Experiences of Racialization in Predominantly White Institutions

Critical Reflections on Inclusion in US Colleges and Schools of Education

Rachel Endo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000174809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Centered on the narratives from ethnically and racially diverse scholars of color with experience studying and working in predominantly White institutions in the United States, this volume offers critical reflection on common assumptions, policies, and practices which limit or preclude racial diversity and inclusion in various types of educational contexts and settings.

Scholars at different stages of their careers and from varied sociocultural backgrounds offer powerful critiques of contemporary experiences of disproportionality, mis/labelling, and exploitation, among others. Exploring both personal and professional repercussions of these lived inequalities, the candid insights of racialized challenges and imbalances are linked to the schooling experiences of minoritized K-12 learners and their families. This book proposes solutions to promote equitable and inclusive environments for faculty and scholars from racialized backgrounds in higher education with a specific focus on universities with education programs.

Students, scholars, and researchers across a broad number of fields including Educational Leadership, Ethnic Studies, Teacher Education, Higher Education may benefit from the discussions provided in this work.

1 “A Slippery Slope”

From Deficit-Based Vantage Points to Ignorance for White Pre-Service Teachers

Alvin Logan, Jr.

First-Day Introductions

“Hello everyone. My name is Alvin. I will be your instructor for the semester.” This is generally how I begin my classes each term. Perhaps first-day-of-class introductions are clichéd to many White teacher educators, but they are sorely necessary for people like me. My verbal introduction paired well with my incognito attempt at learning how mostly White teacher candidates imagine who will teach them before class starts serves me well. I wear casual clothing on the first day of the term. Prior to the class starting, I sit among the students to ask them to share their thoughts about the upcoming class and the instructor. Over the years, the mostly White teacher candidates enrolled in my courses generally provide the same answer when I ask what racial background they think the instructor will be: “Probably White … like the rest of them.“ Yet, when a mid-twenties Black male stood up in front of them, they appear confused. For example, etched in my mind to this very day was the perplexed look on a young White woman’s face. I later learned she was from an affluent and mostly White community in Texas. I remember how she looked around the room in confusion after my welcome … and asked her classmates if this was “the right class.” She then proceeded to check the room number on the door outside to ensure it matched the location printed on her course schedule.

It was amazing for me to witness her and other White teacher candidates’ emotional reactions as they scrambled to compose their stereotypes about the intellectual ability and place of Black people in teacher education, especially those who are teacher educators. Those who become pre-service teachers, especially White women, generally are sympathetic toward the scripted struggles of students from minoritized backgrounds. Subsequently, the development of a White-savior complex (Matias, 2013) primed their propensity to both underestimate and essentialize the ability of racialized bodies, especially those who are Black. This toxic disposition locates White teacher candidates as consummate beings and their future students as empty receptacles needing a cultural auxiliary to deposit an “education” in and on their minds (Freire, 1993). As a Black teacher educator who watched this pattern develop through many young minds, I sought to understand the following: the extent to which the cross-cultural understanding of racially diverse students impacted the ontology and epistemology of White pre-service teachers.

My life as a Black student, and now as a Black educator, is filled with trying to understand (and undercut) deficit perspectives toward racialized bodies, particularly children and youth who are Black. I was raised in Denver, Colorado. I attended racially diverse public schools until I entered my secondary years, where I enrolled in a predominately White, all-boys, Catholic high school. The school was known in the community for producing high-achieving students. My parents sent me there because they wanted me to have the best chance to enter college and also prepare for the demands of a university education. Consequently, most of the “real education” I would receive in this space was in the hallways or in the multicultural office where the few Black students at this school used as our safe haven. It was outside of these spaces that the insidious stereotypes about Black students lived on including among the minds of many White teachers and the majority of White students. I quickly realized that I was the proxy for all Black people and our collective intellectual ability (both imagined and real). Thus, my identity as a young Black male was molded against the antithetical White male privilege that was the symbolic epitome of this prestigious school. In all, my Black male identity surfaced at the intersection of being an athlete, a student leader, and a critical thinker.

