Chapter 5: Doing Whiteness in the Classroom: White Liberal Pedagogy and the Impossibility of Antiracist Subjectivity

Tears welled up in Ms. Carr’s eyes, as she said:

This follow-up conversation with Marie Carr, one of the teachers whom Amy focused on, was the most painful, but also the most eye opening interview of Amy’s 2-year ethnographic study of the College Preparatory Academy (College Prep), a traditional public high school in New York City where she was also a teacher.

In this chapter, we examine data on the racialization of Black students that can occur when a White female teacher uncritically attempts to employ liberal or “emancipatory” curricula. We use the classroom observations of a White teacher that were collected by another White teacher and ethnographer to show a need for a methodological response to this often racist classroom phenomenon. This exchange between a White teacher and Black student can be understood through notions of neoliberal multiculturalism (Hale, 2005, 2006). More specifically, we demonstrate how an ethnographer’s skill in dealing with issues of critical reflexivity can inform and train White teachers in urban classrooms to question their own subjectivities and be open to other worldviews, namely their students’. In collecting and analyzing this data, Amy, a White female teacher/ethnographer, grapples with her own whiteness through a lens of neoliberal multiculturalism. She recognizes that there are limitations on how she can move beyond the privilege that she embodies, but does not use this recognition to fuel political paralysis. Instead she occupies the role available to her and is simultaneously critical of it as she acts. This becomes an ongoing response to what Robyn Weigman calls the “impossibility of antiracist White subjectivity” (1999).