Whiteness Studies

I propose a rich theoretical understanding on Afro-Latino student development based on critical race theory, culturally responsive pedagogy and practice. Addressing racial disparities is about engaging students thereby making their lives better. I believe that creating Afro-Latino pedagogy will create a community of practice in which inquiry is a cornerstone of continuous student self-redefinition through improvement in culturally responsive systems.
We need educators to get involved with Afro-Latino students, our history and the way we occupy space in the Americas in order to address this gap in education.

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

Available now from Penn State University Press, with a foreword by Pat J. Gehrke. Order here: https://www.amazon.com/Metanoia-Rhetoric-Authenticity-Transformation-Self/dp/0271085924/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DL9ENJNF09HO&keywords=ellwanger+metanoia&qid=1581529316&sprefix=ellwanger%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1

One of the challenges faced in post-secondary jazz education across the GTA is finding qualified instructors who are familiar with dialogical methods for teaching African American jazz histories. More specifically, finding and hiring African American instructors whose musical genealogy can be delineated from “black” oral/aural histories and can draw from these historicities. Unless the narratives of this music are unpacked, analyzed and taught from its internal elements, which embodies the symbiosis and synthesis of African American dance, theatrics, poetics and American black English that encapsulates the “African American-ness” in jazz, then there remains a risk that this folk music will become more and more diluted. Consequently, it is my belief that current music educators across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) should consider alternative methods of pedagogy if students are to understand the historicity— the historical authenticity of this African American folk music. The idea for this study originated from my observation of a lack of “African American-ness”—African American narratives not being used as a pedagogical tool in post-secondary jazz curricula across the GTA. Therefore, this multi-case study will lead to the creation of an alternative curriculum that incorporates new teaching methods based on African American narratives. Dr. Barry Harris is one such educator who incorporates new teaching methods based on African American narratives. Therefore, I seek to unpack and analyze the musical and social upbringing that contributed to African American jazz pianist and educator Dr. Barry Harris’  primary contribution to jazz education, which is his concept of movement, while also expanding upon it.  When these antecedents of Harris’  concept of movement have been analyzed, they will use them as a compliance for the cultivation and filling in of gaps in post-secondary jazz curricula across the GTA.

Available now from Penn State University Press, with a foreword by Pat J. Gehrke.

Order here: https://www.amazon.com/Metanoia-Rhetoric-Authenticity-Transformation-Self/dp/0271085924/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DL9ENJNF09HO&keywords=ellwanger+metanoia&qid=1581529316&sprefix=ellwanger%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1

This article investigates the reception of two of the most popular TV programs depicting Italian American mafiosi: The Untouchables (1959-63) and The Sopranos (1999-2007).  Italian American organizations protested against both these ethnic representations, winning concessions from producers in the 1960s but coming up empty by the turn of the last century.  The paper argues that the relative success or failure of these antidefamation efforts is not a mere barometer of white ethnics' cultural status nor aesthetic achievement.  Rather, the cultural status of television itself affected the ways the protesters made their claims and whether or not their demands were met.

This study investigates the radio roots of a discourse of domestic whiteness that is typically associated with family sitcoms of the 1950s. Through analysis of a highly popular evening serial, One Man’s Family (NBC, 1932–1959), the article tracks the production of domestic whiteness in sound, narrative, and vocal performance, situating it within the institutional and social contexts of 1930s radio.

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Americans and Britons connected their joint local experiences with the simultaneous colonial conquests in Cuba, the Philippines, South Africa, and China through the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. From 1898 to 1901 Dawson’s newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, and commercial photography demonstrated the power of this symbolic language of flags and balls, heated rhetoric and dazzling cartoons. The Klondike Nugget, the first newspaper in town and the only one run by Americans, took up the claims of global Anglo-Saxonism with the most fervor, although its sentiments were often echoed in the Canadian-edited Dawson Daily News. Differences re-emerged, especially over the boundary between Alaska and Canada, but this brief episode remained deeply imprinted in narratives of the “two Wests”—both of the North American frontier West and the West as Anglo-Saxon civilization—told at the turn of the twentieth century.

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

This provocation explores the abjective e/affects of white ideology manifested as school language in the United States. Through recursive engagement and symbolic play with her memory of watching a student eat toilet paper during a College Essay Writing class, the author challenges the institutional grammars that shape a collective sense of “school.” Through a critical analysis of the shared “public transcript” (Scott, 1990) of many urban schools, the author considers the ways in which students and teachers get summoned into particular social existences in relation to whiteness as the dominant culture of power. She uses both written and visual languages to offer poetry as a site of theory towards reinscribing the relationship between language, feeling, and address in the urban English classroom and inciting new, socially just structures of learning. The author’s sketches of this memory drawn with ink on toilet paper intervene throughout the article, giving her provocation an added dimensionality.

These poems, composed in Somali and in English, provide a poetic reflection of the recently emerged debate on the theme of Caddaan Studies which means "White Studies". The criticism and counter-criticism contained in the debate dug so deep into life nerve of Somali Studies that over a thousand people participated. The poems, under the title "Inaugurating Caddaan Studies" were composed with a critical observation of the debate.

Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of his emancipation from slavery suggests the distress that agitates white men accustomed to power whenever their social authority is questioned or contested. In each episode in the narrative, there is an evident threat to the power dynamic emboldening white slaveholders and oppressing African-American slaves. These threats, as a consequence, compel the slaveholders to suppress the slaves through violent and dehumanizing means, thus protecting the historical dominance of white men in society. Antagonistic characters like Captain Anthony and Mr. Covey represent the extreme hatred of a cultural institution known as “Angry White Men,” a group that sociologist Michael Kimmel describes by referring to the theory of relative deprivation. The resentment fueling the actions of these men is rooted in their perception of themselves as the true victims of relative deprivation.

This article examines attacks on black academics as an analytical apparatus for connecting histories of U.S. racial violence to the current state of white backlash against black advancement. Through an anatomy of these attacks – of which the author herself was targeted – this essay explores two processes: First, what these attacks do to blackness and, second, what this violence does for whiteness. In the former, this work explains that attacks on black academics are first and foremost anti-black attacks, not dissimilar to attacks on visible African- Americans in other arenas. The intention is to terrorize black progress on the whole. In the latter process, the generative nature of these attacks reproduces collective white identities across region, age, and newly digitized spaces. In the current political moment this digitized mob violence ritualistically reaffirms white hegemony. This essay concludes with an explanation for why the author believes these attacks will continue with regularity.

This paper analyzes discourses of everyday racism and colorblind racism on an internet forum. While skin color is invisible online, identities as black, white and shades in between show through participants' perspectives and communicative behavior in discussions about racism. Critical race theory and whiteness studies argue that there is a perception gap between black and white perspectives on racism, linked to positionality in social structures, which influences experiences and shapes perceptions of the world. This paper shows how black participants in online discussions tend to be more conscious of racial issues and skilled at recognizing racism, while whites often reflect a colorblind discourse that denies structural racism and reproduces everyday racism. Starting with critical perspectives of conscious blacks on the forum and drawing on Cultural Discourse Studies and critical race theory, this paper examines power relations and cultural perspectives underlying white participants' claims, perspectives and speech acts.

This book examines and confronts the passive and often unconscious racism of white teacher education students, offering a critical tool in the effort to make education more equitable. Sherry Marx provides a consciousness-raising account of how white teachers must come to recognize their own positions of privilege and work actively to create anti-racist teaching techniques and learning environments for children of color and children learning English as a second language.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Australians were possessed by two obsessions – the fear of the ›yellow peril‹ and the desire for a white society. The fear of the ›yellow peril‹ found expression in science and politics as well as in innumerable invasion novels which depicted the swamping of the European outpost in the Pacific by Asiatic hordes. The programme of a white society was reasoned scientifically and found political supporters not least in the labour movement. Moreover, it found expression in a medium which was even more popular than pulp fiction: consumer racism which propagated the consumption of ›white sugar‹. ›White sugar‹ was a very special commodity: refined white and produced white, it comprised white labourers, dearer sweetness, protection from the world market, and gaining of intra-continental acceptance through subsidies. Certainly there were countless points of contact between colour discrimination and thinking in terms of whiteness. In the context of the European diggers’ rebellions on the goldfields, the workers’ strikes against the replacement of white with Chinese labour and clashes with Aborigines on the colonial frontier, the whites’ anger was given vent to. But these were largely isolated incidents involving concrete problems and select societal groups. Invasion novels and sugar consumption, on the other hand, aimed at the whole society. The problem to turn the empty north, considered ›terra nullius‹, into a breeding ground for whiteness and, thus, into a bulwark against the ›yellow peril‹ was considered problematic, however. This was due to the utilization interest of the agrarian capital as well as the phantasies of degeneration of race sciences. While the latter were not sure whether whites would altogether proof to be able to successfully settle in the tropics, the former were mainly interested in the exploitation of cheap labour. This paper will look into the ways in which the campaigns to consume white-produced Australian sugar and the genre of invasion novels accomplished to subsume lobbies of adverse interests in the joint pursuit of white Australia.

In this essay, I use some of the topics in Tressie McMillam Cottom’s book, Thick, to comment on how the subjects treated in her book resonate with me as a White man who, for his entire adult life, has lived with, loved, and worked with people of color.  Most of this work involved community development efforts with an overarching goal of making the institutions created responsible for and accountable to the people served.  In many ways, it represents the commentary of a White man speaking from the inside looking out, as opposed to the outside looking in.  The essay also highlights topics raised in Thick, and represents an endorsement of how those topics are treated by the author.

Objective. We propose and develop novel survey questions and quantitative summary indices of White Fragility. Methods. The data come from the 2018 Survey of White Fragility, a longitudinal convenience sample of 279 non-Hispanic white undergraduate students aged 18 and over taking courses at two large public universities in the southeastern and southwestern United States. Results. Factor analyses revealed two latent factors. The first factor—Remorse Fragility—was defined by feeling sad, guilty, and, to a lesser extent, angry in the context of discussions related to racism, race-based discrimination, and white privilege. The second factor—Depletion Fragility—was defined by feeling drained/exhausted, unsafe, and, to a lesser extent, attacked and confused in the same contexts. Additional analyses supported the reliability and validity of our indices. Conclusion. More research is needed to establish measures of White Fragility to inform interventions that support critical discussions of whiteness and the racist structures of society.

