADKINS is an Assistant Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations, Illinois State University, Campus Box 5900, Normal, IL 61790. Her primary areas of scholarship are educational policy, equity, and social justice.

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We also need to consider the appropriateness of a pedagogy of whiteness for our students of color, despite the fact that we both teach in predominantly white universities. Many of these students express to us that they find value in observing their peers engaged in a different form of discourse about diversity issues. They have hope for the institution of education when they see that the “official curriculum” of professional schools draws explicit attention to the historic dominance of whiteness and its role in the educational experiences of students of color. Others we find have invested themselves somewhat in the whiteness of institutions and social practices, because they have learned to negotiate them successfully. For them, institutional and social analyses of whiteness allow them to analyze their own taken-for-granteds critically and to resurrect their own experiences of learning the culture of power.

Before reviewing more carefully the critique presented in whiteness studies, we offer a brief explanation of how we position the notion of whiteness in this discussion. We work from an understanding of whiteness not as substantive (lendmg itself to a booth at a multicultural food fair), but as conceptual (lending itself to discussions of systems of privilege, cultural capital, and dominant interests). We do not use whiteness in the way of an essentialized identity that all white people have internalized, but as widely circulating discursive forms that contribute to, but do not constitute, people’s identities and experiences in society and its institution^.^ Admittedly, this is simply one of many approaches to studying issues of power, domination, and reproduction relative to gender, sexual orientation, class, and ability, as well as race. There may be some good reasons not to overemphasize the term “whiteness” because the term mayreify the emphasis on race andobscure other matters of privilege and power. And yet, “whiteness” offers a symbolically efficient way to name a constellation of social forces and cultural practices that systematically impose and reinforce the dominant culture in our institutions. Furthermore, using the term pushes the matter of white racism to the forefront. While other forms of privilege and oppression concern us (and affect us), systemic, structural, and epistemological racism warrant a more concerted attack in teacher education, precisely because of the imbalance of representation between teachers and students overall.

Working from an understanding of whiteness as conceptual and not essential opens another critical distinction, namely the need to emphasize the institutionalized effects of whiteness that disenfranchise some and privilege others, rather than personal expressions of racism that devalue people of color. Prevailing public (dominant) dscourse frames racism as an individualistic phenomenon, which suggests that if we want to eliminate racism, we must find ways to persuade people to think about all people in equal terms. Alternatively, our use of whiteness emphasizes how the imprint of whiteness permeates social structures, public discourses, and institutions and thus systemically conveys racist effects. This perspective leads us to a different mandate: if we want to eliminate racism, it is not

4. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” inMichel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfuss and Paul Rabinow [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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that we must {only) think differently about people, but, more important, we must also think differently about institutional configurations and discourses, how they convey white privilege, and how they can be reconfigured. Institutions, of course, do not exist in the absence of people within them. So in the arena of education, the institutional and social dimensions of ”white teacher/minority student” relations are what come into focus.

Historically, explanations of unequal educational outcomes among minority students relied on notions of innate (inlability, cultural deficit, and cultural difference. This represents the strong tradition within educational research, influenced by educational psychology, to focus on the learner and to identify patterns among learners that explain why they do not achieve at “normal“ levels. This approach continually locates the problem within the child, even while attributing the problem to cultural ”factors.” From this view, we ”blame the victim” as we re-state the problem in terms of what the child brings to sch001.~

Whiteness, as conceptual, discursive, and institutionalized, shifts our attention to the institution’s contribution to unequal levels of achievement among diverse students in what William Ryan characterizes as culturally deprived schools, schools that lack sufficient multicultural richness to embrace and support the variety of children they are meant to serve.6 From this perspective, the locus of the problem changes: it is not what children bring to school, but how school is prepared to receive and to educate them. Such a view would be a more appropriate way to capture the problem. After all, as a society we compel children to attend school. It is therefore incumbent upon our institutions and those of us who work within them to accommodate all children. Yet, reading the status quo of schooling, we seem to expect children to conform to institutional practices, or, worse, we privilege some and fail others based on what they bring to the institution. When whiteness remains invisible, all of our efforts to support the achievement of minority students are focusedon what we can do “for them” and we ignore what we, as white teachers, need to do ourselves.

A pedagogy of whiteness aims to disrupt educational practices that “blame the victim.” It speaks directly to future teachers’ concepts of themselves as powerful social agents in education. Whiteness, or white culture, is a crucial gap in our understanding of cultural relations because it “makes itself invisible precisely by asserting its normalcy, its transparen~y.”~ As a “system of unearned privilege,” whiteness accounts for unequal power relations and differential access to material and cultural resources.sAlthough whiteness seems invisible, its influence on social

5. William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage Books, 1976).

6. Ibid.

7. Ruth Frankenburg, “Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997),4.

8. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspon- dences Through Work in Women‘s Studies,“ in Readings in Sociocultural Studies in Education, 2d ed., ed. Kate Rousmaniere (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995).


relations, including those in schools, is not diminished; indeed, it is enhanced. A pedagogy of whiteness thus aims at exposing, studying, and disrupting the culture of power as the first step in conceptualizing educational and social practices that are empowering for all people.