In my four years in this space, one realization was made clear: I was expected to be academically and intellectually inferior to my White peers. Seemingly, this positioning located any Black student who was intelligent as “acting White” (Ogbu, 2004), negating associations between Black identity and cerebral ability. This unsettling feeling radiated from the gaze of White teachers and the peppering of jokes by White classmates about my stereotypical lack of “academic ability” when juxtaposed to other White students. It was in these spaces where I first encountered White saviors who treated Black students like we were children who were in need of academic and cultural assistance to become like the rest of the White student body. Ultimately, Black youth were to be “saved” from our own plight by Whites. Luckily, our cohort of Black students and some amazing White teachers prevented much of the treatment from seeping into our subconscious and helped those of us who were Black to ultimately preserve our self-worth. Had it not been for the multicultural office staff, some of our football coaches, and several teachers, our intellectual place among other capable White students at this Catholic institution of learning would have been co-opted. Through those memories, I treaded a path to disprove timeless eugenic myths. Instead, I seek to educate future teachers how to recognize the tremendous wealth and sociopolitical struggles that people who are BIPOC represent in our schools and society.

Unfortunately, in my role as an instructor at a large predominantly White research university in the South, my passion was swiftly met by resistant White teacher candidates with adversarial results. For example, I taught a course titled “Sociocultural Influences on Learning” for a pre-service teacher-credential program. The course was designed to guide teacher candidates through the socio-historical relationship between schooling, interlocking forms of oppression, and the meaning (or many meanings) of education. The course was also cross-listed with the African American Studies Program; thus, there was a heavy emphasis on Black students and the education and experiences of African Americans. Initially, I led students through an understanding of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the US context, as well as interlocking forms of oppression (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989). We then applied these frameworks to understand the history of unequal schooling in the United States. Once we finished dissecting the relationship between schooling and racial segregation, we began to delve deeper into the foundations of Black education and the various equity issues that Black communities experience in contemporary contexts. The later class sessions became interesting during the campaign and subsequent election of President Donald J. Trump. His inflammatory rhetoric and emboldened defense of White-supremacist ideologies were reminiscent of the blatantly racist discourse prevalent before and during in the 1960s. My goal in unpacking this and similar types of rhetoric was to deescalate mostly White pre-service teachers’ deficit understanding of Black students. Although I was mildly successful, this approach led way for the deflection of a deficit-based vantage point for understanding racialized bodies to White teacher candidates’ embodiment of ignorance when confronted with their participation in everyday racism.

The Racial Contract Theory

Charles Mills (1997) artfully constructed a critique of color-neutral rhetoric in his seminal work titled The Racial Contract. His work details the omitted rights of racialized Americans and the impacts to how we discursively construct morality and humanity. It further details the moral, political, and social aspects of humanity that purposefully ignore racialized bodies to ultimately protect the privileged rights of White people. The contract outlines boundaries for those who are considered White, denoted as the White polity, as well as all others who are designated as subpersons. He defines subpersons as “humanoid entities who because of racial phenotype/genealogy/culture, are not fully human and therefore have a different and inferior schedule of rights and liberties applying to them” (Mills, 1997, p. 56). The White polity is headed primarily by White males of European ancestry who serve as signatories to the creation and maintenance of exploitive treatment toward people they label as “non-White.” The transnational White polity further privileges White people as “civilized” and juxtaposes BIPOC individuals as “savages” because of their supposed barbaric dispositions. The racial contract is proposed to be infinite due to its malleable boundaries and its signatories vowing to keep it place at all costs. The contract has a powerful impact on those in the White polity, as it garners a level of cultural superiority among its members. Mills further states that the racial contract is epistemological by “prescribing norms for cognition to which its signatories must adhere” (Mills, 1997, p. 11). The contract ultimately seeks to create and sustain sociopolitical power to subordinate individuals who are BIPOC worldwide.

