Learning in the Dark: How Assumptions of Whiteness Shape Classroom Knowledge

Harvard Educational Review

Volumn 67, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 321-349

  Maher, Frances A ^a   Tetreault, Mary Kay Thompson ^b  

^a WHEATON COLLEGE   (United States)

^b CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0347141447     PISSN: 00178055     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17763/haer.67.2.j7866368086k9491     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 52.
2. Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom: An Inside Look at How Professors and Students Are Transforming Higher Education for a Diverse Society ( New York: Basic Books, 1994). In this article, we include excerpts from five classes at three different institutions. The first one is from a seminar in literary theory at Lewis and Clark College. The second is from an honors freshman writing course at Towson State University. The third is from a course on women writers since 1800, and the fourth is from a course entitled "Feminism in Historical Perspective/Feminist Theory"; both of these courses were also at Lewis and Clark College. The fifth is from a class, "Images of Women in Literature," taught at Emory University.
3. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, chapter one.
4. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
5. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
6. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
7. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
8. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
9. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
10. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
11. See, among other works, the following: Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and Ruth Frankenberg, "Whiteness and Americanness: Examining Constructions of Race, Culture and Nation in White Women's Life Narratives," in Race, ed. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 62-77; Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies," in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont. CA: Wadsworth, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Gregory and Sanjek, Race, pp. 78-102; Beverly Daniel Tatum, "Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," Harvard Educational Review, 62 (1992), 1-24.
12. Grey Osterud made this point to us in a telephone conversation with Mary Kay Tetreault on October 22, 1993.
13. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, p. 11.
14. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, p. 196.
15. There was only one other White male in the class; he rarely attended.
16. We use pseudonyms for all the students in this article.
17. Privileges accorded people because they are middle or upper class, male, and heterosexual are also often unacknowledged, and operate in similar ways. In this essay we focus on Whiteness, while noting ways that Whiteness intersects with other forms of privilege in the different vignettes that we explore.
18. McIntosh, "White Privilege," p. 71.
19. Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness; Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," in Off-White, Readings on Society, Race and Culture, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 259-269; and Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Working Difference in Education," Curriculum Inquiry, forthcoming; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"
20. Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness; Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," in Off-White, Readings on Society, Race and Culture, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 259-269; and Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Working Difference in Education," Curriculum Inquiry, forthcoming; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"
21. Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness; Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," in Off-White, Readings on Society, Race and Culture, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 259-269; and Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Working Difference in Education," Curriculum Inquiry, forthcoming; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"
22. Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness; Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," in Off-White, Readings on Society, Race and Culture, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 259-269; and Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Working Difference in Education," Curriculum Inquiry, forthcoming; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"
23. Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness; Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," in Off-White, Readings on Society, Race and Culture, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 259-269; and Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Working Difference in Education," Curriculum Inquiry, forthcoming; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"
24. Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness; Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," in Off-White, Readings on Society, Race and Culture, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and Mun Wong (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 259-269; and Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Working Difference in Education," Curriculum Inquiry, forthcoming; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995); Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"
25. Becky Thompson and White Women Challenging Racism, "Home Work: Anti-Racism Activism and the Meaning of Whiteness," in Fine et al., Off-White, pp. 354-366.
26. See Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," p. 260.
27. Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, pp. 13-14.
28. Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?"; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, pp. 13-14.
