Dear “Good” Schools: White Supremacy and Political Education in Predominantly White and Affluent Suburban Schools

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dinorah Sanchez Loza
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Suburban Schools ◽  
Political Education ◽  
Good Schools

Mormonism and White Supremacy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
White American ◽  
Mormon History ◽  
Moral Innocence

This book examines the role of white American Christianity in fostering and sustaining white supremacy. It draws from theology, critical race theory, and American religious history to make the argument that predominantly white Christian denominations have served as a venue for establishing white privilege and have conveyed to white believers a sense of moral innocence without requiring moral reckoning with the costs of anti-Black racism. To demonstrate these arguments, the book draws from Mormon history from the 1830s to the present, from an archive that includes speeches, historical documents, theological treatises, Sunday school curricula, and other documents of religious life.

scholarly journals Is There A Place For Us? Social Workers of Color As Outside Agitators Within the Profession

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 978-988
Author(s):  
Michael Rangel
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Communities Of Color

The outside agitator narrative has been used to discredit and harm people of color for decades. Currently, it is being used as a forceful tactic to separate the movement for Black lives from the broader narrative that racism is deeply rooted in American social structures, institutions, and everyday life. This article examines the implications of how the profession of social work has similarly and simultaneously maintained a culture of white supremacy and racist ideologies in our work. As outsiders in a predominantly white profession, social workers of color act as outside agitators when dispelling myths and practices used in and for communities of color. By centering the lived experiences and knowledge of social workers of color, all social workers can increase their awareness of racism within our profession and work together to dismantle the culture of racism and white supremacy that persists within social work.

scholarly journals The fear of multiple truths: On teaching about racism in a predominantly white school

2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (5) ◽  
pp. 18-23
Author(s):  
Antony Farag
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Elective Course ◽  
White School

In a post-truth world, it is imperative for educators to help students sift through the various views of both historical and current events. Critical race theory (CRT), a controversial theoretical framework directly critiquing white supremacy and incorporating the histories of historically marginalized communities, is a useful tool for helping students develop their own understanding of history and the world. However, research shows that social studies educators of white students are unprepared to use CRT. Antony Farag shares his research into white teachers’ use of CRT and describes what happened when his predominately white school attempted to launch an elective course build on critical race theory.

Disrupting Whiteness

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-82
Author(s):  
Ann Russo
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Academic Institution ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Normative Systems ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Classroom Communities

This chapter reflects on the gravitational pulls of white supremacist patriarchal imperialist capitalism that compel people, particularly those most privileged within the systems, toward a callous disregard of the pain and suffering of others in order to accept and assimilate into the hegemonic normative systems of power. Drawing on the author’s experiences of teaching in a historically and predominantly white academic institution, this chapter reflects on pedagogical practices of disrupting the whiteness of callous disregard. This requires the building of classroom communities that can hold a compassionate awareness of students’ differential relationships to and experiences of interlocking systems of oppression and violence. In this essay, I share some of my experiences in and outside of the classroom with seeking to disrupt and undermine the distanced and disembodied approach to racism, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression. I offer some of the methods and strategies I am learning, and try to practice, that encourage myself and others to name, understand, explore, and begin to heal from trauma and violence caused by historically-based interlocking systems of oppression.

Dismantling White Supremacy and Racial Innocence

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-206
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
P Systems ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
White American ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Communities Of Color

Systems as pervasive as white supremacy do not just transform quietly. They must be recognized, investigated, understood, and intentionally abandoned or dismantled, and their impacts to communities of color must be repaired. Predominantly white American Christian communities that wish to take moral responsibility for the advantage-taking that has yielded white privilege and Black suffering must engage with the concept of reparations. But how does a religious community—a predominantly white American Christian community—begin to conceive of reparations? This chapter assesses the pathways toward dismantling white supremacy open to predominantly white American Christian denominations, including Mormonism, through institutional and grassroots changes.

