White teachers talking race

We Cannot Become Oppressors: Towards a Critique of Safety through a Reading of Students’ Reflective Journals on Issues of Race and Racism

“…As Vice's [8] deliberation on post-apartheid race-relations reminds, much of contemporary white privilege is non-voluntary in origin. This factor exacerbates the discomfort experienced by white subjects when they are confronted with this privilege and their personal implication in the racist distribution of power [8,4,5]. Often such difficult knowledge elicits a variety of defensive stances, such as asserting that white South Africans have become the real victims of a race-obsessed post-1994 government [9].…”

“…Often such difficult knowledge elicits a variety of defensive stances, such as asserting that white South Africans have become the real victims of a race-obsessed post-1994 government [9]. Maintaining the viability of such defence stances involves a broad range of power-evasive explanations for racial disparity and ideologically-productive accounts of race that are typically expressed in wellrehearsed patterns and with a pseudo-logic, as identified in studies of white resistance discourse [4,6,7,9].…”

“…Psychoanalytic research by Segall and Garrett [4] caution against the assumption that this kind of resistance denotes a complete lack of learning. Instead, the presence of resistance indicates an awareness (however unacknowledged) that difficult knowledge is present and that it is recognised as jeopardising extant views.…”

“…The latter, by comparison, are invested in upholding a non-racist image, and to avoid the displacement of extant worldviews through interpellation in white privilege. The tension thus entails a clash between lived experience, and attempts to consign racism to history and/or to isolate the problem to aberrant individuals who pose no systemic threat to the accomplishment of post-racialism and meritocracy [4,6,12]. Central to Sue's [5] explication of this friction is the politeness protocol, animplicit ground rule that complicates the repudiation of, or back-talk, to power-evasive framings [12].…”

“…This interest in different constructions of racism stems from Durrheim, Greener and Whitehead [3], Segall and Garrett [4] and Sue's [5] research on the ideologically-productive nature of competing conceptualisations, including the way competing understandings of racism affect classroom interaction. Following this first-level analysis, more attention was paid to the way journals composed by black students construct race and racism along lines that seem to acquiesce to certain stand points in ideologies of whiteness.…”