TITLE: The Emotional Power of Racism: An Ethnographic Portrait of an All-White High School
AUTHOR: Jennifer Seibel Trainor
SOURCE: CCC 60:1, September 2008 (NCTE)
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
Global questions: What are the causes and origins of racism? How does the emotional infrastructure of schooling and institutional practices work against anti-racist pedagogies?
More specifically, the study asks—
(1) What emotional rules were taught and how were they taught?
(2) How and when were emotional rules performed and enacted?
(3) How were they applied and policed across contexts?
(4) How did emotional learning participate in the development of racial identity, and in the construction of persuasive social beliefs?
ANSWER TO RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
The emotional infrastructure of schooling and institutional practices works against anti-racist pedagogies by encouraging students to respond in the following ways:
(1) Denial or rationalization of racism (e.g., “They just want to complain.”)
(2) White victimhood and reverse racism (e.g., Whites are victims of racism too; “only a small number of ‘ignorant’ or ‘redneck’ whites [are] racist.”)
(3) Bootstrap Theory (“Anybody can make it if they try.”)
(4) White superiority (Non-whites are biologically and genetically inferior to whites.)
RESEARCH DESIGN:
A one-year qualitative study based on—
(1) discussions with a high school teacher during her daily planning period;
(2) interviews of students and administrators;
(3) observation of students in two classrooms; and
(4) examination of curricular material and student writing.
KEY RELATED STUDIES:
Abu-Lughod, L., and C. Lutz [the politics of emotion]
Boler, Megan [emotions and education in relationship to power]
Cintron, Ralph [an ethnographic study of how emotions affect institutional practices]
Daniells, B.A. and Lindquist, Julie [some recent examples of nonacademic ethnographic literacy studies]
DeVoss, Daneille Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill [the embedded social arrangements, organization\, and conventions of practice that govern local practices of literacy, i.e., infrastructure]
Foucault, Michel [mentioned but not cited. Trainor states her research methods derive from Foucaultian theories focused on how norms and rules govern public behavior and private perceptions and emotions.]
Gorzelsky, Gwen [the importance of paying attention to emotional processes when changing ideological beliefs]
Jacobs, Dale, and Laura Micciche [rhetorics of emotion]
MacIntosh, Peggy [a representation of white privilege as property, which Trainor disagrees with]
Kates, Susan (quoting Gere) [the short time span between high school seniors and freshmen composition students]
. . . from a total of 29 citations
UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS:
(1) The “prevailing view of student racism as arising from a need or desire to protect or gain white privilege, or as rooted in ignorance of systemic oppression or lack of exposure to difference” is wrong-headed.
(2) Educators need to rethink “our curricular and pedagogical responses—multicultural exposure to difference, critical interrogations of whiteness and privilege.”
(3) We need to do this by examining “the workings of emotion within institutional practice [the ‘infrastructure’], the embedded social arrangements, organization, and conventions of practice that govern local practices of literacy.”
(4) We also need to pay “attention to the role of individual and collective emotions in the creation of persuasive belief systems.”
SUBJECTS (including how selected):
Students in an all-white high school enrolled in (a) an advanced writing course for college-bound students and (b) a graduation requirement called Introduction to Humanities. The central theme of both courses is “identity, difference, and social justice.”
METHOD OF RESEARCH (including key variables):
A one-year qualitative study based on—
(1) interviews with a progressive teacher at an all-white high school;
(2) interviews of administrators;
(3) observations of classroom interaction;
(4) interviews of students; and
(5) examinations of student essays.
MEASUREMENT OR ANALYTIC METHODS:
Qualitative analysis
RESULTS:
(1) Almost every student essay reflected at least some racist beliefs.
(2) Many students simultaneously held racist and non-racist beliefs.
(3) Many of the racist beliefs were based on emotional rules taught both intentionally and unintentionally.
CONCLUSIONS:
(1) Racist assertions do not always or even often originate in racist attitudes or belief.
(2) Racist discourses are best understood as psychosocial rhetorical phenomena—forms of persuasion that need to be understood not only for their political meanings and implications but also for their persuasive subjective and affective coherence.
(3) Racist discourses structure feelings sometimes linked to, but rarely reducible to, the racial politics such discourses forward.
(4) School scaffolds the emotional frameworks within which racist discourses cohere.
(5) School itself—its infrastructure—exerts a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, pedagogical and persuasive force.
(6) Institutional racism is fueled by curriculum and in-school social practices.
IMPLICATIONS:
Educators and researchers need to—
(1) pay attention to persuasion in antiracist education;
(2) examine the ways that schools structure the emotional logic that makes racism convincing;
(3) consider ways to teach different emotional rules;
(4) change current emotional positions to serve as alternative models for students;
(5) reconsider the effectiveness of racism-as-property metaphors in anti-racist education when exploring racism with white students.
STRENGTHS OF THE STUDY:
The overarching question is limited to an examination of the emotional infrastructure of the school and its curriculum. The author is careful not to generalize about participants’ levels of racism and shows that some individual students hold more than one view. She cites a large number of references that develop and often support her study’s premises from a variety of perspectives.
CRITIQUE OR LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY:
(1) Trainor mentions outside-of-school factors that create racist views and discourse but fails to give sufficient evidence of their possible effects on the racist school infrastructure.
(2) Trainor admits many students exhibited both racist and nonracist beliefs but declines to include the latter.
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE STUDY:
Would there have been a way to analyze the effects of non-school racist beliefs?
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