Читать книгу More Than an Ally - Michael L. Boucher Jr. - Страница 8

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 and the assumption 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.