More Than an Ally. Michael L. Boucher Jr.
justice in education, these uncomfortable conversations are necessary and should lead to action.
Who Am I?
In order to discuss the positionality of teachers and gain the historical and personal context for how they can work in solidarity with students, it is important to have at least an outline of my personal history and positionality so that my identity and worldview can also be placed in context. Personal and family histories matter in that they have shaped and continue to have influence over us. Thus, one of the first steps to interrogating my own standpoint is to understand how I came to that position. In short, I am a mostly White male who grew up in the suburbs of Minnesota and taught in an inner-city high school in Minneapolis.
As for my family history, on my mother’s side, my ancestors came from Poland and England along with many other immigrants in the 1800s. On my father’s side, beginning in 1830, some of my ancestors were removed by the United States during the Trail of Tears from their homes and farms in what is now Mississippi and Alabama. They were placed in southern Oklahoma “Indian Territory.” By blood quantum, my grandmother was a quarter Choctaw and Irish, and my grandfather was mostly English from a poor family of farm laborers. I am a registered and voting member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
When I was very young, my father obtained a position in Minnesota, and that is where I grew up and spent most of the first forty-five years of my life. Growing up in Minnesota, all my friends’ parents were White, middle class, and college educated. It was the stable, uncomplicated life that my parents wanted for me. Yet I felt there was a piece of me that belonged somewhere else. I was discontent identifying with the cultural norms of the Minnesota mix of Norwegians, Germans, and Swedes of my suburban upbringing. Even though we only went to Oklahoma a few times in my youth, I was always proud to be “something else” that others did not share.
I have had little contact with Choctaws in Oklahoma other than extended family, but I feel that the Choctaw Nation is an important part of who I am. In college, I began carrying my Choctaw identification card in my wallet. That ID card is a good metaphor for my connection to the tribe. It is something that I keep with me, but it is not outwardly visible.
It is my own indicator of difference from the society around me and, growing up, I felt that it gave me permission to be an outsider whenever I felt like it. However, as an adult, I came to realize that for all my imaginings of being an outsider, I was deeply rooted in the privilege afforded me by whiteness and my middle-class economic status.
Upon graduating from college with a degree in social studies education, I gained a position in the Minneapolis public schools where I began the process of becoming an urban educator. There I found the diversity I had been wanting. I was able to experience cultures, ideas, and people that taught me how to be a more complete teacher and person. I taught middle and high school social studies for eighteen years until I left to pursue my doctorate in education and became a teacher educator. For the purposes of this discussion, I position myself as a mostly White male former high school teacher, now teacher educator.
Strategic Essentialism and Diversity
The focus of this work is the teaching of African American students by White teachers. These categories are imposed in order to begin a dialogue, but there is no assumption that these categories are static or isolated from the history of colonization, slavery, segregation, and White supremacy. However, unless artificial categories are overlaid to some extent, the discussion becomes so watered down as to become meaningless. This specific type of essentialism allows for a conversation about race.
According to Azoulay (1997), strategic essentialism is a “prerequisite for dialogue” about race (p. 102). Strategic essentialism opens up the intellectual space by grouping people together, even in ways that do not always reflect people’s lived reality. To understand that race is a socially constructed concept should not get in the way of understanding that it is also a historical reality. To deny this leads people to the kind of color-blind ideology that only reifies the current social and political structure of White privilege and “color-blind racism” (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 40).
Strategic essentialism should not be confused with essentialized frameworks like White supremacy, which assumes that White people are fundamentally better and more equipped to run things than people of color. White supremacy essentializes others who are not assumed to be White and places them in the category of diverse or non-White, while White people are considered normal and outside of race (Irving, 2014). All over the world, White people have created spaces for themselves and pushed others to the margins. However, in each context blackness and the response to it are different. The binary of Black and White does not work in all global contexts and does not even scratch the surface of the range of human diversity.
A caveat is important here. Strategic essentialism is a device meant to be used temporarily to give space for discussion of real historical issues. Thus, when talking about Black and White people, the tool of essentialized racial categories allows for the discussion of race in the United States and in the study of diverse classrooms. If strategic essentialism is never abandoned, the danger is that it will become real essentialism and move away from its original intent.
With that danger in mind, it is important for teachers and researchers to acknowledge that while some group identifications are real, and while historical inequity and racism are real, the racialized concepts that ground these notions are socially constructed and are not based on any biologically determinable differences (Helfenbein, 2003).
Capitalizing White
Throughout this text, I have capitalized the word white when referring to White people. This has been my practice as a way to state that whiteness, in this context, is not a mere description like hair or eye color. White, instead, is a socially constructed grouping of people based on their racialization in the U.S. context, not a scientific or empirically observable characteristic. White, Black, and Brown are all racialized descriptors of group membership, not neutral descriptions of actual skin colors.
I have also used the terms racialization or racialized when referring to how people are perceived. It is a shift in thinking for many White people from the assumption that race is old and descriptive to seeing it for what it is, a relatively new way to categorize people. People are not naturally dropped into races. They have race imposed upon them as they are categorized by others. Thus, people are racialized in order to place them in the racial categories used to decide who is in power and who is excluded.
As part of this book’s strategic essentialism, I have not specifically discussed the experiences of people who identify as mixed race. As a matter of history, all people in the United States are mixed from different parts of the world. Sometimes this causes identity conflicts as people do not know where they fit in a racialized America. This volume will not deal with the specific issue of the very important work of how mixed-race people relate to the concept of race.
Therefore, as a matter of definition, “White people” refers to the people of European descent who hold both social and economic power that comes with being perceived as a member of the White race. Whiteness and blackness have historically been fluid and contextual. Quotations from scholars and their capitalizations, or not, have been preserved, so the reader will need to be ready for different cases within paragraphs, but my explanations will use the capital W.
Some scholars and activists use the lowercase w in referring to White people or use whyte rather than white in order to decenter whiteness in academic literature, and I applaud their work and some are cited in this book. In this case and after much deliberation, with an eye toward my intended audience and the future, I have chosen to capitalize White in an effort to help teachers and newer scholars to see whiteness, sometimes for the first time.
So much of whiteness is taken for granted as normal or even as the only way to do things, and ways of decentering whiteness further its disintegration (Michael, Coleman-King, Lee, Ramirez, & Bentley-Edwards, 2017). For a definition, whiteness is the intersection of privilege based on the perception of being a member of the White race