Identifying your skin is too dark as a put-down: Enacting whiteness as hidden curriculum through a bullying prevention programme

Abstract

In my second year teaching at the elementary level, two biracial first graders told a Black child that she could not play because her skin was too dark. I found myself, a white female teacher, using the language of the bullying prevention programme to ignore the racialized nature of the incident and ultimately enact a hidden curriculum of white supremacy. In this article, I analyze the incident using the concept of hidden curriculum and a critical whiteness studies lens in order to better understand how formal social curricula, such as bullying prevention programmes, might be used to promote harmful social norms in a covert manner. I posit that explicit social curricula grounded in behaviourist theory are especially problematic because they are designed to elicit standardized rather than contextualized responses to problematic student behaviours. I explore the ways I utilized colour evasiveness and taught it to my students through the hidden curriculum and the bullying prevention programme. I conclude with implications for the implementation of formal social curricula in schools and considerations for teacher education to break white discourse norms that contribute to the hegemonic hidden curriculum.

Keywords:

• Hidden curriculum
• critical theory
• student and teacher experiences
• bullying prevention

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Drs. Loyce Caruthers, Candace Schlein, and KIndel Turner-Nash for their instrumental support in developing this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In an attempt to re-equalize racial labels I have chosen to capitalize Black, Brown, and Colour while leaving white lowercase to recognize the racialized experience of people of Colour and challenge white supremacy in language (Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon, & Galindo, 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rhianna Thomas

Rhianna Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at New Mexico State University. She is an arts-based researcher who studies the sociocultural context of early childhood education. She is particularly interested in the ways children conceive of and utilize the social construct of race and how critical literacy and antiracist curricula might be used in early childhood educational contexts.