Strict fathers, competing culture(s), and racialized poverty: white South African teachers’ conceptions of themselves as racialized actors

Abstract

This article focuses in particular on four white South African female practicing P-12 teachers’ narratives about their own racialized understanding of their classroom practice(s) and their (racio-cultural) self-identity. Each of the four participants reported growing up with what they described as ‘strict fathers’ and shared ways in which their self-identified ‘white-Christian-Afrikaner’ upbringing is at times in conflict with their political and pedagogical commitments as practicing teachers in contemporary South Africa. To better understand the concept of ‘strict fathers’ and its/their impact on these teachers I use George Lakoff’s and Kevin Kumashiro’s notions of ‘framing’ to examine teachers’ conceptions of their racial upbringing and how they view this influence on their classroom practice. Through an engagement with whiteness literature from both the US and South Africa I discuss the implications of the simultaneity of both essentialist cultural-deficit racial discourse and socially inclusive racial discourse. Finally I discuss implications for future work on whiteness in education, for researchers in the US in particular, on what learning from a context outside the US offers as we continue to (re)theorize whiteness as it impacts teaching and learning.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• practicing teachers
• critical whiteness studies
• framing
• South Africa
• comparative education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The city name has been changed here to protect the identities of my participants.

2. White supremacy is defined by the Challenging White Supremacy (CWS) Workshop (2000) as ‘an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations … for the purposes of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.’

3. In the particular metropolitan area I was researching the schools are able to choose their primary language of instruction: either Afrikaans, or English. The particular politics of language in the context of South African education are far too contentious and complex for the space of this article, but my own sense making of the racialized nature of these different mediums is drawn from Jansen (2008, 2009, 2011).

4. The Sotho are the largest indigenous black population in the area, and are the ethnic/racial/linguistic majority in this particular part of South Africa.

5. ‘Learners’ should be read here as synonymous with ‘students’ in the US context. In South Africa, P-12 students are referred to as ‘learners’ while university students are referred to as ‘students.’

6. I employ the term ‘anti-racist’ following Kailin’s (1999) conception, that, ‘From an anti-racist perspective, the historical context of racism is structural oppression in a capitalist society,’ and further, ‘an anti-racist perspective looks at the world from below critiquing the structural limitations of liberal reforms as experienced by those who are oppressed’ (81).