Mrs. Meredith: It wasn’t easy, but I just focused on why I became a teacher. I took a few days off, you know. I took some time, my principal told me to take some time off, but then I realized I missed my kids. So I came back after a few days, and all of the kids had signed a card for me. It was a thank you card and um, it was just such an incredible feeling. I knew right then that I would never leave. For better or worse, these are my kids. This is my classroom and nobody is going to chase me out. I’ve been there ever since.
While the above example is somewhat extreme, it nevertheless captures the process by which white teachers came to feel uncomfortable, or in this case, “humiliated,” primarily because of their race and how it was used against them in predominantly black schools. Whenever a black student, a black parent, or even a black colleague specifically invoked whiteness when objecting to student-teacher interactions – or other day to day processes – it signaled to my conversational partners they were, to a large degree, being singled out because of their race. This process consistently led to feelings of frustration, humiliation, sadness, anger, and even guilt. The fact that these emotions were explicitly tied to race, all but ensured that, from the
perspective of my conversational partners, whiteness, particularly the way it was symbolized within predominantly black schools, was the root cause of their treatment and subsequent discomfort. Thus, feeling white was not random, nor was it benign. Because it (mostly) resulted from negative experiences, to feel white was to feel mistreated, to feel white was to feel
stigmatized, to feel white was to feel like the racialized other. I Do Everything As A White Teacher
How can I be an effective teacher if I’m constantly looking over my shoulder? How do I know one of my students won’t misinterpret something I say and I get labeled a racist or that teacher that hates black students? You just never know for sure, so you have to be extremely careful. So I keep that in the back of my mind, you’re not just a teacher, you’re a white teacher. That’s how it is now, I do everything as a white teacher.
Seeing white and feeling white were both highly salient steps in the process of becoming white. The third step – being white – moved beyond racial (self) recognition and feelings of racialized discomfort. Being white traverses thoughts and emotions and crosses into the realm of action, it encapsulates behavior, performance, and any manner of doing whiteness (Ahmed, 2007; Warren, 2001). For my conversational partners, being white was never an explicit process before they started working in predominantly black schools. In fact, reinforcing the invisibility of whiteness through personal behavior is a crucial, if not always conscious, characteristic of being white (Warren, 2001). As John T. Warren notes, “whiteness, while a systemic historical process that is diffuse and abstract, is also located through embodiment – through a repetition of
mundane and extraordinary acts that continually make and remake whiteness, all while eluding scrutiny and detection” (Warren, 2001, p. 92). For white teachers in predominantly black schools, however, making and remaking whiteness while “eluding scrutiny and detection” was something they found to be virtually impossible.
Not only was whiteness easily detected within nonwhite racialized spaces, but it was scrutinized on a fairly regular basis. On the lighter side of such scrutiny, teachers were accused of talking “like a white girl,” or dressing “like a white boy.” As one teacher put it, “the kids get a kick out of the way I dress, they always make fun of me for dressing like a white boy.”
Conversely, on the more serious side, teachers endured racially-based insults and accusations of discriminating against their nonwhite students. Also, as mentioned previously, whiteness was outwardly criticized by students, parents, and teachers of color for being insufficiently attuned to, and culturally incompatible with, the behavioral patterns and learning styles of black students. With their racial visibility in mind, my conversational partners were well aware that any aspect
of their behavior – from interacting with students to pedagogical practices – ran the risk of being interpreted racially, meaning that their actions could be attributed to their whiteness.
If being white, or performing whiteness, was typically comprised of unrecognizable and unintentional acts, the context of predominantly black schools rendered the process both
recognizable and intentional. After recognizing themselves as meaningfully white, and
subsequently experiencing the frustration, discomfort, and/or anger that, at times, resulted from feeling white, my conversational partners sought ways to accept the former while reducing the latter. That is, they made peace with that fact that whiteness, particularly their own, was suddenly visible to them, but they actively strategized and consciously acted in ways that minimized the likelihood of them feeling like the racial outsider. They also wanted to find the best way to connect with students, all while insulating themselves from charges of racism. In order to avoid confusion and confrontation, my interviewees often performed whiteness in a deliberate and purposeful manner.
