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Educated in Whiteness

Good Intentions and Diversity in Schools

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Angelina E. Castagno

Educators across the nation are engaged in well-meaning efforts to address diversity in schools given the current context of NCLB, Race to the Top, and the associated pressures of standardization and accountability. Through rich ethnographic accounts of teachers in two demographically different secondary schools in the same urban district, Angelina E. Castagno investigates how whiteness operates in ways that thwart (and sometimes co-opt) even the best intentions and common sense—thus resulting in educational policies and practices that reinforce the status quo and protect whiteness rather than working toward greater equity.

Whereas most discussions of the education of diverse students focus on the students and families themselves, Educated in Whiteness highlights the structural and ideological mechanisms of whiteness. In schools, whiteness remains dominant by strengthening and justifying the status quo while simultaneously preserving a veneer of neutrality, equality, and compassion. Framed by critical race theory and whiteness studies, this book employs concepts like interest convergence, a critique of liberalism, and the possessive investment in whiteness to better understand diversity-related educational policy and practice.

Although in theory most diversity-related educational policies and practices are intended to bring about greater equity, too often in practice they actually maintain, legitimate, and so perpetuate whiteness. Castagno not only sheds light on this disconnect between the promises and practices of diversity-related initiatives but also provides insight into why the disconnect persists.

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Table of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Contents
  • Introduction: Whiteness, Diversity, and Educators’ Good Intentions
    • Niceness and Whiteness in Action
    • Educated in Whiteness
    • Niceness as a Mechanism of Whiteness in Schools
    • Seeing Whiteness through Ethnography
    • This Is the Place
    • Overview of the Chapters in This Book
  • Chapter One: “Equity Has to Be a Priority”: Converging Interests and Displacing Responsibility
    • Policy on the Books, Policy in Practice
    • Displacing Responsibility for Equity to Individual Schools
    • When Interests Converge and Equity Is a Policy Imperative
    • Investing in Whiteness at the Expense of Equity
  • Chapter Two: Engaging Multicultural Education: Safety in Sameness or Drawing Out Difference?
    • Multicultural Education as Powerblind Sameness
    • Multicultural Education as Colorblind Difference
    • The Ambiguity between Sameness and Difference
    • Sameness, Difference, and Whiteness
  • Chapter Three: Practicing Politeness through Meaningful Silences
    • Silencing Race
    • Silencing Sexuality
    • Thinking through Influence, Intentionality, and Implications
  • Chapter Four: “It Isn’t Even Questioned”: Equality as Foundational to Schooling and Whiteness
    • So What Is Equality?
    • Shaping and Maintaining Spruce’s Reputation
    • Birch’s Contradictions of Success
    • Equality, Success, and Whiteness
  • Chapter Five: Obscuring Whiteness with Liberalism: Winners and Losers in Federal School Reform
    • Classical Liberalism, the Individual, and Whiteness
    • SIG Policy: Schools Take Your Mark, Get Set, Go!
    • The SIG Effort at Birch: Pursuing “Truth” at the Expense of Equity
    • Who Wins? Who Loses?
  • Conclusion: Engagement and Struggle within the “Culture of Nice”
    • Toxicity
    • A Nicely Bundled Package
    • Educating against Whiteness
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
    • Introduction
    • 1. “Equity Has to Be a Priority”
    • 2. Engaging Multicultural Education
    • 3. Practicing Politeness through Meaningful Silences
    • 5. Obscuring Whiteness with Liberalism
    • Conclusion
  • References

Metadata

  • rights
    Portions of chapter 2 were previously published in "Making Sense of Multicultural Education: A Synthesis of the Literature," Multicultural Perspectives 11, no. 1 (2009): 43–48, and in "Multicultural Education and the Protection of Whiteness," American Journal of Education 120, no. 1 (2013). Portions of chapter 3 were previously published in "I Don't Want to Hear That! Legitimating Whiteness through Silence in Schools," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2008): 314–33. Portions of chapter 4 were previously published in "Common Sense Understandings of Equality and Social Change: A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Liberalism at Spruce Middle School," International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22, no. 6 (2009): 755–68.

    Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
  • publisher
    University of Minnesota Press
  • publisher place
    Minneapolis, MN
  • restrictions
    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
  • rights holder
    Regents of the University of Minnesota
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