Anti-Racist Teaching

193 Pages·2016·2.69 MB·English

by  Robert P. Amico

AntirAcist teAching
New Critical Viewpoints on Society Series
EditEd by JoE R. FEagin
Antiracist Teaching
By Robert P. Amico (2014)
What Don’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger: African American Women
and Suicide
By Kamesha Spates (2014)
Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, and Endur-
ance
By Joe Feagin & José A. Cobas (2014)
Mythologizing Black Women: Unveiling White Men’s Racist and
Sexist Deep Frame
By Brittany C. Slatton (2014)
Diverse Administrators in Peril: The New Indentured Class in
Higher Education
By Edna Chun and Alvin Evans (2011)
AntirAcist
teAching
robert P. Amico

First published 2015 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2015, Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-882-5 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-61205-883-2 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-31563-597-2 (eBook)
To my first antiracist and antisexist mentors:
Susan Shaw, Donna Champeau, Laurie Lippin, Judy Helfand,
Charlie Virga, Francie Kendall, and Bonnie Booman
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Chapter One: What Is White Privilege? 1
Chapter Two: Why Is Teaching about White Privilege to
White Students So Difficult? 18
Chapter Three: The Class Setting, Pedagogical Goals, and
Theoretical Frames 42
Chapter Four: Applying the Dialogic Approach 69
Chapter Five: Assessment 103
Chapter Six: Conclusion 137
Appendices 141
Bibliography 171
Index 176
About the Author 178
vii
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Preface
Antiracist teaching is about awakening students to their own hu-
manity. In order to teach about this awakening, one must be in the
process of awakening oneself. There is no way around it. I am a work
in progress as much as every one of my students.
Antiracist teaching is a value-laden enterprise predicated on
principles of social justice and equity. It requires that we take a hard
and unflinching critical look at our culture and ourselves in order
to understand our role in maintaining racism.
Hardly mainstream in academia (although that is changing),
antiracist teaching can be a lonely enterprise because many of
our colleagues and administrators are caught in a worldview that
maintains the status quo and allows and perpetuates gross racial
injustices and white dominance. Sociologist Joe Feagin terms this
perspective, or weltanschauung, “the white racial frame,” and anti-
racist teaching is designed to name, expose, critique, and challenge
this view of the world.
This book aims to aid educators and professionals in all realms
working to incorporate antiracist teachings into their curriculums
and programs. The following story is an example of what I mean by
incorporating antiracist teachings and by naming, exposing, critiqu-
ing, and challenging this view of the world.
I became an analytic philosopher, specifically, an analytic epis-
temologist. I wrote technical papers in philosophical journals until
the late 1990s. The world of analytic philosophy is an Anglo- and
Eurocentric white male one. Indeed, if one examines most history of
philosophy books, one will discover that nearly all the philosophers
ix