Diversity, inclusion and (anti) racism in health and physical education: what can a critical whiteness perspective offer?

ABSTRACT

This Fritz Duras lecture argues for the importance of physical educators’ critical engagement with issues of race and ethnic diversity. Despite its colonial history and close relationship to sport - where racialised discourses about the body contribute to shaping commonsense ideas about race - we have yet to engage in any sustained way with issues of race in Health and Physical Education (HPE). Concerns over rises in racism, coupled with persistent gaps between a largely white profession and ethnically diverse school populations in developed countries, point to the need to support teachers’ critical engagement with race. In the paper I examine the potential - and challenges - of adopting a critical whiteness perspective for this task. Antiracist perspectives focusing on the effects of racism position white teachers ‘outside’ of race, and contribute to a deficit view of minority ethnic students in HPE as ‘problems’ for not being ‘active or healthy enough’ in relation to an accepted white (male and middle class) norm. Critical whiteness perspectives shift the focus towards an examination of the workings of the dominant culture through a critical engagement with whiteness, centralising white teachers within processes of racialisation. I ask what such an approach might mean for HPE educators and our (antiracist) practice. To do this, I draw on recent research, funded by the British Academy, that sought to explore the cultural resources on which physical educators draw to make sense of race, including an analysis of discourses of race evident in national curricular policy. Examples from the findings demonstrate how whiteness in HPE works through two discursive techniques, universalisation (the way in which white experience and knowledge is taken to count for the experiences of everyone) and naturalism (the ways in which race is defined in relation to ‘others’, so that white bodies and perspectives are seen as ‘natural’ and the norm). The paper concludes by returning to what a critical whiteness perspective might offer teachers in their anti-racist practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• race
• physical education
• racism
• teachers
• curriculum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anne Flintoff is Emeritus Professor of Physical Education and Sport in the Carnegie School of Sport, Leeds Beckett University. Her teaching, research and consultancy centres on issues of equity and social inclusion, particularly gender and race.

ORCID

Anne Flintoff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4384-2000