More Than an Ally. Michael L. Boucher Jr.
of normality that being White has in the United States.
My project here is to uncover whiteness and separate it from normativity so that teachers will then be equipped to enter into relationships of caring solidarity with their Black students. That is only possible if White people see their own whiteness and develop what Helms (1990) referred to as a positive White racial identity. I have also capitalized Black and Brown when referring to racialized groups in the same way.
The Task at Hand
From August to June, teachers meet young people in schools to teach them the ideas, skills, and knowledge needed to become successful in the wealthiest, most powerful society ever created by humankind. The responsibility is awesome. With the mechanisms that teachers provide, these students will vote, earn a living, raise a family, and leave their own legacies to society. The work teachers do in the classroom every day shapes the future. There are many jobs that pay more and carry more prestige, but it would be difficult if not impossible to find a job with as much influence over as many people as being the teacher.
If an adult conversation is to be had about teachers working across the color barrier, whiteness both as a concept and a fact must be addressed. The waters ahead are not easily navigated, but unless the gaps between teachers and students in terms of race, culture, income, political power, and privilege are embedded in the structure of reforms, they will not address the issues facing today’s schools.
The project of this book is focused on the teaching of African American students by White teachers, but that is not the only project that needs a full examination. Being strategically essential allows for a focus on this one area, but the intersectionality of sexual orientation, colorism, sexism, anti-indigenousness, and a multiplicity of other oppressions also impacts students and their teachers.
However, as with all research, the question used to collect the data for this volume narrowed the focus to examining the phenomenon of White teachers in classrooms of mostly African American students. That is the focus here, but there are many other foci that need to be explored. The goal is that the theory herein will be applicable to many contexts.
A New Paradigm
There are several elements to becoming a teacher in solidarity that have emerged from my research and, more importantly, the research of the myriad scholars of color who have so generously taught me over the years and are cited throughout this book. While working toward caring solidarity with students, it is important to consider that there will always be an ebb and flow in this journey, and each individual is different in their growth and their situation.
This framework is for teachers who are looking for a way to move toward solidarity with students and for researchers looking for a way to describe teachers who work in solidarity with students. It was created to be both descriptive and aspirational. It can be used to describe teachers in the field who are currently working in caring solidarity with their students, and it can be used to train or develop teachers with intentions toward caring solidarity.
Caring solidarity builds upon current frameworks such as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) and abolitionist pedagogy (Love, 2019c) and is a way to map a journey for White teachers toward those pedagogies. Everyone starts from somewhere. The path is winding and long, but the goal, to create an equitable and humane classroom, is worth the trip. The purpose of this framework is to point the way.
1.
The term teacher candidate is used throughout to refer to university students enrolled in a teacher education program or during student teaching. Other names used in the literature are teachers in training or preservice teachers. This wording is an attempt to avoid confusion when referring to “students” in a pre-K–12 context.
Chapter 1
Caring Solidarity, Race,
Teachers, and Schools
The framework of caring solidarity addresses both the mind-sets that allow a person to move toward caring solidarity and also the skills of empathy, alliance, and being an accomplice. As Katsarou, Picower, and Stovall (2010) stated, “to truly teach in solidarity with schools and communities requires of teachers both specific mindsets and skill sets” (p. 152). This framework addresses critical perspectives on solidarity that include White allies (Patel, 2011), false empathy (Delgado, 1996; Warren & Hotchkins, 2014), and White savior syndrome (Straubhaar, 2014). Caring solidarity asks teachers to delve deeply into their own position and explore the mechanisms, conditions, and mental commitments necessary to do that work.
As communities of color come under increasing attack from above and below, teachers must be the vanguard of equity and diversity in our schools and our society. Caring solidarity is situated in second-wave White teacher–identity studies (Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016) and is applied to students and teachers. However, the majority of the theoretical basis for the framework comes from scholarship done by African American scholars in elementary school settings. Their insights are crucial to the construction of the theories behind the framework, and they are quoted and cited widely in this book.
Caring solidarity framework.
This new framework is rooted in critical theory, critical whiteness studies, and multicultural understandings, but seeks to move to a deeper commitment that will allow White teachers to meet the deep challenges of the present age and usher in a new one that fulfills the promise of an equitable, empowering, and democratic education for all of our students. The theoretical work relies on culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies and seeks to be an extension or precursor needed for White teachers to build solidarity with Black students. It is also meant to be a mechanism to more fully integrate these frameworks into daily teaching.
The caring solidarity framework is meant to be both descriptive of teachers who seek solidarity across the color line and aspirational for teachers seeking to create classrooms where Black students know they are valued and learn to thrive. It asks White teachers to deeply examine their roles, positions, ideas, and methods used when they teach African American students. Caring and solidarity are concepts that have been explored separately and tangentially in education for decades but have not been placed together as a specific way to describe the effort of teachers who work across the color line.
These first few chapters summarize some of that research to give a portrait of how schools disempower and disenfranchise Black students. It begins with discussion of the current White teaching force and race. The second chapter explains the imperative of the moment with an outline of the deepest moral failure of our schools, the school to prison pipeline. The third chapter reviews the concept of multicultural education and its ineffectiveness to meet the current challenges. The conversation then turns to ways to meet the challenges and begins the move from allyship and other asset pedagogies to a new framework of caring solidarity.
No other profession has the potential to reshape and redirect this age where science, reason, and equality have been all but abandoned. Teachers can effect societal change through their work in and out of classrooms. They can expose their students to truths that are unavailable to them anywhere else. Teachers are world changers, and teaching effectively is essential to creating needed change in the country, the world, and our communities.
The White Teaching Force
Before explaining the framework that will allow White teachers to succeed across the color line, it is important to examine the current state of teaching and learning in the United States. In order to understand the moral imperative of dismantling the school to prison pipeline and to solve the current crisis in the education of African American children, we must look at who is teaching, why they are teaching, and how they are teaching.
The American teaching force, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), is 80 percent White, middle-aged, and middle-class (Feistritzer, Griffin, & Linnajarvi, 2011;