Rethinking white resistance: exploring the discursive practices and psychical negotiations of ‘whiteness’ in feminist, anti‐racist education

Abstract

This article explores how under‐theorized representations of whiteness in pedagogical literatures have informed simplistic ideas about white resistance among students. It is argued that the performance and practice of discourses of whiteness in pedagogical contexts, and the subjective, psychical and emotional complexities of engaging with discourses of whiteness, have been neglected in pedagogical research, diminishing the potential for understanding processes of subjective and social change through anti‐racist education. Analyzing observational findings from an ethnographic study of a course focused on issues of ‘women’s diversity’ in a Canadian Women’s Studies programme, the author explores how discourses of whiteness play out in the context of a feminist classroom in ways that contributed to a predominance of individualizing discourses of racism. She draws on psychoanalysis to analyze the highly defensive dynamics enacted among students, examining projective practices where some subjects are positioned as wholly resistant to anti‐racism with very difficult effects. However, the potential for shifting investments among white women and evidence of movement away from defensiveness over whiteness, when whiteness is complicated by other axes of ‘privilege and oppression,’ are also traced through interview narratives. The author suggests that documenting students’ negotiations of discourses of whiteness in the classroom and in their reflections upon classroom conflict can teach us as researchers and pedagogues what is problematic in our theories of whiteness, and also begin to tell us what differently located, and racially marginalized, students need from an anti‐racist, feminist curriculum and pedagogy.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. The author would also like to thank Valerie Walkerdine for her comments on an earlier draft of this paper and the helpful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. The emphasis on an unqualified ‘whiteness’ also obscures the important relations of class, nationality, beauty (etc.) that mark out a normative, recognizable, heteronormative feminine subject who qualifies for rescue via the ‘heroic masculinity’ of the pilot (Reay, 2002; Youdell, 2006).

2. See Schick (2000) and Hatchell (2004) for important exceptions to the tendencies of positioning white resistance as a homogenous block in pedagogical literatures. Schick (2000) explores how white pre‐service teachers negotiate issues of class and respectability through gaining politically correct knowledge of racism which they can then use to discipline and regulate their student colleagues. Hatchell (2004) examines links between ‘white privilege’ and ‘hegemonic masculinity,’ foregrounding students’ capacity for change given educational provisions that grapple with ‘multiple positionings.’

3. Since the Seventies, what is broadly understood as the second‐wave feminist movement, and the subsequent institutionalization of Western feminism in the form of Women’s Studies, has been challenged for reproducing Eurocentric, neo‐colonial world views and attendant racisms (Carby, 1982; Hull et al., 1982; Lorde, 1984). Critiques of white, Euro‐North‐American feminism centre on challenging the generic, unitary notion of woman, and theories that locate patriarchy as the overriding source of all women’s oppression (Bannerji, 1995). For a thorough review of anti‐racist, black feminist critiques of ‘white feminism’ in the international context see Weedon (1999).

4. The students were a highly ethnically diverse group: 13 were women of colour; of these, five identified as ‘African‐Canadian’ and six as ‘Caribbean‐Canadian’ and two identified as ‘South Asian‐Canadian.’ The rest of the women identified as ‘white,’ although three of these women qualified their identity as ‘Portuguese,’ ‘Italian’ and ‘Hawaiian;’ finally there was one man who identified as ‘African‐Canadian.’ I have explored the issues and dynamics involved with my own identity as a ‘white’ woman Ph.D. student and researcher in Women’s Studies in great depth elsewhere (see Ringrose, 2002, 2003, 2004).

5. I trace the nuances of the psychosocial approach and its relevance for educational research on pedagogy in much greater detail than space allows here in Ringrose (2007).