Whitewashed Critical Perspectives

Restoring the Edge to Edgy Ideas

Catherine Compton-Lilly, Tisha Lewis Ellison, Kristen Perry, Peter Smagorinsky, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Tisha Lewis Ellison, Kristen H. Perry, Peter Smagorinsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume examines revolutionary constructs in literacy education and demonstrates how they have been gentrified, whitewashed, and appropriated, losing their revolutionary edge so as to become palatable for the mainstream. Written by top scholars in literacy education, chapters cover key concepts that were originally conceived as radical theories to upset the status quo —including Third Space, Funds of Knowledge, Culturally Relevant Pedagogies, and more. Each chapter addresses how the core theory was culturally appropriated and de-fanged to support rather than take down racial and societal hierarchies.

Critiquing the harmful impact of watering down these theories, the contributors offer ways to restore the edge to these once groundbreaking ideas, reject racist and assimilationist trends, and support the original vision behind these liberatory theories. In so doing, this volume adopts a truly radical, critical stance that is essential for researchers, scholars, and students in literacy education.

1

Introduction

Catherine Compton-Lilly, Tisha Lewis Ellison, Kristen H. Perry and Peter Smagorinsky

There are times when educators and scholars get frustrated. This book is a response to some of those moments. Specifically, this book was conceptualized after the editors participated in a series of two-day meetings in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Georgia, as part of the SEC Faculty Travel Program. This series of intercollegiate visits and presentations ended with two days of conversation about the state of education in the United States and around the world. Educational equity and reflexive critique informed our initial impetus.

However, during the course of our writing and editing of this volume, the world shifted. As we write, we are in a global pandemic that has continued for over eight months with no end in sight. We have witnessed not only a global response to the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other African American people at the hands of law enforcement, but also a frightening backlash of radical conservatism, racism, and white supremacy. These concerns have been amplified by a highly contentious presidential election that has the potential to significantly change the history of the United States, as well as globally in China and South Africa, with increasing effects of climate change on nations, and particularly under-resourced communities, xenophobia violence, and economic sustainability. We also note the significant increase in the influence of far-right, fascist, and white supremacist groups and related atrocities around the world. These shifts highlight not only the need for this volume but the importance of scholars speaking out against injustice. Our premise is that educational scholars have provided a set of tools that can help literacy educators to raise, examine and respond to underlying issues of inequity and hate.

To encourage educators and scholars to challenge educational injustice, we name and critique what we call the whitewashing of critical and emancipatory ideas related to race, social justice, and education. We intentionally chose a term that references whiteness to recognize the role that white educators and scholars have played in gentrifying, diluting, taming, de-fanging, appropriating, and making revolutionary constructs more palatable to predominantly white audiences. As an editorial team that includes three white scholars and one Black scholar, we recognize the personal and collective role we have all played—despite our good intentions—in the dismantling and diluting of liberatory constructs. We fully recognize that we are not immune to the critiques presented in this volume, and we acknowledge that we have also been complicit in whitewashing in the academy.

Across this volume, we are intentional in combining whiteness with references to “washing.” While washing is often associated with cleanliness and purity, it also has an underside. Washing can remove a surface of its imperfections, rough spots, and stains. Washing can make the world look clean, safe, and just. For example, power washing can remove graffiti from the side of a building that presents messages of local and social critique. Things, ideas, and perspectives can be washed away. A “wash” can also be a layer of color that is used to hide imperfections and make things more uniform. The Urban Dictionary defines “wash” as a “cancelling-out or balancing effect. An incident where nothing is gained and nothing is lost,” as in “that was a wash” (Urban Dictionary, 2020). Our use of “wash,” in whitewashing, references all of these ideas and a related construct described by critical race theorists: “interest convergence” (Bell, 1987, p. 62). Bell argued that Blacks would achieve racial equality when it converged with the interests of whites—or benefited whites. In short, CRT scholars (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Tate, 1997) remind educators that civil rights legislation did more to advance the interests of white women—including members of our editorial team—than the interests of Blacks, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). CRT scholars question liberalism’s faith in slow, sustained growth and the implementation of changes that are palatable to white people and serve white interests (e.g., standards, testing, retention, behavior policies). CRT demands recognition of systemic and historic racism. As described below and across this volume, whitewashing serves dominant interests, while denying that potential these constructs might have for BIPOC communities.

