Racial individualism in middle school: How students learn white innocence through the social studies curriculum

ABSTRACT

This study explores how the ideology of racial individualism—which prioritizes an understanding of racism as individual wrongdoing—becomes embedded in the curriculum and discourse of the middle school social studies classroom and becomes embedded in the curriculum and discourse of the middle school social studies classroom to shape the racial socialization of students shapes the racial socialization of students. I provide a case study of one teacher’s combined English and U.S. History class, drawing on data from classroom observations, teacher interviews, student work, and classroom artifacts. The analysis shows how racial individualism was the dominant narrative to frame racism from the colonial period to the present day. I argue that this racial ideology reproduces white racial innocence, including the innocence of individual white people in creating and participating in racist systems and the innocence of the United States as a white nation. Moreover, I show how racial individualism allows white students to appear as anti-racists while creating unsafe conditions for Students of Color to engage in honest dialogue about race. The study thus advances existing scholarship on color evasion in education by illuminating how young adolescents negotiate racial individualism in their everyday classroom interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Race talk
• racial socialization
• racism
• social studies
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

I am forever grateful to the students and educators at Kennedy Junior High for sharing their thoughts and experiences with me during this research. Thanks especially to Mr. Winters, who graciously opened his door and his heart during this study and made these contributions possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Similar to other critical scholars of whiteness in education, I intentionally lowercase “white” and “whiteness” in order to “challenge white supremacy in language” (Matias et al., 2014, p. 302).

2. All school, city, and participant names in this study are pseudonyms. Students chose their own pseudonyms.

3. In line with Annamma et al. (2017), in this article, I consciously use the term “color evasiveness” rather than “colorblindness” to resist positioning people with disabilities as problematic and using dis/ability as a metaphor for the undesired (p. 153).

4. As an indication of the majority politics of Green City, in the November 2016 Presidential Election, 63% of Green City voters selected Republican candidate Donald Trump as President of the United States.

5. In this paper, I use “American” to refer to the colloquial way in which people in the United States refer to their national identity while acknowledging that many nations and nation-states are included within the geographic region of the Americas.

6. Bartolomé de Las Casas is known for his essays defending Native Americans against the brutality of Europeans. In order to shift the labor population in the Americas away from Native Americans, Las Casas promoted the use of African slaves, who he believed did not have souls.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funds from the Stanford Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education (Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Grant) and the Stanford Graduate School of Education (Dissertation Support Grant).