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Early Years An International Research Journal

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Multiple pathways to whiteness: white teachers’ unsteady racial identities

Erin T. Miller

To cite this article: Erin T. Miller (2017) Multiple pathways to whiteness: white teachers’ unsteady racial identities, Early Years, 37:1, 17-33, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2016.1223022

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Early yEars, 2017 VOl. 37, NO. 1, 17–33 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2016.1223022

Multiple pathways to whiteness: white teachers’ unsteady racial identities

Erin T. Miller

Department of reading and Elementary Education, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, Usa

ABSTRACT Teacher education programs in the US, recognizing the mismatch that exists in preschool provision between mostly white teachers and a very diverse intake of young children, have begun to explore ways of raising racial awareness among pre-service teachers, with the aim of improving non-white children’s classroom experiences and outcomes. This paper analyzes 60 critical memoirs written by students about their own awareness of their identity to demonstrate the intersectionality of teacher identity, and in particular the impact of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion on the processes whereby white students acquire a successful white teacher identity. In doing so, it highlights the ways white pre-service teachers who hope to work with young children imagine or realize their whiteness as it intersects with other aspects of their identities.

Once I got to high school, things got even harder because I was White. I always felt like I was trying to prove my unracistness [italics original] … If I said I didn’t want to have sex with [black boys], it was because I was a racist and obviously, if I said I wanted to, I would be labeled as a White whore. Rebecca

My parents strived to provide me with everything I wanted and needed. However there were many times I felt as if I was not good enough. While many other girls wore pretty dresses and striking bows, I wore T-shirts and jeans. Teachers would always choose these pretty girls to be their ‘class pets’. Being from a lower class family, I always felt different. Teachers would always choose the pretty girls to be their class pets … This humiliating experience taught me that being an upper class, White student allowed you to get away with almost anything in the classroom. Justine

When these words were written, Rebecca and Justine1 were both young, white women taking methods courses in a large city in the south-eastern United States at a leading urban edu- cation university to learn how to teach diverse young children. Rebecca and Justine’s words above are quoted from individually written critical school memoirs in an Elementary Education (kindergarten through sixth grade) pre-service teacher education course. Reflecting upon their prior experiences becoming raced in schools is an integral part of their course content. I use the term becoming raced to reflect the active social construction of developing a racial identity (Doane and Bonilla-Silva 2003). That is, we are not born into one

© 2016 TaCTyC

KEYWORDS Teacher education; white teacher identity; young children

ARTICLE HISTORY received 3 March 2016 accepted 8 august 2016

CONTACT Erin T. Miller [email protected]

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particular race or another, but we learn how to ‘do’ race over time by participating in social and cultural worlds that are stratified hierarchically around the myth that one race is biolog- ically superior or inferior to another.

Despite the pedagogical, content and theoretical knowledge pre-service teachers will gain through their teacher education coursework, deeply engrained experiences with race and racism can impact teaching, learning and student outcomes (Delpit 2012; Downey and Pribesh 2004; Drakeford and Staples 2006; Gershenson, Holt, and Papageorge 2016; Todd, Thiem, and Neel 2016). These experiences will continue to shape their identities as human beings and influence the students they teach. In their memoirs, both Rebecca and Justine wrestled with vivid, abrupt moments of racial awareness that highlight the complex nature of race and racism as they intersect with other identity markers – sexuality, gender, ethnicity and social class. Rebecca and Justine’s experiences with race and racism remind us that teaching and learning cannot be viewed in isolation from the self as possessed by the teacher.

This article draws from a narrative research (Spector-Mersel 2010) study to highlight the ways white pre-service teachers who hope to work with young children imagine or realize their whiteness. I wanted to explore the question, What are the multiple pathways into whiteness for white women? I found that whiteness is not about race alone and learning to be white happens at particular intersections with other identity factors. The goal of the manuscript is to offer insights into how white women’s racial constructions might influence their work with young children of color and to raise deeper questions about the racial iden- tities of white teachers. These are questions which should be taken up in the development of critical racial identity work in teacher education programs across the US.

