Digital Storytelling as Racial Justice

Abstract

Teacher education is replete with an overwhelming presence of Whiteness, a presence that if not explicitly interrogated indefinitely recycles hegemonic Whiteness. Needed are pedagogical strategies that expose the hegemonic invisibility of Whiteness. This critical reflection examines the utilization of digital storytelling by teacher educators of color to pedagogically deconstruct Whiteness in a predominately White, urban-focused teacher education course—a necessary deconstruction if these teacher candidates are to effectively teach urban students of color. Particularly, this article deconstructs four academic years of digital stories produced in a mandatory diversity course in an urban teacher education program and illustrates how digital storytelling itself promotes a critical self-revelation that confront Whiteness in White teacher candidates. The preliminary analyses suggest that digital storytelling is a racially just way of having White teacher candidates self-reflect on their own Whiteness in a multitude of ways, by (a) ending emotional distancing, (b) debunking colorblindness, (c) engaging emotions, and (d) sharing the burden of race.

Keywords

teacher education preparation race class gender sexual orientation teacher learning teacher beliefs urban teacher education

Whiteness and Teacher Education: Setting the Stage

Over 10 years ago, Sleeter (2001) argued the existence of an overwhelming presence of Whiteness in teacher education. Such a claim hastened the academy—specifically teacher education—to revisit its practices, promoting the adoption of culturally diverse theories (Villegas & Lucas, 2002) and increasing the hiring of faculty of color. Despite such efforts, middle-class, straight, White females still occupy most positions in both the K-12 teaching profession and in programs of teacher preparation/education in institutions of higher education across the United States (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2012). Needless to say, there still exists an overwhelming presence of Whiteness in teacher education that is so invisible and undetected that teacher education is still asking how is Whiteness defined today. However, with mission statements that now explicitly commit to social justice, an increase in urban-focused programs, and the wide adoption of culturally diverse theories (e.g., cultural responsive teaching, multicultural education, etc.), the manifestation of Whiteness has become more nuanced. How are such programs continually enacting Whiteness despite these commitments to social justice?

Psychoanalytically, this quandary parallels the same underlying racial fallacies found in statements like, “Our society is post-racial upon the election of our first Black president,” “I’m not a racist because I am married to a Latino,” or, more poignant to education, “I cannot possibly be a racist because I teach urban students who are mainly African American and Latino.” These commonly used statements are exemplars of how today’s understanding of race dynamics, inclusive of an understanding of Whiteness, get misconstrued, and, in misconstruing race, the hope for racially just education becomes less hopeful. Plainly stated, increased exposure to people of color, multicultural theories, and explicit commitments to social justice is simply not enough to eradicate Whiteness in teacher education. To self-invest in an antiracist education system, interrogations of how Whiteness mutates, survives, and re-fashions itself must be taken up, even if it means uncomfortable discussions.

If we, as academics, acknowledge Sleeter’s (2001) demand for diversifying teacher education over 10 years ago, then why is teacher education still emotionally investing in maintaining Whiteness-at-work in the academy by not talking about the issues of Whiteness directly (Yoon, 2012)? When dealing with Whiteness, often invoked are theorizations of how Whiteness operates in White teachers (Ringrose, 2007), how Whiteness becomes a burden for faculty of color (Williams & Evans-Winters, 2005), and how Whiteness operates writ large (Leonardo, 2009). Yet not often considered is why a society may continue to maintain Whiteness for emotional reasons. Because masculinists often refute the study of emotions and the pervasiveness of male-privilege in a patriarchal society (Boler, 1999; hooks, 1994), the critical understandings of the emotionality of Whiteness are overlooked, therefore this article includes a critical analysis of Whiteness and emotionalities of Whiteness to attempt to act upon Sleeter’s (2001) decade-old demand for de-Whitenizing teacher education. The focus of our analysis in this article is “How do teachers make sense of Whiteness and/or their own White identity in the context of digital stories as pedagogy?

