front cover of Rhetorics of Whiteness
Rhetorics of Whiteness
Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education
Edited by Tammie M. Kennedy, Joyce Irene Middleton, Krista Ratcliffe, with a foreword by Lilia D. Monzó and Peter McLaren
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Winner, CCCC Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection Category, 2018

With the election of our first black president, many Americans began to argue that we had finally ended racism, claiming that we now live in a postracial era. Yet near-daily news reports regularly invoke white as a demographic category and recount instances of racialized violence as well as an increased sensitivity to expressions of racial unrest. Clearly, American society isn’t as color-blind as people would like to believe. In Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, contributors reveal how identifications with racialized whiteness continue to manifest themselves in American culture.

The sixteen essays that comprise this collection not only render visible how racialized whiteness infiltrates new twenty-first-century discourses and material spaces but also offer critical tactics for disrupting this normative whiteness. Specifically, contributors examine popular culture (novels, films, TV), social media (YouTube, eHarmony, Facebook), education (state law, the textbook industry, dual credit programs), pedagogy (tactics for teaching via narratives, emotional literacy, and mindfulness) as well as cultural theories (concepts of racialized space, anti-dialogicism, and color blindness). Offering new approaches to understanding racialized whiteness, this volume emphasizes the importance of a rhetorical lens for employing whiteness studies’ theories and methods to identify, analyze, interpret, and interrupt representations of whiteness.

Although whiteness studies has been waning as an active research field for the past decade, the contributors to Rhetorics of Whiteness assert that it hasn’t lost its relevancy because racialized whiteness and issues of systemic racism persist in American society and culture today. Few whiteness studies texts have been published in rhetoric and composition in the past decade, so this collection should quickly become mandatory reading. By focusing on common, yet often overlooked, contemporary examples of how racialized whiteness haunts U.S. society, Rhetorics of Whiteness serves as a valuable text for scholars in the field as well as anyone else interested in the topic.
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Educating the Enemy
Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands
Jonna Perrillo
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Compares the privileged educational experience offered to the children of relocated Nazi scientists in Texas with the educational disadvantages faced by Mexican American students living in the same city.

Educating the Enemy begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism.

Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into “Mexican” schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish—the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation—they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children—one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such—reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation.

Listen to an interview with the author
here and read an interview in Time and a piece based on the book in the Boston Review.
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front cover of The Enduring Legacy
The Enduring Legacy
Structured Inequality in America's Public Schools
Mark Ryan
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Enduring Legacy describes a multifaceted paradox—a constant struggle between those who espouse a message of hope and inclusion and others who systematically plan for exclusion. Structured inequality in the nation’s schools is deeply connected to social stratification within American society. This paradox began in the eighteenth century and has proved an enduring legacy. Mark Ryan provides historical, political, and pedagogical contexts for teacher candidates—not only to comprehend the nature of racial segregation but, as future educators, to understand their own professional responsibilities, both in the community and in the school, to strive for an integrated classroom where all children have a chance to succeed. The goal of providing every child a world-class education is an ethical imperative, an inherent necessity for a functioning pluralistic democracy. The challenge is both great and growing, for teachers today will face an evermore segregated American classroom.
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Engineering Manhood
Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute
Jonson Miller
Lever Press, 2020
It is not an accident that American engineering is so disproportionately male and white; it took and takes work to create and sustain this situation. Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute examines the process by which engineers of the antebellum Virginia Military Institute cultivated whiteness, manhood, and other intersecting identities as essential to an engineering professional identity. VMI opened in 1839 to provide one of the earliest and most thorough engineering educations available in antebellum America. The officers of the school saw engineering work as intimately linked to being a particular type of person, one that excluded women or black men. This particular white manhood they crafted drew upon a growing middle-class culture. These precedents impacted engineering education broadly in this country and we continue to see their legacy today.
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First Strike
Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles
Damien M. Sojoyner
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

California is a state of immense contradictions.  Home to colossal wealth and long portrayed as a bastion of opportunity, it also has one of the largest prison populations in the United States and consistently ranks on the bottom of education indexes. Taking a unique, multifaceted insider’s perspective, First Strike delves into the root causes of its ever-expansive prison system and disastrous educational policy. 

