White Racial Dominance Research Articles

Stronger together: race, power, and parent-teacher partnership in the COVID-19 era

ABSTRACT This article explores parent-teacher partnerships as a strategy for improving students’ educational experiences and addressing racial equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a subset of qualitative open-response questions specific to family perceptions from a large-scale 2020 Boston Public Schools survey, the results of this study indicate that the demands of remote learning during the pandemic left families, particularly those of Black and Latinx backgrounds, desiring stronger relational connections with teachers and schools. This analysis furthers the literature on race and education by attending to how white racial domination influences educational opportunity, even in times of crisis. Accordingly, our findings emphasize how the wider society must reckon with the effects of racial capitalism as a driving force of racialized inequities in student and family experiences in education.

White Racial Framing and White Supremacy Culture in STEM Education: Experiences of Students with Minoritized Identities of Sexuality and/or Gender

Whiteness is prevalent in higher education and therefore permeates science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. While research shows STEM’s long history of exclusion and marginalization in higher education (Ong et al., 2011), there has been limited research on the ways students with minoritized identities of sexuality and/or gender (MIOSG) in STEM interact with systems of dominance, such as whiteness. Using white supremacy culture (Okun, 2021; Okun Jones, 2001) and the white racial frame (Feagin, 2010) as sensitizing concepts, this paper explores how students with MIoSG are situated in relation to systems of whiteness and white racial dominance in STEM learning spaces. Our findings included three emergent categories: color-evasiveness, desiring diversity in STEM, and the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in STEM. Findings illuminated the complex ways BIPOC and white students with MIoSG experienced and thought about whiteness and white supremacy in STEM. Data point to the need for intentional anti-racist research, policy, and practice in STEM learning spaces.

Introduction

Introduction

The voice of the Other in a ‘liberal’ ivory tower: Exploring the counterstory of an Asian international student on structural racism in US academia

ABSTRACT The normative institutional practices of White, native English speakers have been explored in detail by CRT scholars in US academia, and these practices perpetuate a system which maintains White privilege to the detriment and systemic exclusion of the Other. Consequently, students of colour and non-native English speakers are inclined to face a number of forms of inequality, inequity, discrimination and harassment based on Whiteness and nativism including English speaker centrism, and this eventually serves to reproduce Whiteness and White racial domination. To better understand this institutional practices based on Whiteness in US academia, this paper explores how structural inequity based on linguistic racism and White privilege is reproduced by patterns in everyday institutional practice in US academia, and how intersectional structural inequity influences non-White, non-native speakers of American English such as international students from Asia by interviewing an Asian international ELL Ph.D. student, and exploring his counterstory in detail.

Mills’s account of white ignorance: Structural or non-structural?

Recent philosophical secondary literature on white ignorance – a concept most famously developed by the late philosopher Charles W. Mills – suggests that white ignorance is, one way or another, a non-structural phenomenon. I analyse two such readings, the agential view and the cognitivist view. I argue that they misinterpret Mills’ work by (among other things) committing a kind of structural erasure, and one which implies that Mills’ account cannot capture, for example, cases where white ignorance (and white racial domination) involves historical erasure, especially when perpetrated by sociopolitical institutions. This is particularly salient in cases such as the recent movement against anti-racist education, now widely conflated with critical race theory, in the United States and United Kingdom, which I offer as a brief case study.

Disrupting White racial dominance: How White antiracists challenge the racial status quo in interpersonal relationships.

As White activists are growing the racial justice movement, their antiracism frequently disrupts the racial hierarchy, which features whiteness in a dominant role, especially in interpersonal relationships. We investigate how White antiracists disrupt whiteness in interpersonal relationships. We interviewed 16 White antiracists who had experienced significant relationship distance due to their antiracism. We conducted thematic analyses to understand the conflicts that emerged between antiracists and their White counterparts as activists challenged White racial dominance.Antiracists disrupted whiteness by exercising social power to punish racist offenders. In response, their White counterparts resisted these challenges by exerting their instruments of power to sanction antiracists. The conflict with White people led antiracists to build greater personal and social capacity for antiracist activism.This study illustrates how conflicts can emerge during social change efforts even at the microlevel as parties exercise power to contest or support the status quo.

