Whiteness and damage in the education classroom

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses relationships between whiteness and damage in the university classroom through a focus on two contemporary areas of critical education in Canada: raising white racial consciousness and truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. First, whiteness is damage-producing – it orients anti-racist education towards white students and their needs, there by harming the well-being and constraining the education of non-white students. Second, whiteness gravitates towards what Unangax scholar Eve Tuck calls “damage-centred approaches,” which objectify non-white suffering, pathologising Indigenous peoples whilst obfuscating the ongoing reproduction of racism and colonialism. As such, white educators must remain assiduously vigilant about a key tension regarding whiteness and damage: that our pedagogical focus on racial and colonial oppression can simultaneously raise critical consciousness and divert attention away from more fundamental interrogations of whiteness, agency, and relationality within a systemically racist social order. The article closes with some considerations for educators in terms of addressing complicity in their institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• pedagogy
• racism
• colonialism
• damage-centred teaching
• reconciliation

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dia Da Costa and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

^1. The main forms of violence that occur in the classroom are epistemic and discursive in nature – they involve knowledge formations shaped by power that silences certain ways of knowing and shapes institutional knowledge about particular groups in empowering and disempowering ways. As Pakistani Dalit Muslim scholar Shaista Patel states, while the physical violence of racism and colonialism is distinct from its subsequent representation, ‘we should focus more [attention] on the relationship between the two in our teaching, in our classrooms’ (2021, 17). The racist, colonial structure and its production of violence takes different, interrelated forms across bodies and institutions.

^2. Pine Ridge Reservation is the site of the Wounded Knee massacre where hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children were killed by the US Army.

^3. The affected student did not attend this class. I had also been in communication with her over email about the incident after class.

^4. ‘Legacy’ calls to action ‘address the ongoing structural inequalities that marginalised Indigenous peoples – intentionally or not,’ and (2) ‘Reconciliation’ calls to action seek to (a) advance Indigenous inclusion in society, (b) ‘educate Canadian society at large about Indigenous peoples, residential schools, and reconciliation; and (c) establish practices, policies, and actions that affirm Indigenous rights’ (Jewell and Mosby 2020, 6).

^5. For context on the blockade of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline, see Hosgood (2022).

^6. My focus here is not on the actual trauma that is being lived and endured, nor the ways in which Indigenous communities are painstakingly addressing its effects on their own terms.

Additional information

Funding

Part of the research for this article was supported by a Support for the Advancement of Scholarship Grant from the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta.