1. Whiteness and damage in the education classroom.
- Author
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Da Costa, Alexandre E.
- Subjects
RACISM ,RACIAL identity of white people ,CRITICAL consciousness ,OPPRESSION ,INDIGENOUS peoples ,ANTI-racism education - Abstract
This paper analyses relationships between whiteness and damage in the university classroom through a focus on two contemporary areas of critical education in Canada: raising white racial consciousness and truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. First, whiteness is damage-producing – it orients anti-racist education towards white students and their needs, there by harming the well-being and constraining the education of non-white students. Second, whiteness gravitates towards what Unangax scholar Eve Tuck calls "damage-centred approaches," which objectify non-white suffering, pathologising Indigenous peoples whilst obfuscating the ongoing reproduction of racism and colonialism. As such, white educators must remain assiduously vigilant about a key tension regarding whiteness and damage: that our pedagogical focus on racial and colonial oppression can simultaneously raise critical consciousness and divert attention away from more fundamental interrogations of whiteness, agency, and relationality within a systemically racist social order. The article closes with some considerations for educators in terms of addressing complicity in their institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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