INTERPRETATIONS OF WHITENESS

Typically, when we talk about race issues in education, and multiculturalism in general, we frame our discussions in terms of ”others,” “differences,” or those on the “margins.” We talk about adding more voices of “people of color” to the Western canon, and of being more representative of diverse experiences. Yet there is a dimension to multicultural studies that has only recently been attended to: what it means to be part of the dominant culture, namely, white. In the last decade, whiteness studies, both within social theory broadly defined and within education specifically, have exploded on to the academic scene. We draw from two broad moves demonstrated in this scholarship: characterizing how we take our whiteness for granted and using critique to disrupt our assumptions and problematize the unjust effect of whiteness in social relations.

An interpretation of whiteness depends upon an initial project of defining the phenomenon in question, andin this case, as in most, perspective is everything. From within the construct, on its own taken-for-granted terms, whiteness is nothing in particular, an unmarked category, an empty set. It is, indeed, a meaningless distinc- tionj as such, it does not merit critical inquiry at all. As white people, we do not see “whiteness” as a significant construct. However, some theorists have persisted despite white people’s claims about their whiteness-as-nothing and they argue that such claims themselves represent a “strategic rhetoric” that demands critical a t t e n t i ~ n . ~ Here, then, we synthesize these scholars’ efforts to describe and critique whiteness external to its own assumptions.

The central impetus for the development of whiteness studies has come from nonwhite scholars, most notably feminist and postcolonialist writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, and Gayatri Spivak. They have called for white people to locate themselves within structures of privilege and to shift perspectives from naive notions of pluralism to understanding the ways in which unacknowledged white supremacy inhibits any authentic project for diversity. Such scholars claim we whites avoid identifying ourselves as racial beings. We insist on racially marking others, and yet we demarcate our white selves only through a process of elimination (for example, “white-non-Hispanic” ).Io Our category goes unmarked, except in negative opposition (not-X), and thus we construct for ourselves the distinction of ”that which is not exclusively anything else.” We achieve the status of lowest common denominator, which is a paradoxical distinction, for while it is reductive, it enables us to proclaim as “human” and “universal” what these authors name as

9. Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 291-309.

10. Nakayama and Krizek, ”Whiteness.”

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“white.” We position our whiteness as the natural or normal state, synonymous with humanness. This positioning has significant consequences, particularly f or people of color. Anzaldua argues, “whites not naming themselves white presume their universality; an unmarked race is a sign of Racism unaware of itself, a ‘blanked-out’ Racisrn.“’l While people from the dominant culture often presume universality for certain ideas and assumptions, “most of the time when ’universal’ is used, it is just a euphemism for ‘white’: white themes, white significance, white

We could interpret this subtle association of whiteness as humanness through the postmodem critique of essentialism and find a way to dismiss this association; that, however, would divert us from an even more useful interpretation, whiteness as normative, which allows us to see how we not only privilege the white experience but seek to expand the franchise to it. Russell Ferguson describes whiteness as ”the invisible center” that “defines the tacit standards from which specific others can then be declared to deviate.”I3 This tendency reinforces our concern about a deficit- model of education that explains student failure in terms of what students lack when juxtaposed against a “normal” (white, middle-class) child. Richard Dyer extends this interpretation:

white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other people’s; white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail.”14

While he acknowledges that this seeing of others through white lenses is not done maliciously, or even often consciously, this does not obviate its effects.

This is an admittedly facile description of “whiteness,” but three points are useful. First, absent critical scrutiny we construct whiteness as “nothing-in-particular” and thereby prematurely evade our own pivotal role in the construction of the “problem” of diversity. Second, critique enables a new way of thinking about and conceptualizing whiteness that reveals the following characteristics. We take our whiteness to be: (a) a category that is nonracial, unmarked, and unnamed; (b) a paradoxical status of both reductive humanness and universalizable model; and (c) a normative ideal that occupies an invisible center. Third, our own strategic rhetoric effaces the privileges that accrue to our whiteness. It is precisely that circumstance that warrants critical intervention, even though it is itself the mechanism that masks the imperative.

A small but growing number of educational theorists have begun this critical intervention into whiteness. In part, these scholars shift the multicultural gaze from

11. Gloria Anzaldua, “Hacienda Caras, Una Entrada,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Hacienda Caras, Creative and Critical Perspective.v by Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990), xxi. 12. Merle Woo, “Letter to Ma,“ in This Bridge CalledMy Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua [Watertown: Persephone Press, 1984), 144. 13. Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Out Tnere: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 19901, 9. 14. Richard Dyer, White [London: Routledge, 1997), 9.

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studying others to looking at the ways in which the dominant culture, in effect, creates the category of “other.” Their work critically addresses the meaning of whiteness and its role in perpetuating inequalities. Peggy McIntosh asks us to understand white privilege so that we can dismantle it in order to bring about more equitable social relation^.'^ Peter McLaren calls for decentering whiteness as part of a transformative politics of difference.I6 Michelle Fine argues for a shift in focus from the inequities that beset nonwhites to the merits associated with whiteness.” Christine Sleeter highlights the importance of critical self-reflection in breaking white silence about white racism.l6 These approaches go beyond merely describing the form of whiteness to using critique to disrupt and problematize its assumptions. Here whiteness studies provide accounts of the construct that lend themselves to transformative practice. Not only is whiteness no longer nothing in particular; more important, whiteness is no longer something to be ignored in the search for social justice. It becomes, rather, something to be acted upon.

