Leveraging Vulnerability for Antiracist Praxis with White Educators, Diane Codding

Whiteness is a pervasive problem in education. Through supporting institutional hierarchies and systemic racism, whiteness limits access to high quality learning experiences for students across the United States. Research has shown that whiteness, color-blind ideologies, and white fragility work to obscure racism by making white privilege and institutional racism invisible. One of the ways teachers and education scholars are seeking to disrupt whiteness and white supremacy is through antiracist teaching practices. To combat the negative impact of whiteness in schooling, white teachers must take personal responsibility to engage in learning opportunities that enable them to disrupt white supremacy and explore their own necessary role in reforming schooling practices and policies that disadvantage BIPOC students. Using qualitative methodology, this paper presents a multiple-case study bounded by a white antiracist affinity group in which white teachers participate in a monthly discussion about antiracism and antiracist teaching. Applying a critical framework informed by Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies, this work examines how white classroom teachers, working with racially minoritized students, express vulnerability and invulnerability, also known as white fragility, when engaging in critical conversations around race and racism. Findings reveal a more complex relationship between enactments of white fragility and vulnerability in the bounded context of this study than previously theorized. Vulnerability does not prevent moments of racial discomfort or white fragility from occurring. Instead, vulnerability leaves white educators open to learning in the discomfort rather than descending into the discursive practices of white fragility that leave them invulnerable to change. Understanding how we can foster vulnerability among white educators has the potential to offer essential insight into creating effective spaces for antiracist inquiry and promoting antiracist praxis in education.