Trying to Decenter Whiteness in the Academy by Dr. Chelda Smith Kondo

Context: I am a Black woman co-teaching a Critical Pedagogy class to 61 current and future educators. My co-instructors are a Black man and a white woman. To varying degrees, we, three, are experienced social justice educators committed to providing equitably rigorous and engaging instruction to our culturally diverse group. About 20 of the students self-identify as Black. This is our second time teaching this cohort; the first being last summer when we taught them Culturally Responsive Pedagogy.

The intent: The ideal learning outcome for program graduates would be that they each identify as change agents and disruptors of systemic oppression. Throughout the program, they would interrogate their identities, examine implicit and overt biases, interrogate systemic oppressions spanning from capitalism to patriarchy and they’d be committed to transgressing these structural inequities to provide an equitably transformative and rigorous education to their students, especially the historically marginalized.

The actions: Like most multicultural educators, we discuss agism, classism, ableism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, etc., and our text selections reflect emic perspectives from disenfranchised groups. We teach about intersectionality and elevate resistance efforts of marginalized peoples rather than perpetuate narratives of their subjugation and oppression.

In addition to addressing the fundamentals of teaching, our assignments include writing and publishing op-eds, book studies, reviews of critical sociology texts, writing and revising antiracist teacher oaths, critical media analysis, and counter narrative research papers.

Our students experience weekly synchronous meetings with lectures, workshops, simulations, guest speakers, and we even share personal missteps to illustrate our enduring biases and how we are working through them. In real time, we call each other out on oppressive and bigoted words and actions and encourage students to use our shortcomings as teachable moments, which illustrate the journey as the actual destination toward culturally sustainable teaching and learning.

The outcome: We STILL center cis-heternormative, middle class whiteness. The majority is still getting the most attention. They request more interactions, private sessions, and group consultation. Worse yet, this is done at the expense of our Black and Brown students. How do I know this? Despite two thirds of the faculty being Black, our Black students don’t speak up. Instead of offering their introspective inquiries into the oppressions of others, they mostly write and share about their own oppression. They situate themselves as course content. Oppression is so “novel” to our white students that they monopolize the discussion space and willingly rely on Black students’ experiences to further their development. This reliance on Black students’ experiences could be making Black students feel pressured to be native informants on Black oppression. Tuitt’s (2012) study of Black graduate students in classes taught by Black faculty highlighted how asking Black students to “take center stage as the ambassador of their race, [could] add a layer of tension to an already stressful learning experience” (p. 197).  Are BiPOC students resolved in their experience of oppression to the point of not engaging faculty or their peers in critical inquiries into their own accountability? Or are they simply tired of being reminded of and discussing all the ways they have been or will be oppressed?

The impact: We’re unsuccessful in our efforts to dismantle a Black/white binary that positions white people as needing to change and Black students as needing that change. The only intersectionality we effectively address is that of the compounding oppression of Black folks who experience disproportionality at nearly every marker (health, education, economics, etc.). In the tradition of failed multicultural education, despite our intentions and actions, our Black and Brown students are disempowered, and white students become the center of our efforts and energy (Smith Kondo, 2019).

The intervention: Recognizing that students, both non-white and white need space to unpack their anxieties, process their budding transformations, and take up their fragility, we’ve initiated affinity-based small working groups (Oto, & Chikkatur 2019). We offer space for self-identifying BIPOC students to be with Black faculty to learn the same objectives, but away from the white gaze. There, BIPOC students are the target audience and their voices and concerns are centered (Carey, et al., 2017). When they try to pivot to the actions of white peers and colleagues, we amplify BIPOC issues without using the lives of BIPOC students as content replacement due to their demographic affiliations. We can ask them to consider the oppressions of Latinx, queer and non-binary, under-resourced, Indigenous, disabled and rural folks. Free of whiteness, they have to interrogate their biases, epistemologies and actions. We hold them accountable and challenge them. They engage. Moreover, they can talk to each other. bell hooks (1994)  explains that teaching can’t be exciting if it’s one directional and in those affinity spaces, the cross directional exchanges are possible and a homogeneous, deficit-based construction of Blackness is disrupted. They request more interactions, private sessions, and group consultation. Our Black students also grow.

Chelda Smith Kondo is an Associate Professor of Elementary Education at Georgia Southern University. Her research, service, and activism center the identities, socialization, education, and schooling of marginalized communities. She is the co-founder and director of a Masters of Arts in Teaching program focused on cultures and communities.

References

Carey, R. L., Williams, B. D., Brown, J. D., & Hyler, M. E.(2017). Creating the SPACE. Independent School, 76(2), 90–97.

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Oto, R., & Chikkatur, A. (2019). “We didn’t have to go through those barriers”: Culturally affirming learning in a high school affinity group. The Journal of Social Studies Research, 43(2), 145–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jssr.2018.10.001

Smith Kondo, C. (2019). Front Streeting: Teacher Candidates of Color and the Pedagogical Challenges of Cultural Relevancy. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 50(2), 135–150. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12285

Tuitt, F. (2012). Black Like Me: Graduate Students’ Perceptions of their Pedagogical Experiences in Classes Taught by Black Faculty in a Predominantly White Institution. Journal of Black Studies, 43(2), 186–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934711413271