In this essay, I draw on two black theorists of whiteness--W.E.B. Du Bois and the Reverend Thandeka--to examine how white supremacy and white racial identities emerge from and are fortified in the relations of "white people to other white people." I use stories told by two white people from a rural, white farming community in…

My commentary on this special issue reflects on experiences I have had in which critical knowledges, and the people who produce them, were marginalized. I congratulate the editors and authors of this special issue for creating a space for such knowledges and for refusing to be marginalized.

In this article, we introduce our special issue, "Second-Wave White Teacher Identity Studies: Toward Complexity and Reflexivity in the Racial Conscientization of White Teachers." We characterize white teacher identity studies as a developing field with important implications for education research and teacher education. Early work in…

Background/Context: Increasingly, researchers and educators have argued that alternative conceptions of Whiteness and White racial identity are needed because current conceptions have undermined, rather than strengthened, our critical pedagogies with White people. Grounded in critical Whiteness studies, and drawing especially on the writings of…

In this study of White teacher identity literatures, we historicize, define, and advance second-wave White teacher identity studies in education research and teacher education. First, we provide a discussion of methodology used to conduct this study called the synoptic text. Second, we provide an historical account of White teacher identity…

In this article, members of the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective argue that Peggy McIntosh's seminal "knapsack" article acts as a synecdoche, or as a stand-in, for all the antiracist work to be done in teacher education and that this limits our understanding and possibilities for action. The authors develop this argument by…

Drawing on critical whiteness studies, I examine a performance I did over 25 years ago in high school, in which I told a story at an awards program. I interpret my performance as later-day blackface minstrelsy--one without blackface, but with a black folktale and with ways of speaking and moving that my audience recognized as "black." I build up…

This article examines the complex social production of white racial identity. Specifically, the author theorizes white people's fear of people of color and make a case for conceiving of white racial identities as profoundly ambivalent. Drawing from a larger ethnographic interview study conducted in a small, rural, white community in the Midwest of…

Research on the racial identities of White future teachers has assumed and circulated an overly simplified, and ultimately unhelpful, conception of White racial identity. An alternative is needed, which the authors develop with reference to scholarship that explores White people's participation in blackface minstrelsy. They argue that at the core…