White Educators Negotiating Complicity

Reviews / Votes

"Classrooms are contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance circulate with equal vigor. White complicity cannot be engaged critically without careful attention to the active ignorance that sustains it. Barbara Applebaum's White Educators Negotiating Complicity offers a refreshing reorientation to questions of white complicity at a time when critical race theory has been weaponized to stoke culture wars in educational settings. Most scholarly explorations of the topic focus on the discursive habits white students employ to dodge questions of white complicity. Applebaum, however, engages the recent feminist scholarship on epistemic injustice to explore a thornier dilemma: How do white educators who teach about whiteness to racially diverse groups of students negotiate complicity in the systems of domination we seek to disrupt? How does white complicity shape our pedagogy? Applebaum's long-awaited book engages these questions with her characteristic clarity, gifting readers with an indispensable conceptual toolkit for naming and engaging the connections between white complicity and pedagogy." -- Alison Bailey, Illinois State University "In this theoretically sophisticated yet engaging book, Barbara Applebaum explores the complicity of white educators in upholding white power, privilege, and supremacy in the classroom, even while they work with good intentions to disrupt these systems and structures. Arguing for the importance of vigilantly vulnerable and informed humility, she offers essential resources for white teachers and students to work in coalition with their racially diverse peers in dismantling unjust racial systems. This is a must-read book for white teachers who aim both to disrupt white students' willful ignorance around race and to ensure that students of color thrive in predominantly white institutions." -- Kathy Hytten, University of North Carolina Greensboro