Mrs. McCormick: Well, I expect it now. It’s no big shock when I hear it these days. But um, to me, it simply means that I have to find a way in. Whether it’s sports, music, the Obamas, that’s a good one, they all love the Obamas, um, you have to be willing to put in the work. It’s not easy, believe me it’s not easy, but once a student drops their guard and decides to let you in, all the work you put in is worth it. Now you can teach.
Mrs. McCormick went on to describe some of the meaningful relationships she has formed with students over the years. Considered to be a necessary prerequisite to effective teaching, Mrs. McCormick attributes her success in forming relationships to the herculean effort
that she undertakes to overcome the distrust her students harbor towards white people in general. As she mentions above, building relationships with her black students, although not impossible, is unnecessarily difficult because of racial mistrust. As it turns out, for Mrs. McCormick, getting past the racially motivated barriers that are constantly erected by her black students requires her to think about and consider the various ways that whiteness has impacted, and continues to impact, the lives of her students. Mrs. McCormick makes this point later in the interview when she, rather concisely, states, “it can’t be a coincidence that so many of my students don’t trust white people. It’s my job to figure out why.”
Although Mrs. McCormick was unique in the way she made sense of whiteness in nonwhite racialized spaces, the genesis of her seeing whiteness to begin with – student/teacher interactions – was consistent with the genesis of white visibility for my other conversational partners. Mrs. McCormick thought about whiteness in an effort to better understand her students, particularly why so many of them distrusted white people. Other teachers, too, began to notice their personal whiteness through extensive interactions with black students. Ms. Livingston, a physical education teacher who works at a school that is close to 70% black, talked at length about seeing herself specifically as a white woman, as opposed to a woman.
Ms. Livingston: I’ve always taken pride in being a strong, independent woman. I mean come on, I’m a gym teacher. Not many students expect to walk into the gym and see me standing here. So being a woman, um, it’s something I’ve always thought of as important to who I am. But, after working here for six years, it’s a little more complicated now. I just don’t see myself as a woman, I see myself as a white woman, you know. When you’re standing in front of a gym full of black students, um it’s, impossible not to notice that you’re not quite in the club (laughter). It’s like, yep, I’m definitely white.
The more she interacted with her black students, the more Ms. Livingston saw whiteness as something bigger and more meaningful than pure demography. Seeing herself specifically as a
white woman, as opposed to a race-less woman, was the direct result of her experiences within nonwhite racialized spaces. Put differently, the racialization of predominantly black schools, including the students, the culture, and the physical space, itself, caused Ms. Livingston to look at herself racially, to see herself as meaningfully white. Furthermore, by positioning herself outside of the racial norm – as “not quite in the club” – Ms. Livingston placed herself squarely in the realm of the racial other. That is, within predominantly black schools, she is not only white, but she is different as well. For Ms. Livingston, the overwhelming blackness of her student body proved to be the most salient factor in her transition from a woman to a white women, from the invisible norm to the racial other.
The more my conversational partners interacted with their students, the more they realized that black students ascribed specific meanings to whiteness, including racism and privilege. As one teacher remarked about her nearly all black student body, “they think all white people are privileged snobs who don’t know anything about struggle. They think we all have it easy.” In this sense, no matter its gendered or classed dimensions, no matter its intra-racial variation, whiteness was privileged in the black imaginary. This is a reality that my
conversational partners found to be shocking. In addition to being privileged, black students also conveyed to their white teachers their thoughts on white racism. Ms. Strodel, a 29 year old health teacher, was shocked to learn that her students, at least initially, saw her as racist, a revelation that helped her see whiteness in different, more meaningful ways.
Ms. Strodel: Ivory, she’s probably one of my favorite students, just flat out told me one day that she was happy I wasn’t a racist. And I’m like, why would you even think that, you know. She looks me right in the eyes a casually says, ‘because you’re white.’ Then she just walks off like it was no big deal. Meanwhile, I’m standing there shocked. I mean is this how she sees white people? Is this how they all see white people? I don’t know, it just got me
thinking a lot, you know, like, how am I supposed to respond? What am I supposed to do?
Even though Mrs. McCormick, Ms. Livingston, and Ms. Strodel reacted somewhat differently to seeing themselves as white, the process by which whiteness was revealed to them was largely the same. Prior to working in predominantly black schools, not one of them looked at themselves in racial terms. For all three teachers, whiteness symbolized normalness, and thus, remained invisible and conceptually insignificant. Once they began interacting with black students, however, they soon realized that whiteness, in the eyes of their students, was not only visible, but it was racially meaningful as well. To a great number of their black students, whiteness symbolized a combination of racial privilege and racial oppression, a sentiment that was outwardly expressed on a regular basis. Ultimately, whiteness, disparately symbolized, shaped the interactions between teachers and students. In turn, these daily interactions helped to create new meaning, constructing whiteness in a way that was visibly meaningful to my
conversational partners for the first time in their lives.
Sometimes it really sucks being the only white person in the room I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in the 4th grade. Believe me, people look at you funny when you’re a boy bragging about wanting to be a teacher. So I’m used to being uncomfortable, I’m used to being different, you know. I think it’s hard to make me feel uncomfortable or like the odd man out, but somehow, a group of 14-year-old boys, um, black boys, did it by the second month of school (laughter). I laugh now, but man let me tell you, sometimes it really sucks being the only white person in the room. That’s something I really wasn’t ready for.
Clay Davis, 36
Seeing whiteness was only the first step in the three-step process of becoming white. In fact, for my conversational partners, seeing themselves as white was the most benign stage in their spatialized construction of a racially meaningful identity. Although realizing that their black students saw them as white could be jarring, it was the way they felt after seeing whiteness,
themselves, that forced many of them to question who they were as people, as well as their ability as teachers. That is, after recognizing their own race as meaningful, my conversational partners subsequently realized that, within nonwhite racialized spaces, their feelings about whiteness, about themselves, and about their chosen profession, had changed significantly. They started to notice their surroundings more, and even though racial context was instrumental in helping them see whiteness to begin with, now, they started to feel white, particularly in the sense that they were racially out of place. Thus, feeling white – while as unusual and unique as seeing white – was far more consequential to the process of becoming white.
The fundamental difference between seeing white and feeling white is that the former pertains to racial (self) recognition, while the latter pertains to an emotional state resulting from interactions with specific people or reactions to specific events. It should also be noted that seeing white and feeling white were not mutually exclusive processes, and that they sometimes overlapped. Seeing white influenced how white teachers felt, and feeling white helped white teachers recognize their whiteness on a more consistent basis. As a result, my conversational partners routinely found themselves in situations where, based on the words and/or actions of their black students, the parents of their black students, or at times, even their black colleagues, they began to feel out of place specifically because they were white. This particular point is important because, for my conversational partners, the source of their discomfort and the driving force of their otherness, was being recognized and treated as white in nonwhite racialized spaces.
Mrs. Gray, a high school music teacher, recalled an incident that epitomizes the process of feeling white. I asked her if she had ever felt uncomfortable or out of place at work because of her race, and she immediately answered in the affirmative. Mrs. Gray told the story of how, during a rehearsal for a Black History Month celebration, one of her fellow music teachers – who
was black – started speaking openly and negatively about white people. Stunned and left speechless, Mrs. Gray remarked on how she felt both disgusted and guilty, not because of anything she had done, personally, but simply because she was white.
Q: Within predominantly black schools, have you ever felt uncomfortable or out