Contemporary Struggles in Education

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Teaching Education

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“Why do you make me hate myself?”: Re-teaching Whiteness, abuse, and love in urban teacher education

Cheryl E. Matias

To cite this article: Cheryl E. Matias (2016) “Why do you make me hate myself?”: Re-teaching Whiteness, abuse, and love in urban teacher education, Teaching Education, 27:2, 194-211, DOI: 10.1080/10476210.2015.1068749

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2015.1068749

Published online: 14 Aug 2015.

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“Why do you make me hate myself?”: Re-teaching Whiteness, abuse, and love in urban teacher education

Cheryl E. Matias*

School of Education and Human Development, University of Colorado Denver, CO, USA

(Received 5 May 2014; accepted 28 June 2015)

Teacher educators are constantly trying to improve the field to meet the needs of a growing urban populace. Inclusion of socially just philosophies in the curricu- lum is indeed essential, yet it can mask the recycling of normalized, oppressive Whiteness. This reflective and theoretical paper employs critical race theory and critical Whiteness studies to deconstruct Whiteness, abuse, and love in teacher education. Using an interdisciplinary and emotion-based approach to understand- ing Whiteness, this paper examines how denying race during white childhood via a color-blind ideology leaves lasting emotional scars, impressions that per- petuate the institutional silencing of race in teacher education. This “abuse” is projected onto urban students of color and, more broadly, people of color. This paper asserts that until teacher education programs make confronting and explor- ing Whiteness a priority, they cannot truly love their urban students of color as complete beings and so deny humanity full and just consideration.

Keywords: critical race theory; Whiteness; teacher education; urban education; emotions; abuse; students of color

Get up. You see those crackheads and prostitutes out there?! That’s what you will be if you don’t listen to me. (Comment from a white female teacher overheard in a Bedford-Stuyvesant classroom)

Is teacher education more than a mere utterance of socially just terminologies such as “cultural responsive” (Gay, 2000), “multicultural education” (Banks, 2001; Nieto & Bode, 2008), and “cultural competence” (McAllister & Irvine, 2000)? Acknowledging that the current climate of teacher education renders attachment to socially just ideals as fashionable as skinny jeans, complete with promises to “close the achievement gap” and “save” urban schools, rarely interrogated is the question of why an achievement gap exists in the first place. Should we not seek out the root problem? Or is finding it too unbearable? Despite silently acknowledging that race plays a role in the fruition of these phenomena, the study of race, racism, and exer- tions of Whiteness are rarely recognized as a substantive issue in teacher education and the teaching profession (Sleeter, 2001). We cannot even begin to address symptoms, such as the racial achievement gap, if we do not address the underlying diseases of racism and Whiteness.

Critical educators must have a thorough understanding of the racialized context that results in the lack of achievement by urban students of color. This context must

*Email: [email protected]

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Teaching Education, 2016 Vol. 27, No. 2, 194–211, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210.2015.1068749

include a theory of emotionality lest we forget the voices of urban students of color who endure a racist educational system and daily racial battle fatigue1 (Gordon, 2005; Harper, 2009; Marx, 2006; Schofield, 2009; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002; Yosso, Smith, Ceja, & Solorzano, 2009). Therefore, as simple as it is to use socially just terminologies in teacher education as a litmus test of antiracist nature, these termi- nologies do not ring true in the hearts of urban students of color who must emotion- ally survive color-blind racism2 inside the classroom (Gordon, 2005; Marx, 2006; Schofield, 2009; Valenzuela, 1999). The typical educational response is to minimize or overlook the pain felt by urban students of color by conjuring up educational remedies without ever naming racism or Whiteness itself. hooks (1994) reminds us that we must “name our pain” in order to articulate the liberatory praxis necessary for healing. Thus, it behooves teacher education – specifically in teaching teacher education – to recognize the magnitude of these students’ pain and humanity. Sim- ply put, in a multiracial society like the USA, aren’t people of color worth humanly respect and consideration? Is their pain not worthy enough to understand? Especially by those who claim to “save” them?

This issue particularly concerns me because, as the only teacher educator of color in an urban-focused teacher preparation program in a western US urban city, I desperately search for a glimmer of humanly recognition from my white teacher candidates and liberal white colleagues. I epitomize both an urban student of color and a former urban classroom teacher whose needs were and are silenced or over- looked, but I am often opportunistically used as the face to justify these socially just remedies. Therefore, I consider whether my white colleagues – many of whom are committed to urban education – will ever fully recognize the humanly worth of urban students of color, for when they minimize the pain of people of color – intentionally or not – they opt out of developing a humanly bond with people of color, minimizing the true totality of humanity. Additionally, because this article acknowledges White supremacy as an overarching system of white Western racial domination, which manifests globally (Allen, 2001), I do not question whether or not racism is occurring in any specific situation, context, or location, or if any indi- vidual white person is or isn’t engaged in racism. Nor am I concerned that by generalizing about racism and Whiteness, I may be creating binaries. Given that we are all operating under the system of white supremacy – which can and does morph and adapt as needed – I acknowledge that other intersecting identities, shifting boundaries, and regional contexts complicate the workings of Whiteness. Thus, the antiracist project is to identify how (but not if) racism is manifesting – morphing and adapting – in any given context, both locally and globally. In this sense, I do generalize and essentialize white supremacy and use whites and people of color as generalizable units of analysis to theorize abuse.

