Hope through vulnerability: disrupting white fragility in education
Date
2021
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Whiteness is a pervasive problem in education. Through supporting institutional hierarchies and systemic racism, whiteness limits access to high quality learning experiences for students across the United States. Research has shown that whiteness, color-blind ideologies, and white fragility work to obscure racism by making white privilege and institutional racism invisible. One of the ways teachers and education scholars are seeking to disrupt whiteness and white supremacy is through antiracist teaching practices. To combat the negative impact of whiteness in schooling, white teachers must take personal responsibility to engage in learning opportunities that enable them to disrupt white supremacy and explore their own necessary role in reforming schooling practices and policies that disadvantage BIPOC students. White fragility (DiAngelo, 2011) is one manifestation of whiteness among white educators. This dissertation offers an empirical examination of Barbara Applebaum’s (2017) theory of vulnerability as the antidote to white fragility by exploring how teachers are expressing white fragility and vulnerability while engaging in critical conversations about race and racism. ☐ Using qualitative methodology, this dissertation presents a multiple-case study bounded by three white teachers in a Mid-Atlantic middle school with a primarily Black student body. Data were collected over eight months of prolonged engagement through observations of monthly affinity group meetings, initial interviews, monthly focus groups and individual interviews, final interviews, and document collection. Informed by Critical Whiteness Studies, this work examines how white classroom teachers, working with racially minoritized students, express vulnerability and white fragility while engaging in critical conversations around race and racism. Additionally, it explores how antiracist affinity groups can disrupt white fragility by fostering vulnerability and preparing white educators to engage in antiracist praxis. ☐ Findings reveal a more complex relationship between enactments of white fragility and vulnerability than previously theorized. Vulnerability does not prevent moments of racial discomfort or white fragility from occurring. Instead, vulnerability leaves white educators open to learning in the discomfort rather than descending into the discursive practices of white fragility that leave them invulnerable to change. This study suggests that white educators express both white fragility and vulnerability during critical conversations about race and racism. Vulnerability can be described as an antidote to white fragility, in that expressions of vulnerability can successfully keep white educators engaged in critical conversations and promote antiracist praxis. Through prolonged vulnerable engagement, white teachers are able to express white fragility less frequently during antiracist inquiry. In addition to being an antidote to white fragility, vulnerability functions as a catalyst for antiracist praxis by keeping white educators engaged in the process of antiracist inquiry, even after experiencing instances of white fragility. Finally, this dissertation discusses how specific features of white antiracist affinity groups, such as critical conversations and cultivating space for brave engagement, can foster vulnerability and promote antiracist praxis. ☐ Understanding how we can foster vulnerability among white educators has the potential to offer essential insight into creating effective spaces for antiracist inquiry and promoting antiracist praxis among white educators. This scholarship contributes to ongoing efforts in the field of education to promote equitable and antiracist teaching practices, driven by a desire to improve schools and better prepare educators to address racial inequities and push for systemic change. This study was limited by social distancing restrictions during COVID-19 and a homogenous group of participants. Future research should test the conceptual framework put forward in this study by examining a demographically diverse group of white educators who are at various stages in their antiracist development to better understand how expressions of vulnerability influence engagement in antiracist inquiry.
Description
Keywords
Affinity groups, Antiracism, Educational equity, Vulnerability, White fragility, Whiteness