The two primary ways that teachers performed whiteness were 1) compensatory and 2) protective. Compensatory ways of being white were comprised of behaviors that sought to compensate for the racial and cultural mismatch between teachers and students. Teachers engaging in this type of performance did so with the intention reassuring their students that they accepted, if not embraced, black culture. Whether authentic or inauthentic, spontaneous or staged, my conversational partners routinely described scenarios in which they lionized black celebrities, familiarized themselves with black music, and in some cases, even integrated “black vernacular,” or “black slang” into their own speech patterns. None of this was meant to be mocking or condescending towards the students, but rather, as Mr. Davis notes, “you want the kids to know that you understand them and you’re not judging them. Even if you have to fake it,
you want them to think what’s important to them is important to you. Otherwise you’re just some ignorant, bland-ass white person.”
For Mrs. Scott, her compensatory behavior started off as purely strategic, but after multiple years of teaching in predominantly black schools, it became something more. Initially, looking for a better way to connect in the classroom, Mrs. Scott enlisted her students to teach her “their lingo,” thereby facilitating better communication between teacher and students. As time went by, however, Mrs. Scott came to appreciate the way her students communicated with one another, and she found herself repeating their speech habits outside of the classroom. While Mrs. Scott purposely adapted to the cultural identity of her students in order to become a better teacher to them, she eventually “saw the complexity in the way they spoke to each other” and realized that “their communication style made more sense when you saw it up close.” As a result, Mrs. Scott, in her own words, sometimes speaks “like a 14-year old black girl.” When asked to provide an example, she replied, “I always find myself saying ‘now I’m Gucci’ whenever I’m in a good mood. I got that from the kids, you know. I’m Gucci means I’m good. My husband thinks I’m crazy.”
After performing whiteness for compensatory purposes, Mrs. Scott subconsciously integrated parts of said performance into her personal identity. For many of my other
conversational partners, their compensatory performances started off strategic and they stayed that way. A major part of said strategy was to convince skeptical black parents that whiteness, or that being white, was not an insurmountable obstacle to reaching and successfully teaching their children. To accomplish this goal, my conversational partners performed whiteness in a way that reassured parents that they did, in fact, possess the requisite cultural competency needed to communicate and care for black students. These performances ranged from the playful – such as
secret handshakes with individual students – to the serious – such as openly promoting Black Lives Matter in their respective classrooms. Compensatory performances were designed to compensate for whiteness. Through various ways of being white, my conversational partners sought to bridge the cultural gap between black students and themselves, thereby becoming better teachers and reassuring skeptical black parents in the process.
The second, and in some respects, more serious way of performing whiteness, was for protection. That is, in order to protect themselves from accusations of racial discrimination – and to avoid getting branded a racist – my conversational partners closely monitored their behavior, always accounting for the racialized ways it could be perceived and interpreted by black students and their families. The teachers I interviewed routinely performed whiteness in an effort to avoid feeling white. Protectionary performances were not immediate. Teachers did not come into predominantly black schools knowing that they would routinely, and explicitly, be seen and addressed as white, nor did they realize that their behavior would constantly be scrutinized through a racialized lens. As discussed previously, before their exposure to nonwhite racialized spaces, the majority of my interviewees saw themselves as individuals who just happened to be white. After being spatially socialized, however, my conversational partners internalized their new role as white teachers, and subsequently adjusted their performances to avoid any and all forms of racialized stress (DiAngelo, 2011).
For Mrs. Weaver, mentioned above, the need to perform protectionary whiteness was learned through a traumatic experience that took place early in her career. In her third year of teaching – but first in a predominantly black school – Mrs. Weaver, in a bout of frustration, admonished her students for not working hard, and questioned whether or not they wanted to spend their adult lives on welfare. Initially unaware that she had did anything untoward, let alone
discriminatory, Mrs. Weaver would soon find out just how controversial her comments were. As she explained, the incident in question quickly grew out of control, and forever altered the way she performs whiteness in her school.
