Race ignore-ance, colortalk, and white complicity: white is.white isn't

Educational Theory

Volumn 56, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 345-362

  Applebaum, Barbara ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44549085939     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2006.00230.x     Document Type: Review

References (46)

1. I draw part of this essay's title from the title of an exceptional book: Donna Deyhle, Sofia Villenas, and Laurence Parker, eds., Race Is - Race Isn't: Critical Race Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999).
2. Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't this Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (1989): 324.
3. Ibid., 305-306.
4. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25-73.
5. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds.,Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995); and Neil Gotanda, "A Critique of 'Our Constitution is Color-blind,"' Stanford Law Review 44, no. 1 (1991): 1-68
6. Ian F. Haney Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 177.
7. Anita Tijerina Revilla, Amy Stuart Wells, and Jennifer Jellison Holme, '";We Didn't See Color': The Salience of Colorblindness in Desegregated Schools," in Off White: Readings on Power, Privilege and Resistance, 2d ed., eds. April Burns, Michelle Fine, Linda Powell Pruitt, and Lois Weis (New York: Routledge, 2004);
8. Nancy Ditomaso, Rochelle Parks-Yancy, and Corinne Post, "White Views of Civil Rights: Color Blindness and Equal Opportunity," in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, eds. Ashley A. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003), 189-198;
9. Amanda Lewis, "There is No 'Race' in the Schoolyard: Color-Blind Ideology in an (Almost) All-White School," American Educational Research Journal 38, no. 4 (2001): 781-811;
10. Janet Ward Schofield, "Causes and Consequences of the Colorblind Perspective," in Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, 3d ed., eds. James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks (Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon, 1997), 251-271;
11. and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone A. Forman, '"I'm not a racist but.": Mapping White College Students' Racial Ideology in the U.S.A.," Discourse and Society 11, no. 1 (2000): 51-86.
12. Joe R. Feagin, America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York: Routledge, 2001).
13. I would like to thank Jennifer Conrad, a graduate student specializing in disability law, for stimulating discussions we had on this topic.
14. Mica Pollock, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School (Princeton, New Jersey:Princeton University Press, 2004), 44. This work will be cited as CM in the text for all subsequent references.
15. Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). This work will be cited as FR in the text for all subsequent references.
16. Virginia Lea and Judy Helfand, eds., Identifying Race and Transforming Whiteness in the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). This work will be cited as IR in the text for all subsequent references.
17. Audrey Thompson, "Colortalk: Whiteness and Off White," Educational Studies 30, no. 2 (1999):141-160.
18. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this way of framing my arguments.
19. See, for example, Jan Narveson, "Collective Responsibility," Journal ofEthics 6, no. 2 (2002): 179-198;
20. Larry May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Larry May, Collective Responsibility: Five Decades ofDebate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics (New York: Row-man and Littlefield, 1991).
21. Sandra Bartky, "Race, Complicity and Culpable Ignorance," in "Sympathy and Solidarity" and Other Essays (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 151.
22. Barbara Houston, "Taking Responsibility," Philosophy of Education 2002, ed. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2003), 1-13.
23. Or, as Joyce King would explain it, such denials are a part of dysconscious racism in which white norms and privileges are uncritically accepted. See Joyce E. King, "Dysconscious Racism: Ideology, Identity, and the Miseducation of Teachers," Journal of Negro Education 60, no. 2 (1991): 133-146.
24. Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1.
25. Ibid., 122 (emphasis added).
26. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 41.
27. James Joseph Scheurich, "Toward a White Discourse on White Racism," Educational Researcher 22,no. 8 (1993): 9.
28. Alan David Freeman, "Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine," in Critical Race Theory, eds. Crenshaw et al., 29.
29. Judith Lichtenberg, "Racism in the Head, Racism in the World," Report from the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy (Spring/Summer, 1992): 3-5.
30. Lawrence Blum, "I'm Not a Racist But.": The Moral Quandary of Race (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2002).
31. See especially, J.L.A. Garcia, "The Heart of Racism," Journal of Social Philosophy 27, no. 1 (1996):5-45;
32. and Tommie Shelby, "Is Racism in the 'Heart'?" Journal of Social Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2002): 411-420.
33. See also Michael R. Levine and Tamas Pataki, Racism in Mind (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004).
34. Blum, "I'm Not a Racist But." 14.
35. Matthew Silliman, "Structural Racism and the Failure of Empathetic Imagination: A Comment on Lawrence Blum," Theory and Research in Education 1, no. 3 (2003): 303-313.
36. Jane Roland Martin, "Gender in the Classroom: Now You See It, Now You Don't," Democracy and Education 9, no. 3 (1999): 9-13.
37. William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), as cited by Martin.
38. King, "Dysconscious Racism," 140.
39. Joe Feagin and Hernan Vera, White Racism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7.
40. For an excellent discussion of how whites are in control of membership in that privileged group, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant,
41. Joe Feagin and Hernan Vera, White Racism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
42. William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Random House, 1976).
43. Leslie G. Carr, Colorblind Racism (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1997), 149.
44. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
45. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Random House, 1993), 28.
46. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 149.