Drawing on my experiences in teaching antiracist pedagogy, I am often con- fronted with a resistance to acknowledge me as a professor or peer worthy of exper- tise, knowledge, and authority because I am a “colored body” (Matias, 2013a; Rodriguez, 2009). There exists a presumed incompetence; I am seen as biased – a “marked intellectual” (Gutierrez y Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012; Orelus, 2011). In fact, when I asked my white teacher candidates how learning about race, class, and gender from a poverty-born female professor of color as opposed to from a middle-class white male professor, one student provided a revealing answer:

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My social movements professor was a white middle-class male and I felt that I learned a lot from him. I also felt that I got a non-biased opinion of the subject matter which, when confronted with the facts, provoked strong emotion. In other words, having it come from someone who was removed from the subject allowed the facts to speak for themselves. I imagine that if I had a colored-female [professor], I would have gotten less from the class. This is because she would have been extremely connected to the subject [and] therefore is more emotional about it. For me, her emotion would have detracted from the emotion of the raw facts. [emphasis added]

I cannot place the blame of these racial biases solely upon the shoulders of my white teacher candidates, for this display of Whiteness can be institutionalized inside teacher education. For example, my teacher preparation program is an enterprise that encourages the maintenance of Whiteness by deflecting its color-blind racism through co-opting socially just terminologies and abstract liberalism (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). It is the assumption that one cannot possibly exert color-blind racism if the word equity or social justice is uttered.

Instead of masking the root problem, I offer a new lens with which to view teacher education. Namely, I parallel teacher education to the cycle of abuse found in maintaining Whiteness. Just as teaching white children how to be white and act white is racially abusive (Thandeka, 1999), so too is institutionally supporting Whiteness through dispelling ideas of benevolent saviority, adopting false racially coded terminologies, and denying an understanding of the white self by deflecting focus only to “the Other.”3 As emotionally unfettering is it to call this racial abuse, I ask the reader to consider the argument described below. I present my own reflective experience in teaching racially just education as a humble yet revealing example because, personally, I feel responsible to change this abusive cycle. I hope other brave teacher educators, students, and teachers will likewise not turn a blind eye to this etiolated abuse for, in doing so, the cycle in which abusers repress that they are, in fact, abusing (Engel, 2004; Hegstrom, 1999; Mills, 2009) will continue.

The roadmap toward methods

From the tradition of teacher reflection, I begin with a theoretical interrogation of the intersectionality of Whiteness, abuse, and teacher education using critical Whiteness studies and critical race theory. Through interdisciplinary approaches, I fuse postcolonialism, Black Feminism, and critical pedagogy. Then, to demonstrate the connectivity of how Whiteness hurts urban students of color, I share my own counterstories and poems of growing up in urban schools predominate with white teachers and of teaching in a white-dominated teacher education program. I also intersperse stories from the works of other scholars of color to demonstrate how the pain is beyond myself. Additionally, I share the racial dispositions of my white teacher candidates as proffered in a survey I administered in my course “Social Foundations and Issues of Cultural Diversity in Urban Education.” To do this, I created an ongoing IRB-approved research study that includes a pre and post course survey to gauge my students’ level of racial understanding for the purpose of teaching antiracist pedagogy; it has become instructive in revealing the extent to which emotionality is embedded in Whiteness. Last, I offer implications for the field of teacher education while cautioning teacher educators and teachers of the perils of ignoring racial pain and abuse.

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Understanding the abuse of Whiteness

Dear Brown Sanity, How I love you so, your capacity to feel, to know, to bear witness to; And with those sensory inputs you critically deduce; What is laid before you in the real time of Obama, Yet never forgetting historic times and hoping for future times, You filed the historic remnants of 1865, 1960s, Great Migrations, Thind and Ozawa, Yellow Peril, Treaty of Hildalgo and the hate You remember the pictures of hate so venomously captured in Little Rock A hate of water hosing, stake burning, and Japs Move! Thank you for not having historical or reality amnesia Because what you capture is a colorful landscape plastered on the humility of a brown canvas Rich with bittersweet strokes of vibrancy and sullenness And it is this ever-dominant white blindness that denies the very real picture drawn upon the canvas For what is often unspoken but is felt, understood, and known; Is the reality that shall not be uttered aloud; For in its mere mention you know all too well The onslaught of colorless atrocities, berating, and ostracism That you will bear as white markers upon your brown back From “How dare you speak of what I cannot see” to A lasting pain that denies you the mere space to cry aloud A forever branding that silences the beating of a true brown heart All because you dared attest to what was real As real as the table placed before you And the brown child you bore from your body As real as the collective sadness found in the false hope for Afrolantica And the real tears shed upon awaiting the late night count of Barack Obama Despite its realness you are asked to betray yourself Deny yourself a sense of place Assume you are not real Regardless to the fact that you are burdened with it each and every day of your life And you do this … Because you are forced to placate the blinded white heart, Lest be trapped in a forever illogical argument An argument that drives you to the brink Othellian or McBethian madness, For as you clearly see the white spot upon the brownness of your hands The evil Iago acts as if it were not there “Why are you washing your hands?” he questions. A question you cannot help but ask of him. Therefore in order to live in a world where hallucinations and false premise run free I must bid you adieu And upon your exit leave no trace of your lucidity Because such clarity is not welcome in an insane world As much as it pains me to see you go

