Whiteucation

Privilege, Power, and Prejudice in School and Society

Jeffrey S. Brooks, George Theoharis, Jeffrey S. Brooks, George Theoharis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351253468
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This important volume explores how racism operates in schools and society, while also unpacking larger patterns of racist ideology and white privilege as it manifests across various levels of schooling. A diverse set of contributors analyze particular contexts of white privilege, providing key research findings, connections to policy, and exemplars of schools and universities that are overcoming these challenges. Whiteucation provides a multi-level and holistic perspective on how inequitable power dynamics and prejudice exist in schools, ultimately encouraging reflection, dialogue, and inquiry in spaces where white privilege needs to be questioned, interrogated, and dismantled.

1

“If Everyone Would Just Act White”

Education as a Global Investment in Whiteness

Christopher B. Knaus

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON TACOMA

While the world’s populace consists primarily of people of color, schools across the globe have applied whiteness to school design, curriculum, and pedagogy. Indeed, despite the multilingual nature of the world’s incredibly diverse societies, Western languages and ideologies are preferred—and enforced, depending on perspective—in schools across the reaches of the (former) colonies. In China, Japan, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Tonga, to name just a few countries that were never formally colonized by the West, English has become the language of instruction in many schools, particularly schools designed for upward mobility. The implementation of Western-framed schools is so widespread that one may travel Earth visiting schools and scarcely see any meaningful variance in what are called classrooms. Regardless of culture, language, and historical context, schools across the globe look remarkably similar—typically there is one lead teacher, many students, and often the same chalkboard amplification of the teacher’s voice, technological innovations such as smartboards and tablets aside. The result of the implementation of Western-framed schooling has ensured that Richard Wright’s quote (embedded in the chapter title) is as accurate today as it was when published some 60 years ago (Wright, 1956). Across the globe, children, regardless of social, linguistic, political, or economic context, are told that being educated in the West is the primary—and preferred—route to economic and intellectual development.

This chapter clarifies how this global investment in whiteness, or the value system through which countries implant education that requires Western-framed schooling, has committed the world’s children to Wright’s notion of being molded as Westerners (Wright, 1957). The problems of such a global investment’s colonial impact have been argued extensively (Collins, 2000; Freire, 1973; Krishnamurti, 1953; Lulat, 2005; Smith, 1999). This chapter situates this investment as both a cause of global inequalities and an intentional justification for systems of racism that appear permanent (Bell, 1993). The commitment to molding children into Westerners is a global investment in maintaining what Mills (1997) refers to as the racial contract that maintains racism at all levels of society. In what comes next, I clarify whiteness as the foundation of schooling across the globe, and situate how the uneven implementation of an intentionally colonial school system fosters inequality, internalized racism, a perpetual need for Western aid, and globalized infrastructures of capitalism. I then situate how “best” practice has become defined entirely by adherence to white-aligned schooling practices, which is problematic at best and promotes a context of educational genocide at worst (Knaus & Rogers-Ard, 2012). After centering the global commitment to whiteness as a primary cause of inequality, I position Rendón’s (2009) sentipensante pedagogy as an indigenous-informed departure from Western schooling.

Globalization of Whiteness as Schooling

Richard Wright’s clarification about being molded into a Westerner recognizes that efforts to civilize the world through Western schooling have fostered many of the world’s inequalities (Wright, 1956). The spread of Western-based education has been based upon contemporary colonization and imperialism that position schools as the primary vehicle for implementing whiteness, white privilege, and capitalism. Indeed, as Lulat clarifies, colonialism “required the training of an indigenous political elite for the purposes of governance; though not in competition with the colonial elite it must be emphasized, but subservient to it” (Lulat, 2005, p. 208). Western-based education has long served as a tool to pacify indigenous populations, primarily through either withholding schooling—and thus, participation in a violently imposed Western colonial economy—or through forced schooling and the related intentional silencing of culture, language, and identity (see Adams, 1995; Gillborn, 2008; Lulat, 2005; MacDonald, 2004; Smith, 1999; Williams, 2005; Woodson, 1933/1990). While MacBeath and Swaffield clarify the context of Ghana, their argument is global:

When the British officially colonized Ghana (then the Gold Coast), they used schools to educate intermediaries for colonisation (Segura, 2009). This was essential to their policy of indirect rule so as to impose superiority of knowledge, language, and culture, and cut pupils off from their families in order to create new indigenous elites who would align themselves with the culture, values, and world view of the coloniser (Antwi, 1992; McWilliam & Kwamena-Poh, 1975).

