Education Commons^™

Racism Without Race: The Racialization Of Middle Eastern And North African Students At U.S. Colleges, Hannah Mesouani

Dissertations

Although a growing body of literature covers the experiences of international students at U.S. colleges, the stories of those who do not fit into the U.S. racial schema remain untold. This study examined how Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) students understood their racial identities given the United States’ tense history with Islam and the MENA world. Using foundational texts on critical race theory, current scholarship on Arab Americans and foreign-born students, and facets of the Ethnic Identity Scale (EIS), this study examined the experiences of MENA students who study amid a national backdrop of xenophobia and racialized Islamophobia. This …

The Making Of A Bilingual University In The 21st Century, Michael Mena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the southernmost tip of Texas, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) opened its doors on August 31, 2015 as a ‘bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate’ campus—the only one of its kind and at a scale never before attempted in the United States. This is a categorical achievement in the near 200 year-long quest for the educational advancement of Latinxs in Texas—a state historically structured by white supremacist ideologies, violent economic and political disenfranchisement, as well as a racially segregated education system designed to maintain exploitative labor practices (Montejano 1987; González 1990, 2013, 1999; Blanton 2004). This constitutes the …

Writing Through Whiteness: Utilizing Personal Narratives To Strengthen The Racial Competency Of White Teachers, Paul F. Walsh

Education Doctorate Dissertations

While the student population in the United States is becoming increasingly diverse, the teaching force is still White-dominant by a large margin. In the 2017-2018 school year, 79% of public-school teachers in the United States were White and non-Hispanic (National Center for Education Statistics). This White-dominant population of teachers is tasked with educating increasing numbers of students of color from diverse backgrounds. With this charge should come the necessity for White teachers to critically consider the complex ways that whiteness characterizes the American education system and their ways of teaching. White teachers cannot navigate issues of race in their schools …

An Unspoken Story Of Education: An Autoethnographic Exploration Of Racism In Education, Elisa A. Perez-Garcia

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Privilege is when one voice is the norm, but some children’s voices are underheard within research. Extensive research has demonstrated that Hispanic face multiple barriers within the education system. This study examines how whiteness within the education system can impact a Hispanic student’s perspective of the world. An autoethnographic approach is used to analyze five stories. A grounded theory approach identified emergent themes from the stories shared. The four themes that emerged among the stories were intersectionality, privilege, social construct, and microaggression. It demonstrated minority students’ experiences and interactions could profoundly affect how they view their identity. There are measures …

Challenging Whiteness At Claremont High School, Terri Nicol Watson, Angel Miles Nash

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Ebony Wright was slated to graduate from Claremont High School in the spring. She was on the honor roll, captain of the girls’ varsity softball and swim teams, and recently awarded an academic scholarship to attend a highly ranked university in the fall. Ebony was a “model” student. How she found herself sitting in the principal’s office several weeks before graduation was a shock to everyone. This case study challenges the function of whiteness in school policies. Aspiring school and teacher leaders are provided with the opportunity to consider the impact of a seemingly race-neutral school dress code policy.

“In The University But Not Of The University”: Examining Institutionalized Counterspaces Through A Staff Perspective, Omar A. Ramirez

Master's Theses

Using a qualitative case study, this thesis examines a university counterspace that serves Students of Color through the perspective of the staff who work in that space. The case study aimed to explore four areas of investigation: the interviewees’ knowledge and perceptions of 1) the history of their counterspace; 2) the purpose of their counterspace; 3) the benefits of their counterspace; and 4) challenges of their counterspace. The counterspace was a program within a large, 4-year, public, R-1 research university. Five staff from the counterspace were interviewed. A thematic analysis of the data suggests that students were an essential part …

Precarity In Feminism And Feminist Art Education: Decentering Whiteness Through Reproductive Justice Activism, Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, Olga Ivashkevich

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The article addresses precarity in mainstream feminism and feminist art education as a systemic dismissal and exclusion of the critical concerns and voices by disenfranchised women of color from its narratives and agendas. It draws on a case of the reproductive justice feminist activism to illustrate how the mainstream pro-choice feminist movement neglected the urgent and often life threatening reproductive concerns by Black, Brown, Indigenous and immigrant women, which led to an establishment of the reproductive justice coalitions by activists of color. The reproductive justice movement is an important call to action to challenge and decenter Whiteness in mainstream feminism …

Navigating The Silences: Social Worker Discourses Around Race, Cherie Bridges Patrick

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This thesis explored social worker discourses to learn what they could reveal about professional workplace practices and experiences with race and racism. The study traced the subtle and elusive racism often found in everyday professional conversations that are not considered racist by dominant consensus. Using tools of thematic and critical discourse analysis (CDA), and van Dijk’s (1993, 2001, 2008, 2009, 2011) general theory of racism and denial (1992, 2008), data from 14 semistructured interviews and one focus group with a racially diverse group of social workers was analyzed in two ways. First, thematic analysis offered a horizontal or flat exploration …

Preparing Culturally Responsive Educators In The 21st Century: White Pre-Service Teachers Identification Of Unearned Privileges, Winston E. Vaughan Ph.D.

