Whiteness and damage in the education classroom

• Published in: Whiteness and education (Print) 2024-01, Vol.ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print), p.1-17
• Main Author: Da Costa, Alexandre E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: colonialism; damage-centred teaching; pedagogy; racism; reconciliation; Whiteness
• ISSN: 2379-3406; 2379-3414
• DOI: 10.1080/23793406.2022.2136106

This paper analyses relationships between whiteness and damage in the university classroom through a focus on two contemporary areas of critical education in Canada: raising white racial consciousness and truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. First, whiteness is damage-producing - it orients anti-racist education towards white students and their needs, there by harming the well-being and constraining the education of non-white students. Second, whiteness gravitates towards what Unangax scholar Eve Tuck calls "damage-centred approaches," which objectify non-white suffering, pathologising Indigenous peoples whilst obfuscating the ongoing reproduction of racism and colonialism. As such, white educators must remain assiduously vigilant about a key tension regarding whiteness and damage: that our pedagogical focus on racial and colonial oppression can simultaneously raise critical consciousness and divert attention away from more fundamental interrogations of whiteness, agency, and relationality within a systemically racist social order. The article closes with some considerations for educators in terms of addressing complicity in their institutions.