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Alas there is nothing I can do For as the white hole slowly sucks up this here Alicia I am at the mercy of a queen who is a braggart of her own narcissistic heart Chops the head off of those who do not bow to her white supremacy And it is within this suffocation that I watch you die And before your last breath, And in the clutch of my heart for as I say, “Good bye” to reason. … I also say goodbye to my brown self. (Written by Cheryl E. Matias)

I share this poetic letter to illustrate the pain of Whiteness exerted. Rarely would anyone associate the relationship between white teachers and urban students of color as “abusive.” Yet, five days a week, seven to eight hours a day, teachers are present in the lives of children and are responsible for cultivating their identities. Therefore, in this educational endeavor, critical educators must interrogate the development of the teacher herself.4 For if, as critical pedagogy states, teachers must be advocates of liberation, then what are the racial and emotional contexts that qualify them to liber- ate urban students of color (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Freire, 1970/1993)? To find and unveil these contexts, I asked my white teacher candidates: “Do you believe yourself to be an antiracist educator committed to racial equity?” They responded in problematic ways:

I don’t believe myself to be antiracist. I know that I don’t like what they stand for but we all serve a purpose. Without racists to bring attention, we could not foster antira- cists. As the quote in the movie states, “Without evil, we wouldn’t know what good was like.” I do, however, consider myself committed to racial equity. I believe we should all be colorblind. I don’t think it will ever happen. I mean, even within the white community, there’s distinguishing characteristics and stereotypes – blondes are dumb. It’s in human nature to have to be better than someone else. [emphasis added]

I don’t think I would be considered completely antiracist by a general consensus of the colored population. I have certain prejudices that I don’t believe to be racially moti- vated. I am committed to equality and justice, based on the depiction of a person’s soul, so I am definitely on the path to racial equity. Racial equity means that I believe people are just people. [emphasis added]

Racism is not an issue for me. Therefore I have a hard time saying that I am an anti- racist educator, meaning I don’t plan on going out of my way to show special treat- ment to students of color. Rather, I plan on treating them the same way I would treat any other student. With that said, I do believe in racial equity, but see myself as already taking part in equality. [emphasis added]

In teaching at a US urban-focused teacher preparation program, my white teacher candidates professed a readiness to teach urban students of color though most had had no previous interactions with people of color; this is akin to saying one is ready to work with children despite never having interacted with them! Further, they argued that the absence of people of color in their lives was “race neutral,” implying an all-white state of being was the norm and an abnormal climate included interac- tions with people of color. Such a discourse pattern parallels Bonilla-Silva and Embrick’s (2006) analysis of how whites talk about race without ever engaging the word “race” itself, and that this is white “diss-course”5 because its inherently disrespects people of color (Matias, 2012):

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I have had no teachers of color while growing up. I do not think it has had an impact on me because I have been inside urban schools so I see what it is all about. [emphasis added]

I have had no professors of color. During my first semester, I noticed a few professors of color and it struck up a certain emotion in me. Not that I didn’t think they were capable of being professors, rather I simply found it odd. [emphasis added]

I have not had any teachers/professors of color throughout all of my schooling. This lack of teachers/professors of color really hasn’t impacted me. I feel that with or with- out teachers/professors of color, I will still get a good education. I feel that the color of skin does not determine the person, the person inside determines the person. [emphasis added]

How can critical educators expect their white teacher candidates to be prepared to “deal” with urban students of color if they have limited (or no) exposure to people of color and yet feel able to make sweeping statements about them? According to my students’ responses, educators of color are “odd” and the absence of educators of color has “no impact.” Yet, interestingly, they still claim to know what urban education “is all about.” Finally, they applied race neutrality to their own Whiteness, as if white racialization has no effect on their own character development.