Whiteness studies as critique primarily illustrate that contrary to conventional understandings, whiteness is meaningful. Rather than an existential absence, it is an extremely powerful, yet unacknowledged, presence in both the lived experiences of white people and people of color. Being white in this society influences our perspective. Our worldview is culturally embedded; there is no such thing as a universal way of knowing or being. To presume universality belies a racist ideology, a (white) system of ideas that is “pure,” while dismissing alternative systems as partial, imperfect, or biased. This critical interpretation of whiteness facilitates an opportunity to go beyond narrow notions of racism as Klan-ish activity and individual prejudice. Whiteness must be studied, named, and marked so as to uproot it from its position of normativity and centrality. Only then can we conceptualize diversity in ways that are not assimilationist or merely additive, but instead aim to dismantle social practices and structures that perpetuate white privilege and white racism. Thus, within these interpretations of whiteness is our charge as educators.

A PEDAGOGY OF WHITENESS

As discussed, studies of whiteness as institutionalized privilege and normalized status provide the substance of a critique that traces the roots of white dominance in society. Understanding that critique could prove powerful as a way of challenging the dispositions of educators. Traditionally teacher education hsposes educators to identify problems within the learner and equip them with strategies to address those problems. From the perspective of institutional and social relations, however, one can see that the educator contributes to the “problem.” Teacher education, therefore, must recognize and deal with this problematic. What is lacking in the area of

15. McIntosh, “White Privilege, Male Privilege.” 16. Peter McLaren, “Decentering Whiteness: In Search of a Revolutionary Multiculturalism, ” Multicultural Education 5 (1997): 4-11.

17. Michelle Fine, “Witnessing Whiteness,” in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1996). 18. Christine E. Sleeter, Multicultural Education as Social Activism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).

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critical studies of whiteness, however, is a discussion of how to theorize pedagogically about the insights the field offers and, more important, an end to which such theorizing is aimed. A pedagogy of whiteness is fundamental to constructing a new disposition for educators, one that will enable them to be more effective in diverse classrooms.

Our notion of a pedagogy of whiteness parallels Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg’s, although we focus more heavily on particular classroom dynamics and goals as white instructors working with preservice teachers.I9 We concur with them that a pedagogy of whiteness involves examining the social forces that shape white identity, helping students make sense of whiteness as a social construction, and denaturalizing whiteness. We too recognize the importance of supporting students in the transition that occurs when they begin to’realize the power of whiteness and attempt to act in more positive, less racist ways. Where we take our pedagogy in a different direction is in discussing more explicit ways in which we engage the whiteness critique with our students, both how and why. Here we offer a preliminary response to John Warren’s concern that while much of the research in whiteness studies deals with identifying white privilege, it does not go further in identifying how this understanding can be used to create more equitable and just educational practices.20 Within a pedagogy of whiteness, we aim at cultivating in ourselves and in our students a new disposition toward their white positionality and toward diversity issues more broadly. Theoretically, we ask them to uncover and disrupt the normative power of whiteness so as to open up space for dialogue and collaboration across differences.

The potential for the idea of a new disposition is great, but actualizing it is challenging. A pedagogy of whiteness requires scholars, teacher educators, and teachers to unpack deeply embedded cultural assumptions about our identities - it demands that we come to see ourselves as “white” and to see the unearnedprivileges that accrue to that identity. Critically investigating our practices in schools, we begin to see that what is meaningful is white, and what is irrelevant is nonwhite. The stories we tell in school are white (Columbus discovered America, and the Explorers tamed the savages); the practices we abidc by and transmit are white (individual achievement, success through competition; knowledge as rational, scientific, and objective); and the students who do well are -white. Little wonder that disparities among diverse students persist. Two key questions remain: How can we transform a dominantly white institution into one that reflects and supports diversity, and how can a better understanding of whiteness as a system of privilege and a construct of social relations help in that transformation?

The insights born out of whiteness literature and research represent strategic objectives for a pedagogy of whiteness. The notion of “strategic” is important here,

19. Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg, “Addressing the Crisis of Whiteness: Reconfiguring White Identity in a Pedagogy of Whiteness,” in White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, ed. Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ronald E. Chennault (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

20. John Warren, “Whiteness and Cultural Theory: Perspectives on Research and Education,” The Urban Review31 (1999): 185-203.

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both as a means toward the larger goal of better serving all children and as it implies careful attention to our pedagogical tactics as we advance both the objectives and the goal. Ultimately, through a pedagogy of whiteness, we hope to help our students make whiteness visible so that together we can critique andproblematize it, and then use our altered understandings to address social inequities better and to attack white supremacy and racism.

