White racial ignorance and refusing culpability: how the emotionalities of whiteness ignore race in teacher education

ABSTRACT

This article builds on Charles W. Mills’ foundational concept of white racial ignorance to expand his work by exploring the inner dynamics and practices of teacher education (its rationales, student teaching, practicums, pedagogies, curriculum) and explaining how the emotionalities of whiteness play a significant role in the ways that whiteness persists perniciously in teacher education. In order to hold whiteness accountable and culpable, it is argued that teacher education needs to stop emotionally deflecting anti-racist critiques by over pontificating their lackluster commitments to race, a practice which only ignores, and diverts attention away from the hegemonic presence of whiteness. It suggests that teacher educators need to help pre-service and in-service teachers be attentive to how racial politics are felt, acted upon, and reproduced, and how emotionalities of whiteness become ‘ordinary’ in everyday life in schools. The article concludes by outlining some implications for research and theory in critical whiteness studies.

KEYWORDS:

• white racial ignorance
• affect theory
• racialized affects
• teacher education
• emotionality of whiteness
• Charles W MIlls

Special note

To Charles, you are missed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Charles Mills was a professional mentor who became a good friend of mine. I, along with many others, am still mourning his death and still cry writing this. Therefore, I mean no disrespect in calling him by his first name. It is how I remember him.

2. Foucault (2003, 2008) explains that biopolitics is concerned with how individual bodies and populations are subjected to self-discipline through technologies of power like reporting, surveillance and other techniques that aim at submission and docility.

3. We wish to clarify that our goal here is not to provide any phenomenological data from any empirical study, but rather to introduce the phenomenological approach in affect theory as the conceptual framework that guides our theoretical analysis.

4. Gaslighting is a form of emotional and psychological manipulation that attempts to engage in crazymaking, whereby the victim begins to doubt their own reality.