A Jim Crow State of Mind: The Racialization of Space in the McKinney, Texas Pool Party Incident

2019 ◽  
pp. 000276421985961
Author(s):  
Barbara Harris Combs
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Brown Bodies

Violence against Black bodies is not new, but contemporary discussions of these matters often focus on police or other state-sanctioned violence against male Black bodies. While this is important, it ignores the perils all Black bodies face as they navigate White spaces. In this article, I utilize an analytical framework, which highlights intersectional bodies in order to expose the extent to which a Jim Crow-like mentality about where people belong still persists in U.S. society. I examine the 2015 McKinney, Texas, pool party incident as a case study to demonstrate how gender and the social status of children operated to imperil Black (and Brown) bodies in the social environment of a predominantly White upper middle-class suburban neighborhood. I offer a counternarrative reading of the incident utilizing a framework I term bodies out of place, a critical extension on critical race theory scholarship and the work of Nirmal Puwar (2004). The article makes an important contribution toward understanding White epistemologies of ignorance with respect to the existence and maintenance of continuing racial oppression and White supremacy in society.

White Privilege, Racial Innocence, and the Costs of Anti-Racist Dissent, Mormon Examples

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-160
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
Church Members ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
Gender Belief

Just as white Christians develop silent agreements among themselves to define morality in individual terms that take no responsibility for systematic anti-Black racism, white Christian churches develop means for managing and disciplining adherents who do take on anti-Black racism in a serious and discomfiting way. This chapter reconstructs a lost archive of dissent by LDS Church members against white supremacy in Mormonism, including public criticisms by national figures like Stewart Udall. It analyzes the calculus of identity, race, class, gender, belief, belonging, and social and political capital that condition dissent in religious communities, observing that white privilege and status in predominantly white Christian churches allow some to dissent more publicly and with lesser costs than others.

Originalism, Infallibility, and the Institutionalization of White Supremacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-84
Author(s):  
Joanna Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Predominantly White Institutions ◽  
White Institutions ◽  
The Will ◽  
Will Of God

When a predominantly white religious community casts its lots, chooses whiteness, and designates its Black scapegoats, history shows that it attributes these outcomes to the will of God. White Christians begin to tell themselves that although Black suffering is regrettable, it is inevitable. Predominantly white institutions assume the facade of inevitability and timelessness and the exclusion of Black people hardens into a self-perpetuating fact. This chapter examines how systematic theologies produced by American Protestant “fundamentalists” and Mormon theologians alike contributed to the erasure of histories of Black exclusion and normalized anti-Black racism as timeless, essential, and originating with God. This in turn contributed to the institutionalization of anti-Black segregation and discrimination in Church bureaucracies.

Critical White Studies and Curriculum Theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James C. Jupp ◽  
Pauli Badenhorst
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Teacher Identity ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Curriculum Theory ◽  
Identity Studies ◽  
White Studies ◽  
Critical White Studies ◽  
White Teacher