It is not enough that white teachers are trained to be masters of cultural compe- tency of the Other and are never asked to interrogate their own Whiteness (Allen, 2004; Leonardo, 2009; Memmi, 1965; Said, 1978; Sleeter, 2001). All of my teacher candidates acknowledged that they were white and had white privilege, and, because of that privilege, they wanted to “give back” to urban schools. Yet, when asked what privileges they had accrued, they responded with a list of reasons similar to those described by McIntosh (2001). For example, when one of my white teacher candi- dates went on about how hurtful beige Band-Aids were to people of color, I had to interject: “It is not about Band-Aids.” She naïvely but erroneously equivocated the pain of not having brown-colored Band-Aids to more serious matters like racial pro- filing by police. Clearly, the emotional and racial contexts of my white teacher candidates were skewed by their inoculation of Whiteness.

To better understand this phenomenon, Theologian Thandeka (1999) provides an emotional framework to understanding Whiteness. Just as Lipsitz (2006) explains the possessive investment in Whiteness through political and socio-economic senses, Thandeka explains how the emotional and mental investment in Whiteness actually becomes abuse when white parents teach their children to be white and silence the process of becoming white. Thandeka writes:

[I]n the face of adult silence to racial abuse, the child learns to silence and then deny its own resonant feelings towards racially proscribed others, not because it chooses to become white, but because it wishes to remain within the community that is quite liter- ally its life. (p. 27)

This becomes a deep emotional burden for whites because, as they bear witness to the practice of “race-ing” as a child, they are constantly trained to adopt color-blind ideology, to repress reality and become “someone who is living a lie” (p. 34). However, it is not only that white children are asked to deny the reality of a raced society and adopt a false color-blind society; they are also warned that their sub- scription to the latter gains them access to a beneficial community. The white child has a choice of Memmian (1965) proportions; either:

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(1) Revolt by bearing witness to a raced society, but be ostracized by its white community, a process that Lorde (2001) described as “voluntary isolation” (p. 178); or

(2) Comply and thus be welcomed into the privileged community, but then deny itself humanity.

In a state of oppression, the process of dehumanization ensues and such a dynamic is not limited to “those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (through a differ- ent way) those who have stolen it” (Freire, 1993, p. 44). The problem of Whiteness and whether the white child is coerced into Whiteness is in fact abusive because, in the end, the child is given an ultimatum between accepting humanity, but with voluntary isolation or rejecting humanity, but acceptance into the oppressing group.

The concern then is what happens to these white children when they grow up? What are the emotional scars from living and recycling a traumatic lie? According to Thandeka (1999), such denial of reality cultivates a deep white shame “because the persons who ostensibly loved and respected them the most actually abused them and justified it in the name of race, money, and God” (p. 134). Acknowledging the shame produces a “terror of death brought on by the collapse of his internal integrity as both white and non-white” (p. 36). In this terror to unravel the shame, whites are left to find ways to protect and further repress the shame lest they be vulnerable to acknowledging the abuse itself. Some of the emotional behaviors used to mask white shame are:

• Denial (e.g. “There is no such thing as race”). • Rage (e.g. getting angry or red in the face when confronted with race). • Anxiety (e.g. a feeling of foreboding in dialogues of race or finding it difficult to talk about race).

• Loss (e.g. not understanding how one became white, a lack of understanding of Whiteness and white identity).

• Guilt (e.g. crying or statements like “But my family never owned slaves”).

These behaviors are quite disconcerting when we consider that the majority of US teachers teaching urban students of color are racially identified as white and have pre- conceived notions of people of color despite limited interactions with them; this idea is demonstrated through the response of one of my teacher candidates to the question of whether she’d had experiences with people of color in authoritative roles:

I have not had experiences with people of color in authority as I don’t have a boss who is of color and haven’t had to deal with law enforcement. However, I have had experiences with people of color who were not in authority. This includes people where I get my hair done, my doctor’s office, and shopping in many stores. The circumstances were normal and nothing unusual. They were just like the people of non-color and in some places, they were nicer to me. [emphasis added]

This white teacher candidate’s need to cognitively pair people of color in authority to law enforcement is not surprising. Caves and Cook (2012) explicated how people use racial biases to pair two independent variables. This teacher candidate draws from racial bias to cognitively associate people of color with law enforcement. Fur- ther, her claim that people of color in authority were “nicer” directly reflects her experiences with people of color in the service industry – an industry predicated by pleasing and accommodating customers. This teacher candidate was often emotional when discussing the issue of race; at in one instance, she cried out, “But we have Obama, Oprah, and Kobe Bryant!” Oddly enough, her outburst negated her claims

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that “race means nothing” and “we are all the same” by singling out financially successful African-Americans. Per Thandeka (1999), this outburst stems from abuse and her need to self-protect her “core sense of self” (p. 70). The exchange reveals the lie of colorblindness, a process so unbearable that she exerted her emotions in non-tangible ways. Several other white teacher candidates came to this student’s emotional rescue by physically consoling her, being silent and/or looking away, or nodding their heads in agreement with her statement, actions that likewise repressed the reality of race. This scenario has played out several times in my classes, a never- ending repeating story much like the movie Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993).

