Invitations to difference: Refusing white pedagogies of racial inclusions

What does it mean to invite difference? The Canadian “mosaic” or the American “melting pot” are both nationalistic ways of welcoming racial differences into white supremacist racial hierarchies, and schooling and education make much ado about difference and diversity. Such professed beliefs about inviting difference imply an openness and a welcoming to pedagogical relationships that Sara Ahmed (2010) might describe as “being moved” by racialized Others. The articles in this issue unpack the relationship between race and pedagogy in various invitations to difference and map out how racial relations and pedagogy are being theorized by curriculum scholars as they are invited and invite others to what Lynn (1999) describes as critical race pedagogy. Critical race pedagogy centers race as the privileged analytic to “speak back” to the structured powers of whiteness, a pedagogy that is “inherently risky, uncomfortable, and fundamentally unsafe, particularly for whites” (Leonardo & Porter, 2010, p. 139). The authors in this issue trace the limits of critical race pedagogy under the confines of white supremacy as well as their risky, uncomfortable, and fundamentally unsafe interventions, counternarratives, and resistances that disrupt and refuse invitations to normalized relations of racial difference.

In the opening article, “Singing and Dancing for Diversity: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and White Epistemological Ignorance in Teacher Professional Development,” Justin Grinage examines his own experiences as a teacher invited to a series of professional development workshops purporting to address racial equity for secondary school teachers in response to racist incidents. Inspired by the claims of anti-racist curricula and pedagogy of the board mandated, for-profit, professional development workshop, Grinage eagerly signs up to participate. He quickly learns that the workshops have no intention of addressing racial inequality.

Grinage draws on both Jodi Melamed’s (2015) notion of neoliberal multiculturalism and Charles Mills’ (1997) white epistemological ignorance to analyze three moments in the workshop: cultural bingo, flinging culture, and singing and dancing for diversity. He employs neoliberal multiculturalism to highlight the necessity of racism for capital exploitation. He then makes the case that the workshops profit off white liberal desires for inclusion in such ways that anti-racist initiatives “normalize superficial multiculturalism by conflating racial activism with an embrace and celebration of racial differences” (p. 11) that ultimately dilute anti-racist curricula and pedagogy. The pedagogical limits of the workshop’s avoidance of racial inequality come to a head as Grinage takes the reader to a singing and diversity concert. The concert unfolds as a “racial fantasyland” (Mills, 1997, p. 18), with the mostly white audience cheering on two performers, one Black, one white. Drawing on Leonardo (2013), Grinage understands the concert as a means of making white teachers feel good about themselves and the fact that they care about equity, all the while, evading their role in a history of white supremacy and racial oppression. In this way, they misunderstand their desires for racial equity for being anti-racist by evading, through white epistemological ignorance, the racist structures of subjective being they themselves have erected, benefit from, and reproduce.

As a response to his anger as one of a few Black teachers, Grinage counternarrates a grassroots professional development initiative spearheaded by himself and three white teachers. Leonardo’s (2013) insistence that whites who pursue racial equity must “sign off” the racial contract that secures white supremacy, informs Grinage and his allies’ understanding of their strategic resistive actions. As such, they write a letter to the instructor of the workshops to express their discontent in an effort to reject neoliberal multiculturalism and white epistemological ignorance. Grinage also describes a social justice professional learning community through which he and his allies unpack the ways in which white supremacy invites social justice in the form of anti-racist commitments only to insert itself through ignorance. Ultimately, Grinage and his allies work to make innocence untenable in their space of education through a critical race pedagogy that puts at risk whiteness as normal.

In the second article in this issue, Abigail Rombalski examines racial pedagogy from a student standpoint in “I Believe We Will Win! Learning from Youth Activist Pedagogies,” and takes us on a trip alongside predominantly Black and POC secondary school students to challenge invitations to whiteness, both in intent and in method. The youth see their activism as part of growing social movements in the United States, primarily Black Lives Matter, that respond to police brutality and a lack of state accountability. These students ground themselves in onto-epistemologies diametrically opposed to whiteness and drawn from Black Feminism. Rombalski guides the reader through youth activist pedagogies used by interracial anti-racist youth activist groups (IAYAG), such as teach-ins and sit-ins at their high schools. They ethnographically examine the processes the youth activists engaged in when designing political education events aimed at raising critical consciousness and agitating for social action.