I use the framework of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Staunæs 2003) to guide this work as it allows for an examination of how the effects of race, class and gender on women’s identities are intertwined. Intersectionality, rooted in feminist theory, is ideally suited to the task of exploring how categories of race, class and gender are mutually con- stitutive, giving significance to questions such as how race is ‘gendered’ and how gender is ‘racialized’ in ever-changing ways across time and space. An intersectionality framework offers ‘a gathering place for open-ended investigations of the overlapping and conflicting dynamics of race, class, sexuality, nation, and other inequalities’ (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 788). This is in contrast to considering identities as static categories independent of each other (Brah and Phoenix 2013). I use lareau’s notion of class (lareau and Conley 2008, lareau 2003) as a broad social stratification largely shaped by how much money one makes, the kind of work one does to earn money and the social status of one’s work. I also recognize structural considerations of class involving unequal distributions of power (Acker 2005) as well as ways one’s social class shapes habits, mannerisms, approaches to education, material expenditures and ‘styles of life’ (lareau 1987; Weber, Gerth, and Mills 1946). Because most of the considerations of class presented in this article are considered in relationship to neigh- borhoods that are characterized by the dominant racial group within, I centralize the impor- tance of place as it connects three interrelated aspects: individual economic attributes, physical markers of consumptive power and negotiated modes of behavior and action (Pattillo 2008). In the sections that follow I situate the notion of intersectionality within the field of teacher identity studies.

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Teacher identity

Identity, in its broadest sense, has been recognized by Gee (2000) as a ‘kind of person’ (99). Gee explains that people may have a ‘core identity’ (99) which operates in different forms across different contexts, highlighting the fluid and sociocultural construction of identity (Olsen 2011; Sfard and Prusak 2005). Beauchamp and Thomas (2009) explain that teacher identity can be understood as both product (a result of influences on the teacher) and process (a form of ongoing interaction within teacher development). Teacher identity remains ‘at the core of the teaching profession … [and] provides a framework for teachers to construct their own ideas of “how to be”, “how to act” and “how to understand” their work and their place in society’ (Sachs 2005, 15).

Storied dimensions of teacher identity

Drawing on the storied dimension of teacher identity, teachers telling stories or identifying can be seen as a discursive tool and ‘identity-making as a communicational practice’ (Sfard and Prusak 2005, 16). What this suggests is that identities are collections of stories about persons ‘that are reifying, endorsable and significant’ (16). Watson (2006) reminds us to keep the narrative aspect of identity salient because when we tell stories, we are doing identity work. In this article, I draw on the storied dimensions of teacher identity, shared through critical school memoirs and analyzed with a lens that intentionally forefronts the complexity of race and racism, as well as gender. I also evoke and build upon the knowledge gained from white teacher identity studies captured in two distinct waves (Jupp, Berry, and lensmire 2016; Jupp and Slattery 2010) of research over the last 40 years within the purview of critical educational research for social justice.

White teacher identity studies

White teacher identity studies constitute a body of knowledge intended to create a critical racial awareness among predominantly white pre-service (prior to certification) and practis- ing teachers in ways that can better serve minoritized and marginalized students in schools (Jupp and Slattery 2010). Most white teacher identity studies situate their importance in the demographic imperative (lowenstein 2009), or the data that remind us that while 84% of all teachers in the US are white (National Center for Educational Statistics 2012) – an abiding statistic – the number of students of color in US schools continues to rise, nearing 50% (Maxwell 2014). Drawing on African-American intellectual traditions (Du Bois, Blight, and Gooding-Williams 1997; Woodson, Scott, and Franklin 2005) and cross-disciplinary and wide-reaching critical white research, (Allen 1994; lipsitz 1998) white teacher identity studies have been used to characterize (Solomona et al. 2005), theorize (Varghese et al. 2005), flatten and simplify (McIntosh, Privilege, and Privilege 1988) as well as complicate (Asher 2007; Applebaum 2004; lensmire 2010) white teacher identity. More importantly and most recently, they have been used towards ‘pedagogical deployment’ (Jupp, Berry, and lensmire 2016, 27) to influence teaching practices in pre-service teacher preparation programs and in-service workshops for practicing teachers. In a comprehensive literature review on white teacher identity studies, Jupp, Berry and lensmire explain, ‘White teacher identity studies addresses,

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describes, or critically confronts historically institutionalized racial inequalities, racism, and Whiteness in preparing White teachers for work in increasingly diverse schools’ (2).

