A Morrisonian call for the death of (critical) whiteness (studies) in teacher education

ABSTRACT

This theoretical paper is a Black feminist love letter to Toni Morrison from three cultural theorists and critical (teacher) educators constellating in a multiracialized doctoral student-professor assemblage. Following the claim that Morrison’s work is central to Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), we articulate our unease with the ongoing epistemic anti-Black violence evidenced in CWS scholarship in teacher education. We wonder, what is the work of CWS in teacher education? Must we continue this work? Must we continue this work? Who are we and what has whiteness (work) done to us? Through a Morrisonian reading with the critical interventions suggested in Playing in the Dark, we closely read CWS in teacher education literature whilst employing letter writing, an exegetical cultural studies method, to explore the above questions. We further call for the death of whiteness while delighting in what Morrison’s theorizing vis-à-vis possibilities that lay in the beyond and after.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• critical whiteness studies
• teacher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our understandings of Black life, Black love, and (Black) Being are rooted in Christina Sharpe’s In the wake: On Blackness and Being, Kevin Quashie’s Black aliveness: Or a poetics of Being, and Katherine McKittrick’s Dear science and other stories, to highlight a few Black Studies contemporaries. That is, anti-Blackness is a global ontology of total fungibility enacted through whiteness; Blackness is felt-erotic, beautiful, life-giving, love-evangelising, collective survival in the face of anti-Blackness.

2. Here we think about radical in the way that Angela Davis does: ‘Radical simply means grasping things by the root’ (as quoted in Kurayeva, 2018, para. 1).

3. Black studies and humanities scholar Christina Sharpe (2016) writes extensively on ‘care-full’ research and writing that we aspire to.

4. Morrison (1987), December 20. James Baldwin: His life remembered; Life in his language. The NewYork Times. Retrieved from: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-morrison.html

5. Lucía is a white woman doctoral candidate, Sean is a white man doctoral candidate, and Esther is a Black woman assistant professor.

6. We ask this specifically because as the Combahee River Collective (1977/1986) reminds us: ‘If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression’. Taken seriously, this near-fifty-year-old axiom forcefully rebuts any notion of anti-Blackness as an exercise in binary thinking. Indeed, the end of anti-Blackness via the liberation of Black (queer) women, requires an end to all other forms of oppression in relation to anti-Blackness.

7. Morrison (1993).

8. We are trying here to balance on the razor’s edge between Matias’s insistence that ‘someone must be indicted’ (via offering citational evidence, Matias 2022a, p. 698, 2022b, 6; Matias and Boucher 2021, 4) and Stewart’s admonition that ‘mere identification and critique of white people doing white nonsense is inadequate without a praxis that seeks to bring about the death of whiteness’ (2022, p. 726). Hence, we offer categorised references in a document linked in the Appendix.

9. In a special issue of IJQSE dedicated to the question guest editor Matias posed, ‘How do you do Whiteness studies – moreover critical Whiteness studies – in ways that honor your being?’ These are their words” (Matias 2020, 699).

10. Morrison (1993).

11. Our efforts to read multiple works from established CWS scholars yield the added contextual insight to this particular study. One author writes elsewhere about ‘a former institution’ that was hostile to not only their expertise in particular but also CWS in teacher education in general (Archive line 3). As such, we want to acknowledge the harmful realities of combatting whiteness in the academy.

12. These inverted supremacist subjugation roles are a hallmark of the murder-inducing ‘great replacement theory’ that has recently been discussed in the U.S. after a white supremacist targeted Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY. They were family members shopping for the week. They were friends picking up last minute ingredients. They were elders and children out for a treat. They were going to go home. We offer up the names of those whose lives were taken: Pearl Young (77), Ruth Whitfield (86), Andre Mackniel (53), Katherine Massey (72), Celestine Chaney (65), Margus Morrison (52), Heyward Patterson (67), Aaron Salter, Jr. (55), Roberta Drury (32), Geraldine Talley (62). This white supremacist fever-dream also fomented recent killings at a WalMart in El Paso, TX, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, a mosque in Christchurch, NZ, and a rally in Charlottesville, VA, among others. It is also responsible for the U.S’.s death-inducing southern border policy. Untold deaths. It is also responsible for the forced drowning of Syrians, Moroccans (and other North Africans) in the Mediterranean. How many disappeared into the sea? It is why Ukrainians have been so quickly welcomed in the arms of the western world. They are not feared as a replacement. They are like us.

13. We wondered, why use the word ‘feeling’ here? What work does that do, and what does it suggest, especially without remarking on the troubled insistence on the difference between thought and feeling in western dualism? We noticed similar word choice in the phrase ‘drawn heavily on labour and cultural historians here, as well as writers such as W. E. B. DuBois [sic] and Ralph Ellison’ (Archive line 5)

14. The murders of Black people by police and other white supremacists are invoked more than once, as is the death of an infant (see Archive line 6). The only other time Black people appear is in a moment where the author is remembering being angry she wasn’t accepted into an all-Black cheerleading team. Notably absent, too, is the 1968 Orangeburg massacre that must have informed her mother’s activism in that same town – considering it can be inferred from the article that Miller’s mother was about 20-years-old at the time.

15. Again, it is of note that this relationality is presented here as only with other white women. What sort of relationality the author seeks with Black people is unremarked upon.

16. See the CiteBlackWomen collective.

17. In 1910, Du Bois published ‘The Souls of White Folk’ in The Independent. His central question in the essay is ‘what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?’ To which he concluded, ‘I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!’ See: Du Bois, W. E. B. (August 10, 1910). ‘The Souls of White Folk’. The Independent (USA). Reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois (1987). Writings. Library of America. 924.