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Building Racial Coalitions: Limitations And New Directions To Teaching “White Privilege”, Eric César Morales

Race and Pedagogy Journal: Teaching and Learning for Justice

In this article, I pull from critical race theory, psychology, and philosophy to deconstruct the underlying psychological components that lead to “white fragility,” and I explore the limitations in current pedagogical approaches to teaching privilege. I argue that we adopt a more nuanced and context based understanding of “white privilege,” one that breaks down the concept into its two constituent parts: the “privilege/adversity paradigm” and “colonizer alignment privilege.” In the former, basic human physical or cultural traits are presented to students as capable of being beneficial or detrimental depending on context. In the latter, the ways in which people create …