Questioning the white body: on applying a phenomenological mode of inquiry to whiteness studies in education

Abstract

The racialized body is of obvious, or at least implicit, concern for the qualitative study of Whiteness in education. Whiteness, as an organizing principle that conditions normative ways of being in society, is predicated upon the raced body as a social signifier. It is curious then, that the body remains under-examined and not treated as a serious analytic. How bodies interact in real time—how educational spaces are brought to life—are left to the analytical wayside in favor of reflective approaches. This paper questions prominent approaches to studying Whiteness in education, and subsequently proposes expanding the methodological repertoire to encompass a phenomenology of racial embodiment as a way to make-meaning of the subtle interactions between bodies unfolding in unique educational places.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• phenomenology
• racial embodiment
• qualitative methodology

Notes

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the insights and guidance from Frank Margonis, Wanda Pillow, Audrey Thompson, Cheryl Matias, Dolores Calderon, and Clayton Pierce in writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Gardner Seawright is a teacher-scholar whose work focuses on understanding the ways that systems of oppression influence the everyday act of teaching. His research explores Whiteness, Settler Colonialism, teacher education, qualitative methods, environmental education, social studies education, and the philosophy of pedagogy.

Notes

1 To my knowledge, Linda Alcoff was the first to coin the phrase ‘phenomenology of racial embodiment’ in a 1999 essay of the same title. George Yancy, though, was also working with similar concepts in the early 1990s extending Fanon’s initial assertions. More recent works probing this line of phenomenology have been taking up by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology and in a book of collected essays edited by Emily Lee called Living Alterities.

2 The philosophical method that commonly grounds questioning in human science phenomenology is the ‘epoché’ and ‘reduction’ (see Van Manen, 2014, 215–239). The epoché is a commitment to the suspension of belief, or in simpler terms, to not take for granted the taken-for-granted. This is usually done through an attempt to ‘bracket’ off one’s previous knowledge so a phenomenological inquiry can be pure. Reduction can be somewhat misleading and suggest an abstracting, codifying, or shortening, but it is actually derived from re-ducere meaning to ‘lead back’ (Van Manen, 2014, 215). While reduction, being rooted in developments by Husserl, carries multiple, competing, and complex meanings debated within traditional philosophy literatures, simply put, it refers to a process making the invisible visible, or bringing the taken-for-granted experiences of daily living to the forefront of analysis. Phenomenologists have questioned the very possibility of a researcher bracketing their preunderstandings in a way that would make them more of an objective observer. These scholars have instead suggested a direct and reflexive engagement with our theoretical understandings. Mark Vagle (2014) has argued for a ‘dogged questioning of one’s knowledge as opposed to a suspension of this knowledge’ (74–75). Vagle continues by advocating for an approach in which ‘theories are interrogated so they do not dominate or determine what is possible to see during data gathering and analysis, but this interrogation does not mean that theories are not always already running through data gathering and analysis’ (75).

3 See Max Van Manen’s (2014) Phenomenology of Practice from a superb overview of the various conceptual approaches at work throughout phenomenology; this book also has good introduction to qualitative methods that compliment phenomenological inquiry. See Mark Vagle’s (2014) Crafting Phenomenological Research for additional qualitative method resources and a strong overview/critique of traditional phenomenological methods intended to strip bare phenomena.

4 The wealth of sociological work pertaining to this area, from W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic The Philadelphia Negro to Michael Omi and Howard Winnant’s Racial Formation in the United Sates, and Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters have elucidated the ways that racial categories are linked with social habits, practices and ways of knowing that led to the institutionalization of race, and the purported ‘common sense’ nature of racial categories and white supremacy. In addition to this work, some of the most clear illustrations of how race has been invented over time have come from historians like David Roediger (Wages of Whiteness), Theodore W. Allen (The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1&2), Nell Irvin Painter (The History of White People), or Noel Ignatiev (How the Irish Became White).

5 Starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s (1948[2011]) Second Sex, feminist philosophers were the first to systematically critique and expand Merleau-Ponty’s framework through further exploration of the ways that difference is constitutive if being-in-the-world (Ahmed, 2006; Alcoff, 2006; Grosz, 1994; Kruks, 1990; Lee 2014a; Young 2005). Shortly thereafter, a phenomenology of blackness was also developed in response to Merleau-Ponty by Frantz Fanon (1952[2008]), which subsequently inspired a host of contemporary philosophers of race (Gordon 1995; Lee 2014b; Weate 2001; Yancy 2004, 2005).

6 The mode of knowing of concern here is maintained as a social epistemology that cannot be disentangled from misplaced notions of ‘common sense’ that propagate racialized myths of violence, beauty, and intelligence (Mills, 1997, 1998, 2012; Outlaw, 2012; Sullivan, 2012). Through the ubiquity of a racialized ‘common sense’ racial knowledge maintains a degree of social invisibility; what the philosopher Charles Mills (1997, 1998) names epistemologies of ignorance. Ignorance of this sort is not a lack of knowing but a substantive not-knowing. Barbara Applebaum (2010) explains, ‘white ignorance is a form of white knowledge. It is a type of ignorance that arrogantly parades as knowledge. Rather than an absence of knowledge, white ignorance is a particular way of everyday knowing or thinking that one knows how the social world works that is intimately related to what it means to be white’ (p. 39). Giving further context to knowing what it means to be white Zeus Leonardo (2009) argues that ‘knowing’ does not ‘suggest a conscious, self-present mode of thinking, but rather a social condition of knowledge, sometimes buried in the unconscious, sometimes percolating to the level of consciousness’ (p. 112).

7 Boucher’s study takes to task the process of white antiracist teachers realizing their desire to be in solidarity with their students of color. Prior to the development of solidary relationships Boucher suggests that white teachers must interrogate Whiteness. The interrogation of Whiteness within studies like Boucher’s (2014) deploys ‘lived experience’ as foil for cognitively engaging, and ultimately unveiling, a normative white power structure in which the participant is wrapped up in (Boucher 2014, p. 7; a similar approach can be seen in Alice McIntyre’s Making Meaning of Whiteness [1997, p. 21]). Interrogating Whiteness in this context is consistent with the often used psychological models of racial identity development proposed by Helms (1990) and Tatum (1992), which suggest that after a white teacher sufficiently examines the history of race in America and their position in it they will transcend to a position where they, in Boucher’s (2014) words, ‘make the choice’ to shift the lens through which one sees the world (p. 15). This shift is intended as a catalyst that leads to antiracist behaviors. In this capacity, while the lived experiences of participants are present in the research and consistent with research design, participants are not asked to engage with the immediate material or corporeal aspects of any racialized lived experience.

8 Audrey Thompson (2003) clearly illustrates the relational aspects of privilege and complicity as she discusses the ways that antiracist whites routinely endeavor to be ‘allies’, and ‘good’ whites, but resist the possibility of combatting their own privilege. Thompson identifies a common theme in the performance of the good white ally that suggests that these antiracist whites ostensibly fool themselves that they are outside the bounds of white supremacy, and are no longer complicit in the material disparities of a racial caste system. What Thompson illustrates here is that the majority of antiracist whites are unaware of the ways that their racialized body functions in the world and tethers them to a system of white supremacy. It would seem that an emphasis on cultivating a positive white identity and antiracist intentions has created a situation in which whites believe that they can indeed achieve absolution. Thompson (2003) suggests that teachers and students are ‘seduced by our certainty in our own abilities to think critically and to get it right (‘didn’t I just stand up for that black person last week in the grocery checkout line?’ ‘didn’t I point out my friends white bias to her the other day?’)’ (p. 19).