Disruptive race spatiality: educators, white postures, and antiracism

ABSTRACT

This article explores notions of spatiality, race, and productive disruptions of whiteness; focusing on two dinners which were one component of a mixed method study on racism, teaching, and implicit race bias with secondary teachers in Toronto, Canada. The dinners were focused on cross race dialogue. White teachers experienced the dinners as uncomfortable, motivating, and in one case upsetting. The dinners offer a unique look at White experiences of racial spatial disruption. Drawing on reflections, interviews, and dinner transcripts, this article sketches a messy typology of these experiences to flesh out connections between White teachers’ racial (dis)engagements with/in race dialogue, and related (dis)engagements with antiracism. The paper theorises three distinct but related postures of White self-location, and takes up the implications of each for teacher self-identity and engagement with antiracism. Critically engaging the notion of spatiality, this work is guided by critical race theory, and critical phenomenological approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatiality
• antiracism
• teachers
• phenomenology
• race bias
• Canadian education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All participant names used in this article are pseudonyms.

2. Question Five as well as this modified version, were adapted from DiAngelo (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Fund Number 430-2018-0324)