In the context of teacher education, the racial contract frames the experiences of White pre-service teachers because it outlines their thought process toward their future students who they already view as racially different. As I have learned, White pre-service teachers tend to believe that for students who are from racialized backgrounds to become “academically successful,” they must be like them (i.e., White). However, as I try to explain, the system of schooling in the United States is set up for those who understand or mirror hegemonic culture to succeed. More specifically, their epistemology, knowledge base, and scripting of “academic achievement” vis-à-vis racial identity aligns with the White polity, thus, manifesting in ideologically violent treatment toward racialized bodies. When White pre-teachers come into their education classes with a deficit-oriented positionality, they participate in the process of erasing the vast wealth that their future students will bring to their future classrooms.

One White female teacher candidate was persisting in denial as she combatted stories of the many wrongdoing against Mexican American families and students when we were reading Angela Valenzuela’s rich ethnography titled Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (1999). This White pre-service teacher was adamant that the author’s account of White teachers treating Mexican American students as if they were not educable was acceptable and appropriate because, as she put it, “Some students just do not want to learn … so what else can you do?” This epistemological understanding pegs children from racialized backgrounds as outsiders or othered (Kumashiro, 2000). Once another is considered as the Other is the point of cerebral demarcation between official knowledge (Apple, 2014); that is, in this moment, a teacher’s attempt at “building knowledge” to educate future students resorts to expelling Othered knowledge and values. Mills (1997) describes this process within the context of cultural genocide against Indigenous persons: “[T]he mission kills us from within … they impose upon us another religion, belittling the values we hold. This de-characterizes us to the point where we are ashamed to be Indians” (p. 88). The stripping of Indigenous spiritual practices by White settlers is similar to the Othering of students’ cultural knowledge and values because it is a genocidal act that funnels students toward assimilation. That is, many White pre-service teachers are preparing for the goal of education for assimilation by centering their sociocultural knowledge as official and normative while dispelling all others. Yet, this entire process begins with deficit perspectives that spring into “a slippery slope” toward White ignorance. Now layering the impact of Trump on the mindset of many White pre-service teachers, it creates a context for dissonance between fighting to recognize Indigenous persons and people of color as equals against their perpetuation of deficit-oriented practices. In the next section, I will discuss “the slippery slope” between deficit-oriented positionalities and the willful ignorance of many White pre-service teachers.

From White Guilt, to White Saviors … to White Ignorance

Common cycles of emotional responses for White pre-service teachers seem to follow the pattern of White guilt when they learn about the foundation of racial inequality in US schools and society (Iyer, Leach, & Crosby, 2003; Steele, 1990). Their guilt then often transitions to what is known as the White-savior complex (Cole, 2012; Matias, 2013). White guilt is the feeling generated when White Americans actually recognize the advantages that White supremacy has afforded them, as well as how it has systematically disadvantaged groups like African Americans (Steele, 1990). This feeling of guilt has the ability to destabilize understandings of American success stories and debilitates European American and White American identity as pure and moral (Branscombe, 2011; Branscombe, Doosje, & McGarty, 2002). My White teacher candidates’ own experiences with White guilt was invoked by my approach to deeper interdisciplinary analyses into the ramifications of slavery for enslaved Africans and their descendants in addition to Jim Crow laws. I was not shy about showing the gore and having them read explicit details of the gruesome institutions that perpetuated the mass enslavement of Black people. I purposefully presented an in-depth and uncensored history of White American terrorism, genocide, and disdain for Black people to situate White pre-service teachers’ thoughts within the politics of omitted knowledge. Many White teacher candidates were disgusted by the actions of their ancestors. Consequently, they began to shift their epistemological stance from morally denouncing slavery to absolving their personal connection to their ancestors. However, they eventually became uncomfortable with their ties to what they saw as their immoral and racist ancestors (DiAngelo & Sensoy, 2014). The previous shift is important to note because it starkly connected them to the blatant abuse and hatred of Black people. As a Black male educator in front of a group of mostly White pre-service teachers, I grappled with their emotional dissonance as it appeared to only fuel their guilt. I connected the horrors of slavery to inequities in US schooling through explaining the illegality of educating Black people. It was at this point that most White teacher candidates recognized the harm that inequitable and oppressive measures have had on Black America’s schooling experience and the impacts to their literacy rates over generations. In these moments, they further recognized the dangerously foul methods that some White people have employed to frame White students as the norm and young Black people as needing their knowledge to become intelligent, learned, and literate. Though this frame of thinking, the White pre-service teachers’ proposed approach shifted toward becoming assumed superheroes who were able to replenish deficits by showing Black youth and other marginalized youth the so-called right (i.e., White) way to learn.