Drawing on Black feminist theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and bell hooks, Rombalski demonstrates that in the youth activists’ employment of critical, anti-racist, and intersectional frameworks, their pedagogies take the form of collective, participatory democracy. This stands in contrast to representative democratic institutions in the United States, in which whiteness became prerequisite for citizenship (Tillery, 2009). Here, Rombalski turns to hooks (1994) and the Combahee River Collective (1977/2017) statement to theorize the students’ actions, their collective unpacking of their truths, and their efforts to urge their peers to examine their own experiences and complicity in racial oppression. In addition, Hill Collins’ (1990) domains of power framework structures her understanding of youth practices, relationships, ideology, and systems of power. Rombalski observes that for the youth in her study, racism/anti-racism are coterminous with the restriction/sharing of knowledge in the collective.

To further unpack the youth activist pedagogies, Rombalski examines what about them is oppressive as well as what is liberating. While schooling and teaching are often structures that perpetuate the hegemonic codes and the oppressive structures of schooling in which the youth activists needed to situate their work, the youth sometimes took on the roles of “preacher teachers,” for example, when teaching to the middle school teachers. Rombalski observes that the youth’s liberatory intent comes through in how they take up multiple perspectives and how they raise awareness of power and positionality. She finds that their love for and collective reflection with each other, and the students they engage with, is amplified by social media and their recognition of multiple pedagogies. Finally, she argues that youth voices should be invited to tables of research, teaching, and theorizing, not just to share their stories—vital as they are—but as knowledge creators and partners in social change. These youth activists are keenly aware of the patterns exhibited by educators such as those in Grinage’s professional development workshops, and they actively work against—and often pay dearly for—how whiteness morphs to co-opt their work and racial relations with each other.

The lens of critical race pedagogy shifts to colonial relations in Pamela Osmond-Johnson and Peter Turner’s article, “Navigating the ‘Ethical Space’ of Truth and Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous School Principals in Saskatchewan.” Using Indigenous epistemologies, the authors highlight the work of white principals on Treaty 4 land (the province of Saskatchewan) working against the grain of invitations to racial inclusion critiqued by Brayboy (2005). They ask, how do non-Indigenous white settler school principals promote the calls of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in their schools? Their rationale for examining school principals as the heart of “colonial constructions of authority and leadership” (pp. 55–56) centers an Indigenist agenda that is about Indigenous concerns, relationships, accountability, and an orientation towards land in thinking about the work that school principals can orchestrate. By viewing white settlers as the ones who are responsible and accountable for the ongoing legacies of colonization and upholding treaty relationships and Indigenous worldviews, the principals often run into resistance from different camps such as parents, government officials, and public opinion, to name but a few.

Using a form of “two-eyed seeing” that merges Western and Indigenous ways of knowing, Osmond-Johnson and Turner utilize semi-structured interviews and shadowing to analyze the principals’ attempts at strategic advocacy. Centrally, they draw on Goulet and Goulet’s use of nehiyaw (Cree) worldviews to unpack the conceptual grounds on which non-Indigenous principals take direction from Indigenous Elders and worldviews. They find that by engaging in weechihitowin, which highlights the importance of relationships with Indigenous Elders, students, parents, and partners, for example, the principals can avoid settler moves to innocence, which reinscribe colonial settler-Indigenous power relations while purporting otherwise. The school principals’ efforts are complicated by the colonial power in the school board (such as public opinions by school board officials and at times the Saskatchewan minister of education) which often resists and stymies the principals’ efforts for change. Nevertheless, principals in their study demonstrate iseechigehina, finding ways to get the work done despite these obstacles. Ultimately, through a nehiyaw framework, Osmond-Johnson and Turner unpack how “healing for Indigenous peoples in many regards relies simply on settler cessation of the colonial situation Indigenous people tirelessly endure” (pp. 70–71) and is a complex dance for settler allies, who must retain a focus on prioritizing relational and ethical accountability with Indigenous partners. For these principals, their need to step out of white colonial ways of knowing and relating to Indigenous people, through what we see as a critical race pedagogical strategy that adds nuance to settler colonial forms of racialization, results in them facing challenges both from “above” and “below.”

