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Selected Works

Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education

2015

Cheryl Matias

Whiteness

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Education

White Face, Black Friend: A Fanonian Application To Theorize Racial Fetish In Teacher Education, Cheryl Matias Sep 2015

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 Sep 2015

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 Sep 2015

“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 Sep 2015

“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, …