White Studies Research, Critical

Critical whiteness study in a multicultural educational context should delineate the various ways [Page 940]such material effects shape cultural and institutional curricula and pedagogies and position individuals in relation to the power of White reason. Understanding these dynamics is central to the curricula of Black studies, Chicano studies, post-colonialism, and indigenous studies, not to mention educational reform movements in elementary, secondary, and higher education. This work is crucial to the field of curriculum studies for its scholarship as well as for curriculum design and development.

The history of the world's diverse peoples in general as well as minority groups in Western societies in particular has often been told from a White historiographical perspective. Such accounts erased the values, epistemologies, and belief systems that grounded the cultural practices of diverse peoples. Without such cultural grounding, students have often been unable to appreciate the manifestations of brilliance displayed by non-White cultural groups. Caught in the White interpretive filter, they were unable to make sense of diverse historical and contemporary cultural productions as anything other than proof of White historical success. The fact that one of the most important themes of the last half of the 20th centurythe revolt of the “irrationals” against White historical domination has not been presented as a salient part of the White (or non-White) story is revealing, a testimony to the continuing power of whiteness and its concurrent fragility.

Whatever the complexity of the concept, whiteness, at least one feature is discerniblewhiteness cannot escape the materiality of its history, its effects on the everyday lives of those who fall outside its conceptual net as well as on White people themselves. As with any racial category, whiteness is a social construction in that it can be invented, lived, analyzed, modified, and discarded. Although Western reason is a crucial dynamic associated with whiteness during the last three centuries, many other social forces sometimes work to construct its meaning. Whiteness, thus, is not an unchanging, fixed, biological category impervious to its cultural, economic, political, and psychological context. There are many ways to be White because whiteness interacts with class, gender, and a range of other race-related and cultural dynamics. The ephemeral nature of whiteness as a social construction begins to reveal itself when we understand that the Irish, Italians, and Jews have all been viewed as non-White in particular places at specific moments in history. Indeed, Europeans before the late 1600s did not use the label, Black, to refer to any race of people, Africans included. Only after the racialization of slavery by around 1680 did whiteness and blackness come to represent racial categories and the concept of a discrete White race begin to take shape. Such shifts in the nature and boundaries of whiteness continued into the 20th century. One of the reasons that whiteness became an object of analysis in the 1990s revolves around the profound shifts in the construction of whiteness, blackness, and other racial identities that took place in the last years of the 20th century. Indeed, critical multiculturalists understand that questions of whiteness permeate almost every major issue facing Westerners at the end of the 20th century from affirmative action and intelligence testing to the deterioration of public space. In this context, the study of whiteness becomes a central feature of any critical pedagogy or multicultural education for the 21st century.

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