Stories of Smartness and Whiteness in School Pictures and Yearbooks

Abstract

This article explores the way that discourses of smartness and whiteness are produced and reproduced in schooling. Using an approach grounded in narrative research, I explore the convergences and contradictions between my own educational autobiography and the representations of schooling found in my school pictures and yearbooks. In my analysis, I argue that white supremacy played an important role in the construction of my own story of smartness throughout my primary and secondary schooling experiences. I also argue that yearbooks form powerful “artifacts of smartness” (Hatt, 2011, p. 448) that can be used to interpret and interrogate personal experiences as well as larger societal discourses of smartness and whiteness in schooling.

Notes on contributor

Eric Ruiz Bybee is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Brigham Young University. He is a former New York City public school teacher and his research interests include the social and cultural foundations of education; Latina/o education; teacher education; and identity, agency, and social movements in education.

Notes

1. The concept of “race treason” can be traced to the work of Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey (1996) in the book Race Traitor, a collection of essays from a journal of the same name that Ignatiev founded in 1992. For Ignatiev and Garvey, being a race traitor implies acting contrary to the interests of whiteness and is captured in the phrase “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity” (1996, p. 10).