Georgia Educational Researcher

This qualitative /quantitative investigation highlights the analysis of preservice teachers’ responses to an end of semester writing prompt in a diversity course requiring them to identify an unearned privilege that they may have benefitted from. Data were analyzed using qualitative as well as quantitative methodologies. Qualitative analysis revealed a range of privileges that pre-service can rely on when they reflect on the structured nature of privilege within our society such as socio-economic status, race, education, American citizenship, gender, parental support and language. Quantitative results, which focused on descriptive statistics, revealed that Whiteness and social class were privileges that they benefitted …

'Race, Racism, And American Law': A Seminar From The Indigenous, Black, And Immigrant Legal Perspectives, Eduardo R.C. Capulong, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Flagrant racism has characterized the Trump era from the onset. Beginning with the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has inflamed long-festering racial wounds and unleashed White supremacist reaction to the nation’s first Black President, in the process destabilizing our sense of the nation’s racial progress and upending core principles of legality, equality, and justice. As law professors, we sought to rise to these challenges and prepare the next generation of lawyers to succeed in a different and more polarized future. Our shared commitment resulted in a new course, “Race, Racism, and American Law,” in which we sought to explore the roots …

“Who You Callin’ Smartmouth?” Misunderstood Traumatization Of Black And Brown Girls, Danielle Walker, Cheryl E. Matias, Robin Brandehoff

Occasional Paper Series

The emotional rhetoric in education often sympathizes with white teachers while labeling Black and Brown female students as angry, defiant, and/or disinterested. This is done without considering: (a) how white emotions influence interpretations or (b) how Black and Brown girls feel. This essay interrogates how emotionalities of whiteness traumatize Black and Brown girls. Using critical race theory’s counterstorytelling, it begins with the story of a Black girl and her response to her teacher’s white emotions. Then, the paper demands that teachers, especially those who are white, stop emotionally projecting onto Black and Brown girls and instead begin an honest listening.

Toward A Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities, David Ingram

David Ingram

The article re-examines racial and ethnic identity within the context of pedagogical attempts to instill a positive white identity in white students who are conscious of the history of white racism and white privilege. The paper draws heavily from whiteness studies and developmental cognitive science in arguing (against Henry Giroux and Stuart Hall) that a positive notion of white identity, however postmodern its construction, is an oxymoron, since whiteness designates less a cultural/ethnic ethos and meaningful way of life than a pathological structure of privilege and narrowminded cognitive habitus.

Expanding White Racial Identity Theory: A Qualitative Investigation Of Whites Engaged In Antiracist Action, Krista Malott, Tina Paone, Scott Schaefle, Jennifer Cates, Breyan Haizlip

Scott Schaefle

This article presents outcomes of a qualitative exploration of White racial identity. Ten participants whose characteristics were reflective of Helms's (1990) autonomy status defined their racial identities and related lifestyle choices. Findings are conceptualized within the framework of Helms's (1990, 1995) theory of White racial identity development. Suggestions are intended to enhance White racial identity theory and provide empirical support for characteristics of Whites who are engaged in antiracist activities.

White Face, Black Friend: A Fanonian Application To Theorize Racial Fetish In Teacher Education, Cheryl Matias

Cheryl Matias

In Black Skin, white masks (1967, Grove Press) , Franz Fanon uses a psychoanalytic framework to theorize the inferiority-dependency complex of Black men in response to thecolonial racism of white men. Applying his framework in reverse, this theoretical article psychoanalyzes the white psyche and emotionality with respect to the racialization process of whites and their racial attachment to Blackness. Positing that such a process is interconnected with narcissism, humanistic emptiness, and psychosis, this article presents how racial attach-ment becomes racial fetish . Such a fetish reifies whiteness by accumulating fictive kinshipswith friends of color; hence, the common parlance of ‘But …

Who You Callin’ White? A Critical Counterstory Of Colouring White Identity”, Cheryl E. Matias

