Framing Whiteness: Working through the tensions in introducing whiteness to educators

Abstract

Teacher education has recently encountered a radically new approach to the problem of educational inequality of racialised groups of students. Critical whiteness studies have emerged with the realisation that the failure of traditional equity education initiatives is attributable to a misidentification of change object. Reflecting the reframing of race relations work in education, dialogues on racism are shifting from the inadequacies of 'others' or from the race/d relations between 'us' and 'them' to a critical problematisation of whiteness itself. The project entails interrogating whiteness as the active component in processes of domination as distinct from studying racial difference as the effect of such processes. One prevalent approach to critical whiteness-white privilege-is criticised for its inadequate contextualisation of whiteness and for highlighting the individual white body as an appropriate subject for analysis. These and other tensions produce various outcomes in participants: the celebration of white ethnicity; affect; and double binds. Whiteness has been reified as an objective, observable quality definitive of a distinct population. A revised approach to whiteness shifts to the discourse, the culture, the structures, the mechanisms, and the social relations of whiteness that produce racialised subjects including whites.