First wave of white teacher identity studies

The first wave of white teacher identity studies, initially shaped by Sleeter’s (1992, 1993) research on multicultural staff development workshops were strongly entrenched in race-evasive narratives among pre-service and practising teachers. Participants in studies demonstrated a discourse of color-blindness (Frankenberg 1993), individualization of racism (Kailin 1999) and avoidance, discomfort or anger when topics of race and racism were raised (Glazier 2003; Henze, lucas, and Scott 1998). McIntyre (1997) labeled this speech of avoidance and evasiveness as ‘White Talk’ (45). These first wave studies named white privilege and examined how white teachers wrestled with or failed to wrestle with white privilege when deliberately educed in coursework or trainings. While recognizing the important contribu- tions made by the first wave of white teacher identity studies, whiteness scholars offered critique of the studies arguing that they rendered teachers and pre-service teachers as mon- olithic, denied the complexities and nuances of identities in education (lensmire et al. 2013), created Us and Them binaries and resulted in standardized curriculum housed in one-shot diversity courses in teacher education.

Second wave of teacher identity studies

From 2004 to 2014, a second wave (Jupp, Berry, and lensmire 2016; Jupp and Slattery 2010) of teacher identity studies took shape. These newer studies refined prior insights as well as shaped a distinct methodology of research in the study of white teacher identity. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to comprehensively portray the wealth of studies from this decade, notably, race-evasive studies persisted but within a race-visibility narrative (Amos 2011; Raible and Irizarry 2007) creating ‘fertile paradoxes’ (Jupp, Berry, and lensmire 2016, 14) for further study. Additionally, the role of silence was explored (Mazzei 2011), voices of pre-service teachers of color added important contributions (Amos 2010), and researchers demonstrated how participants in their studies were willing to accept and acknowledge whiteness although action to interrupt it did not always follow (laDuke 2009).

White teachers of young children

While the second wave of white teacher identity studies is not narrowly identified by its focus on female teachers or even white teachers alone, I situate my work specifically on young, white female teachers. I do this because young, white female teachers remain the face of Early Childhood and Elementary Education in the United States. From the early days in Dame schools, where white females as young as 14 and 15 years old educated young children out of private homes, to the breakthrough of these women into common (public) schools of the 1830s, young white women emerged as the archetypical teachers of young children. They were viewed by the public as the caring half of the white race, and were hailed as moral exemplars, able to control their students but still controllable by male school admin- istrators. They were, by and large, middle-class, educated in Eurocentric knowledge, articulate

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in standardized English, and were Christian (Wyman 1995). Drawing on Delivosky’s (2010) notion of white femininity, these white female teachers successfully became white not just because they could identify themselves as racially white, but because their other identity factors were congruent with whiteness. White women’s whiteness was characterized by not just her race, but her femininity, heterosexuality, social class and compliance to white men and the institution of schools. While the field of Early Childhood and Elementary Education has diversified over the last 150 years to include teachers of color and male teachers from a wide range of backgrounds, white middle-class women still dominate the profession. Even in publicly funded pre-Kindergarten programs which typically have a more diverse pool of teachers, such as Head Start, white women make up over half of the teaching demographic (Head Start Program Information Reports (PIR), 2012–2013).

Conversations about teachers’ racial identities, then, are important in early childhood and elementary teacher education programs. The dominant public opinion of early childhood and early middle childhood is that this is a time of innocence and benign curiosity about others (Husband 2012) and the white female teacher – a picture of white femininity – is generally viewed as the perfect candidate who can responsibly protect the innocence of childhood for young children by shielding them from such social ills as racism. In fact, early childhood and elementary teachers may be least likely of all teachers to address issues of race, racism or to teach anti-racism, beguiled by the attraction of color-blindness or the refusal to see the significance of race (Boutte, lopez-Robertson, and Powers-Costello 2011; Doucet and Adair 2013; Nash 2013; Nash and Miller 2015). In an attempt to protect young children from the ugly side of the world, teachers of young children have largely avoided addressing issues of race and racism because early years are consistently viewed as a time and space where issues of diversity are usually approached in the spirit of inclusion and tolerance. This is despite repeated calls from scholars that this is a critical point in which to capitalize, confront and interrupt budding racial biases (Derman-Sparks and Ramsey 2011; Feagin 2000; Feagin and Ausda 2001; Miller 2015a, 2015b). And, since addressing these issues must start with a critical self-awareness of the racial location of the teacher – constructed from her ‘experiences, identities, beliefs, values, attitudes, hang-ups, biases, wishes, dreams and hopes’ (Nieto 2003, 24), exploring the storied aspects of white teacher identity in early childhood teacher education programs is an important area for research.