A pedagogy of whiteness is consistent with McLaren’s insight that “we cannot will our racist logics away .... We need to work hard to eradicate them. We need to struggle with aformidableresolve in order to overcome what we are afraid to confirm exists, let alone confront it.”z1 This is why our concern for strategies to introduce these matters is so pressing. In teacher education we need to confront racist logics effectively in a way that contributes to preservice educators’ sense of efficacy among diversity. We need to engage the substance and structures of whiteness as cultural and social constructs: make whiteness utterly visible; subject it to sustained critique; and learn new strategies for recognizing, dealing with, and discussing it. To that end, we begin with a particular theoretical conception of dialogic education that informs our pedagogy of whiteness. We draw from both the critical pedagogy literature that calls for the importance of interaction andvoice in the classroom, and from feminist and post structuralist insights that problematize our ability to dialogue effectively across difference. We concur with Paulo Freire that authentic learning can occur only through interest, reflection, problem posing, and dialogue. It is dehuman- izing simply to deposit information into students: to tell them how to think and what to believe. Underscoring the importance of dialogue, Freire writes, “knowledge emerges only through invention, and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”22 Through dialogue, individuals can name, act upon, and transform their worlds. They also can learn to listen more effectively and understand aspects of other’s worlds.

Dialogue is critical to disrupting the normative power of whiteness because in order to see our own worlds differently, we must learn to listen to others and to some extent, see ourselves through others’ eyes. Nicholas Burbules and Suzanne Rice argue that the very process of dialogue helps us to develop such virtues as “tolerance, patience, and a willingness to listen.”23 The open posture of dialogue acknowledges that knowledge is not fixed (we as instructors do not have all the answers), that we always learn from each other, and that the classroom is a space for possibility. One important caveat is that we do not romanticize dialogue as, in and of itself, idealistic, or as leading to consensus, or mutual understanding. As Elizabeth Ellsworth, Alison Jones, and Burbules have all pointed out, even dialogue that aims at criticalness and

21. McLaren, “Decentering Whiteness,’’ 259

22. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition [New York: Continuum, 20001, 72.

23. Nicholas C. Burbules and Suzanne Rce, ”Dialogue Across Differences: Continuing the Conversation,” in Foundational Perspectives in Multicultural Education, ed. Eduardo Manuel Duarte and Stacy Smith [New York: Longman, 2000), 261.

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inclusion often alienates some people and reproduces the very norms that are being challenged.% Yet we also agree with Burbules that while the paradoxes and impos- sibilities of dialogue make it a more difficult process, it is nonetheless a worthwhile endeavor.25 Thus, dialogue is an important aspect of our pedagogy of whiteness, which we frame in terms of the following dimensions: climate, critique, engagement, and direction.

CLIMATE

Theorizing pedagogically about whiteness requires us to think carefully about classroom climate. We recognize that as it questions the dominant culture, the whiteness literature poses an inherent risk of alienating the audience to which it is most pertinent: white students. Learning about one’s own privilege can inspire a paralyzing sense of guilt or a powerful resistance. We anticipate our students will have these responses, and thus we aim to cultivate a particular classroom climate, one that recognizes the importance of both learning and unlearning, that asks students to see the value and potential in doubt and confusion, and that gives them a sense of purpose or reason for engaging the critique. For our students, this purpose is most apparent in the fact that they might well find themselves teaching in diverse classrooms. They do, indeed, have the best of intentions for their work with their students, but they do not fully understand the context in which they might find themselves. Ultimately, the question comes down to this: How can you know that you understand what is necessary to teach other people’s children? In class, it becomes a moral question that none can take lightly.

At first gloss, it seems to be a daunting question, but we provide our students with a frame to work within that sees learning as an ongoing process that is often discomforting. Our classes ought to be sites of engagement in the mutual, dialogic, construction of knowledge. As instructors we acknowledge the difficulty of the issues we are discussing and identify our own struggles to come to see meaning in whiteness; we share with them our own doubts and confusions. We try to establish an open climate in the classroom, built upon a pedagogy of questions. This type of pedagogy is premised upon the belief that “the condition of doubt itself contains educational potential.”26 Only when we are confused, or have aproblem, do wereally think and rethink that which we thought we knew. Strategically, this necessitates that we as instructors avoid presenting critiques of whiteness too didactically, asserting our perspectives too quickly, or expecting students to tell us what they think we want to hear. We share with our students that we are engaging in the process

24. See Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,” HarvardEducational Review59 j1989):297-324; Alison Jones, “The Limits of Cross- Cultural Dialogue: Pedagogy, Desire, and Absolution in the Classroom,” Educational Theory 49 ( 1999): 299-316; Nicholas C. Burbules, “The Limits of Dialogue as a Critical Pedagogy,” in Revolutionary Pedagogies: Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, ed. Peter Pericles Trifonas (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2000): 251-73. 25. Burbules, “The Limits of Dialogue as a Critical Pedagogy.”

26. Nicholas C. Burbules, “Aporias, Webs, and Passages: Doubt as an Opportunity to Learn,” Curriculum Inquiry30 (2000): 183.


with them and that there are no easy or essential answers for how to address whiteness in schools and classrooms.