(MacBeath and Swaffield, 2013, p. 51)

This intellectual colonization through schooling upheld a clear notion of racism; indeed, schools were implemented as a means to continue to justify domination in subsequent generations (Gillborn, 2008). Lulat (2005, p. 16) argues that “the subjugation and domination of the African people, both physically and mentally, that constituted the colonial project was facilitated at the ideological level by the colonial belief that the Africans were an intellectually inferior people …” This belief has guided the development of schooling across the African continent, and indeed, throughout the world. When colonial powers were overthrown by indigenous revolutionaries—many of whom had been educated in the West—new strategies for ensuring long-term reliance upon the West were needed. MacBeath and Swaffield remind us that intellectual reliance already permeated notions of schooling, and therefore schools were already in place to maintain colonial relationships.

… the transition from colonialism to independence and self-government in Ghana has not brought with it a sudden release from a colonial mind set. Nowhere is this more apparent than in education, where the post-colonial school, in many essential respects, continues to bear the imprint of its colonial legacy.

(MacBeath and Swaffield, 2013, pp. 49–50)

Wright argued that this “colonial legacy was built into the development mindset, such that all progress and social change are measured in terms of the degree to which Asian and African countries resemble Western countries …” (Wright, 1956, p. 191). He went on to clarify, “The systems and the manners of it have varied, but there has not been and there is not a Western colonial regime which has not imposed, to a greater or lesser degree, on the people it ruled the doctrine of their own racial inferiority” (ibid., p. 151). In short, the West has interpreted education solely through the violent imposition of schools that have intentionally been used to promote and justify racial inferiority across the globe.

The massification of schools as places where students learn to embrace whiteness as the only knowledge worth knowing, through individualized systems of success and failure, became the tool to silence vast populations of people of color (Macedo & Bartolomé, 1999). Ultimately, this tool was and is implemented through intertwined systems of aid, governmental support, and resources, framed specifically to improve the educational infrastructure of the world’s impoverished nations (Lulat, 2005). The irony, of course, is that participation as colonial elite has become the ultimate goal, spread throughout early child-rearing, childhood education, P-12, and higher education systems bent upon enforcing colonization, imperialism, and white supremacy. Thus, the world’s most elite universities represent bastions of whiteness, held down by largely white and male faculties as a direct reflection of the capitalistic marketplace’s own preference for white male CEOs. In turn, most other educational edifices increasingly focus on preparing students for participation in elite universities, or, at least going to four-year colleges (Goyette, 2008; Rosenbaum, 2001).

Across the globe, the correlate of elite universities with social, political, and economic goals—especially at the individual level—directly reinforces white colonialism. In their text on the global context of whiteness, Watson, Howard-Wagner, and Spanierman (2015) argue how contemporary efforts are strategically silencing acts of resistance: “Discrete areas of study, settler colonialism, racism, and color blindness didn’t quite capture what we have seen emerge in this historical moment: the wholesale onslaught of sociopolitical efforts towards equity and justice around the world” (p. xiv). The recent U.S. election of a president with direct ties to white supremacist organizations demonstrates both how effective and how pervasive this onslaught is.

Watson et al. go on to suggest that:

Neoliberalism is an instantiation of that work; whiteness is busily about the business of defining that imagined community according to race, ethnicity, and income, making full citizenship and preservation of human rights dependent on whiteness and wealth, or whiteness and a narrowly defined citizenship.

(Watson et al., 2015, p. xv)

Thus, the U.S. president’s 2017 election was based upon legislating this narrowed definition of citizenship, as attempts at baring Muslim and Latino participation in U.S. society parallel ongoing efforts to limit voting rights of African American communities. The spread of education as whiteness directly aligns to corporate interests that are encouraged by the narrowing of schooling to reflect capitalistic training grounds. Indeed, educational innovations from the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union, continue to shape, for example, Australia’s historical and continued foundation in colonial schooling (Dinham, 2015). Within this increasingly and globally exported framing of whiteness, education, and specifically schools, becomes the tool through which whiteness is taught and justified (Gillborn, 2008), and the link to capitalistic participation becomes hidden beneath false notions of merit and democracy.

A great demonstration of the success of schooling is that the world’s poor often look to Western-framed schooling as the way out of poverty. While the massification of the traditional Western classroom has become a global effort, unifying British, American, and European powers like never before, the underlying thread of whiteness has ensured a way of thinking that perpetuates white supremacy in ways that no formal colonizing regime could ever enact so successfully (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Leonardo, 2009; Macedo & Bartolomé, 1999). Indeed, the global implementation of schools as the central tool to implement systems of whiteness reflects what Charles Mills refers to as the racial contract to promote white supremacy (Gillborn, 2005; Mills, 1997). These systems have been promoted as filters for the best and the brightest—those who fail to succeed are first deemed uneducable, then dismissed back into the world of poverty from which they fleetingly allowed themselves to see the mantra of education for upward mobility as applying to them.