Methodology

In an effort to contribute to the second wave of white teacher identity studies, with an explicit focus on white women who teach young children in the United States, I drew on narrative research methodologies to examine 73 critical school memoirs written by students across three semesters and four classes of a course entitled Diversity in Urban Education. I wanted to know more about their self-reported prominent identity factors in school and begin to theorize how early and adolescent experiences with race and racism, as they overlapped and intersected with other identity factors, could widen the scope of understanding the racial location of white female teachers. My implications are geared towards teacher education programs where I propose critical questions that make room for an exploration of unsteady racial identities. To describe my methodology, I first provide a research context and charac- teristics of my participants.

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Research context

These students attend a university in an urban emergent2 (Milner 2012) school district in the south-east. The data examined here come exclusively from Critical School Memoirs, an assignment I have used in my courses on diversity in education for years. The authors of the memoirs were the students themselves and the audience was myself (their professor) and some of their classmates (they shared their memoirs in small groups of 4–5 with other stu- dents). Because of my interest in theorizing the archetypical early childhood and elementary teacher and my own limitations in understanding students of color and male students as a white female, I only analyzed the memoirs written by students who self-identified as white and female. Of all of the student memoirs, 60 fit criteria for analysis.

The memoir assignment guidelines were not specifically about race and racism but rather about salient aspects of identity that I asked the students to name and explore in their memoirs. After eight weeks of study around issues of class, race, racism, language, pedagogy, urban education, whiteness, white privilege, ability, ethnicity and religion, I assigned the students to write a memoir describing two salient parts of their identity and how their schooling experiences were shaped by them as a child or an adolescent in school. As a critical whiteness researcher anchored in the second wave of white teacher identity studies, I believe it is important to recognize, honor and explore how race and racism are amalgamated with other storied aspects of identity. Thus, with an eye towards race and racism in my analysis, I did not evoke such stories by assigning the students to reflect on their raced identities but rather searched how race and racism emerged in the stories the students felt were salient to their identities.

Narrative research

A narrative is a story that tells about a series of events that are significant to the narrator and thus, narrative research is a study of those organized stories (Josselson, lieblich, and McAdams 2003). Narrative research draws heavily on ideas from sociocultural theory or the idea that individuals learn by participation in their social worlds with others and that our cognitive capabilities are developed in a relationship with that social world. When consid- ering teacher identity, or the creation of a ‘kind of person’ (Gee 2000, 99), it is important to consider that we often define ourselves based on our experiences in our social worlds with others.

Data analysis

To begin making sense of such a large quantity of data, I named the storied aspects of identity the students chose to tell. Since each student shared stories about at least two of their salient identity factors in schools, I collected a total of approximately 120 identity narratives. The overwhelming majority of these narratives focused on race and class, but sexuality, gender, religion, ideology, family structure, language, ethnicity, geographic region and family status were all discussed in some narratives as well. As a next step, I looked specifically at racial narratives or identity narratives where I felt race and racism were summoned even if the authors did not explicitly name them as salient. From all of these, I constructed two

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overarching categories that I labeled: Steadily Becoming a white Female Teacher and Precariously Becoming a white Female Teacher. A brief description of each category is below:

(1) Steadily Becoming a white Female Teacher – In these stories, pre-service teach- ers reflected on their prior schooling experiences as they seamlessly achieved the white femininity typical of teachers of young children. Achieving the archetypical white female teacher was not just about identifying as racially white; in order to become a successful white female teacher, it was also necessary to access middle classness, use standardized English and to learn to become or remain compliant to the power structures within schools. Without all of these attributes, the stu- dents could not completely become successful white female teachers. That is, if other identity factors were not congruent with whiteness, the students appeared to struggle with their white identity. The narratives in this category represented students who had seamless transitions into whiteness as they moved through schooling. Approximately 70 narratives fell into this category3.

(2) Precariously Becoming a white Female Teacher – In these stories, becoming raced was more complex because even though the majority of students self-identified as white, there were other aspects of their identity that threatened their ability to become successfully white, i.e. these students may have identified as being from a low-income background or as being poor white; living in a community with people of color; not speaking standardized English; or their ethnicity or racial backgrounds were in contradiction with their whiteness. Thus, although the authors of these narratives now are successful white female teachers, they described abrupt and dis- junctive movements in their narratives where becoming white was problematized by other aspects of their identity. Approximately 40 narratives fell into this category.