The plan for this volume was hatched during meetings supported by the Southeastern Conference (SEC) travel grants program, which promotes collaborations across SEC institutions. In 2018–2019 the four editors were awarded grants to meet at each of our three campuses: University of South Carolina, University of Georgia, and University of Kentucky. Our proposal to the SEC addressed “Learning from Families and Communities: Lessons for Educational Change,” based on the shared research focus of Compton-Lilly (University of South Carolina), Lewis Ellison (University of Georgia), and Perry (University of Kentucky). Smagorinsky (University of Georgia) was invited to join the team based on his contribution to cultural psychology, a research area that has relevance to family and community literacy.

The purpose and plan for this book solidified during our third meeting. While early meetings involved establishing relationships, learning from each other, becoming a team, and brainstorming regarding potential projects, by our third meeting we were ready to move from discussion to envisioning a scholarly agenda. In considering issues related to family and community literacies, we continually referenced theoretical constructs that we believed had been defined and used in questionable ways. As we spoke we began to recognize the value of producing a volume that identified and discussed theoretical ideas that had been stripped of their revolutionary, counter-hegemonic intentions. We noted that this erasure of criticality made these constructs more palatable to mainstream (white) educators, but less effective in stimulating authentic change. We wondered at the reasons behind these erasures and suspected that it was not a simple matter of intentional neutralization. We noted that avoiding the edginess of ideas was easier and less threatening to educators and their students. We considered the simplicity of denial and neglect and how they made educational spaces simpler and more comfortable for people from white, socioeconomically advantaged communities. We reflected on the role that privilege—the ability to ignore situations and realities that define other people’s lives—played in whitewashing. Finally, we grappled with the idea that whitewashing allowed scholars to absolve themselves of responsibility—blame the administration, the families, the communities, the teachers—and focus on academic minutia from offices at the academy.

Each of these actions and outcomes, as Saad (2020) noted, serve to uphold white supremacy and systemic injustice in society. Indeed, Bettina Love (2019) observed that education itself, particularly in the US, is built upon a foundation of white supremacy. She further argued for the importance of educational theories developed by BIPOC: “Theories are more than just academic words that folx with degrees throw around at coffee shops and poetry slams; they work to explain to us how the world works, who the world denies, and how structures uphold oppression” (p. 146). It is crucial, then, that we critically examine the ways in which these theories have been taken up and whitewashed—and in so doing, have upheld oppression and denied the very realities they were designed to highlight.

Many of the constructs that are addressed in the chapters that follow—third space (Gutiérrez), funds of knowledge (Moll and González), Freirean pedagogy (Freire), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings)—were introduced by BIPOC scholars in order to critique educational practices undertaken by white educators who sought to teach historically underserved students. Yet these ideas were co-opted into mainstream practices and programs, and as a result their original critical intentions have been whitewashed away in the course of implementation. To frame the chapters presented in this volume, we present a brief discussion of historical and geographic dimensions of whitewashing. Together these discussions reveal the systemic and continual nature of whitewashing.