Constructing a pedagogy of questions and a climate that sees value in confusion requires that we help students to think about classroom learning in much more active ways than are typical. It entails talking about risk, vulnerability, unlearning, and possibly even crisis. Kevin Kumashiro argues, “the desire to learn must involve a desire to unlearn, a desire to return to what has already been learned, not to repeat or relearn it, but to unlearn it, to understand it in a different way, and to work through the resulting ~risis.”~’Here Ann Diller’s notion of becoming a philosopher of one’s own education is usefuLZ8 She argues that in order for students to make education their own, they must cultivate three capacities or characteristics. The first two of these are the ability to look at ideas from both a distance and from different angles. In studying whiteness, this means not getting caught up in its taken-for-grantedness and seriously considering other perspectives or angles for viewing whiteness, especially those of scholars of color. Her third characteristic is what she calls the “capacity to be torpefied.” By this she means “the ability to be awed, to be surprised, to be astonished, to be moved in a deeply moral, or ethical, or aesthetic, or epistemological, or ontological way. It takes considerable courage, self-knowledge, a brave heart, and honest openness to face one‘s own ignorance and to stay present in the concomitant experiences of dis~omfout.”~9While there is no recipe for creating a climate in the classroom that is encouraging, multiperspectival, and allowing for the kind of openness to change that Diller highlights, at the very least talking explicitly with students about these climate issues is a place to start. CRITIQUE

Given that whiteness is felt by our students as invisibility and norm, and is equated simply with humanness, we present to them the possibility that whiteness is something, and it is meaningful: we ask them to engage the whiteness critique. We build on the notion of differences as relational, and whiteness as the norm against which the “other” gets defined. Throughunderstanding the content of the whiteness critique we can better uncover our own fundamental assumptions about the world - the starting place for white teachers to consider diversity issues differently. Uncovering and problematizing one’s own assumptions involves a shift in perspective, attitude, and disposition toward thinking about oneself and others. This shift calls for those of us who are white to examine what it means to be white, and to acknowledge that it is a significant social location, one marked by power and privilege. Fine refers to this shift in terms of repositioning OUT focus from surveilling others to looking at our dominant social and cultural institutions and ourselves. She writes, “I avert my gaze from the ‘inequities’ produced through ’colors’.. .and turn,

27. Kevin K. Kumashiro, “Teaching and Learning through Desire, Crisis, and Difference: Perverted Reflections on Anti-Oppressive Education,” Radical Teacher 58 [ZOOO): 7. 28. Ann Diller, “Facing the Torpedo Fish Becoming a Philosopher of One’s Own Education,” Philosophy of Education 1998, ed. Steven Tozer [Urbana, Ill.: Philosophy of Education Society, 1999), 1-9.

29. Ibid., 8.

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instead, to the ‘merit’ that accumulates within the hue of ‘whitene~s.”’~~ The precipitant to this shift in understanding is a recognition that white people in this society are systematically privileged, and enjoy “unearned race advantage and conferred d ~ m i n a n c e . ” ~ ~ McIntosh describes this “white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, about which1 was ‘meant’ to remain o b l i v i o ~ s . ” ~ ~ The problem with white privilege is that white people are taught not to see it; instead we think that social privilege andpositionality are based solely on merit and earned superiority. By uncovering unearned forms of privilege that coalesce around white skin, we can begin to dismantle social structures and institutions that perpetuate these privileges for white people and at the same time disempower minorities.

Part of explicitly teaching the content of the whiteness critique is helping students to move beyond viewing racism as an act perpetuated primarily by individuals to seeing it as something embedded within institutions and social systems. Here we ask them to think structurally and systematically, not simply inhvidually. The consequence of viewing issues of discrimination on the level of individual behavior is that attention is deflected away from the systematic and institutional ways in which whiteness is ~r iv i leged .~~ This problematically removes non-overtly racist individuals from feeling any responsibility for addressing diversity issues since they do not see their role in larger discriminatory practices. At the same time, this type of thinking calls for solutions to racism that attempt to fix individuals, yet leave discriminatory systems intact.

With our students, we explore racism at the more systematic and institutional level, and look at how “institutions and organizations, including educational ones, have standard operating procedures (intended or unintended) that hurt members of one or more races in relation to members of the dominant ra~e.”~~Additionally, we look at the role of collective experience in understanding racism, exploring how taken together, minorities fairly consistently experience discrimination in schools, even though not every single individual does. This is a lesson learned in part from Lisa Delpit, who looks at the collective experience of minority educators in relation to discussions about pedagogy, suggesting that systematically, “nonwhite respon- dents have spoken passionately about being left out of the dialogue about how best to educate children of C O ~ O ~ . ” ~ ~

30. Fine, “Witnessing Whiteness,” 57. 31. McIntosh, “White Privilege, Male Privilege,” 193.

32. hid. , 190.

33. James J. Scheurich, “Toward a White Discourse on White Racism,” Educational Researcher 22 (1993): 5-10.

34. James J. Scheurich and MichelleD. Young, “Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased? Educational Researcher 26 ( 1997): 5.

35. Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: The New Press, 19951, 23.


