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…

If we are going to make progress in helping teachers develop awareness and pedagogies that are sensitive to children who live in poverty, we need to challenge the widespread misinformation that is being disseminated in this area and then set a new course. The work of Ruby Payne merely furthers negative stereotypes of the poor.

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…