As the only person of color in the room, I am often left with the pain of being denied a racial reality. Thus, the cycle of abuse is a pyrrhic victory, one where the pain and tears of whites override my own pain; I am spared racial retaliation because, when “white fragility” is left intact, I am not subjected to the aggressive racial angst that emerges from challenging white color-blind ideology (DiAngelo, 2011; Leonardo & Porter, 2010). DiAngelo (2011) argued that white fragility plays an essential role in the maintenance of Whiteness and when unfettered, the consequences can be dire (e.g. guilt, crying, yelling, denying, silencing, refusing, etc.). This process extends the abuse beyond white shame, projecting itself onto people of color. When my white teacher candidates and liberal white colleagues avoid painfully working through their discomfort with race, they deny themselves – and their future students – a process for racial healing, thus continuing the cycle of abuse. To illustrate, this takes place when the white person yells at a person of color crying, “Why are you making me feel bad? You’re just too sensitive and angry about all this nonsense.”

Abuse institutionalized: Whiteness and teacher education

Since the whole of the teacher education pipeline – from teacher candidates to the teacher educators who train them – is overwhelmingly white, we need to understand how individual white repression can morph into an institutionalized, collective repression. Instead of simply operating Whiteness on an individualized level, teacher education – replete with a majority of white stakeholders who write the curricula, program frameworks, assessments, and standards – has permitted Whiteness to become a white enterprise. Worse yet, some white teachers and teacher educators co-opt and redefine theories first conceptualized by scholars of color who were resisting the hegemonic oppression of Whiteness; in using their white ocular to filter out the most radical parts of these theories to fit within white color-blind comforts, the essence of their conception is lost (Matias, 2013c). As Matias (2013c) suggests “it does not matter how much one can learn about cultural responsivity because Whiteness reigns supreme” (p. 75).

Take, for example, the conceptualization of “culturally relevant” teaching as described by Ladson-Billings (1992, 1995a, 1995b, 2000). When she introduced this pedagogical process, it included a critical understanding of race, racism, and white supremacy. In fact, Ladson-Billings (1998) argued that urban schools, dominantly populated with African-American students, were synonymous with the conditions of the colonial educational system found in Soweto, South Africa, because of racism. Thus, Ladson-Billings argued that educators must utilize critical race theory to explicitly understand the intersections of race, racism, and white supremacy that cause the deplorable conditions (Ladson-Billings, 2009). Yet, teacher education programs that are predominantly white teacher educators, such as mine, readily

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adopt culturally responsive teaching instead of culturally relevant teaching. This is important to note since culturally responsive teaching rarely engages race, racism, and white supremacy that culturally relevant teaching initially did. Take, for example, Villegas and Lucas (2002) who address mechanisms of culture, which intersect with race but are not in themselves synonymous with race dynamics. The push to discuss race in racially coded yet socially just terminologies (e.g. “free and reduced lunch,” “urban,” “culture,” “diversity,” and “multicultural”) yet again renders race invisible and strategically silent (Flax, 1998; Gillborn, 2006). That is, since the teacher education pipeline is 86 percent white (NCES, 2012), the white ocular then impacts the racially just component initially conceptualized in culturally relevant pedagogy and opts for a more celebratory strategy like culturally responsive teaching (Matias, 2013c).

Additionally, scholars of color such as James Banks and Sonia Nieto wrote in depth about the need to critically understand racism because “multicultural education is antiracist education” (Nieto & Bode, 2008, p. 44). When understanding racism, Nieto and Bode (2008) argue that “white supremacy is the root of racism” (p. 69); therefore, to fully understand the philosophy behind socially just concepts such as “multicultural education,” critical educators cannot leave out the context of racism and Whiteness that substantiates why such propriety even arose. Yet, the discussion of race, racism, and white supremacy are exactly what is often left out. Take, for example, my teacher candidates who reflect the same national average in racial makeup. Many of them argue that race is irrelevant and merely talking about race makes them too uncomfortable that they shut down in the discussions. In fact, in a study done by critical race teacher educators at an urban teacher education program, scholars found teacher candidates were indeed learning the socially just words about race, but using them to reinforce dominant white ideology (Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon and Galindo, Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon, & Galindo, 2014).

This discomfort with talking about race and racism is well documented in critical Whiteness studies (DiAngelo & Sensoy, 2012; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Tatum, 2003). When I surveyed my white teacher candidates as to whether and with whom they had talked about race and racism before, they responded:

I have had limited conversations about race. It was almost always with someone of a similar background as myself.

This topic makes me uncomfortable.

Worse still, some left the question blank. When my white teacher candidates claim that they are only comfortable with “like-minded” people or people with “similar backgrounds,” they are really saying “I only feel comfortable talking about it with other white people who often never talk about it.” As the only teacher educator of color in the room, I then ask: Where do I fit if they only feel comfortable talking about race with other whites? Despite having professorial power in the classroom, I am subjected to the overwhelming hegemonic power of Whiteness, an invisible and commonplace dominance that, in essence, denies my right and expertise to teach the subject of race. This normalization of Whiteness embeds itself in the daily operations of teacher education. Further, when teacher education curricula relegates issues of culture, multiculturalism, and diversity into a single course, set aside to fulfill a competency checklist, the topics of race and Whiteness are rarely explicitly-discussed

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and, when they are, only in a distant and emotionless manner for fear of unraveling deep-seated emotions (e.g. Color of Fear [1994] by Mun Wah). In many cases, words such as race and Whiteness are rarely uttered for fear of reprisal (Leonardo & Porter, 2010).