For the women highlighted here, I explore how race intersected with other identity factors in malleable ways as whiteness developed. I propose these two categories not as static or absolute but as preliminary possibilities for how we can consider these multiple pathways into whiteness. A deep analysis of these women’s moves into whiteness is important to build towards in future work with white pre-service teachers, but it is not the goal of this particular article. Here, I wish to describe these multiple pathways into whiteness to forefront what these intersectionalities could mean for teacher education programs and provide some questions for other researchers to consider.

Steadily becoming a white female teacher

The narratives analyzed in this section describe white women who generally had smooth and successful pathways into whiteness. These women always identified as white from as far back as they could remember, were always middle class (often explained by having material things, a parent who was able to help out in their school/classroom, and/or described by the neighborhood they lived in), and they were generally compliant within the institution of schooling. In other words, they were ‘good White girls’ (Moon 1999, 181), or abided by and recreated the dominant norms for white girls. Through racial reflections, they were able to name their identities which they largely developed unconsciously and at times ‘confess’ them; other times, they describe feelings of remorse, pity or patronization towards people of color as they maintained gratitude for their whiteness.

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Becoming raced happened unconsciously

For the narratives in this category becoming raced was such a seamless, fluid process that the authors of the narratives did not realize their racial socialization in part because everyone around them was like them. Because of this their whiteness was affirmed and normalized unconsciously. For example, Anna, in a statement typical of this category of narratives, described: ‘I have never really thought much into my Elementary days until now. All I can remember is having White teachers and White students surrounding me’. Dana reiterated this when she explained, ‘When you are young, you don’t understand the way the world works like you do when you get older. When I was in Elementary school, I was not aware of the ways my identity was being affirmed’.

The narratives in this category carefully reflected how comfortable students felt in an environment where everyone was like them. For example, Allison reflected:

being in a school environment of primarily White students and being White made for a com- fortable learning environment for myself. I was able to look around the room and see people of my race. I was always able to find my race included in posters, books and worksheets. All of the teachers and administration at my school were White.

Chelsea echoed, ‘We were all “White” students whose moms dropped them off for the first day of school’.

As they thought back on their early experiences in school, these authors generally had fond memories and reflecting on their prior schooling experiences critically was difficult because, as Amber explained, ‘I cannot pinpoint many memories where I remembered being silenced’. What is interesting about these narratives is that they did not just reflect the stu- dents’ comfort that they were around mostly white people in the school building or in classes. More than that, they were evocations of a culture in which people of color were pushed out as well. For example, Jonie describes that the rules in her school were ‘no hoods, sweatshirts must be crewneck’ Since hoods are often symbolic in the US of black culture and black boys in particular, while ‘crewnecks’ are symbolic of white culture, the very dress code in the school associated blackness with badness. If students of color were in school with the authors of these narratives, the white women maintained hegemonic hierarchies by ‘intentionally avoid- ing students of Color’. Mara describes, ‘I did not have black friends. I was really only friends with people who looked like me, acted like me and had what I had. I intentionally did not hang out with those students because of where they lived. We used to call it ‘over the railroad tracks”. Astutely, Becca reflects on a time when she was in sixth grade and at her first school patrol meeting and realized that there were no students of color chosen to be on patrol duty, an honor given to those students who showed exemplary character. The implicit impact of this was severely imprinted on her racial recollection:

My school never told me this directly or even verbally hinted that White people were better, but the way our school was run and the way our classes were taught sent the message that ideally, White people are meant for positions of power.

Jackie, upon reflection, noted similar messages. She describes her only teacher of color, from a mixed racial background, in her school being commonly referred to as ‘the mixed one who teaches college-prep English’. She reflected that the teacher was never referred to by her name like the other white teachers, a dehumanizing nuance that was noted only years later when writing her memoir.

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Fortunate to be white

Many of the narratives in this group described a feeling of gratitude for whiteness and con- nected whiteness with resources. Molly explains,

I lived in a small, traditional town, so being White was definitely in my favor. I got to go to one of the ‘better’ schools per se. All of the teachers were White, the students were White, the adminis- tration was White, and the other staff members were White, even the substitutes.