Before exploring pedagogical practices that help debunk Whiteness in teacher education we, the authors, provide some definitions to clarify our conceptualizations. First, Whiteness does not equate to White people, albeit Whiteness tends to operate more readily among White people due to the nature of White supremacy (Allen, 2001; Gillborn, 2006; Leonardo, 2009). Whiteness is a “social construction that embraces white culture, ideology, racialization, expressions and experiences, epistemologies, emotions and behaviors” (Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon, & Galindo, 2014, p. 290). White supremacy is defined as the institutionalized process that benefits Whites at the expense of people of color (described more below). Those individuals who attempt to defy Whiteness in a White supremacist society are often labeled “race traitors” who betray the White race (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996). In acknowledging that a “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity” (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 10), we also posit its reverse: loyalty to Whiteness is treason to humanity. As such, to re-humanize education we conceptually believe—as critical race theory (CRT) asserts—that critical race analyses are a viable option for racially just education and to defy Whiteness altogether (Taylor, Gillborn, & Ladson-Billings, 2009). Second, the use of the term White supremacy refers to the overarching institutional and systemic processes of White superiorization, particularly in education (Lewis & Manno, 2011). Finally, terms like Whites and people of color are used generally to illustrate the overarching impact of White supremacy on both groups. We acknowledge that there are different degrees of experiences within these racial categories; however, with respect to larger racial analyses, we use these terms to highlight larger group racial dynamics.

We are personally and professionally preoccupied with diversifying teacher education because we are both teacher educators responsible for training teachers. Although one author is employed at a predominately White institution and the other by a historically Black college, both experience Whiteness in the curriculum, research, professional organizations, pedagogies, and instruction for teachers. As such, we are primarily concerned with how to deconstruct Whiteness in teacher education. In addition, as faculty of color who are typically the only person of color in the teacher education space, deconstructing Whiteness remains a challenge because although we are professors, we are still “out powered by whiteness” (Matias, 2013a, p. 66). This is shown when disgruntled White students “complain” about faculty of color who talk about controversial topics like race (de Jesus & Ma, 2004; Stanley, 2006). Like our antiracist White colleagues, we are constantly finding ways to engage racial justice by directly debunking Whiteness. However, unlike our White colleagues, we, as faculty of color, need alternative ways to engage Whiteness because our students and colleagues find our attempts at direct engagement threatening. After years of teaching, both of us have found a way to emotionally break down Whiteness in a way that fairly redistributes the racial burden of race. This is not to say that we relinquish our responsibility of the educational development of our teacher candidates on topics of race; rather, by placing the onus of race on our teacher candidates, they are able to engage in truer racial justice by beginning with a critical deconstruction of themselves.

According to Skouge and Rao (2009), digital stories are “multimedia projects employing the use of photographs, video, audio, and music” (p. 54). They are used specifically to tell a story in a multimedia form and are beneficial in increasing teacher knowledge and skills (Heo, 2009). For us, the use of digital storytelling has become a technological pedagogy that supports the critical self-reflection needed for our teacher candidates to emotionally invest in deconstructing and dismantling Whiteness in teacher education. Instead of having the professors of color point out Whiteness in teaching and teacher education, which is often met with resistance, we invited our teacher candidates to self-reflect on their own actions and histories through digital stories, a process that helps them emotionally break down Whiteness. This has become an effective strategy for our teacher candidates to rediscover their own Whiteness and share in the burden of race by dismantling Whiteness themselves. In fact, Ladson-Billings (2000) argues that teacher education must restructure using autobiography because it allows teacher candidates to “reflect on their practicum experiences in diverse classrooms” (p. 209). Further, Johnson (2002) argues that autobiographies provide a perspective for which White students can see differently. As such, the pedagogical implementation of autobiography is imperative in teacher education. However, with respect to the millennial generation where social media, technology, and video imaging is easily accessible to each student’s smartphone, this pedagogical reflective article re-examines how digital stories, a form of digital autobiographies, can be a pedagogical and technological conduit (or strategy) for breaking down Whiteness and its emotionalities in teacher education.

