“There can be no racial improvisation in white supremacy”: What we can learn when anti-racist pedagogy fails

Abstract

Using narrative research as a qualitative methodology, we (two white critical whiteness scholars) tell a story about how a dismantling and rebuilding of whiteness occurred in a fourth-grade classroom across three vignettes. Using a close read of Reverend Thandeka’s primer on the ways white children are socialized, we wrestle with what pedagogy aimed to confront racism means when it didn’t work as planned for a white child and his family. In our telling, we will attempt to wrestle with the question: What happens when white children are asked to engage in anti-racist pedagogy?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All names of participants are pseudonyms

2 The improvisational, critical whiteness workshop was offered twice during the 2016–2017 academic year to two groups of fourth grade students, once in Pennsylvania and once in North Carolina.

3 Erin’s inspiration for this lesson came from The Professional Dyads of Culturally Responsive Teaching (PDCRT) of The National Council of Teaching of English (NCTE). The comparison of Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple’s fame was a part of a unit taught by kindergarten teacher, Shashray McCormick, and one that she presented at the PDCRT annual meeting in November 2016.

4 Black face minstrelsy was also a kind of racial improvisation where white people wrestled with their own identities. Lensmire (2017) teaches us that early black face minstrelsy, before it consumed and degraded black culture, had more positive, or at least more complex purposes. Drawing upon Lhamon (1998), Lensmire shows us that early black face minstrelsy was a display of cross-racial solidarity between black and white working-class people.

5 Thandeka argues that we should not think of the core self as an “it” because the core self refers to moments of relating.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin T. Miller

Erin T. Miller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Reading and Elementary Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches courses in language arts and diversity. Her research interests include investigations of racial identity with young children both within and outside of formal school experiences, early literacy, and teacher education. She can be contacted at [email protected].

Samuel J. Tanner

Sam Tanner is an Assistant Professor of literacy education in The Pennsylvania State University system. He taught high school English and drama for nearly fifteen b years prior to becoming a scholar. His research is concerned with democratic education, especially issues of race and whiteness.