Facilitating antiracist sessions for white parents: self-study on the challenges to and perpetuations of whiteness

ABSTRACT

Educational transformation of communities is often focused on school-based initiatives, but parenting offers forth a powerful site for antiracist change. This self-study details how I, a White parent and antiracist teacher educator, both challenged and perpetuated whiteness while facilitating antiracist parenting sessions for White parents. Using critical whiteness studies, I analyse one particular emotional ‘hot point’ where a participant abruptly exited a virtual session. My findings suggest that prior to the incident I challenge race-evasiveness, concepts of goodness and innocence, passive ‘non-racism’, individualism, and the discourse norms of whiteness. However, after the ‘hot point’, I perpetuated whiteness in ways that were deeply connected to the same challenges I had just made, highlighting some of the difficulties White people have in doing antiracist work.

KEYWORDS:

• Antiracism
• parenting
• whiteness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In speaking with the participants I used the language of ‘colorblindness’ since that term is more familiar to people than race-evasiveness. This was to connect my concepts to common statements wherein people say, ‘I am colorblind’. However, I generally encourage the use of race-evasiveness as it is less mired in ableist discourse.