ENGAGEMENT

Along with the challenge of making elusive whiteness visible goes the challenge of facilitating our students’ engagement with whiteness, and particularly its mani- festation in unintended, unrecognized, and yet profoundly effective white racism. This is where work in the study of whiteness is particularly lacking. It is one thing, and we do not mean to discount it, to map out the contours of whiteness as cultural and social practice, but that work is already fairly extensive. It is another thing altogether to develop strategies for engaging preservice teachers in the implications of that practice. Just as whiteness makes itself invisible when we try to see it, other mechanisms of whiteness, especially privilege and ”rationality” come into play to derail the discussion. As we construct pedagogical strategies we have to reckon with the reality that the same privilege that gives our white students unearned advantages in society also allows them to choose to disengage from the conversation. Thus, a third element of a pedagogy of whiteness is facilitating dialogue about and across difference. In part, this involves anticipating the types of responses our students are likely to have to the presentation of the content of the whiteness critique, and devising strategies to respond to them effectively. Here we find it useful to assume a posture of sympathetic understanding, to share with students our stories of coming to understand diversity issues differently, to teach them to recognize and challenge white talk, and to structure their interactions and engagements with diversity issues in particular ways.

Perhaps the biggest barriers we face when teaching issues of diversity from a whiteness frame are resistance and disengagement. This is not surprising, as teaching about privilege is bound to make privileged people uncomfortable, especially when they think their status in society has been solely won through their merit. One key aspect of white privilege is the ability to ignore or avoid contentious discussions about race. In her study of white teachers, McIntyre describes how white people exercise a form of “privileged choice” when it comes to dealing or not dealing with race issues.36 That is, they have the power to choose not to do something about racism. We find the same attitude in our students, who complain that we talk about race too much (‘We’ve already done racism!”], and that these issues are just not that relevant in our overwhelmingly white contexts (“There are no minorities in my school.”). Dismayed by this response in the students she studied, McIntyre asserts, “racism is a form of injustice and that we, as white educators, must redress that injustice whether it’s convenient for us to do so or In trying to get students to this understanding of race issues, we feel it is important to start on their level and remember that for most, this shift in thinking is foreign, especially given that from within the dominant culture we have been taught not to see white privilege but to believe in meritocracy. As white teacher educators attempting to reach our students, we try to start with sympathetic understanding, recognizing that our dispositions

36. Alice McIntyre, Making Meaning of Whiteness: Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers (Albany: SUNY Press, 19971, 55.

37. hid.. 55.

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towards issues of diversity used to be similar to theirs. We reflect on, learn from, and talk about how we came to think differently and the experiences that led up to our shifts in thinking. As white teachers, it is our job to provide whitepreservice teachers with multiple lenses for seeing the world, without too quickly and easily chastising them for their lack of understanding or their resistance.

The real dilemma of white privilege is that we whites can choose to ignore it. As we conceive how to raise issues of white privilege and racism, we have to consider how we can do so and sustain student participation. To take the radical, critical, moral high ground, in our experience, is counter-productive among white audiences. It causes them to resist, to shut down, and to turn hostile. Any of those three reactions equals ”disengaging” the question. One of our concerns with the whiteness literature is that scholars working in this area imply but do not reveal their own understandings with regards to whiteness, privilege, and racism. Any of us working in this area must recognize the extreme difficulty of coming to see whiteness -not to celebrate our accomplishments of doing the difficult, but to represent the cognitive struggle it requires in order to offer a model for our students. In asking preservice teachers to make the role and power of whiteness in schools and society explicit, we are asking them to Qg deeply into their taken-for-granted cultural experiences, and ultimately, be open to the possibility that their beliefs may change. As teacher educators, we need to remember that this is an arduous process of “making the familiar strange” when as white people, we tend not to even recognize our whiteness as existent, much less familiar.

Uncovering and challenging “white talk” is a useful way to begin to make the familiar strange to our white students. McIntyre characterizes white talk well, suggesting that it is ”talk that serves to insulate white people from examining their/ our individual and collective role(s) in the perpetuation of racism.”38 Aspects of white talk include talking about racism as a thing of the past (“my parents were racist but Ifm not”), perpetuating the view that racism is solely an individual act, dismissing arguments that differ from our own dominant cultural experiences, controlling discussions about racism or choosing not to engage in them, appealing to ”exception to the rule” stories of minorities who defy the odds, and turning the problem on to people of color (“they are distancing themselves from white In our classes, we feel it is important that students begin to recognize white talk when it occurs, either by us or by their classmates, and to point it out and challenge it. As teacher education instructors, we try to attend to our own whiteness and concur- rently, our role in systems of privilege, heeding Sleeter’s warning of our tendency to “semantically evade our own role in perpetuating white racism by constructing sentences that allow us to talk about racism while removing ourselves from dis~ussion.”~~ Modeling this behavior for our students is an important aspect of facilitating their engagement with whiteness.