In this example, Molly explains it was in her ‘favor’ to be in a place where even the lowest positions in the hierarchy of school – the substitutes – were white. The words favor, fortunate, thankful and lucky were used over and over to describe their whiteness. For example, Dillan suggests:

I do think that I have had an advantage growing up, and a large part of that reason is because I am White. Though it sounds bad as bad as it feels to type it out, I know that I grew up very comfortable and that is something I am very thankful for each day.

Brittany concurs, ‘Everyone around me was white, talked the way I did, and behaved the way I had been raised to behave. I felt affirmed in this, like I was meant to be there and that gave me the biggest relief ’.

Compliant to the institution of schooling

In these narratives, students learned early on to comply with the school rules and norms for white girls. Because they were white, and middle class they were accepted into schools warmly and teachers had high expectations for them. Jackie describes,

All throughout school I was pretty much your typical model student. I always completed assign- ments on time, got excellent grades, and was consistenly in [advanced placement] classes. Because I am an upper middle class White female, I have had very few negative experiences regarding my schooling.

Dana expounds, ‘I never once got in trouble my whole elementary school years and that’s not exaggerating. I was too quiet, did all my work and was too much of the teacher’s pet’.

White confessionals

While the narratives in this category echoed the theme of schooling being comfortable because of racial and cultural similarity between the authors and administrators, teachers and other students in the school, some students explicitly described being placed in a posi- tion of racial privilege by their assimilation in school, and described this privilege through confessional stories, or stories that read like an admission of something of which they are now ashamed. A compilation of such examples is listed here:

• I do recall students of all races getting into trouble at times, but the majority were African-American students. Close to all of the African-American students were viewed as the ‘bad’ students.

• I do think that being white kept me out of trouble that I probably deserved to be in. I was viewed as a quiet, white girl with blond hair and blue eyes. My teachers didn’t expect me to misbehave so when I did it got ignored.

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• One of my friends in class at the time was a black student. I remember her [getting into trouble] for talking. I never once [got in trouble]. I was displaying the same behavior as my black friend, but I was never punished for it.

At times the authors of these narratives provided descriptions of people of color that were profoundly patronizing. For example, Emily describes her only recollection of a person of color in her school was a janitor named George who was ‘a very kind and friendly man who always smiled and welcomed you into and out of the school. He always had a big smile on his face no matter what he was doing’. In her memory, hegemonic racial order was main- tained because the one person of color she could think of, occupying perhaps the lowest status position in the school, was always smiling and welcoming, indicating, at least in her memory, that he was happy with his status. Some students, like Morgan, did not feel that the lack of racial diversity in her school was harmful because she ‘was able to have contact with African Americans by going to the store down the road or going to Wal-Mart in the city limits’. As I will discuss later, the various ways the students recollected their racial narratives and how they made sense of them as they became successfully white are important when considering how to best prepare white pre-service teachers for their work with diverse young children.

Precariously becoming a white female teacher

Not all students had easy transitions into becoming white female teachers. The most frequent evidence of this in the narratives was when they were from low-income communities which put them in greater proximity to people of color. Growing up around black people, potentially having sex with black boys in their neighborhood, having black friends, listing to R & B and speaking in African-American English all made the transition into white female teachers a rocky path for these authors. For them, when identity factors such as class, sexuality and language was not congruent with whiteness, students experienced racial awareness much more abruptly as they learned to make deliberate moves into whiteness.

Social class moves into white women

Over and over, social class was described in the narratives in terms of the neighborhoods where the students resided because of the financial situation of their parent(s). Poorer, more rural or urban neighborhoods and low-income communities tended to have a larger pro- portion of people of color living in them which put the white authors of these narratives in more contact with people of color. Justine explains, ‘Even though I am not black, I have a sense of what it is like living in a black community. I grew up on a dirt road of trailers where my family was the only White family’. These neighborhoods fed into schools that served more students of color which created more abrupt racial awareness for these students than for students from white, middle income neighborhoods attending mostly white schools. Students who attended schools where they were racial minorities often felt isolated because of their race. Kristen’s narrative is an example of feelings of racial isolation: ‘I was picked on and teased, at recess I played by myself and at lunch, my teacher sat with me’. Jenna shares a similar story: ‘I remember walking in to my first day of class and observing my surroundings only to see a vast amount of people who were different from me. I felt like an outcast’. Both

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Kristen and Jenna were ‘saved’ into whiteness when they were able to leave their lower income neighborhoods and move to whiter, middle-income neighborhoods where they could attend schools where white people were either in the majority or were kept separated from most students of color because they were over-represented in advanced placement classes. Kristen describes that being around more white people in a neighborhood where there was ‘a more equal ratio of races’ helped her ‘grow and develop as a child’. likewise, Jenna’s family moved to a white, ‘nice’ neighborhood, ‘with upper middle class White families and were located near our town lake’.

