24cf Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Whiteness Studies

Whiteness Studies

October 5, 2005

Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

October 05th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Whiteness Studies

Arguing that “race shapes white women’s lives” as well as the lives of women of color, Frankenberg asks dominant (white) academic feminism to recognize its relation to both race and racism (1). Analyzing whiteness in material and discursive terms, Frankenberg suggests that whiteness is socially constructed and, while it is frequently racialized as racism, it can in fact become a site of resistance to racism. White Women, Race Matters centers around 30 interviews Frankenberg conducted with white women between 1984 and 1986 in Northern California. Her interviewees were diverse in “age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation, and political orientation,” and by reading these interviews critically against themselves, one another, and her own questions, Frankenberg hopes to convey the way in which “race, racial dominance, and whiteness” are “complex, lived experiences” (23, 22). By insisting that racism is a “‘white issue’” as well as an issue that results from the ways in which racial discourses and material relations are reproduced, Frankenberg “attempts […] subversion” by way of an “investigation of self rather than of other(s)” (18). This study calls for its own self investigation and in doing so, models a self-critical model of study that has implicit—rather than explicit—pedagogical ramifications. (Read the article)

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September 20, 2005

Sleeter, Christine E. “How White Teachers Construct Race,” Race, Identity and Representation in Education. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, Eds. New York: Routledge, 1993, 157-171.

September 20th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Public School Initiatives, Whiteness Studies

In this article Sleeter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of multicultural teacher education programs. She begins by noting that the teaching population in the U.S. is becoming increasingly white, even as the student population grows increasingly diverse. Sleeter argues that while multicultural teacher education is somewhat effective at raising white teachers’ awareness of racial issues, the only way to reverse institutional racism is to draw more teachers of color into the teaching profession. (Read the article)

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September 19, 2005

Owens, Louis. “Moonwalking Technoshamans and the Shifting Margin: Decentering the Colonial Classroom.” In Race and the College Classroom. Eds. Bonnie Tusmith and Maureen T. Reddy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002: 253-263.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Native American, Whiteness Studies

This essay examines the tactical play with Native American stereotypes enacted by Native American students in a course taught by Owens in 1991 at UC Santa Cruz. This course, devoted to the Native American novel, was unusual in Owens’ experience because the Native American students made up a significant portion of the class; they took advantage of this situation by exercising their knowledge and authority with the cultural material in such a way as to displace the expectations, including what Owens calls the “literary tourism,” of the participating EuroAmerican students. The essay shifts between an analysis of the Native American students’ discourse, and an examination of the trauma negotiated by the EuroAmerican students. (Read the article)

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September 16, 2005

Giroux, Henry A. “White Noise: Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness.” In Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997: 89-136.

September 16th 2005 Posted to Whiteness Studies

This chapter argues for a rethinking of “whiteness,” especially as the term is engaged in educational settings. Giroux finds existing scholarly treatments of whiteness too inclined to simply collapse people who identify as white with the projects of domination and racism. According to Giroux, this tendency leads white students toward guilt and/or resentment, and undercuts the ways in which whiteness could function in an anti-racist fashion. In short, complicating our understanding of how whiteness operates can greatly enhance the anti-racist pedagogy project. (Read the article)

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August 13, 2005

Barrish, Phillip. “The Secret Joys of Antiracist Pedagogy: Huckleberry Finn in the Classroom.” American Imago 59.2 (2002): 117-39.

August 13th 2005 Posted to The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Whiteness Studies

In this essay, Barrish analyzes the pleasures inherent in being a liberal white antiracist professor. These educators face an “unavoidable paradox” when they attempt to address racism: while the purported aim of such an antiracist pedagogy is to move beyond the influence of a racist past, citing this past leads white educators into a performative reiteration of the past and of racism itself (117). For his primary example, Barrish deconstructs the rhetoric underlying prohibitions of the word “n-word,” showing that the prohibitions themselves tend to repeat the word again and again, placing the white antiracist uttering the word in a double bind or, in more psychoanalytic terms, an aporia. Barrish turns to the Lacanian psychoanalytic term “jouissance” to explain the horrifying pleasure-pain of being caught in this double bind, but notes that because jouissance demands the dissolution of the individual’s psyche, it is “quickly repackaged” into a “more readily consumable masochistic scene of fantasized white male suffering” (122). (Read the article)

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July 6, 2005

Hall, Kim. “White Feminists Doing Critical Race Theory: Some Ethical and Political Considerations.” APA Newsletters: Newsletter on Philosophy, Law, and the Black Experience 98.2 (Spring 1999).

July 06th 2005 Posted to Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Whiteness Studies

Writing from the perspective of a white feminist who considers herself a Critical Race Theorist, Hall notes the danger of separating gender, class, and sexuality from discussions of race. Hall acknowledges that white philosophers approaching questions of race must negotiate their own positions of white privilege, but she writes that such perspectives on race—as well as such negotiations of white privilege—are necessary to the eventual elimination of racial marginalization. Rather than simply adding another element to an already-complete discussion, gender is in fact integral to any adequate treatment of race. Similarly, any treatment of gender must acknowledge race as a constitutive component of the conversation. “White Feminists Doing Critical Race Theory” Article Online

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