Institutional Racist Melancholia: A Structural Understanding of Grief and Power in Schooling

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabina Vaught
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Property A ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
Structural Framework ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
Juvenile Prison ◽  
Whiteness As Property

In this article, Sabina Vaught undertakes the theoretical and analytical project of conceptually integrating Whiteness as property, a key structural framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and melancholia, a framework originally emerging from psychoanalysis. Specifically, Vaught engages Whiteness as property as an analytic tool to examine data from a larger ethnographic study of juvenile prison and schooling. She suggests that the psychoanalytic framework of melancholia enriches and complicates this analysis and proposes a theoretical move toward understanding structural affective processes in the scholarly effort to map schooling, race, and power. Throughout, Vaught illustrates the significance and utility of such an approach through multifaceted data-driven analyses.

Diversity Dissonance as an Implication of One School’s Relocation and Reintegration Initiative

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-529
Author(s):  
Deena Khalil ◽  
Elizabeth Brown
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Parent Survey ◽  
Student Demographics ◽  
School Demographics ◽  
Hidden Patterns ◽  
The Right ◽  
Whiteness As Property

Purpose: This article describes one charter school’s ‘diversity’ initiative—a relocation to a racially and socioeconomically diverse site—intended to reintegrate minoritized students displaced by gentrification. Research Design: We employ Critical Race Quantitative Intersectionality to frame the descriptive analyses of student enrollment, city census, and parent survey data that narrates the resulting student demographics after a school’s relocation. Our goal in utilizing an anti-racist framework rooted in Critical Race Theory is to a) quantify the racist material impact of “race-neutral” reform through intersectional data mining, b) disrupt the notion of letting “numbers speak for themselves” without critical analysis, and c) taking a transdisciplinary perspective to reveal the hidden patterns of whiteness under the guise of diversity. Findings: Our findings highlight the limits of a school’s agency to implement ‘diversity’ policies aimed at reintegrating minoritized students displaced from opportunity. While the relocation racially diversified the student population, the policy failed to reintegrate the district’s historically minoritized population. This exclusion both limited who had the right to use and enjoy the school and reinforced the school’s status and reputation, thus cementing its whiteness as property. Implications: We conceptualize diversity dissonance as a framework that challenges the unary ahistorical criteria that describe current school demographics, and calls for leaders and policymakers to problematize how the construct of diversity is interpreted when considering minoritized students’ access to programs and schools. Diversity dissonance situates diversity from solely an inclusive rhetoric to an exclusionary one, where limited access reinforces status—mimicking rather than juxtaposing whiteness.

Overkill: Black Lives and the Spectacle of the Atlanta Cheating Scandal

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camika Royal ◽  
Vanessa Dodo Seriki
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
School Reform ◽  
Black Educators ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Racial Realism ◽  
Whiteness As Property

This article examines the 2015 Atlanta cheating scandal trials and sentencing. Using critical race theory, the authors argue that cheating is a natural outgrowth of market-based school reform and that racial realism will always lead to scrutiny of Black performance. The sentences of these Black educators is overkill, rooted in anti-Blackness, and can be best understood as a means of preserving Whiteness as property.

scholarly journals “That’s Why I Say Stay in School”: Black Mothers’ Parental Involvement, Cultural Wealth, and Exclusion in Their Son’s Schooling

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quaylan Allen ◽  
Kimberly White-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Parental Involvement ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
School Experiences ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Black Boys ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Cultural Wealth

This study examines parental involvement practices, the cultural wealth, and school experiences of poor and working-class mothers of Black boys. Drawing upon data from an ethnographic study, we examine qualitative interviews with four Black mothers. Using critical race theory and cultural wealth frameworks, we explore the mothers’ approaches to supporting their sons’ education. We also describe how the mothers and their sons experienced exclusion from the school, and how this exclusion limited the mothers’ involvement. We highlight their agency in making use of particular forms of cultural wealth in responding to the school’s failure of their sons.

scholarly journals Wrestling the Elephant

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 545-565
Author(s):  
Carolyn Mak ◽  
Mandeep Kaur Mucina ◽  
Renée Nichole Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Institutional Policies ◽  
Classroom Dynamics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Work Education ◽  
Whiteness As Property

White supremacist ideology is the elephant in the social work classroom, negatively impacting educators’ abilities to facilitate discussion and learning. One of the most effective ways to dismantle and organize against white supremacy is to politicize the seemingly benign moments that occur in the classroom that can create discomfort for students and instructors. Politicization includes identifying and addressing both the racial (micro-) aggressions that occur in the classroom and the processes and institutional policies that create complacency and lull us to sleep. In this conceptual piece, we use a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework to understand how white supremacy perpetuates itself in the classroom, with a particular focus on whiteness as property. As well, we explore what it means to decolonize the classroom. Using a vignette based on our teaching experiences, we use these two frameworks to analyze classroom dynamics and interactions, and discuss how implications for social work education include waking from the metaphorical sleep to recognize the pernicious effects of whiteness and white supremacy. Included are practical individual teaching, relational, and systemic suggestions to enact change.

scholarly journals Measuring the Wages of Whiteness: A Project for Political Economists

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maha Rafi Atal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Material Force ◽  
Whiteness As Property ◽  
Global Research

This comment responds to the recently held Global Research in International Political Economy roundtable on race in IPE. In particular, it argues that scholars of political economy could draw fruitfully on the notion of “whiteness as property” from the critical race theory subfield of law in order to trace the workings of whiteness, and race more broadly, as a material force in the economy.

White Fear, White Flight, the Rules of Racial Standing and Whiteness as Property: Why Two Critical Race Theory Constructs are Better Than One

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamel K. Donnor
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Grade Point Average ◽  
White Flight ◽  
White Female ◽  
African American Female ◽  
Property Value ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Grade Point ◽  
Whiteness As Property ◽  
Better Than

Despite earning the highest grade point average (GPA) in her graduating class at the recently integrated Cleveland High School (CHS) in Cleveland, Mississippi, Ms. Jasmine Shepard, an African-American female, was named “co-valedictorian” with Ms. Heather Bouse, a White female, who had a lower GPA. Utilizing Derrick Bell’s rules of racial standing theory and Cheryl Harris’ analytical construct whiteness as property, this article examines Ms. Shepard’s lawsuit against the Cleveland School District. In addition to explaining how White flight was deployed as a policy distraction to justify the inequitable treatment of Ms. Jasmine Shepard, this article posits that the specter of Ms. Shepard becoming Cleveland High School’s first Black valedictorian triggered area Whites’ fear of losing the property value of their whiteness.

Unstandardizing Testing: Low-Scoring American Minority Students in the Crosshairs of Conservative Policymakers

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sami Chedhli Nighaoui
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Minority Students ◽  
Standardized Tests ◽  
Feedback Mechanism ◽  
Cultural Bias ◽  
Testing System ◽  
Quantitative Methodology ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Opt Out

That standardized tests do not accurately assess the true competencies of minority test takers is a widely shared claim among conservative educationists. The opt-out-of-testing community has lately grown unprecedentedly vocal in several states, questioning even more seriously the accountability of the testing system altogether. This paper adopts a Critical Race Theory perspective to investigate the conceptual underpinnings of conservative criticism as well as the interpretations made popular using quantitative methodology. The key premise of this paper is that a colorblind approach to testing understates the importance of a range of unquantifiable variables, mainly the linguitic and cultural backgrounds of the test takers, in determining assessment outcome. It attempts to demonstrate where specifically standardized tests may not be used as a reliable feedback mechanism and suggests that a more flexible assessment paradigm be considered, one that engages learning quality followup to keep cultural bias to a strict minimum.          

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