Critical White studies (CWS) refers to an oppositional and interdisciplinary body of historical, social science, literary, and aesthetic intellectual production that critically examines White people’s individual, collective, social, and historical experiences. CWS reflexively assumes the embeddedness of researcher identities within the research, including the different positionalities of White researchers and researchers of Color within White supremacy writ large as well as whiteness in the social sciences and curriculum theory. As an expression of the historical consciousness shift sparked by anglophone but also francophone African-Atlantic and pan-African intellectuals, CWS emerged within the 20th century’s emancipatory social sciences tied to Global South independence movements and Global North civil rights upheavals. Initiated by cultural studies theorists Stuart Hall and Dick Dyer in the early 80s, CWS has proliferated through two waves. CWS’ first wave (1980–2000) advanced a race-evasive analytical arc with the following ontological and epistemological conceptual-empirical emphases: whiteness as hegemonic normativity, White identity and nation-building, White privilege and property, and White color-blind racism and race evasion. CWS’ second-wave (2000–2020) advanced an anti-essentializing analytical arc with pedagogical conceptual-empirical emphases: White materiality and place, White complexities and relationalities, Whiteness and ethics, and social psychoanalyses in whiteness pedagogies. Always controversial, CWS proliferated as a “hot topic” in social sciences throughout the 90s. Regarding catalytic validity, several CWS concepts entered mass media and popular discussions in 2020 to understand White police violence against Black people—violence of which George Floyd’s murder is emblematic. In curriculum theory, CWS forged two main “in-ways.” In the 1990s, CWS entered the field through Henry Giroux, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and colleagues who advanced critical whiteness pedagogies. This line of research is differently continued by Tim Lensmire and his colleagues Sam Tanner, Zac Casey, Shannon Macmanimon, Erin Miller, and others. CWS also entered curriculum theory via the field of White teacher identity studies advanced by Sherry Marx and then further synthesized by Jim Jupp, Theodorea Berry, Tim Lensmire, Alisa Leckie, Nolan Cabrera, and Jamie Utt. White teacher identity studies is frequently applied to work on predominantly White teacher education programs. Besides these in-ways, CWS’ conceptual production, especially the notion of “whiteness as hegemonic normativity” or whiteness, disrupted whitened business-as-usual in curriculum theory between 2006 and 2020. Scholars of Color supported by a few White scholars called out curriculum theory’s whiteness and demanded change in a field that centered on race-based epistemologies and indigenous cosmovisions in conferences and journals. CWS might play a role in working through the as-of-yet unresolved conflict over the futurity of curriculum theory as a predominantly White space. A better historicized CWS that takes on questions of coloniality of power, being, and knowledge informed by feminist, decolonial, and psychoanalytic resources provides one possible futurity for CWS in curriculum theory. In this futurity, CWS is relocated as one dimension of a broad array of criticalities within curriculum theory’s critical pedagogies. This relocated CWS might advance psychoanalytically informed whiteness pedagogies that grapple with the overarching question: Can whiteness and White identities be decolonized? This field would include European critical psychoanalytic social sciences along with feminist and decolonial resources to advance a transformative shift in consciousness.

Advocacy for Equity: Extending Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Predominantly White Suburban Schools

2017 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
April Warren-Grice
Keyword(s):  
Predominantly White ◽  
Students Of Color ◽  
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy ◽  
Culturally Relevant ◽  
Suburban Schools ◽  
Black Educators ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Suburban High Schools ◽  
Relevant Pedagogy ◽  
Black And Latino

Background/Context This article describes Black educators in predominantly White suburban schools who have used advocacy through the lens of culturally relevant pedagogy and serve as Educational Cultural Negotiators to help the students of color in these spaces academically and socially. This article highlights the advocacy needed to address the plight of students of color in suburban schools who disproportionately lag behind their White and Asian counterparts. Purpose/Focus of Study This research focuses on the experiences and reflections of five Black educators who have directed after-school programs in predominantly White suburban schools. Through their experiences and reflections, this study provides a snapshot—part of a larger study—of the ways Black educators use culturally relevant pedagogy to advocate for students of color. Setting Four suburban high schools in a Midwest metropolitan region of the United States. Research Design Qualitative research (i.e., portraiture) was used to capture the reflections and experiences of five Black educators (18–30 years of experience) in predominantly White suburban high schools. I interviewed participants three times during the course of a year, with the last interview conducted as a focus group. I developed interview questions thematically to provide information on each director's background, the role they played in influencing Black and Latino/a student achievement, their experiences as they helped program participants, their insight on sustaining program directors, and suggestions for educational leaders and educators of Black and Latino/a students. Findings/Results Participants shared a sense of racial uplift to address issues of concern with Black and Latino/a students. Racial uplift manifested in the form of racial and academic advocacy. Racial advocacy came through protecting students from various types of mistreatment, neglect, and macro and micro forms of racism. Educators worked with the staff and students to help navigate and negotiate the racial space. Academic advocacy came through encouraging and supporting students to reach their highest potential though mentor-ship, tutoring, student life workshops, college visits, and cultural field trips.

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