Confronting Whiteness

Writing or acting about something you are not is always fraught with danger. A particular frame of reference can be used in ignorance, one that is inadequate and inappropriate and can misinterpret a situation entirely. Alternatively, while attempting to understand what it means to be a person of colour, for example, a white and non-Indigenous person can reflect on his or her own understanding of the world and provide a critique of personal and collective white standpoints. This would hopefully enable a better understanding of personal and different cultures to appear and for follow-up action and change. In her groundbreaking work on whiteness, Frankenberg (1993) describes the concept in terms of the intersections of class, race and culture where power, domination, language and identity collide. This account can be used as a starting point by any person of colour and non-colour as critique of their social and political practice. The concept of whiteness itself is often silent, unnamed and difficult to describe which is taken as an important characteristic of being dominant.

Because all observers view an object of inquiry from their own vantage points in the web of reality, no portrait of a social phenomenon is ever exactly the same as another. Because all physical, social, cultural, psychological and educational dynamics are connected in a larger fabric, researchers will produce different descriptions of an object of inquiry depending on what part of the fabric they have focused (Joe Kincheloe, 2005, p. 333).