TOWARD DEFINITIONS OF WHITENESS AND CRITICAL WHITENESS STUDIES: Disruption and Response-ability

This chapter introduces critical whiteness studies and explains how they may help both white people and People of Color to better understand and resist white supremacy. It offers important definitions to ground the conversation, and then describes the history and inherent challenge of critical whiteness studies. Critical whiteness studies “brings whiteness into the center of analysis in order to locate it, demystify it, and, if possible, discontinue its hold on education”. Everyone benefits when faculty, administrators, and institutions address -and act on-critical understandings of whiteness and white supremacy. Whiteness, then, is “the ideology that works to normalize and promote white supremacy”. It is “the attitude and philosophy that positions the white race as superior, whether through intelligence, beauty, or culture/traditions”. In classrooms a politics of disruption could take the form of a white instructor strategizing with Black students so that time spent at a Black Lives Matter rally counts as class participation.