‘There’s no such thing as a clean line’: an award-winning history teacher’s racial ideologies-in-pieces

ABSTRACT

Using the notion of ‘ideology in pieces’ as a guiding concept, this paper presents a case study of one teacher who won his state’s history teacher of the year award. This study uses critical discourse analysis to explore the complex and at-times competing racial logics this teacher expressed regarding what race/racism is, how it operates in society, and its role in his teaching. Ultimately, this paper reveals that this teacher’s racial ideologies emerged ‘in pieces,’ constituted by a range of factors including his perception of the needs of his student population, community context, and his larger epistemological stances on both race/ism and history. While some discourses seemed to be in conflict, ultimately, white supremacy was protected through a lack of systemic analyses of racism and undergirding anti-Black logics.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial ideologies
• race
• racism
• discourse analysis
• CRT
• history teachers
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

The author would like to recognize Cynthia Lewis, Kim Vachon, Ian Slattery, Fatima Raja, Raul Meneses Semperio, Trevor Brooks, and Melissa Svigelj-Smith for their contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.