Denying a space to critically interrogate race has forced many scholars of color to find alternate outlets. In articles and book chapters, they share their pain of racism (e.g. Berry & Mizelle, 2006; de Jesús & Ma, 2004; Gutierrez y Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012; hooks, 1995; Orelus, 2011; Stanley, 2006; Williams & Evans-Winters, 2005). Yet, in a white enterprise, the pain for people of color is still secondary to the discomfort of whites (DiAngelo & Sensoy, 2012; Leonardo & Porter, 2010; Matias, 2013b). In subjugating the pain of people of color and denying them a space to dialogue about race, whites institutionally inflict abuse onto them. Instead of whites working through their role in this abusive cycle, their Whiteness deflects their responsibility and, once again, places the burden on the shoulders of people of color.

Counterstories are replete with nuanced understandings of race, racism, and white supremacy because they evidence racial microaggressions that people of color must endure in a white supremacist society (Allen, 2001; Delgado & Stefanic, Delgado & Stefanic, 2000; Gillborn, 2006; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). Consider my own counter- stories of how I experience white abuse in a predominately-white teacher education program. In refusing to succumb to Whiteness by silencing a discussion of race in my classroom, white teacher candidates constantly “report” me to the dean’s office. One white teacher candidate was so disturbed by me talking about race that she drafted a petition to have me fired and circulated it among other white teacher candidates. Such events are commonplace. What concerns me more, however, is how administration responds. My current administration has mandated that an administrator talk to me or sit in on my classes, thus – perhaps inadvertently – supporting the very exertion of Whiteness I am attempting to address; that is, Whiteness becomes institutionally- sanctioned because the burden falls upon me, the teacher educator of color, to (re-) demonstrate my competence due to the difficulty of a white administration to address the issue of race and Whiteness. Further, why white teacher candidates are so unsettled by discussions of race is not interrogated and herein lies the irony and, truly, the tragedy. This avenue of discussion would not only be entirely appropriate to the course title and the interaction between my white teacher candidates and me, but it would also bring the issue of Whiteness to the fore.

Conversely, when teacher educators of color express their frustrations about the white resistance they incur from their students, they are often asked by the adminis- tration to “be professional” (Cleveland, 2004; Stanley, 2006). Thus, the message to all stakeholders, from teacher candidates to teacher educators, is that Whiteness prevails above all other qualifications; a white teacher candidate simply needs to complain about hearing of race and Whiteness and their responsibility ends, but educators of color must go beyond by making a change in their behavior. By ignoring the emotional response to self-protect their shame of abuse, and by redirecting the emotional angst onto teacher educators of color, white abuse is institutionally maintained, sanctioned, and self-perpetuated.

Why do you make me hate myself?: listening and loving students of color

Critical pedagogues argue that teachers need a genuine love for their students (Allen, 2004; Duncan-Andrade, 2009; Freire, 1993; hooks, 1994; Valenzuela, 1999).

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Sandoval (2000) stated, “Love as social movement is enacted by revolutionary, mobile, and global coalitions of citizen-activists who are allied through the apparatus of emancipation” (p. 183). This love becomes more than Fromm’s (1956) character- ization of “care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge” precisely because, in a state of global supremacy, those values are laden with hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). That is, as Boler (1999) suggests, emotions are not expressed in isolation. Rather, they are expressed, felt, and understood in relation to the power structure for which they are rendered. Thus, emotions, such as love, are not exempt from the power structure of race. Take, for example, how audience members give pity to white teachers in films that portray them as saviors in urban schools, but that same pity is not easily given to the urban (“ghetto”) students they teach (Vera & Gordon, 2003). But, we must ask whose care are we talking about? Whose idea of respect? Whose notion of love? For those in an oppressed positionality, love takes on a more revolutionary role in which a loving relationship is about emancipation; for those in an oppressor positionality, love can be distorted as paternalistic (Freire, 1993). The precursor to a loving relationship, however, is listening. Bell (1992) argued that, in a quest for racial justice, we must begin with simply listening to those in subordinate positions:

In listening, we must not do them the injustice of failing to recognize that somehow they survived as complete, defiant, though horribly scarred beings. We must learn from their example, learn from those whom we would teach. (p. 198)

If listening is so simple, then why do people of color – moreover students of color – feel it is not being done? Why assert a need for love in the first place? If one of a teacher’s roles is to love her students, then it becomes imperative that the genuine- ness of that love be interrogated.