Mrs. Weaver: I like came in and we were thrown in, it was a brand new middle school so they had me teaching 7th grade. There was only one team of 7th grade teachers and everyone else was 6th and there was no 8th grade yet. So, it was just kind of transitioning and I was, there wasn't any kids that were white, at all. I think I had 130 kids, only African American kids and we had them for 90 minute blocks. I had only taught high school before and I didn't have too many years of experience at that even, and I remember that I was like oh my god, it was the hardest thing I ever done in my entire life. I think middle school, in of itself, and just um, you know, going into that, it was completely new to me, like the kids were a lot different than I would have ever expected in middle school and um, yeah. Just to make my year kind of really tough, they were really being bad for me and I was very frustrated and I think I was reading them a riot act or
something, and I was just saying something like um, you know, you guys need to get things done, you need to work harder blah blah blah, and I said, you now, you need to get to college and get a good job, you don’t want to spend your entire life on welfare or something like that. I was trying to be like motivational, but I, they didn't take it that way and they pounced on me and they started like, saying that, um, that I was, like, being racist and being, you know, kind of turning the tables, sort of a mutiny, kind of turning the tables on me.
Looking for a way to simultaneously motivate her students, address their behavior, and quell her own frustration, Mrs. Weaver blurted out words that, intentionally or not, included a reference to the decades old stereotype about African Americans and their alleged dependency on welfare (Gilens, 2009; Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001; Peffley, Hurwitz, and Sniderman, 1997; Quadagno, 1994). Although Mrs. Weaver claimed to be oblivious to the racialized significance of her words, her students recognized it immediately and responded by “turning the tables” on her and staging a “mutiny.” Unfortunately for Mrs. Weaver, as she would go on to explain, the racial backlash from her comments would only get worse.
Mrs. Weaver: So I got very frustrated and after class I go down and talk to Florence, like oh my god that was just an absolute nightmare in there. I go, the kids mutinied me, you know what do I, she was a, you know, a black principal so I thought, ok, she can help me and she did, she was like, ‘listen, go get a coffee,
relax, this happens, just relax.’ So I come back the next day and she goes, ‘you have to leave.’ I go what do you mean and she goes, ‘you have to leave the school, you can't be here.’ So I go can I go to my room and get stuff? And she says, ‘no you have to leave.’ So I ask why do I have to leave? And she never really told me, so I left and I didn't hear from anybody. So, all of a sudden, Nelly Fisher, she was a returning teacher, she had retired and kind of returned to help out, she wrote me a letter and said that, you know, the kids had kind of said that I said that all black people are on welfare, and I'm like what, where would I have ever have gotten that in my entire life, I never would have even of known that statistic, like why am I trouble for that. So I was like twisted all around and then I got suspended for six weeks, with pay, but no one ever called me and asked how I was doing, you know, so it was like this huge horrendous, awful thing that
happened to me. I didn't know if I was getting my job back, so I think that was the first time that I figured wait, this racism kind of could go both ways, like they sort of turned the tables on me really quick. And I realized from that day on, you got to be super careful, super clever, and super, you know kind of like, leveled off and that's what I've done ever since then. And I think I've been there now the longest of all teachers and I think it was that experience and that adaptation that I made that I kind of can do ok in that environment.
Even after Mrs. Weaver resumed teaching, she found that the negative reaction to her words went far beyond paid suspension. Despite her persistent claims to the contrary, invoking “welfare” while chastising her black students was seen as racially insensitive at best, and explicitly racist as worst. As a result, Mrs. Weaver developed a negative reputation, one that painted her as a teacher that harbored racial animosity towards her black students. She was not seen as a teacher who, under immense pressure, made a thoughtless and insensitive remark, but rather, she was a white teacher who trafficked in racial stereotypes about African Americans. This latter construction was especially prevalent amongst black students and black teachers. As Mrs. Weaver would go on to explain, this unfortunate incident soured her relationships with her black coworkers for years to come.
Mrs. Weaver Well remember how I was telling you about what the kids were accusing me of and I got suspended? Probably for two or three years, the black teachers in the building didn't talk to me. They kind of shunned me, they didn't look at me, they didn't invite me to little luncheons or picnics or anything like that. We were very separate for a long time and, um, really it was, I almost had to pretend to be someone I’m not, at least until I felt comfortable enough to open up.
And um, after they sort of got to know me and knew that I was not the evil one or whatever, they were like, ‘wait, maybe she wasn't being racist,’ and it started occurring to more and more teachers what was happening. So after a while they started, their eyes got a little bit more opened and they were fine, you know, I got them on my side.
Q: You say you had to pretend to be someone else, what exactly do you mean by