29. Hacker, Two Nations, p. 8.
30. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, p. 3.
31. We first saw this quote from Adrienne Rich in a paper by Renato Rosaldo, entitled "Symbolic Violence: A Battle Raging in Academe," presented at the American AnthroR pological Association Annual Meeting, Phoenix, Arizona, 1988.
32. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, chapter seven.
33. Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," p. 265.
34. All quotes in this paragraph from Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness."
35. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985). See Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, pp. 72-76, for a discussion of this class. The quotes in this essay are not always fully quoted in the book; we returned to the data to reexamine it for other issues. The data for the classroom vignettes and analyses in The Feminist Classroom were gathered over a period of at least three weeks through classroom visits and taping of class discussions. Class discussion data were supplemented by interviews with the professor and four or five selected students. Based on this material, we wrote detailed case studies of each professor's teaching, and shared them with our informants. Based on informants' comments and our own further research, we revised these case studies, and finally used them as the basis for the vignettes and analyses in the book, which were organized around four themes: "Mastery," "Voice," "Authority," and "Positionality."
36. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985). See Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, pp. 72-76, for a discussion of this class. The quotes in this essay are not always fully quoted in the book; we returned to the data to reexamine it for other issues. The data for the classroom vignettes and analyses in The Feminist Classroom were gathered over a period of at least three weeks through classroom visits and taping of class discussions. Class discussion data were supplemented by interviews with the professor and four or five selected students. Based on this material, we wrote detailed case studies of each professor's teaching, and shared them with our informants. Based on informants' comments and our own further research, we revised these case studies, and finally used them as the basis for the vignettes and analyses in the book, which were organized around four themes: "Mastery," "Voice," "Authority," and "Positionality."
37. SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, was a student movement in the 1960s that opposed the war in Vietnam and worked for civil rights.
38. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, pp. 178-185.
39. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p. 159.
40. Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Macmillan, 1967), Poem 288, p. 133.
41. Johnson, Complete Poems, Poem 327, p. 155.
42. Hacker, Two Nations, pp. 18-19. Neil Gotanda spoke of these issues at a presentation, "Reconstructing Whiteness: Color Blindness, Asian Americans, and the New Ethnicity," at California State University, Fullerton, April 16, 1996.
43. Interview with a teacher at Spelman College, April 1993.
44. The college is known for its strong Gender Studies program and an institutional pedagogy focused on student perspectives as learners. A hallmark of their pedagogy is the practice of beginning with the students' questions rather than the common approach of beginning with the teachers' questions.
45. Nancy Grey Osterud, "Teaching and Learning about Race at Lewis and Clark College," Unpublished manuscript, 1987.
46. There were other issues present that beset many feminist classrooms: how to attend to theory by getting students to think theoretically without separating it from the their personal experience and feminist practice; how to enable the students to set their own agenda; and how to deal with the disparate discourses in a class that arise from, in the professor's words, "that real separation, the gap between inside the classroom and the real world of personal experience out there . . ."
47. The students agreed that they had to take collective responsibility for the class as a whole and changed some of their classroom processes. Students met in small groups for part of the class and then as the full group of thirty students. They agreed to select report topics for the small groups and the subsequent agenda for the large one, and to choose a student to chair the large-group discussion each day.
48. Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Review, 59 (1989), 297-324.
49. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, pp. 112-113.
50. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, p. 39.
51. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, p. 160.
52. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, p. 178.
53. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, pp. 172-178; 191-197.
54. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, pp. 172-178; 191-197.
55. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, p. 194.
56. Ellsworth, "Double Binds of Whiteness," pp. 260-261.
57. Ellsworth, "Working Difference," p. 14.
58. Frankenberg, White Women.
59. Maher and Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, p. 112.
60. Ellsworth, "Working Difference"; Lawrence, "White Educators"; Gotanda, "Reconstructing Whiteness."
61. Ellsworth, "Working Difference"; Lawrence, "White Educators"; Gotanda, "Reconstructing Whiteness."
62. Ellsworth, "Working Difference"; Lawrence, "White Educators"; Gotanda, "Reconstructing Whiteness."
63. Anoop Nayak, "Tales from the Dark Side: Negotiating Whiteness in School Arenas," Unpublished manuscript, University of Newcastle, UK.
64. Ellsworth, "Working Difference"; Lawrence, "White Educators"; Tatum, "Talking about Race."
65. Ellsworth, "Working Difference"; Lawrence, "White Educators"; Tatum, "Talking about Race."
66. Ellsworth, "Working Difference"; Lawrence, "White Educators"; Tatum, "Talking about Race."