Illuminating antiracist pedagogy in nursing education.

In the profession of nursing, whiteness continues to be deeply rooted because of the uncritical recognition of the white racial domination evident within the ranks of nursing leadership. White privilege is exerted in its ascendency and policy-making within the nursing discipline and in the Eurocentric agenda that commands nursing pedagogy. While attention to antiracism has recently increased, antiracism pedagogy in nursing education is nascent. Pedagogical approaches in the nursing profession are essential. Because it encompasses the strategies used to transmit the science in how nurses practice and teach, which has predominantly been informed using a Eurocentric lens. This paper presents a literature review on antiracist pedagogy in nursing education, discussing how nurse educators can integrate antiracism pedagogy in nursing education, highlighting examples presented by the authors. Key terms related to antiracism are reviewed. The resultant themes from the literature review include resistance to antiracist pedagogy, managing emotional responses, and supporting transformative learning using an antiracist approach. The primary implementation of Eurocentric pedagogical approaches whiteness pervasive in nursing education must be uprooted. Antiracist and other antioppressive learning approaches must be embraced to understand the insidiousness of racial inequities and its power in sustaining structural oppression in nursing academia.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

O CHEIRO DO RACISMO NA CULTURA POLÍTICO-AFETIVA HIGIENISTA BRASILEIRA: O SANEAMENTO DO CORPO-DEJETO

Abstract: This article takes the racial stigma as an object of analysis, more precisely the symbolic construction that black people are dirty, stinky and/or filthy - a discussion that has been ignored in the Brazilian racial debate. In this sense, the aim is to discuss the racist production of bodies, senses and emotions. It is argued that, in a racist society, the processes of socialization and subjectivation are structured under a hygienist political-affective culture that reinforces white racial domination while subjectively subordinating, subjecting and sanitizing-whitening black people. Thus, there is an urgent need for greater articulation between the Psy field and Social Sciences to understand the interface between health, citizenship and the sociopolitical construction of ethnicity.

“I Wanted Diversity, But Not So Much”: Middle-Class White Parents, School Choice, and the Persistence of Anti-Black Stereotypes

This interview study examines the school choices of white middle class parents who live in a large Northeastern city. Interviewees identify as progressive urbanites and express an appreciation for racial diversity. Simultaneously, interviewees draw on anti-Black stereotypes when evaluating school options and avoiding majority Black schools. While previous studies suggest that diversity-seeking whites are well intentioned and inadvertently reproduce racism through school choice, my analysis allows for greater consideration of white parents’ investment in the reproduction of white racial dominance.

The unremarked optimum: whiteness, optimization, and control in the database revolution

ABSTRACT The 1970s saw major transformations in how computerized databases were conceived, developed, and designed. Part of a broader shift in how software applications were developed, these transformations—sometimes referred to as “the database revolution”—introduced new and then-novel approaches to structuring and arranging digital data, optimizing them for usability and convenience. At the same time, however, the rhetoric of innovation and revolution surrounding this moment in database development obscures the ways it helped concentrate and extend particular kinds of racialized power and, in particular, whiteness (i.e., those norms and values congenial to the reproduction of white racial dominance and the subjugation of blackness). In this article, we revisit key works of the database revolution to show how they encoded whiteness as a kind of unremarked optimum, in both implicit and explicit ways. Finally, we argue that these developments helped to codify and extend a kind of “willful ignorance” that, as scholars of epistemology and justice have shown, is central to the preservation and reproduction of whiteness.

Exculpating Injustice: Coroner Constructions of White Innocence in the Postbellum South

Research notes the broad complicity of white public officials in historical racial violence and repression. These discussions emphasize the role of criminal justice actors in perpetrating and enabling this repression. Extending this assessment, the authors examine coroners’ facilitation of white racial dominance through administrative performances constructing white innocence. Using cases from post-Emancipation South Carolina, the authors document race-related patterns of exculpatory effort, through the omission and curation of evidence amid the post-Reconstruction rise of white supremacist redemption. The authors theorize that these exculpatory efforts helped sustain an ideology of white innocence and institutional legitimacy by constructing a white “law-abiding” public. The authors argue that such coroner misconduct not only degrades the rule of law but has broader implications, including its corruption of the corpus of mortality and crime data. Finally, the authors suggest that these administrative performances persist in present-day coroner reporting, including in the exculpation of racist police violence.