In the final article, moved by the surge of right wing populism and white supremacist violence in the United States, Noah De Lissovoy and Courtney Cook question the neutrality and primacy of dialogue invoked by defenses of free speech in their article, “Active Words in Dangerous Times: Beyond Liberal Models of Dialogue in Politics and Pedagogy.” While rightist defenses of free speech mark an entry point into their critique, they trace ideologies central to notions of free speech and dialogue through liberal philosophy. They argue that liberal notions of dialogue, freedom of speech, and discourses of unity flatten social relations, further concealing inequality and, in particular, white supremacy and racial violence. Specifically, they critique notions of dialogue as an effect of the rights of the individual dependent on the Kantian white European subject who transcends material social, economic, and historical oppressions. In turn, De Lissovoy and Cook offer Paulo Friere’s emancipatory notion of dialogue, which presumes an unequal terrain of social relations, to launch their analysis of discursive nationalistic liberal calls to solidarity and unity such as those provoked though #CharlestonStrong and #BostonStrong slogans.

Of particular importance to thinking about how white supremacy structures the limits of public pedagogy, is their unpacking of liberal calls to unity in the aftermath of the slaughter of peacefully observing parishioners at historically Black church Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston South Carolina. The authors focus on the “Bridge to Peace” event following the massacre and the unifying slogan #CharlestonStrong that intends to communicate to the nation that race relations in Charleston are improving and moving forward. The parallel here to Grinage’s understanding of white epistemological ignorance is evident in the “racial fantasy land” upon which white ignorance continues to thrive despite the reality of white supremacist Black death on their doorsteps. De Lissovoy and Cook contrast this display of liberal unity, a kind of invitation to the “American melting pot” of racial difference, to the message and critique of a separate event, “Burying White Supremacy” which was organized by a local Black Lives Matter chapter. The BLM organized event refuses invitations to unity through their critique of the Bridge to Peace event as an outward display of public mourning curated by political elites that operates to solidify the already normalized legacy of racial difference through the sordid violence of white supremacy.

Finally, the authors turn to the classroom to consider what is at stake if liberal models of dialogue that work towards uncritical notions of community and unity are left unchallenged in the classroom. For example, they point to the regularly employed practice of debate, which often aims to seek resolution across issues of social discord and difference by providing a platform and structure to hear all sides and perspectives. The problem here, again, is an imagined level terrain when the reality is historically entrenched inequality and systematic oppression. This uncritical humanism evades the existential situation of real people shaped by hierarchies of power and continues to marginalize students of colour. Instead they challenge pedagogues to work within difference, versus working past it in hopes of uncovering unruly truths, such as those explored by the student activists Rombalski describes. Through these truths, dialogical solidarity opens the potentials of self and social transformation that demand more ethical ways of being in relation to each other.

The four articles in this issue, geographically located as they are in white settler states, compel us to view them in a larger system of national-racial-colonial power that invites difference to a white supremacist framework. Invitations to these forms of difference are in fact invitations to systems of exclusion and expulsion. The alternatives proposed by the authors in this volume refuse these invitations by carefully exhuming how whiteness as a system of power is pedagogically ordered in terms of neoliberal multiculturalism and ignorance (Grinage), domains of power and complicity (Rombalski), settler colonial innocence (Osmond-Johnson and Turner), and liberal notions of dialogue (De Lissovoy and Cook). At stake in the invisibilizing power of whiteness are real, material, and situated lives of students of colour and Indigenous people that are at risk of being lured into comfortable notions of allyship that ignore, disavow, and maintain systems of white supremacy. The authors in this collection, through critical interventions that risk interrupting the blissful party, insist on iseechigehina, or finding ways to get the work done, within difference that prioritize the epistemologies, needs, and demands of racialized communities. We end here by keeping in mind Rombalski’s inter-racial youth activists’ dictum “We Believe We Will Win!” as a good place to start.

Notes on Contributors

Neil Ramjewan is a senior editor with Curriculum Inquiry and doctoral candidate in the department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at OISE/UT. His work focuses on the relationship between childhood and colonization.

Lucy El-Sherif is an associate editor with Curriculum Inquiry and doctoral candidate in the department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at OISE/UT. Her work examines pedagogies of citizenship, the socio-spatial production of subjectivities, and narratives of belonging.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.