The “I have to do something about this” attitude fueled by White guilt laid a perfect foundation for explicating the White-savior complex in this course. White saviors are portrayed through many popular films in the United States such as Dangerous Minds, Finding Forrester, and Glory, and even shows such as Last Chance U. Matias (2013) describes the ramifications of the White-savior mentality in teacher education:

well-intentioned White women enter urban schools, ridden with gangs, promiscuity, and drugs, they themselves become victims of the of the illness of urbanity that plagues People of color and in doing so, they become White martyrs/messiahs for taking on the risk of contaminating their inherent purity.

(p. 53)

White pre-service teachers generally embodied these presumed “good intentions” and misappropriated the historical bastardized schooling experiences of urban youth as portrayed in the popular media to plot their vengeful fight for their future students’ dignity. The White pre-service teachers in my class started using deficit rhetoric that positioned them as uniquely poised and qualified to usher success to urban learners. As a critical teacher educator, I have made every attempt to quell this attitude by naming it and calling folks out on the problems with the White-savior complex. I often will tell my teacher candidates the following: “They should put on a cape because they are acting like a White savior.” It became a dunce cap for aspiring White teachers who became infatuated with being the one White person who could “save” Indigenous students and students of color from what they viewed as their “abnormal” schooling troubles. However, I sought to empower them to be a key part of a larger quest to erase the race-based opportunity gap, but not through hollow practices. Resultantly, several White teacher candidates were more purposeful in avoiding what could be seen as White-savor language and subsequently shifted their focus from historical to contemporary schooling experiences. This shift is significant because it drew their thinking away from being White saviors to focusing on the ways by which today’s schooling experiences are better and worse for students from marginalized backgrounds. In most cases, focusing on the positive provokes optimism. However, I witnessed many White teacher candidates becoming or choosing to remain ignorant as we started to explore the issues facing K-12 students today in a racialized society.

Imagine the cacophony of feelings that mold young White privileged minds to believe that people unlike them need help that only they could give, which motivates them becau...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author Biographies
• A Note on Terminology: The Power of Language
• Optical Illusions: On Being Un/Desirable Bodies of Difference in Education
• 1 “A Slippery Slope”: From Deficit-Based Vantage Points to Ignorance for White Pre-Service Teachers
• 2 (Re)discovering My Racialized Body: Critical Autoethnographic Connections
• 3 Life After Death: Beyond the Epistemologies of Black Education Struggle in Teacher Preparation and Toward a Pedagogy of Black Educational Life
• 4 Even if Our Voices Shake: Refusing to Be and Teach “Inside of the Lines”
• 5 From Consumption to Refusal: A Four-Part Exploration of the Dilemmas of Black Education Scholars and Radical Knowledge
• 6 A Shattered Window
• 7 Disproportionate Underrepresentation of Faculty of Color in Education: A Critical disAbility Studies in Education (dSE) Analysis
• 8 From the Mekong River to the Merrimack River: One Lao American Refugee’s Journey Through the Academy
• 9 Still Searching: My Present Reality
• 10 “You Need to Be More Social”: Controlling Images of Black Women in Tenure Dossiers
• 11 Iconic Modernism and Gendered-Racialized Realities
• Conclusion – From Relics of Racial Oppression to Sites of Authentic Inclusion: Challenges and Possibilities
• References
• Index