Threads of the White Web: Exposing and Contesting the Hegemony of Whiteness in Art Education

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been an increased amount of art education scholarship that has focused on race, some of which has begun to examine Whiteness. However, many aspects of the art education field remain unexamined, allowing Whiteness to continue to operate invisibly, stealthily undermining our antiracist agenda. Using Joseph-Salisbury’s web of Whiteness as a framework and heuristic device, I explore how this web exists and works within K–12 art education through the threads of Whiteness of intellect and the Whiteness of curriculum. As a result, I propose that the web of Whiteness can be an effective tool to make visible the ways Whiteness operates within the art education field, which can subsequently prompt antiracist interventions and actions to contest it.

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback on this article.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2020) stated that racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized. Therefore, within this article “White” is capitalized except when quoting the work of another author. For the purposes of this article, I also chose to capitalize “Whiteness” so as not to affirm it as the norm or standard. When quoting other authors, capitalization is kept in its original form.

2 All names are pseudonyms.

3 Naomi’s experience is based on raw data collected as part of a classroom study conducted in 2016.

4 https://kehindewiley.com.