Meaningful Ambivalence, Incommensurability, and Vulnerability in an Antiracist Project: Answers to Unasked Questions

Abstract

The author reports the findings from a yearlong antiracist project involving three White male preservice teachers in a Midwestern rural U.S. state. Drawing on second-wave White teacher identity literature and Emotional Tools of Whiteness, the project focuses on collaborative critical self-reflection to explore the participants’ individual relationships with race and racism. The study reveals some important misconceptions relating to ambivalence, incommensurability, and vulnerability. The author attends to the participants’ affective responses to the misconceptions and discusses how their affects are indicative of both larger social structures and of the way in which the project was conceptualized initially, focusing on the ideals and outcomes rather than the actual practice of engaging in the self-reflection. The author argues for the need to account for complexity of preservice teachers’ experiences as they engage in antiracist work.