‘It wasn’t racism; it was more misunderstanding.’ White teachers, Latino/a students, and racial battle fatigue

Abstract

This article explores how and why a group of Latino/a high school students identify and explain racism differently over the course of an 18-month participatory action research (PAR) project. To do this we examine what recent scholarship has termed racial microaggressions in what is thought of as the Post-Racial America public school system. Pulling examples from student and teacher interview, focus group, and class discussion data we first examine how these students’ teachers conceptualize and talk about racism, cross-racial relationships, and racial misunderstandings, and then we juxtapose that with students’ discursive work to make sense of the ways their teachers make their conceptualizations known and/or seen in school. Focusing on the K-12 context, this study finds racial battle fatigue may be why students switch between how they label these aggressions.

Keywords:

• Racial microaggressions
• racial battle fatigue
• participatory action research (PAR)
• K-12
• Latino education

Notes

1. Much of this article is written in the voice of its first author because she was in the field when these events took place. However, the second author was highly involved in the project, overseeing all data collection and analysis, and her contributions are seen throughout the work.

2. All names and identifying information are pseudonyms.

3. While this article’s second author was not part of the research collective she was my academic advisor and, as such, was a specialist in Latino studies and Latino education. She oversaw the research but did not participate in the field. She worked with me on data analysis throughout the lifetime of the project and guided me toward useful theoretical literature.

4. See Wang 2006.

5. Although this article’s second author was not in the field with the research collective she was involved in the analysis of these data. We were both concerned about how to approach this issue and about not placing our understanding of these students’ lived experiences above their own understandings.