As a global phenomenon, education for whiteness ensures systems of schooling that perpetuate whiteness as property rights bestowed by successful navigation through schooling systems. The very definitions of merit and knowledge have thus become rooted in one overarching, culturally dominating framework that intentionally perpetuates bias towards white ways of thinking and expression (Leonardo, 2002). As Segura (2009) argues within a specific context, “Colonial powers and donors have set up structures of schooling that carry political meaning and values, and they continue to limit and create possibilities of what school is in Ghana” (p. 13). These limits on what school could actually be lays at the heart of white privilege, as the very infrastructure of schooling has remained intentionally rooted in whiteness (Dei, 2012). MacBeath and Swaffield clarify:

… the structure of schools and the nature of the school day continue to mimic the “Western” layout of classrooms, with rows of seats, blackboards, textbooks and subject timetables, and with inflexible starting times, so that if school starts at 7:45 in the morning, pupils who arrive late tend to be punished by excluding them from lessons and making them tidy the compound.

(MacBeath and Swaffield, 2013, p. 52)

While the structure and operation of schooling replicates Western values, knowledges, and approaches, this global commitment to whiteness is reflected in every aspect of implementation (Dei, 2012). While referring specifically to the United States, James Baldwin (1985) highlights the obvious curricular bias in whiteness as schools: “History is a hymn to White people, and all us others have been discovered—by White people …” (p. 80). In Timor-Leste, Beck and Araujo (2013) report how “from 2012 Portuguese has been mandated as the language of instruction. This mandate has been legislated despite the ongoing difficulties faced by both teachers and students in using Portuguese” (p. 166). They further contend that “the curriculum has been devised by both Portuguese and Brazilian curriculum specialists, many of whom have never visited Timor-Leste …” (ibid., p. 167). With a mismatched language of instruction and curriculum built from afar, an outside-in education is being situated not only in Timor-Leste, but across the globe. Every aspect of schooling is treated as if human beings all share the same language, culture, tradition, and norms—or at least should be taught to. Beck and Araujo explain:

While these textbooks are now being written specifically for Timor-Leste, they were originally designed for the Portuguese context, and were simply transferred from Portugal to Timor-Leste, ignoring the special circumstances of the emerging country and its needs.

(Beck and Araujo, 2013, p. 167)

In addition to the denial of imperial history, linguistically silencing and irrelevant curricular contexts, and a framework of schooling forcibly handed down by colonial countries, the focus on academic standards, however imperial, makes little rational sense within war-torn countries. Indeed, children in the midst of unstable regimes are forced to learn within colonizing schools. Since alterative notions of schooling have yet to be fully implemented at the nation-state level, the influence of Western ideals seemingly offers the only respite. The impact of the only sense of knowledge coming from the West, and imparted through schools, cannot be understated. Wright clarifies the individualization of this impact through the notion of the “frog perspective”:

This “frog perspective” which causes Asians, Africans, American or West Indian Negroes to feel their situation in terms of an “above” and a “below” reveals another facet of the white world, that is, its “whiteness” as seen and felt by those who are looking from below upwards.

(Wright, 1957, p. 8)

Wright’s point is that Western and whiteness-framed schooling creates a condition in which colonized populations begin to assess their intellectual worth by the virtues of the colonial educational infrastructure. While many exceptions and pockets of indigenous resistance have maintained across histories, adherence to the frog perspective has a discombobulating effect: “This contradiction of being both Western and a man of color creates a psychological distance, so to speak, between me and my environment” (ibid. p. 49). In this distance, whiteness as schools becomes a dehumanizing effort, as those who are not yet “civilized” assess their self-worth through the colonizer’s measurement system, and this is especially so in contexts without competing indigenous knowledge systems to combat the negativity of whiteness.

The impact of the rampant implementation of whiteness as schooling silences indigenous knowledges, thereby encouraging...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Sonya Douglass Horsford
• Preface by Jeffrey S. Brooks and George Theoharis
• Acknowledgements
• 1. “If Everyone Would Just Act White”: Education as a Global Investment in Whiteness
• 2. White Privilege and American Society: The State, White Opportunity Hoarding, and Inequality
• 3. The Unbearable Whiteness of Educational Leadership: A Historical Perspective on Racism in the American Principal’s Office
• 4. White Privilege and Educational Leadership
• 5. Black and White Women’s Leadership: Disadvantage and Privilege
• 6. Transcending Barriers in the Superintendency: The Resiliency Leadership Discourse of African American Women
• 7. Whiteness as Policy: Reconstructing Racial Privilege through School Choice
• 8. Black Girls, White Privilege, and Schooling
• 9. A Photo-Testimonio: Educational Expectations for Resiliencies of First-Generation Latina STEM College Students
• 10. “Asians in the Library”: Sophistry and the Conflation of Affirmative and Negative Action
• 11. Myths around the Recruitment of Faculty of Color in the Academy
• Author Biographies
• Index