Disrupting Educational Spaces

Abstract

This chapter explores the weaponization of whiteness within education, particularly in K-12 education. Situated as a cultural phenomenon, educators who ascribe to this ideology do so out of fear–fear of what they understand and know to be true; young African American boys are the epitome of public intellectuals. However, marred by some educational leaders and stakeholders, many young African American males within our educational systems are bound to a common narrative that marginalizes, dehumanizes, and positions them as less than others. Low-performing, ill-equipped, hyperactive, and a societal problem is a narrative that enters classroom and learning spaces all too often before they do. In this work, the hope is to begin a courageous conversation regarding the implications of whiteness and how it egregiously disrupts the education of young African American boys. Also, framed as an autoethnography, readers will engage in seven questions to learn firsthand why a culture of whiteness within our school and classroom spaces is a crisis we must seriously dismantle.