Deconstructing Whiteness for Racially Just Teachers

Introduction

It is crucial that Ladson-Billings (1998) uses terms like “White supremacist” and “sustained inequity” to describe educational policies and practices in the United States because while such racist educational practices are presumably unintentional, it nonetheless demonstrates how education policies can still exact white supremacy (p. 18). In the end such policies privilege white students at the expense of the achievement, access, and opportunities of students of color (Ladson-Billings 1998). Inasmuch as white supremacy impacts educational policy, so too, by extension, does it impact classroom environments that are subjected to those very educational policies. Therefore, as critical educators committed to the ideals of racial justice, it then behooves us to critically interrogate how the classroom environment (e.g., pedagogies, curricula, standards, pacing plans, instructional strategies, classroom management, etc.) also inoculates race inequity and racism such that it...