38. Ibid., 45.

39. Ibid., 45-78.

40. Sleeter, Multicultural Education as Social Activism, 148.


One of the most formidable challenges our students face as they engage the whiteness critique is actually their will to dismiss it. The problem is not that it cannot be dismissed, rather that the students try to do so prematurely. For example, when reading Delpit’s chapter on “The Silenced Dialogue,” students want either to stop reading on the first page because she offends them or they want to argue the merit of the racist experiences she claims to r e p r e ~ e n t . ~ ~ Here we need to find ways to structure dialogue and discussion more carefully. While there is no formula for doing this, the important thing is to sustain student engagement. In more diverse classes, this may mean breaking the class into working groups that coalesce around interests or identities, and perhaps even separating white and not white students for discussion, as Jones found so In our predominately white, and relatively small classes, this is not typically feasible. Yet we can ask students to assume particular postures in the classroom and to work through these postures. For example, Burbules and Rice talk about the usefulness of the ”believing game,” which “involves taking the attitude that we stand to learn form what another has to say, and that we should grant the other’s claims a provisional plausibility simply based on the fact that those claims are sincerely held.’f43 Using a parallel strategy with Delpit, we ask students, “For the next 45 minutes, pretend everything she says is true, and everything she says you have to do, you do,” and respond from that stance. This helps them carefully and thoughtfully assume a position that they may not hold, without feeling that their own beliefs are being challenged in ways that result in disengagement. After the promised amount of time, the “rules” are suspended, and they have an opportunity to revisit their original critique. Most of the time their initial resistance is resolved, as they more clearly understand what Delpit advocates. The fact is, they realize they have resisted her tone, not her recommendations. This becomes apowerful illustration of the consequences of whiteness in our institutions. This waiting to critique often tempers emotional responses and results in more genuine questions (as opposed to quick Ismissal) when we reopen the floor to critique.

Equally important in facilitating engagement is appreciating the level of insight our students manage to achieve in the course of a semester, rather than criticizing them for the progress they do not make. It is important to d~scuss the limits of their understandmg, and they seem to get that what they accomplish is not enough, not nearly enough. Nevertheless, this is difficult work they are engaging in, and we want to recognize their efforts. Acknowledging the challenge of this work provides another reason for calling for white teachers to provide more autobiographical accounts of their own coming to understanding. Again, it owes to the difficulty of uncovering and confronting our deeply taken-for-granted assumptions, but it is also a potentially useful pedagogical tool. We are, after all, asking students to reckon with that which they probably never knew existed. And we are assuming that this

41. Delpit, Other People’s Children.

42. Jones, “Limits of Cross-Cultural Dialogue.”

43. Burbules and Rice, “Dialogue Across Diffcrences.’’

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reckoning might radically transform their understanding of themselves and their work as teachers. That equals risk, and once again, because of their privileged status, this is a risk they can easily choose not to take. Couple the option to withdraw with the difficulty of the task, and, it seems to us, an important component of this aspect of the pedagogy of whiteness is a set of exemplars of white people who can share their experience of coming to see these issues, their own whiteness, and the implications both have for practice. DIRECTION

Presuming we can overcome students’ resistance to the whiteness critique, and moreover, get them to cognitively and affectively engage this critique, a pedagogy of whiteness must also provide some constructive direction for using this critique to help develop and sustain more socially just educational practices. It is essential that our students recognize that understanding how whiteness problematically makes its presence felt is by no means sufficient in and of itself. Rather, it is only a first step in truly engaging diversity issues. Only when we, as white teachers understand the “power“ of whiteness can we begin to practice arresting it and, in turn, engage in constructive dialogue with nonwhj tes about creating educational practices that serve all of our students. We agree with Delpit that teaching “other people’s children” is best conceived as the result of dialogue and collaborative work with those “other people.” Educational experiences that are appropriate and effective for children of color ”can only be devised in consultation with adults who share their culture.. ..Good liberal intentions are not enough.”44 As members of the dominant culture, we cannot construct socially just educational practices alone; it is arrogant and preposterous to assume we can. What we can do, however, is recognize our “culturally clouded visions,” and begin to remove our white blinders, so that we can then learn how to work better with people who are different than us. Pedagogically, we can help our students to do this as well.

This aspect in a pedagogy of whiteness thus involves helping our students to recognize directions for ongoing work. Perhaps the most crucial starting task here is to learn to listen more carefully and more openly to the voices of nonwhites: scholars, teachers, parents, community members, and students. While we start discussions of diversity in our classes with readings on whiteness, works by minority scholars are necessarily positioned prominently. Reading these within a frame drawn from whiteness studies allows students both to listen more carefully, and listen for what minority scholars are saying specifically to white teachers. While far from ideal, it provides a context for proximate “dialogue” with nonwhites in predominately, if not exclusively, white teacher education classrooms. Delpit implores white educators to listen, hear, and to not speak for all people, especially when it comes to educating minority children and understanding their experiences in schools. Her admonition to “keep the perspective that people are experts on their own lives” is an important warning for us to not dismiss what minority children, families, and educators are telling us. It is also a call for us to “learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our world to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves into

44. Delpit, Other People’s Children, 45.


our consciousness.”45 Part of listening more openly is resisting the urge to diagnose perceived educational problems without first considering that the problem may be us. If we did this in schools, it would shift our focus away from constantly identifying deficits in children, to considering the ways in which we as teachers are deficient in providing quality educational experiences for all children. Another part of listening more openly is being quiet more when minorities are talking about their perceptions and experiences, and not attempting to speak for them.