What is White Ignorance?

AbstractIn this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred.

Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack With Becky and Karen

“BBQ Becky” and “Karen” memes reference real-world incidents in which Black individuals were harassed by White women in public spaces. In what I term the BBQ Becky meme genre, Black meme creators use humor, satire, and strategic positioning to perform a set of interrelated social commentaries on the behavior of White women. By conducting a visual Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) of BBQ Becky memes, I argue that Becky and Karen memes are a cultural critique of White surveillance and White racial dominance. I find that memes in the BBQ Becky meme genre call attention to, and reject, White women’s surveillance and regulation of Black bodies in public spaces—making an important connection between racialized surveillance of the past and contemporary acts of “casual” racism. This meme genre also disrupts White supremacist logics and performative racial ignorance by framing Karens and Beckys as racist—not just disgruntled or entitled. Finally, in a subversion and reversal of power dynamics, Karen and BBQ Becky memes police White supremacy and explicitly call for consequences, providing Black communities with a form of agency. Hence, I conclude that Black memes matter in the struggle for racial equity.

Democracy, Exclusion, and White Supremacy: How Should We Think About Exclusionary Zoning?

David Imbroscio’s argument about exclusionary zoning contains several salient arguments that deserve the attention of those working on issues of housing justice, racial justice, and urban equity. Attention to Imbroscio’s concerns can strengthen efforts to produce greater regional equity in American metropolitan areas. I find two main elements of his argument, however, unconvincing. First, his assertion that the anti-exclusionary zoning movement “is underlain by a deep commitment to neoliberalism” is a misreading of the greater history and aims of anti-exclusionist advocacy and scholarship. Second, his claim that anti-exclusionism is anti-democratic suffers from an overly narrow and process-focused concept of democracy that ignores historical and enduring power dynamics of local land-use politics as they are and have been expressed within a system of White racial domination.

(Un)Common White Sense: the Whiteness Behind Digital Media

Wielding its power through operations of invisibility and normalcy, whiteness, as a racially hegemonic ideology, acts as if white racial domination is the normal, natural order of the world, as if it is common sense. But this ‘common’ sense has another operating mechanism; it allows whiteness to go undetected, thereby masking racial inequities. That is, as folks blindly accept what is ‘common’ sense as rationale to justify their actions, they inadvertently ignore how whiteness, and thus white supremacy, is inextricably bound into that white sense making. As such, we opt for another term, (un)common white sense which deliberately makes the ‘common’ uncommon by revealing the hidden tendencies of whiteness. Take, for example, historically white (In solidarity with Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholarship, this article strategically capitalizes Black and lowercases white) institutions of higher education where curating a diverse public image of racial magnanimity generates a positive public reputation so needed by the university. Yet in this branding and imaging, whiteness is still ever-present. Though the university brochures are glittered with diverse Black and Brown faces, the university is pimping Black and Brown bodies for its own agenda, perpetuating the oft inequitable racial experiences of people of colour. In the end, those glittering, diverse university brochures are just another attempt to present a fictitious racial utopia. By exposing how universities apply (un)common white sense in their postdigital media, the maintenance and manifestations of white supremacy are revealed. Using Critical Race Theory’s method of counterstorytelling, this article illuminates how (un)common white sense embeds itself in university postdigital media. We, the authors, first explore how this face-value diversity has been used in the past, how it is presently being enforced on a historically white university (HWU) campus, and how the present problem of white ‘common’ sense can perhaps be made (un)common.