Recentering analysis of Black masculinity beyond public rhetoric, First Strike critiques the trope of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and instead explores the realm of public school as a form of  “enclosure” that has influenced the schooling (and denial of schooling) and imprisonment of Black people in California. Through a fascinating ethnography of a public school in Los Angeles County, and a “day in the life tour” of the effect of prisons on the education of Black youth, Damien M. Sojoyner looks at the contestation over education in the Black community from Reconstruction to the civil rights and Black liberation movements of the past three decades. 

Policy makers, school districts, and local governments have long known that there is a relationship between high incarceration rates and school failure. First Strike is the first book that demonstrates why that connection exists and shows how school districts, cities and states have been complicit and can reverse a disturbing and needless trend. Rather than rely upon state-sponsored ideological or policy-driven models that do nothing more than to maintain structures of hierarchal domination, it allows us to resituate our framework of understanding and begin looking for solutions in spaces that are readily available and are immersed in radically democratic social visions of the future. 

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Ghosts in the Schoolyard
Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
Eve L. Ewing
University of Chicago Press, 2018
“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.”
 
That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.
 
But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together.
 
Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?
 
Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.
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front cover of Integrations
Integrations
The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education
Lawrence Blum and Zoë Burkholder
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The promise of a free, high-quality public education is supposed to guarantee every child a shot at the American dream. But our widely segregated schools mean that many children of color do not have access to educational opportunities equal to those of their white peers. In Integrations, historian Zoë Burkholder and philosopher Lawrence Blum investigate what this country’s long history of school segregation means for achieving just and equitable educational opportunities in the United States.
 
Integrations focuses on multiple marginalized groups in American schooling: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. The authors show that in order to grapple with integration in a meaningful way, we must think of integration in the plural, both in its multiple histories and in the many possible definitions of and courses of action for integration. Ultimately, the authors show, integration cannot guarantee educational equality and justice, but it is an essential component of civic education that prepares students for life in our multiracial democracy.
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front cover of Power, Protest, and the Public Schools
Power, Protest, and the Public Schools
Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City
Melissa F. Weiner
Rutgers University Press, 2012
Accounts of Jewish immigrants usually describe the role of education in helping youngsters earn a higher social position than their parents. Melissa F. Weiner argues that New York City schools did not serve as pathways to mobility for Jewish or African American students. Instead, at different points in the city's history, politicians and administrators erected similar racial barriers to social advancement by marginalizing and denying resources that other students enjoyed. Power, Protest, and the Public Schools explores how activists, particularly parents and children, responded to inequality; the short-term effects of their involvement; and the long-term benefits that would spearhead future activism. Weiner concludes by considering how today's Hispanic and Arab children face similar inequalities within public schools.
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front cover of Progressive Dystopia
Progressive Dystopia
Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco
Savannah Shange
Duke University Press, 2019
San Francisco is the endgame of gentrification, where racialized displacement means that the Black population of the city hovers at just over 3 percent. The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.
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Resisting Brown
Race, Literacy, and Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia
Candace Epps-Robertson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018

Winner, 2018 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Many localities in America resisted integration in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education rulings (1954, 1955). Virginia’s Prince Edward County stands as perhaps the most extreme. Rather than fund integrated schools, the county’s board of supervisors closed public schools from 1959 until 1964. The only formal education available for those locked out of school came in 1963 when the combined efforts of Prince Edward’s African American community and aides from President John F. Kennedy’s administration established the Prince Edward County Free School Association (Free School). This temporary school system would serve just over 1,500 students, both black and white, aged 6 through 23.