Becoming white through racial terrorizing

When the students identified as lower class in middle-income schools, they felt isolated – not completely white – because of their class. In a troubling narrative, Justine describes feeling marginalized because she was not one of the ‘pretty’ white upper middle-class girls:

Being from a lower class family, I always felt different. Teachers would always choose the pretty [upper class White] girls to be their class pets …. This humiliating experience taught me that being an upper class, White student allowed you to get away with almost anything in the classroom.

In an act of rebellion, Justine ‘became the trouble student’ and was placed in the ‘mush pot seat’ in the middle of the classroom which further humiliated her and further distanced her from white femininity since she not only came from a low-income community but now she was also not compliant within her institution according to the norms of good white girls. later on, she experienced a class change because her parents had new job opportunities. Justine describes ‘because of this social class change, I was able to participate in four sports … [and] participated in band. I also took honors and AP classes. Teachers treated me as an adult, allowing me to get away with anything’. Perhaps as an effort to solidify her whiteness, Justine took advantage of her newfound status as she describes a vivid moment when she terrorized a black classmate and was reward by white supremacy:

One day while in band class a few students decided to partake in some trouble. I am ashamed to say that I took part in this as well. We convinced another student, an African American stu- dent, to crawl into a storage locker. The door was shut and locked on this container, forcing this student to stay inside. One teacher eventually found this student and found out the culprits. The African American student received the punishment instead of me and my other upper middle class, White friends. The teacher stated that the African American student should not have crawled into the locker and that it was his fault for doing so. This action affirmed that the group of upper-middle class White students were superior to all others.

Other moves into whiteness

Other students who grew up in lower income neighborhoods where they were in more frequent contact with people of color were able to achieve white femininity by disassociating themselves from the people and cultures of color that were threatening their progression into white women. Some examples of these movements are included below:

• I learned to redirect my speech [African-American English] into what most people would call proper [white] English.

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• A cousin who I hadn’t seen in years, called me white chocolate [because I speak in African-American English] not realizing it wasn’t funny. This has happened to me so much that I had plenty of thoughts of looking into voice lessons.

• When it came to place me in classes, they always placed me with the African-American students … They decided it was a ‘better fit for someone like me’ [someone from a low income community]. Sometimes I fought it.

• Growing up as an army child, the majority of my friends I played with were African- American … sure some days I played jump rope and sang along to ‘Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss her fellow’ [linguistic activities commonly associated with African-American female youth], but most days I did what my other white friends were doing.

Sexually committed to whiteness

Although not occuring frequently in the data, I choose here to explore a rich and important data-set authored by Danielle and having to do with the ways sexuality and whiteness were imagined. I borrow from the advice of Crabtree and Miller (1999) who write that researchers should celebrate anomalies for all they can uncover. Since whiteness in America has often had to do with the policing of white women’s sexuality to prevent them from having sex with men of color (McGuire 2011), this seemed a salient data-set and worth investigation.

Danielle’s move towards whiteness happened when her white boyfriend’s family triggered a move from a predominantly black school where salient memories were the sexual advances by black boys which made her ‘fear for my safety daily’. She remembers, ‘Upperclassmen black males were very upfront about what they wanted to do to me sexually because they wanted to be with a White girl’. For her, being ‘saved’ into whiteness happened when her boyfriend (now husband) told his parents he was worried about her being assaulted by a black boy. Shortly after that, she received an ‘anonymous’ scholarship to attend the white, private school in town. She explains, ‘If you go to the private school, it’s because your parents loved you enough not to send you to that that God-awful county school. I guess my parents didn’t love me enough’. Although Danielle still does not know for sure who paid for her to attend the private school, she has ‘an idea that it was my [now] husband’s parents’. Delivosky (2010) writes how learning to be white is largely learning to stay within sexual race bound- aries (created and enforced by white men). In her new school, Danielle’s boyfriend did not worry that she would have sex with black boys and she was able to make a successful tran- sition into whiteness because she remained sexually loyal to her race.