Teaching white preservice and practicing teachers how to listen and learn from others is only the first step on the path towards disrupting the current pattern of failing in the education of nonwhite children. So, too, is teaching educators how and when to be quiet and humble. A pedagogy of whiteness gives us a viable alternative to the current practice in schools of correlating failure with cultural deficiency, and opens up transformative possibilities.

REFRAMING DIVERSITY EDUCATION

The remaining question is how these ideas for a pedagogy of whiteness can benefit the children of color who are subject to white teachers, given the prevailing demographics of schools. This, clearly, is the most important question and the one that legitimates any others raised in this essay. The dominance of white teachers among the public school teaching force is not likely to diminish significantly in the foreseeable future. As such, teacher education must face head-on the options to recognize and work to ameliorate the consequences of the forces of whiteness within institution^.^^ One of the most immediate ways to interrupt these forces is to radically redefine our definition of the locus of “problem” from student (of color] to us (as white teachers). Along with, or short of, diversifying the teaching force in our public schools, the best answer we have right now for how a study of whiteness can promote the achievement of students of color is the following, sad, expectation: perhaps we can stop ourselves from doing further harm, even if we cannot yet describe the good we might do. Such a statement is to recognize our own humility and fallibility in trying to serve “other people’s ~hildren.”~‘ Perhaps this is a way to recognize our tendency to underestimate the complexity of teaching among diversity and to overestimate our ability to “fix problems.” The hubris of whiteness keeps us from seeing ourselves as the problem.

Yet we feel a pedagogy of whiteness is an important overlooked dimension to the current wave of scholarly work in this area. As we see it, there are two problems to address in our engagements with whiteness. First, there is the problem of whiteness itself, that is, the fact that it is invisible to white people and makes its presence felt as normative. The second problem, of course related to the first, is how to address diversity issues effectively in a predominately white educational system. At the root of this problem is the issue of dialogue: what is needed to enable effective collaborative chalogue across differences. Thus far, the bulk of work in whiteness studies

45. Ibid., 47.

46. Fine, “Witnessing Whiteness.”

47. Delpit, Other People’s Chldren

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only addresses the first problem. While this is important work, in education, addressing the problem of whiteness is critically important mostly so that we can get to the issue of dialogue. It will not serve as an end in itself. Responses to the problem of whiteness are thoroughly described in the literature. Yes, as others have noted in whiteness studles, we must uncover whiteness, mark it, understand its effects, critique it, and disrupt it. But we must do so at least largely so as to hear the challenges, concerns, and ideas of nonwhites more effectively. This then allows us to see how our whiteness has impacted our approaches to diversity in schools, most often in deleterious ways (“blaming the victims” for the “cultural deficits” they possess). It also allows us to be more self-reflective and to enter dialogue with people of color more openly, vulnerably, humbly, and quietly. It is these dialogues that can lead us to consider the second problem, which is how we recreate schools so that all children are served. Admittedly, dalogue across difference is a significant challenge and there is still much theoretical work to be done in this area. Yet certainly an important aspect of this dialogue is deep reflexivity about one’s own social positionality. Schools where all children succeed can only be created after we have critically addressed whiteness, for it is only then that we can engage in collaborative partnerships with nonwhites without our agenda and our cultural biases dominating.

Current approaches to whiteness in the literature do not do a good job of tracing the pedagogical role of whiteness in positively transforming our approaches to multiculturalism in schools, which should be our ultimate goal as educators. We speculate several reasons for why whiteness studies focus on understanding whiteness and its effects, and ignore the question of what this work can get us. Whiteness is a profound construct, one that requires detailed analyses and description. Given that, it is easier to prioritize characterizing the problem, perhaps assuming solutions will be obvious once we better understand problems (a pattern endemic to critical work in education). Alternatively, because the white community has only recently begun to interrogate whiteness systematically, we lack powerful examples of what this gets us. Simply, we do not know enough about what comes next, particularly in schools. Another explanation may be anxiety about the real implications of the whiteness critique, and perhaps even fear of whether we really want to participate in a transformed system where power is more evenly dispersed.

We offer a different explanation. A pedagogy of whiteness only gets us to the place where we can begin to dialogue about positive, ongoing, transformation of schools. As white educators, we cannot do this on our own, although we certainly think we have tried to. Addressing the problem of cultural diversity in schools is something people of all colors must do together. A pedagogy of whiteness allows for the critical, self-reflective posture we from the dominant culture need to assume before we can even imagine creating and sustaining meaningful dialogue, coalitions, and partnerships that allow us to educate all our students well.

WE WISH TO THANK Iohn Warren, Sofia Villenas, Linda Lyman and the editors and reviewers of Educational The<JIyfOr their valuable cumments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We are grateful, as well, to Audrey Thompson and Barbara Applebaum for countless stimulating conversations that informed our understanding of this topic.

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