Confronting White privilege: the importance of intersectionality in the sociology of education

Abstract

This article explores how White privilege and a hierarchy of oppression have resulted in competing identities in which gender has been given greater importance compared to race. I argue that the sociology of education needs to adopt an intersectional approach that travels in different directions if it is to remain valid. The article examines how gender, perpetuated by White privilege, continues to play a key role in the positioning of Black and minority ethnic staff, students and pupils within a range of stereotypes that operate to marginalise their life trajectories. The article argues that if sociologists of education are unwilling to challenge White privileged populist discourses and their own positions of White privilege, then they will become complicit in maintaining a socially unjust status quo.

Keywords:

• Race
• gender
• intersectionality
• White privilege
• equity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public broadcasting service which is one of the largest broadcasters in the world.

2 In 2014, the drinking water source for the city of Flint, Michigan (USA) was changed from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to a cheaper source of water from the Flint River. As a result, lead leaked into the water pipes of drinking water which exposed over 100,000 residents to high levels of lead. Critics have argued that the Flint water crisis is an example of environmental racism as 56.6% of Flint’s population is African American (Eligon 2016).

3 Mean Girls is a teenage black comedy broadcast in the USA which documents female high school life with friendship cliques and the damaging impact these can have on girls.

4 A meme is an idea or behaviour that spreads from individual to individual by means of imitation to convey a particular phenomenon or meaning.

5 The full details of these statistics are reported in Bhopal and Henderson (2019a).

6 This has included the Scientific Women’s Academic Network and the Athena Project. Both of these were combined to create the Athena Swan Charter.

7 The Equality Challenge Unit is a registered charity in the UK, which works to advance equality in higher education. In 2018, the Equality Challenge Unit together with the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and the Higher Education Academy formed Advance HE.

8 See https://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter/members-award-holders/

9 See Bhopal and Henderson (2019a) for full details of the project aims and methodology.