Cheryl Matias

This action research, which utilizes critical race theory's counter-storytelling, analyses a process of debunking White students' epistemology of ignorance in a history course at an urban public high school. After piloting a raced curriculum that deliberately re-centers marginalized counter-stories of students of colour, I document its impacts on White students' understanding of history. Ultimately, such a process problematizes White students' sense of identity. I employ the analytic tools of Whiteness as power to understand how White students responded to curriculum on race and racism. The analysis silences White dominant Discourse while activating counter-stories by modelling critical consciousness and colourscence for …

“When Saying You Care Is Not Really Caring”: Whiteness And The Role Of Disgust, Cheryl E. Matias, M. Zembylas

Cheryl Matias

Drawing on one of the author’s experiences of teaching white teacher candidates in an urban university, this paper argues for the importance of interrogating the ways that benign emotions (e.g., pity and caring) are sometimes hidden expressions of disgust for the Other. Using critical race theory, whiteness studies, and critical emotion studies, it is shown how whiteness ideology erroneously translates disgust for people of color to false professions of pity or caring. This phenomenon is particularly interesting because care, sympathy, and love are emotions that are routinely performed by teacher candidates (who are predominantly white females) and embedded in teacher …

“Loving Whiteness To Death: Sadomasochism, Emotionality, And The Possibility Of Humanizing Love”, Cheryl E. Matias, Ricky Lee Allen

Cheryl Matias

Although scholars have articulated how whites institutionally, economically, and socially invest in their whiteness, they have paid little attention to white emotionality. By explicating a critical, more humanizing theory of love that accounts for the painful process of sharing in the burden of creating humanity, this psychoanalytic theoretical essay illustrates how the norms and values of white emotionality are premised on a sadomasochistic notion of love. Finally, the authors re-imagine a different set of norms and values through a critical humanizing pedagogy of love, one that can only be realized when whites learn to “love whiteness to death.” That is, …

A Multiple Case Study Of Whiteness And Critical Literacy Practices Among White Elementary Teachers In Urban Public Schools, Amanda Rose Vandehei

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether white elementary teachers' perception of Whiteness influences critical literacy practices in elementary classrooms in an urban school district in the Southwest United States. This study consists of six white elementary school teachers.

Using Hardiman's model of White Identity Development, (WID) this study specifically explores the phenomenon of Whiteness and how teachers view themselves as having white privilege and advantage in American society. Hardiman's WID model includes five stages of white racial identity development in which a white person begins with no awareness of him or herself as a racial being and …

Meanings And Typologies Of Duboisian Double Consciousness Within 20th Century United States Racial Dynamics, Marc E. Black

Graduate Masters Theses

Americans still have more work ahead before we can come together and laugh together as a race-conscious people. This thesis is about the sad and painful work we need to do so we can heal and rejoice as a truly free and equal partnership of all our various communities. To tie ourselves together through and after our healing of our racial conflicts, we will share a special intimacy, a human connection, where our shared culture, our partnership, (overlapping with our primary cultures) includes our high proficiency at understanding how we appear to each other. This new cultural understanding and partnership …

"Courageous Conversations": Rural South Georgia Teachers Reflecting On The Role Of Race And Racism In The Education Of Rural South Georgia Students, Lawanda P. Gillis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Author's abstract: The requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has forced school systems throughout the United States to consider the achievement gap between White students and non-White students, which had not previously been a factor in determining school success for federal and state funding. However, acknowledging the gap is not enough. Schools must move beyond acknowledging the gap to developing strategies to close the gap. A professional development course entitled Courageous Conversations About Race, written by Curtis Linton and Glenn E. Singleton was taught to thirty-seven teachers in a rural South Georgia school system. Eight of …

Toward A Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article re-examines racial and ethnic identity within the context of pedagogical attempts to instill a positive white identity in white students who are conscious of the history of white racism and white privilege. The paper draws heavily from whiteness studies and developmental cognitive science in arguing (against Henry Giroux and Stuart Hall) that a positive notion of white identity, however postmodern its construction, is an oxymoron, since whiteness designates less a cultural/ethnic ethos and meaningful way of life than a pathological structure of privilege and narrowminded cognitive habitus.

Decentering Whiteness, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"I wish to make two claims in this article. One is that multicultural education has largely refused to acknowledge how imperialism, colonialism, and the transnational circulation of capitalism influences the ways in which many oppressed minority groups cognitively map their paradigm of democracy in the United States. The other claim is that the present focus on diversity in multicultural education is often misguided because the struggle for ethnic diversity makes progressive political sense only if it can be accompanied by a sustained analysis of the cultural logics of white supremacy; While these two claims mutually inform each other, it is …