Social and Cultural Foundations Lecture
Responses to Whiteness: Critical Whiteness Studies and Classroom Encounters
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Becky Aanerud, English, University of Washington
April, 2006This presentation explores the ways in which liberalism offers a narrative structure for white students and teachers that reproduces limited spaces for antiracist whiteness, constructed along a binary of "good whites" and "bad whites." Aanerud argues that in the effort to remain a good white and "non-racist," white students and educators inadvertently collaborate in white supremacy by placing far greater energy on maintaining their comfort rather than challenging racism and inequality. She argues that educators must learn to forge new responses to whiteness that are attentive to the histories and legacies of white supremacy and enable a more complicated understanding of whiteness within white supremacy. Drawing on the work of critical whiteness theorists Ruth Frankenberg and Audrey Thompson, Aanerud discusses the need to encourage and enable "uncertainty" in the classroom that recognize that antiracist identities, both for white students and for students of color, are always in process, internally contradictory, and ambiguous.
This talk was jointly sponsored by Social and Cultural Foundations and the College of Education Futures Committee.
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