Drawing upon extensive archival research, Resisting Brown presents the Free School as a site in which important rhetorical work took place. Candace Epps-Robertson analyzes public discourse that supported the school closures as an effort and manifestation of citizenship and demonstrates how the establishment of the Free School can be seen as a rhetorical response to white supremacist ideologies. The school’s mission statements, philosophies, and commitment to literacy served as arguments against racialized constructions of citizenship. Prince Edward County stands as a microcosm of America’s struggle with race, literacy, and citizenship.

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Rethinking Racism
Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School
Jennifer Seibel Trainor
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

In Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School, Jennifer Seibel Trainor proposes a new understanding of the roots of racism, one that is based on attention to the role of emotion and the dynamics of persuasion. This one-year ethnographic study argues against previous assumptions about racism, demonstrating instead how rhetoric and emotion, as well as the processes and culture of schools, are involved in the formation of racist beliefs.

Telling the story of a year spent in an all-white high school, Trainor suggests that contrary to prevailing opinion, racism often does not stem from ignorance, a lack of exposure to other cultures, or the desire to protect white privilege. Rather, the causes of racism are frequently found in the realms of emotion and language, as opposed to rational calculations of privilege or political ideologies. Trainor maintains that racist assertions often originate not from prejudiced attitudes or beliefs but from metaphorical connections between racist ideas and nonracist values. These values are reinforced, even promoted by schooling via "emotioned rules" in place in classrooms: in tacit, unexamined lessons, rituals, and practices that exert a powerful—though largely unacknowledged—persuasive force on student feelings and beliefs about race.

Through in-depth analysis of established anti-racist pedagogies, student behavior, and racial discourses, Trainor illustrates the manner in which racist ideas are subtly upheld through social and literacy education in the classroom—and are thus embedded in the infrastructures of schools themselves. It is the emotional and rhetorical framework of the classroom that lends racism its compelling power in the minds of students, even as teachers endeavor to address the issue of cultural discrimination. This effort is continually hindered by an incomplete understanding of the function of emotions in relation to antiracist persuasion and cannot be remedied until the root of the problem is addressed.

Rethinking Racism calls for a fresh approach to understanding racism and its causes, offering crucial insight into the formative role of schooling in the perpetuation of discriminatory beliefs. In addition, this highly readable narrative draws from white students' own stories about the meanings of race in their learning and their lives. It thus provides new ways of thinking about how researchers and teachers rep- resent whiteness. Blending narrative with more traditional forms of ethnographic analysis, Rethinking Racism uncovers the ways in which constructions of racism originate in literacy research and in our classrooms—and how these constructions themselves can limit the rhetorical positions students enact.

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front cover of Schools Betrayed
Schools Betrayed
Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education
Kathryn M. Neckerman
University of Chicago Press, 2007

The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In Schools Betrayed, her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts.

Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, Neckerman compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, she contends, stemmed from Chicago officials’ decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. And it deepened, she shows, because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago’s black community, leaving educators unable to help their most disadvantaged students.

Schools Betrayed will be required reading for anyone who cares about urban education.

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front cover of Swimming Against the Tide
Swimming Against the Tide
African American Girls and Science Education
Sandra L. Hanson
Temple University Press, 2009

“They looked at us like we were not supposed to be scientists,” says one young African American girl, describing one openly hostile reaction she encountered in the classroom. In this significant study, Sandra Hanson explains that although many young minority girls are interested in science, the racism and sexism in the field discourage them from pursuing it after high school. Those girls that remain highly motivated to continue studying science must “swim against the tide.”

Hanson examines the experiences of African American girls in science education using multiple methods of quantitative and qualitative research, including a web survey and vignette techniques. She understands the complex interaction between race and gender in the science domain and, using a multicultural and feminist framework of analysis, addresses the role of agency and resistance that encourages and sustains interest in science in African American families and communities.