Before we analyze the pedagogical implementation of digital storytelling, we begin by explicating the theories that frame our analysis. Namely, we draw from an amalgamation of critical Whiteness studies, CRT, and critical emotion studies to undergird our analysis. We then explicate our methods and methodology for this pedagogical reflective study. Next, we analyze the effectiveness of digital stories in three main themes:

Personalization: Stopping Emotional Distancing

I See Color!: Debunking Colorblind Ideology

Engaging Emotions: Analyzing Emotions to Understand Whiteness

Finally, we conclude with implications and recommendations for the field of teacher education. Although understanding Whiteness requires ongoing critical discussions, we hope that this technological pedagogy provides teacher educators with ways to have their teacher candidates—who are predominantly White—feel the burden of race in a way that is self-reflective and conducive to change. Suffice it to say, not until someone feels the pain and burden of race can they truly understand why they must emotionally self-invest in prolonged projects of antiracist education.

Theoretically Framing the Project: The Backstage

To theoretically investigate the effectiveness of digital storytelling as a pedagogical strategy for deconstructing Whiteness, this article employs an amalgamation of critical Whiteness studies, CRT, and critical emotion studies. That is, although each theory has its own tenets and guiding principles, we opt to fuse them together to undergird how we analyze the digital stories in total. In this article we do not pair our analyses of the digital stories with one particular theory. For example, we will not pair one aspect of the analysis with a tenet of social justice or validation of experiential knowledge found in CRT. Or, how one emotional response of the digital stories is a direct example of how emotions are expressed within the confine of a set power structure. Instead, we outline below how each theory contributes to an underlying framework for how we analyze the stories.

CRT

For example, as CRT acknowledges the endemic nature of race, racism, and White supremacy in education (Taylor et al., 2009), we need not explore whether or not race, racism, and/or White supremacy is present in the digital stories. Instead we can operate under the assumption that they are operating and hence investigate ways how they are operating and how the teacher candidates are combating it. In addition, the article parallels the racially just quality of digital storytelling to CRT’s counterstorytelling (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) as both combat majoritarian stories about race. However, instead of applying CRT’s counterstorytelling as a mode of racial expression for the racially colonized, the application of digital storytelling in this article will be used to decolonize the racial colonizers’ mind. That is, according to Memmi (1965), the state of racial colonization leaves society with two portraitures: the racial colonizers (Whites) and racially colonized (people of color). To provide a more racially just educational system we, as educators, must find ways to decolonized both portraitures from the dominant narrative of race.

Critical Whiteness Studies

Critical Whiteness studies is a transdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex nature of race, racism, and White supremacy with a specific focus on how manifestations of Whiteness uphold White supremacy (Leonardo, 2009). Allen and Howard (2012) define White supremacy as follows:

White supremacy is the dominant form of racial supremacy at the global level. White supremacy structures racialized social relations within, between, and across nation-states throughout the world. It functions to construct White geopolitical domination, ascribe higher social value to White personhood and labor, and distribute unjust advantages to those who approximate as “White.” (p. 1429)

With respect to this definition, Whiteness then encompasses various elements such as colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2010), White racialization (Frankenberg, 1993; Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996; Thandeka, 1999), White racial identity (Helms, 1990), Whiteness as property and economic advantage (Harris, 1993; Oliver & Shapiro, 1997), Whiteness as hegemonic (Morrison, 1992), possessive investment in Whiteness (Lipsitz, 2006), White abolition (Ignatiev & Garvey, 2007), and White privilege (McIntosh, 2001; Rothenberg, 2008). These theorizations provide micro- and macro-leveled analyses of enactments of Whiteness both individually and systemically, all of which, when expressed, ultimately uphold a White supremacist society.

