What’s Love Got to Do With It? Toward a Theory of Benevolent Whiteness in Education

Abstract

In this theoretical essay, I argue that the contemporary over-disciplining of Black and Native youth can best be understood through understanding the culturally violent roots of the heroic white woman teacher. I use analytical tools from settler colonial theory and feminist of color theory to inform my epistemological framing of power as a site of multidimensionality existing across space and depth (Sandoval, Methodology of the oppressed, vol 18, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2013) and comprised of mutually constructed systems of oppression (Collins, Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, Routledge, London, 2002). Revisioning the “discipline gap” from this vantage point moves us away from culturally focused or individualized deficit thinking aimed at communities of color and toward understanding the structures and histories foundational to our contemporary school systems, and the individuals who have informed and upheld those structures for nearly 200 years. I close with a discussion of immediate practical changes we can implement in classrooms, as well as a perhaps less practical call for reimagining decolonial futurities for teaching and schooling, both taking into account that the current U.S. teaching force and enrollees in credential programs are majority white and female whereas the student population is not.