scholarly journals INTRODUCTION: THE STAKES OF WHITENESS STUDIES

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Durington
Keyword(s):  
2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Steyn

Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) article is useful in helping to establish and develop whiteness studies in South African academia, and thus to shift the academic gaze from the margins to the centre. The article is published in the wake of three waves of international whiteness studies, which successively described whiteness as a space of taken-for-granted privilege; a series of historically different but related spaces; and, finally, as part of the global, postcolonial world order. Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) contribution could be extended by more fully capturing the dissimilarity in the texture of the experience of whiteness in Australia and South Africa. In South Africa whiteness has never had the quality of invisibility that is implied in the ‘standard’ whiteness literature, and in post-apartheid South Africa white South Africans cannot assume the same privileges, with such ease, when state power is overtly committed to breaking down racial privilege.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Annette Sprung

This paper discusses organisational development in institutions of adult education aimed at enhancing diversity and preventing the discrimination of migrants. A critical analysis of three approaches, inter- cultural opening, managing diversity and fighting institutional racism, will be presented and amplified in the light of critical whiteness studies. The concepts differ in terms of their main goals, traditions, fields of practice and discourses of legitimation. The paper is based on the theoretical and empirical results of an Austrian applied research project, which explored how adult education institutions deal with migrant-related diversity. Finally, a strategic approach for opening up Austrian adult education for migrants, which was developed as part of the project, is presented.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Horrell

This article takes its point of departure from the effort to reflect critically on how my racial/ethnic identity shapes what I (and the academic tradition of which I am a part) see and ask (and do not see or ask) in our interpretative work. Selections from commentaries are used to illustrate the history of interpretation of Gal. 3.28, and the findings are interrogated in the light of questions and issues deriving from the field of ‘whiteness’ studies. For a start, such studies may provoke us to think about how far Christianness – and unspoken assumptions about its superiority – shapes what is said about this text (e.g., in the frequent contrast drawn between Jewish exclusivism and Christian inclusivism). Furthermore, we may ask about the particular location of this interpretative tradition not only in religious terms, but also in racial ones. The changing contours of interpretation help to show how it is, in part at least, shaped by its contexts of production in the white, Christian West: it may thus be ‘particularized’ in both religious and racial terms. Just as whiteness studies has criticized the tendency of the ‘white’ perspective to remain ‘unlabelled’, unspecific, implicitly ‘human’ and universal, so too we may critique the tendency of this tradition of biblical studies to avoid labelling and recognizing its own specificity. Doing so, moreover, may help us not only to acknowledge our own particularity, but also to recognize why we need the insights of differently located and embodied interpreters to reach towards richer insight. Recognizing and labelling the particularity of our own perspective is thus one step towards equalizing the value of the various (labelled and unlabelled) perspectives in biblical studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 306-318
Author(s):  
Stephanie Behm Cross ◽  
Nermin Tosmur-Bayazit ◽  
Alyssa Hadley Dunn

Studies on student teaching continue to suggest that preservice teachers’ feelings of dissonance are related to disparate views of teaching and learning between universities and schools. Drawing on interview, artifact, and observation data, the authors utilize Cognitive Dissonance and Critical Whiteness Studies to make different sense of the experiences of one White student teacher (Brett). Results indicate that Brett experienced dissonance related to fractured relationships, misaligned teaching strategies, and disengagement as he taught youth of color. Importantly, the use of Critical Whiteness Studies helped to additionally reveal the way Whiteness affected Brett’s movements toward consonance—mainly through rationalization and problematic notions of perseverance. The authors suggest that Whiteness itself is a dissonant state, and argue that conversations focused on dissonance from misaligned university theory and K-12 schooling practices is dangerously incomplete. Implications for research and practice are included.


Author(s):  
Barbara Applebaum

In 1903, standing at the dawn of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the color line is the defining characteristic of American society. Well into the 21st century, Du Bois’s prescience sadly still rings true. Even when a society is built on a commitment to equality, and even with the election of its first black president, the United States has been unsuccessful in bringing about an end to the rampant and violent effects of racism, as numerous acts of racial violence in the media have shown. For generations, scholars of color, among them Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Franz Fanon, have maintained that whiteness lies at the center of the problem of racism. It is only relatively recently that the critical study of whiteness has become an academic field, committed to disrupting racism by problematizing whiteness as a corrective to the traditional exclusive focus on the racialized “other.” Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) is a growing field of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege. CWS presumes a certain conception of racism that is connected to white supremacy. In advancing the importance of vigilance among white people, CWS examines the meaning of white privilege and white privilege pedagogy, as well as how white privilege is connected to complicity in racism. Unless white people learn to acknowledge, rather than deny, how whites are complicit in racism, and until white people develop an awareness that critically questions the frames of truth and conceptions of the “good” through which they understand their social world, Du Bois’s insight will continue to ring true.


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