Historical Whitewashing

Whitewashing has deep roots in educational history. Influenced by Horace Mann and others, public schools were designed to foster the development of disciplined and judicious citizens in order to forge a national identity to counter the new cultural and linguistic diversity following from new waves of European immigrants in the mid-1800s (Smagorinsky, in press). With the emergence of large cities with increasing immigrant populations, schools socialized white immigrants to Eurocentric ways of being (Cremin, 1988). Eurocentric expectations were imposed on BIPOC communities and the children who attended schools in those communities. Despite recurring rhetoric that promotes diversity in schools and universities, assimilationist imperatives remain central to the deep structures of schools, which are designed to perpetuate status quo values and practices (Smagorinsky, 2020). The preservation of Eurocentric norms, structural racism, and white supremacy has historically been aided by the whitewashing of history, through the omission of historical acts of resistance and agency. Thus, whitewashing has played a significant role in educational history through the memorializing via monuments and the commemorative naming of white historical figures, including those traitors and white supremacists who played prominent roles in the Civil War. Among these deep and structural efforts to resist change, overt authoritarian efforts have been used to shut down Afrocentric and Latin curricula in schools (Acosta, 2013).

Education in America has been continually and systematically whitewashed, by removing historical accounts of conflict and often violence, and denying educators of the agency, resistance, and strategic action that characterized their work. Writing about Freedmen Schools established after the Civil War, Morris (1980) drew on semi-annual reports, budget materials, and textbooks to highlight the orientation toward freedom, academic skill, and hope that characterized those institutions. In her detailed historical ethnography of African American educators in the US South, Siddle Walker (2001) presented the experiences of African American teachers during the 1940s and 1950s and challenged images that depicted them as under-educated and ignorant. She reported that African American teachers were often better prepared than their white counterparts and described their active participation in professional organizations. Siddle Walker noted the apparent destruction of archival evidence that could tell this story and highlighted the challenges she encountered—including the need to rely on private family archives. Shannon (1989) described the efforts of educators at the Highlander Folk School in the 1950s who sought to employ “local literate people who spoke the same dialect as the illiterates to serve as teachers” (p. 128) in order to connect school learning to people’s lives in South Carolina. Finally, in an interview with Siddle Walker, Heller (2019) reported the agential and strategic work of African American leaders as US schools moved toward integration during the 1950s and 1960s. Muhammad (2020) studied Black literary societies that emerged in the 1830s in the US, observing that the roots of literacy in these communities were “much more expansive and advanced” than the forms that literacy takes in modern classrooms, and included “goals of identity meaning-making and criticality” (p. 10). Literacy, in these societies, was not only tied to literate skills and proficiencies, but also to self-empowerment, liberation, and “making oneself visible within the intellectual community” (p. 27). Muhammad based her construct of historically responsive literacy, along with a resulting teaching framework, upon 10 lessons she gleaned from Black literary societies.

Our assimilationist history has a continuing and significant effect on contemporary educational practice and policy. In US schools, the teaching force is currently comprised largely of white people (about 85%) and the majority of this same teaching force is women (about 85%) (Hrabowski & Sanders, 2015). Only 7% of teachers are Black (5% females; 2% males; US Department of Education, 2016; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2017a, 2017b). In contrast, demographic trends reveal that the student population itself is moving away from white majorities and toward more pluralistic classrooms (de Brey et al., 2019). For example:

between fall 2000 and fall 2017, the percentage of public school students who were white decreased from 61 to 48 percent. In contrast, the percentage of public school students who were Hispanic increased from 16 to 27 percent during the same period.

(National Center for Educ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Contributor Biographies
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Third and Hybrid Spaces in Literacy Scholarship and Practice: They are Different and Their Differences Matter
• 3. What the FOK?: An Illustrative Case of How Whitewashing Occurs in Higher Education
• 4. Whitewashing as a Scholarly Liability: Racism and Inequity in Family Literacy Scholarship
• 5. “Stop Whitewashing Our Stories”: Using Counter-Stories to Dismantle Racist and Deficit Perspectives in BIPOC Narratives
• 6. Freirean Concepts: Diluted and Damaged
• 7. Put Some Respect on the Theory: Confronting Distortions of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
• 8. Dialoguing and Personhood
• Afterword: Restoring the Edge to Edgy Ideas in Literacy Education
• Index