Chapter 2: Naming the Unnamed: White Culture in Relief

Is there such a thing as White culture? “Are you kidding me?” one South Asian American colleague replied when we posed this question,

As the five coauthors of this paper (five women educators of different races), we set out to identify the cultural manifestations of whiteness in acknowledgment of the fact that there is no monolithic White culture, but many varied manifestations of whiteness and White cultural practices across the United States. We share stories of our lives as students—sitting in desks in the classrooms of White women¹ teachers—bumping up against cultural manifestations of whiteness and feeling confused, insufficient, unworthy, and judged for being who we were. It only became clear over time that the thing we were bumping up against was a whole set of cultural norms that were very different from our own. To the White women teachers in our classrooms, these norms seemed, frankly, normal. “Culture,” as Gloria Ladson-Billings described it once in a talk, is nothing more than “how we do things around here.” But for children who did not grow up in homes and communities shaped by White cultural norms, it felt alienating and oppressive. While not every point in this chapter addresses White women directly, the article as a whole aims to highlight a few of the myriad ways that the cultural manifestations of whiteness show up in schools so that White female teachers can begin to identify themselves as both cultured and raced—not culturally neutral and objective—and ask themselves to what extent the cultural manifestations of whiteness shape their behavior and expectations in school.