The globalization of Whiteness (Allen, 2005; Gillborn, 2006; Leonardo, 2009) has left people of color feeling as if they are “the wretched of the earth” (Fanon, 1963) Their voices, identities, and experiences are left out of the classroom such that new pedagogies about culture, race, and diversity are created to re-assert them back in (e.g. Banks, 2001; Gay, 2000; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Nieto, & Bode, 2008). For example, Duncan (2002) described how he instructed his white teacher candidates to observe an urban classroom. Despite the richness of the com- puter-based classroom environment, his white teacher candidates only noted pitfalls or deficits. He was so concerned with their false empathy that he initiated a syllabus of critical race theory in order to reveal their racial lens. For me, critical race theory is not enough. My white teacher candidates use the semantics of race, i.e. socially -just terminology, as a way to pretend to learn about the Other (Said, 1978) and to avoid responsibility for their role in the maintenance of Whiteness. As such, marrying critical race theory with critical Whiteness studies has helped me teach the complexities of race, how it hurts people of color, and showing how Whiteness is historically produced and maintained. Therefore, Whiteness, in itself, is the pre-existing condition that compels critical pedagogues to assert the need to truly define and deliver love.

hooks (1994) captured this genuine love about her African-American teachers before desegregation whom she described as “committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers – black folks who used our minds.” She noted in her introduction:

We learned early that our devotion to learning, to the life of the mind, was a counter- hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization

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… Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exceptional, gifted, were given special care. Teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we ful- filled our intellectual destiny and by doing so, uplift the race. (p. 2)

hooks (1994) illuminated how her Black teachers lovingly viewed their black students and how such a genuine love impacted their learning. Black teachers were aware of white supremacy and utilized education to resist it. By acknowledging white racism, hooks described how wonderful it felt when her “teachers made sure they ‘knew’ us.” In fact, that genuinely-loving relationship impacted her as a Black student:

Attending school then was a sheer joy. I loved being a student. I loved learning. School was a place of ecstasy – pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure plea- sure. … School was the place where I could forget that self and through ideas, reinvent myself. (p. 3)

hooks (1994) then described how she viewed education after racial integration and what it was like to be taught by white teachers who rarely acknowledged – let alone discussed – race. In that moment of being “mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes,” she learned that “for Black children, education was no longer about the practice of freedom” (p. 3). White schools were about teaching Black students “that obedience, and not the zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority” (p. 3). Finally, she wrote, “I lost my love of school” (p. 3). Learn- ing from white teachers who had been indoctrinated in their Whiteness such that they refused to acknowledge race only reinforced racism. hooks’s situation is no dif- ferent from today’s urban students of color who come into the classroom each day, ready for their teachers to engage in a process of knowledge building, yet are soon shut down by the “subtractive schooling” of some of their white teachers (Valenzuela, 1999).

Nothing cuts so deeply as hearing a student say, “I lost my love of school.” Schools have made students of color hate themselves. Admittedly, this is why so many students of color drop out. They do not want to achieve a white standard, lest be called a “coconut,” “brown on the outside and white on the inside.” This is a pro- cess that Fordham (1988) coins racelessness when studying academic achievement among African-American females. In fact, the white teachers of my childhood – though well-intentioned – refused to talk about race or the ethnic histories that gave me pride in my own heritage. In this void, I diverted to street gangs because it was a space of pride in learning about race, racism, and ethnic studies, rebuilding of my depressed racial identity from urban schools. But that exchange came at the cost of witnessing gang rapes, street warfare, and death.

Teaching in Bedford-Stuyvesant and South Los Angeles, I often heard the hege- monically-produced self-hate in phrases such as “What’s the point? I’m black” or “What’s a Mexican gonna’ do with a degree?” When schools use culturally relevant teaching that addresses race and white supremacy, white educational stakeholders often belittle its importance. For example, in response to the need for culturally relevant schools for African-Americans, former Secretary of State, William Bennett, questioned, “Where are they going to live after they finish their school? Africa?” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 256). Sentiments like this continually berate the racialized experiences and cultural nuances that make students of color who they are. In the end, what does this repression mean for humanity?

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How can white teachers teach students of color if they claim not to see color in the first place? Herein lies the problem of a liberal white teaching force that has yet to understand its Whiteness (Matias, 2013c). People of color are human beings often denied the fact that their reality is truth, their language is beautiful, their culture is rich. Whether it is the hegemony of English (Hopson, 2003; Shannon, 1995) or deficit notions of culture (e.g. A Nation at Risk; model minority; Mendez v. Westminster), students of color are taught that they lack a human quality to render them worthy of recognizing their tears (Matias, 2013b). Some white teachers/teacher educators and those educators who deny the reality of race shed false tears (or no tears at all) over the pain of students of color because they do not fully understand the problem of the color line (DuBois, 2007). In not understanding race, these educators create their own versions of tears in the guise of benevolence, saviority, and heroism – a historical rhetoric so often employed in the domination of marginalized people (e.g. President McKinley’s Benevolent Assimilation speech to colonized Filipinos). That is, just as Matias (2013b) suggests, they elevate their pain and tears above that of their students and then project onto their students that they should be ones worthy of present for even teaching at such a place in the first place. This patronizing type of alleged socially just education limits the racially just possibilities of teaching by assuming humanity is stratified according to whose tears count and whose do not.

