White teachers talking race

Abstract

In light of the increasing racial diversity in American schools and the consistently homogenous teacher workforce in the United States, understanding the ways white teachers consider and attend to racial issues is of crucial importance to the educational landscape. This paper, based on a qualitative study, explores five white American teachers’ talk about race following their viewing of a documentary film about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. The paper adds to the already rich literature on white teachers’ talk about race by using three kinds of analytic tools: narrative analysis, discourse analysis, and psychoanalytically-informed notions of ignorance and resistance that complicate the existing literature’s exploration of white teachers’ avoidance of racial issues. The authors argue that white teachers have sophisticated knowledge about race, despite the common suppositions otherwise, and suggest attention be paid to the ways in which this knowledge is activated, ignored, and/or resisted. The paper concludes with implications for teacher education.