Community identity discourse and the heritage academy: colorblind educational policy and white supremacy

Abstract

This study focuses on the case of The Heritage Academy (THA), a predominantly white charter school in rural North Carolina. Through a critical race analysis, this article suggests that predominantly white charter schools like THA benefit from colorblind educational policies in a whitestream and white supremacist society. Specifically, this case study focuses on how white community activism around the creation of THA strengthened a community school identity discourse founded on the principles of whiteness as property. Because of the privilege of whiteness, predominantly white and middle‐class charter schools like THA may have greater access to economic and symbolic resources that ensure their success. This article raises questions about the use of school choice rhetoric as a raceless metaphor in the charter school movement that may result in race‐based inequality, separation and segregation.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are offered to George Noblit, Paula Groves Price and the North Carolina charter schools evaluation team. Special thanks are also extended to Dorothy Holland, Lesley Bartlett, Mary Beth Monahan, Marytza Gawlik, Laura Goe, Steven Gubberman, Margaret Eisenhart, and four anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on previous drafts of this manuscript. An early draft of this manuscript was presented at the annual meetings of the American Educational Studies Association, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2000.

Notes

1. The concept of race is now widely understood as a social construct created to rationalize oppression. Scholars in philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, history, anthropology and geography have demonstrated how constructions of race such as ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ are unstable, situated products of particular historical, political and cultural moments. I am also aware that what it means to be a member of a racial group is different for each person and also differs across time and place. Yet, for the purposes of this article, racialization is a historical product of a socially constructed understanding created to justify the superiority of whites and subsequently the inferiority in different degrees of people of color in US society.

2. Colorblind educational policy, in this article, refers to the implementation of policies and reform, like the charter school movement, that does not include a complex analysis of historical and existing racial inequality, or provisions for implementation that strive toward equality and equity across racial groups without leading to group segregation, separation or isolation. Colorblind or race‐neutral educational policy would be appropriate in a society without a racist past and present.

3. Thompson (1999) states that in a multicultural and racist society, like the US, colorblindness is the whitestream’s (see note 7) refusal to acknowledge color (race) by claiming to take a moral and democratic stance. This refusal, however, really means a lack of acknowledgement to ‘recognize the obstacles facing people of color or to see that, depending on the context, different ethnic and racial groups may have distinct needs and interests’ (p. 143)

4. All of the names for people and places used in this article are pseudonyms.

5. The author wishes to clarify that he is not unfamiliar with or unsympathetic to the literature on rural identity and education, community schools, consolidation efforts that erode a sense of community, and equality of educational opportunities (Peshkin, 1982; Miller, 1995; Reynolds, 1999) The focus of this article, however, is on the tension between local control and educational equity in the charter school movement and how that relates to colorblind educational policy implementation through a critical race analysis.

6. Sandy Grande (2000) refers to ‘whitestream’ as the cultural capital of whites in almost every facet of US society. Grande uses the term whitestream as opposed to mainstream in an effort to decenter whiteness as dominant. Whitestream, according to Claude Denis (1997), is a term that plays on the feminist notion of ‘malestream.’ Denis defines Whitestream as the idea that while (Canadian) society is not completely white in sociodemographic terms, it remains principally and fundamentally structured on the basis of the Anglo‐European white experience. Whitestream in this article therefore refers to the official and unofficial texts used in US society that are founded on the practices, principles, morals, values and history of white Anglo‐American culture, i.e. white cultural capital. I must clarify that the whitestream is not exclusively the domain of whites in US society, but of any person actively promoting white models as ‘standard.’

7. The following is cited from Urrieta (2004): ‘Historically, whiteness was associated with being eligible for US citizenship. During the height of immigration from Europe, the meaning of whiteness was debated because immigrants were valued by capitalists for cheap labor, but this need conflicted with republican and nativist ideas about who should become a citizen (Jacobson, 1999) Between 1878 and 1952, for example, applicants for citizenship tried to establish that they were white, which forced the courts to detail reasons for rejecting or accepting their petitions (Spring, 2004.)’

8. In line with traditional ethnographic methods, direct quotes henceforth in the article are drawn from the data themselves. Either from interview transcripts or fieldnotes, items in direct quotes were explicitly taken from the data and are not meant to emphasize points or researcher interpretations.

9. US Census Bureau, 2001.

10. US Census Bureau, 2001.

11. Data obtained from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction Charter School information website, the National Center for Education Statistics District information site, and the Great Schools.Net organization. Specific website addresses are not given to protect the anonymity of the study.