Integration as Perpetuation: Learning from Race Evasive Approaches to ESL Program Reform

Background Currently, most Latinx emergent bilingual (EB) students are educated in English-medium programs alongside English-dominant peers. Legally mandated social integration of EB students coincides with a prescriptive linguistic emphasis on content-language integration in ESL (English as a second language) programs; both integrative approaches are particularly salient in the current hyperracial climate in the United States. Focus of Study We explore two schools’ responses to Latinx EB population growth via the intersecting racial and language ideologies informing and influenced by programmatic changes, educator perceptions, and pedagogical practices. Research Design This qualitative multiple case study spans two Texas schools selected by purposeful maximal sampling over the course of two separate academic years. Data include semistructured interviews, focus group interviews, and participant observations. Findings We find that institutional structures across the sites tended to promote a denial of responsibility for racial stratification and a concomitant disciplining of the school curriculum. We argue that both integrative approaches ultimately perpetuated white racial domination. Conclusions/Recommendations We suggest that ESL research and practice would benefit from an explicit questioning of racializing discourses and boundaries of academic disciplines as part of a racially literate critical practice designed to counter the normalization of whiteness.

Theorizing White Racial Domination and Racial Justice: A Reply to Christopher Lebron

Journal of Social PhilosophyEarly View Special Issue Theorizing White Racial Domination and Racial Justice: A Reply to Christopher Lebron Charles W. Mills, Charles W. MillsSearch for more papers by this author Charles W. Mills, Charles W. MillsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 August 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12296Citations: 2 [Corrections added on December 24, 2019 after first online publication: Section number was removed for “Introduction” and the subsequent section headings were renumbered accordingly.] Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Whiteness As Innocence

Current antidiscrimination law is exceedingly hostile to the project of race-conscious remediation—the conscious use of race to mitigate America’s persistent racial hierarchy. This Article argues that this broad hostility can be traced in significant part to what I call “Whiteness as Innocence” ideology. This ideology is a system of legal reasoning by which the formal principle of equality is filled with the substantive principle of white racial dominance via invocations of white innocence. That is, under this ideology, ideas about white innocence influence legal decisions on who is “alike” and “unalike” and what constitutes “alike” and “unalike” treatment in race-conscious remedies cases in ways that generally favor whites as a group yet appear consistent with, perhaps even required by, the ideal of racial equality. As a result, Whiteness as Innocence reasoning legitimizes doctrinal outcomes that help perpetuate America’s racial hierarchy by making them appear to be decisions about responsibility, fairness, and desert, rather than exercises of racial power. In this process, innocence has displayed a malleable meaning and become presumptively attached to the law’s understanding of whiteness itself. This illustrates in powerful ways that race is a socially and legally constructed concept. Whiteness as Innocence ideology has shaped important aspects of American race law in favor of perpetuating racial hierarchy. The most significant contemporary example is strict scrutiny doctrine as developed in the 1970s and 1980s under the lead of Justice Lewis Powell. Whiteness as Innocence ideology influenced all major aspects of this doctrine that have hamstrung race-conscious remedial efforts since then: (1) its strict standard of review; (2) its restrictions on the purposes for which race-conscious remedies can be used; and (3) its firm limits on the ways in which such remedies can be implemented. Important cases before and after that time, reaching from Dred Scott to decisions of today, also illustrate the long historical arch of this ideology. Whiteness as Innocence ideology allows racist premises of white superiority to infiltrate legal doctrine and creates racial hostility and resentment. Reform efforts seeking to promote racial justice ought to be freed from the strictures imposed by this ideology. This may well have to involve redefining the meaning of white innocence itself.

Latino/a Student Threat and School Disciplinary Policies and Practices

Using a nationally representative sample of approximately 3,500 public schools, this study builds on and extends our knowledge of how ‘‘minority threat’’ manifests within schools. We test whether various disciplinary policies and practices are mobilized in accordance with Latino/a student composition, presumably the result of a group response to perceptions that white racial dominance is jeopardized. We gauge how schools’ Latino/a student populations are associated with the availability and use of several specific types of discipline. We further explore possible moderating influences of school crime and economic disadvantage on punishment. We find that schools with larger percentages of Latino/a students are more likely to favor certain punitive responses and less likely to favor certain mild responses, as predicted by minority threat. The percentage of Latino/a students is also related to greater use of certain disciplinary responses in schools with less crime.