In the 1880s Chicago architects celebrated the so-called ‘western’ style appearing in their city as the architectural expression of a new American race forming on the frontier. Influenced by the racial theory of human development that defined the nineteenth century, they saw the characteristics of this style – strength, simplicity, functionalism and independence – as the most recent manifestation of the Aryan race as it moved globally westwards. This essay looks at the development of this idea in the late nineteenth-century, paying particular attention to the continued presence of racial themes in the development of a distinctive industrial aesthetic. These themes are crystallized in Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1901 lecture, “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” which set out a political agenda for advanced industrial design in the United States. For Wright the emancipatory potential of industrialization was directly tied to the progress of American democracy. By 1900 Chicago was regarded as the most advanced city in the world, an exemplary urban-industrial machine serviced by a huge population of European immigrants, far surpassing the productive potential of the southern slave economy of fifty years earlier. Transformed by disciplining regimes of education and architecture, the ethnically diverse immigrant population was converted an idealized ‘white’ working class, technicians rather than semi-skilled machine operatives. Analysis of Wright’s lecture in the context of the industrial landscape of Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century reveals the ongoing presence of questions of race and labor within the philosophy of the Chicago School, and their passage into the positive reception of Chicago architecture by European modernists in the 1920s and 30s.

Resumen: En este artículo exploro aspectos de mi trayectoria de blanquitud, por medio de un análisis de la racialización del género en Cúcuta y Bogotá, Colombia. A partir de un ejercicio autoetnográfico de la memoria, consigno experiencias en mi diario de campo para interpretar mi proceso de constitución como sujeta blanca y mi participación en la construcción de representaciones lícitas y sancionables de feminidades racializadas. Estos procesos estaban análogamente vinculados a las luchas por la racialización de los espacios, como mi barrio o la institución de educación superior en la que estudié, y la designación de sus legítimos propietarios.

Palabras clave: blanquitud, feminidad, racialización, alteridad, instituciones de educación superior, espacio.

Racismo No Brasil? É coisa da sua cabeça

As narrativas autobiográficas que estão no livro são narrativas de professores e fazem a intersecção com experiências ligadas ao tema de raça,  racismo e letramento racial crítico. Trata-se de experiências vividas em sala de aula, no ambiente familiar e nas relações sociais. As autobiografias que estão no livro foram geradas no contexto das aulas/disciplinas que a Profa. Dra. Aparecida de Jesus Ferreira leciona. O livro tem a intenção de:

Fortalecer expectativas 2017 livro racismo no Brasil e coisa da sua cabecade que, através do livro, sejam possibilitadas situações em que as pessoas se coloquem no lugar das pessoas negras;

Possibilitar que as pessoas reflitam sobre racismo e como isso afeta a vida das pessoas;

Acreditar que, através do livro, as pessoas tenham exemplos de como utilizar o letramento racial crítico nas suas vidas, nas suas escolas, nas suas universidades e em vários outros contextos em que o livro possa ser utilizado.

O livro tem 30 narrativas e vem com 150 perguntas reflexivas que podem ser utilizados tanto no contexto de sala de aula, como para as pessoas que tiverem acesso ao livro também possam refletir sobre os temas abordados nas narrativas autobiográficas.

Between 1976 and 1988 organized White supremacist groups targeted the Marquette Park section of Chicago, seeking to mobilize the predominantly White residents to block integration. One local pro-integration group, the Southwest Community Congress, (SCC) successfully reframed the debate in the neighborhood and swayed public opinion against the violence encouraged by the organized racist groups. This detailed history of the conflict, by a participant-observer who advised SCC, shows how both racist and anti-racist social movement organizations mobilized resources, sought to open and close political opportunities, and framed issues and grievances to appeal to multiple audiences. Frame theory is used to identify seven different competing frames contending for allegiance in the community.

This paper will look at moral panics over the presence of Chinese diggers on the Victorian goldfields and examine the commonalities between anti-Chinese sentiment and popular attitudes towards the local indigenous population. It will consider both in terms of the politics of land usage in the colonial context and the function of associated assumptions about the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon culture and institutions.

To that end this paper will examine the development of fears of the Yellow Peril, especially in the aftermath of the Eureka Rebellion of 1854. It will consider the extent to which the repressive behaviour of the colonial administration further negative outcomes in the spread of popular racism. It will look at at how racism functioned then as an outlet or ‘safety valve’ for tensions produced by the colonial style of administration that were otherwise not permitted expression.

Ultimately then this paper will explore racism as a means of facilitating blame-shifting and avoiding accountability for institutional injustices stemming from colonialism more broadly. It will consider the meaning of ‘whiteness’ and the tendency to perceive the world through the prisms of class and the dominant ethnicity in these terms, and examine the extent to which such were the motivating force behind the development of the White Australia policy.