Whites, as a dominant racial group, have the responsibility and power to enact a change.

This change must come from a deep need to undo the abuse of denying race altogether. Although this will be a painful process, it is nonetheless a necessary step to heal themselves from a trauma that traumatizes us all. As much as it is painful to understand how one became white, it is ultimately more painful to know it requires others to learn to hate themselves. As an urban student of color taught to hate myself because my race and my racial experience were deemed irrelevant in a realm where Whiteness ruled, I can finally stop that hate when whites learn to love themselves so much that they are willing to learn about and let go of their Whiteness (see Sadomasochism and Whiteness by Matias and Allen [2013]).

A fuller love: implications for teacher education

The lower socio-economic Black male is a man of confusion. He faces a hostile envi- ronment and is not sure that it is not his own sins that have attracted the hostilities of society. All his life he has been taught (explicitly and implicitly) that he is an inferior approximation of humanity. As a man, he finds himself void of those things that bring respect and a feeling of unworthiness. (Newton, 2009, p. 77)

Newton’s (2009) excerpt shows the displacement of the Black man in a world of lovelessness, i.e. he internalizes a racist worthlessness. Once teacher education understands how and why whites have become culturally white, it can engage in a deeper conversation of race and racism, move beyond guilt, anger, and denial needed to become whole-heartedly antiracist. Doing so intimately binds the libera- tion of whites’ racial repression to people of color’s racial oppression. When this happens, white teachers can walk into urban classrooms populated with students of color and genuinely recognize the context of race, a validation that gives urban students of color a chance to speak their experiences aloud. Only until then can teacher education become a healer of abuse rather than a recycler of it.

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A combination of critical Whiteness studies, emotionality, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy gives urban teachers and their urban students of color a chance to mutually understand the racial lay of the land and the assumptions, rhetoric, and realities of their relationship. Teacher education must include an emo- tion-based form of education, wherein white teacher candidates and white liberal teacher educators undergo the painful therapy of understanding their Whiteness, of asking why they feel uncomfortable talking about racism. Absent of this process, they will not be well-equipped to engage in a process of antiracism. Helms (1990) asserts that those who plan to engage in the racial identity development of others must first go through that jungle themselves. Likewise, white teacher candidates and white teacher educators must first understand their Whiteness before “saving” urban students of color.

Learning to love ourselves: a conclusion

I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. (Lorde, 2007, p. 113)

As a motherscholar I have a deep love for my children. At times I must be strict, diligent, and prescriptive, regardless of how they resist. Because of this unceasing commitment, I acknowledge that rearing them will always burden me; it is a burden I would have no other way. The burden any parent endures is a testament to how we love humanity; that we are willing to shoulder that burden so that humanity sim- ply survives. This kind of deep love is needed in teacher education, regardless of the painful revelations of past abuse or shame. Just as Freire (1993) wrote, “NO to an ideology that humiliates and denies our humanity” (p. 27). I say HELL NO to a teacher education that humiliates people of color and, in doing so, denies all of us our humanity.

Being able to deeply dialogue about race and Whiteness lends itself to a greater connectivity. In this truer dialogue, imagine the possibilities for personal and profes- sional relationships, societal responsibility, and racial healing! In this moment of digging deeply into what terrifies us most, we can reopen the possibilities for racial justice beyond a mere engagement of the word social justice. In the end, racial justice in urban schools is not about teaching them, understanding them, or saving them. Rather, it was, is, and will forever be about teaching, understanding, and saving us.

Special note

To educators and students everywhere. May racial justice be made possible by bear- ing witness to the preciousness of our colorfulness instead of denying its beauty. To Danny, Noah, and Malina, may your brown skin always be recognized for its strength, endurance, and richness.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes 1. The term “racial battle fatigue” refers to the emotional, psychological, and social strain

due to daily acts of racial microaggressions. (see Smith, 2004). 2. Color-blind racism is defined as “‘racism lite.’ Instead of relying on name calling

(niggers, Spics, and Chinks), color-blind racism otherizes people softly (‘these people are human too’); instead of proclaiming God placed minorities in the world in a servile posi- tion, it suggests that they are behind because they do not work hard enough; instead of viewing interracial marriage as wrong on a straight racial basis, it regards it as ‘problem- atic’ because of concerns over children, location, or the extra burden it places on couples” (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 3).

3. “The Other” denotes the postcolonial process of making one group feel inferior to the dominant group based on their differences.

4. In lieu of the often confusing and ungainly generic singular, (“he or she” or “s/he”) I use the feminine simply because the majority of teachers, teacher educators, and students are female.

5. The term “diss” is an often-used slang term in the USA to indicate disrespect.

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