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front cover of To Advance the Race
To Advance the Race
Black Women's Higher Education from the Antebellum Era to the 1960s
Linda M. Perkins
University of Illinois Press, 2024
From the United States' earliest days, African Americans considered education essential for their freedom and progress. Linda M. Perkins’s study ranges across educational and geographical settings to tell the stories of Black women and girls as students, professors, and administrators. Beginning with early efforts and the establishment of abolitionist colleges, Perkins follows the history of Black women's post–Civil War experiences at elite white schools and public universities in northern and midwestern states. Their presence in Black institutions like Howard University marked another advancement, as did Black women becoming professors and administrators. But such progress intersected with race and education in the postwar era. As gender questions sparked conflict between educated Black women and Black men, it forced the former to contend with traditional notions of women’s roles even as the 1960s opened educational opportunities for all African Americans.

A first of its kind history, To Advance the Race is an enlightening look at African American women and their multi-generational commitment to the ideal of education as a collective achievement.

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front cover of Uncivil Rights
Uncivil Rights
Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity
Jonna Perrillo
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Almost fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, a wealth of research shows that minority students continue to receive an unequal education. At the heart of this inequality is a complex and often conflicted relationship between teachers and civil rights activists, examined fully for the first time in Jonna Perrillo’s Uncivil Rights, which traces the tensions between the two groups in New York City from the Great Depression to the present.
While movements for teachers’ rights and civil rights were not always in conflict, Perrillo uncovers the ways they have become so, brought about both by teachers who have come to see civil rights efforts as detracting from or competing with their own goals and by civil rights activists whose aims have de-professionalized the role of the educator. Focusing in particular on unionized teachers, Perrillo finds a new vantage point from which to examine the relationship between school and community, showing how in this struggle, educators, activists, and especially our students have lost out. 
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Whiteness Interrupted
White Teachers and Racial Identity in Predominantly Black Schools
Marcus Bell
Duke University Press, 2021
In Whiteness Interrupted Marcus Bell presents a revealing portrait of white teachers in majority-black schools in which he examines the limitations of understandings of how white racial identity is formed. Through in-depth interviews with dozens of white teachers from a racially segregated, urban school district in Upstate New York, Bell outlines how whiteness is constructed based on localized interactions and takes a different form in predominantly black spaces. He finds that in response to racial stress in a difficult teaching environment, white teachers conceptualized whiteness as a stigmatized category predicated on white victimization. When discussing race outside majority-black spaces, Bell's subjects characterized American society as postracial, in which race seldom affects outcomes. Conversely, in discussing their experiences within predominantly black spaces, they rejected the idea of white privilege, often angrily, and instead focused on what they saw as the racial privilege of blackness. Throughout, Bell underscores the significance of white victimization narratives in black spaces and their repercussions as the United States becomes a majority-minority society.
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front cover of Writing Their Bodies
Writing Their Bodies
Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School
Sarah Klotz
Utah State University Press, 2020
Between 1879 and 1918, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School housed over 10,000 students and served as a prototype for boarding schools on and off reservations across the continent. Writing Their Bodies analyzes pedagogical philosophies and curricular materials through the perspective of written and visual student texts created during the school’s first three-year term. Using archival and decolonizing methodologies, Sarah Klotz historicizes remedial literacy education and proposes new ways of reading Indigenous rhetorics to expand what we know about the Native American textual tradition.
 
This approach tracks the relationship between curriculum and resistance and enumerates an anti-assimilationist methodology for teachers and scholars of writing in contemporary classrooms. From the Carlisle archive emerges the concept of a rhetoric of relations, a set of Native American communicative practices that circulates in processes of intercultural interpretation and world-making. Klotz explores how embodied and material practices allowed Indigenous rhetors to maintain their cultural identities in the off-reservation boarding school system and critiques the settler fantasy of benevolence that propels assimilationist models of English education.
 
Writing Their Bodies moves beyond language and literacy education where educators standardize and limit their students’ means of communication and describes the extraordinary expressive repositories that Indigenous rhetors draw upon to survive, persist, and build futures in colonial institutions of education.
 
 
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