Questions for consideration

These stories beckon us towards unchartered complexities most strikingly captured in the second wave of white identity studies. They bring up more questions than they answer, but these questions must be considered if we are to move towards keener theorizing about the racial identities of white teachers and what this means for the diverse students they teach. For example, the students in many of the narratives came to know themselves as white because they categorized others as not being white; thus, the genesis of their racial under- standing was based on who they were not. When we read the narratives closely, it was not so

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much that the students were happy they identified as white, it was that they were grateful, fortunate and felt lucky that they were not people of color. This raises the question: If the fundamental identities of white teachers rest upon gratitude that they are not people of colour, how will it ever be possible to build meaningful and deep relationships with students they cate- gorise as being a part of a group they feel fortunate to not belong in? Furthermore, if the stu- dents learned to become white by realizing they were not people of color and they felt the ‘biggest relief ’ when they were around other white people, we must wonder: what feelings will transpire when these white teachers walk into classrooms filled with students who are not white? Will they fear, as Danielle did, black boys? Will they terrorize, as Justine did, the black students in their classes? And, while it is unlikely terrorising will manifest in locking a student in a container, it is not a stretch to imagine how subtle transactions like harsher punishments for their students of color compared to their white peers could manifest. In the memoirs described here, white students felt saved when they left spaces dominated by people of color and their whiteness was not threatened. They learned to dissociate with peers of color, games played by people of color, languages spoken by people of color. How, then, will these future teachers feel in schools and classrooms where their successful work with students depends upon their ability to build relationships with families and in communities, to understand and value the cultures and languages of their students of colour? It is hard to imagine these women will have the cultural competencies to work with students unlike themselves when their own racialized identities were built upon invisiblising, fearing, dissociating and patronizing people who are not white. Furthermore, it is doubtful that these young women will be able to have honest and critical conversations with their young students about race and racism when their own identities becoming raced involve doubts, distancing, fear, disassociation and patronization. These are not easy questions; nor are they unlikely ones. Remembering Nieto’s words, it becomes clearer how those ‘experiences, identities, beliefs, values, attitudes, hang-ups, biases, wishes, dreams and hopes’ (24) could potentially unfold, day in and day out, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways for the future young children entrusted into the care of these future teachers. It is possible that the very act of writing their critical school memoirs opened doors for new understandings of their positionalities as white women; it is unlikely that one memoir in one ‘one-shot’ diversity course will have lasting implications for the deep, difficult and complex work of unlearning racial superiority.

Conclusion

In the racial narratives I portrayed in this article, becoming white female teachers of young children was most luminous when becoming white intersected with other identity factors in abrupt and disjunctive ways. Given the strong push towards standardizing experiences with diversity in colleges and university, I wanted to directly challenge this simplistic reduc- tion in my analysis by highlighting the complexity of these narratives. I directly align myself with scholars (i.e. Jupp and Slattery 2012; Jupp, Berry, and lensmire 2016; lensmire et al. 2013) who assert that we need far more work in teacher education before we can feel con- fident we are adequately preparing white female teachers to teach in diverse schools. I also argue that we need far more critical and complex racial theorizing of white female teachers who will teach our nation’s youngest children.

30 E. T. MIllER

Notes

1. All participants in the study were given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. I received approval to use the data for this research study on 22 January 2015 from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s University Institutional Review Board (IRB). According to the IRB protocol, these data – original work collected from former students –.are considered to be exempt as archival data under category 4 (45 DFR 46.101).

2. An urban emergent district has characteristics of a large city but has less than one million residents (Milner 2012).

3. It is important to note that one student could have written two narratives within the same memoir that fell into different categories for analysis. For example, lauren described in one narrative how she was generally successfully white because of her middle-class background, but that she experienced conflicts related to her whiteness as a military child who had lived oversees and spoke German as her primary language when entering public schools in the United States. learning to be white meant abandoning her German language and speaking ‘perfect’ American English which she felt she achieved one day as she perfectly recited The Pledge of Allegiance for her entire school.

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge one of my greatest mentors, Timothy lensmire, for helping me imagine new ways to consider the racial identifications of white women.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the University of North Carolina Charlotte Scholarship of Teaching and learning [grant number # 1-02452].

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