For example, as Thandeka (1999) suggests when engaging in racial discourses, displays of emotional discomfort stem from complex dynamics that develop after a White child witnesses racial dynamics but is told to adopt colorblind ideology lest she/he be ostracized from the White community. Such a process of racialization then cultivates a deep sense of shame in the White child because “the price for the right to be white had already been exacted: wholeness” (p. 87). Once the child is grown, these emotions that were first cultivated in childhood are then displayed later when teaching or learning about race which, when emotionally resistant, bars the capacity to learn about racism (see hooks, 1994; Tatum, 2009; Williams & Evans-Winters, 2005). Without learning about racism and Whiteness, the field of teacher education, though meritorious in its attempt to combat racism with culturally responsive pedagogies and diversity courses, falls short in tackling racism itself (see Berlak, 1999). That is, since there are few curricular inclusions that provide a critical analysis of racism and Whiteness, “discussions about racism are in some sense meaningless to them [predominantly White students]” (Berlak, 1999, p. 112).

Fortuitous is this phenomenon in that the study of race—specifically Whiteness—needs a pedagogical process that accounts for the processes one undergoes with her/his racialized emotionalities. Deconstructing one’s racialized emotions requires taking a personal stake in how one reacts to learning about race and how those emotional reactions may, in part, impact how one learns about racism. Such a personalized process moves the discussions of racism from meaningless to personally invested. Suffice it to say that to move away from doing lip service to race studies, teacher education must directly engage Whiteness and emotionality to deconstruct the hegemonic stronghold of White supremacy. As one race scholar puts it, “racism is not the disease; it’s the symptom.”¹ White supremacy, on the other hand, is the disease that is supported by Whiteness. With respect to this, a pedagogical process must allow for one to self-interrogate the racialized emotions felt at each step of learning and feeling about race.

Applying critical Whiteness studies to digital storytelling as a form of critical Whiteness pedagogy then becomes advantageous in that it provides an overarching critique of the hegemonic practices of Whiteness that often get overlooked or ignored due to the nature of its dominance. However, this is not without limitation; though transdisciplinary, the focus on Whiteness often does not account for the other various factors that may play a part in how one learns and engages with learning about race (Helms, 1990). For example, as Helms (1990) suggests, initial White racial identity stages like contact and disintegration increase “awareness of the social implications of race on a personal level” (p. 68) depending on a variety of elements such as sociocultural influences, psychological products, personal attributes, worldviews, and systemic forces that one may or may not experience. Thus, one factor alone paints only a partial picture but is nonetheless painting how that one factor may be manifesting and influencing one’s emotions. Since this article focuses on using digital storytelling as a pedagogical strategy to emotionally deconstruct Whiteness, the study of Whiteness itself is vital to understanding why it is essential to deconstruct in the first place.

Critical Emotion Studies

Finally, emotions, and the critical study of emotions, also play a vital role in understanding how digital storytelling provides a medium for one to engage in deconstructing Whiteness. Emotions, in general, “impact teaching and learning significantly” (Winans, 2012, p. 150), especially when topics produce uncomfortable emotionalities. Such is the case with the study of racism and Whiteness. By emotionally distancing oneself with the topic, students inadvertently “reinforce rather than question inequitable social norms” (p. 152). As such, Winans (2012) demands that education includes critical emotion literacy, so that it becomes a social practice that provides a means of analysis or “an ongoing critical inquiry regarding emotions, an inquiry that allows us to attend effectively to different and identity” (p. 152). For the purposes of this study, applications of critical emotional literacy allow for critical analyses of emotions and psychoanalytic approaches to investigate from where these emotions stem.

Instead of assuming that emotions emanate from one’s innate sensibilities, Ahmed (2004) posits that emotionality “is clearly dependent on relations of power, which endow ‘others’ with meaning and value” (p. 4). