White Educators Negotiating Complicity

What does it mean to be a white educator teaching about and against whiteness to a racially diverse group of students while simultaneously acknowledging one’s white complicity? This books gleans insight from philosophical scholarship that can help respond to the challenges that white complicity creates for pedagogy.

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While there is a proliferation of research on white educators who teach courses around anti-racism, White Educators Negotiating Complicity: Roadblocks Paved with Good Intentions focuses on white educators who teach about whiteness to racially diverse groups of students, and who acknowledge and attempt to negotiate their complicity in systemic injustice. Scholars continue to remind white people of the paradox through which their endeavors to disrupt systemic white supremacy often reproduce it. In this book, Barbara Applebaum explores what it means to teach against whiteness while living that paradox.

Rather than an empirical study, this book offers insights from recent scholarship surrounding critical whiteness and epistemic injustice and applies them to some of the most trenchant challenges that white educators face while trying to teach about whiteness to racially diverse groups of students. Introducing the concept of a vigilantly vulnerable and informed humility, Applebaum both illuminates what theory can tell us about praxis and offers guidance for white educators in their attempts to negotiate the effects of white complicity on their pedagogy.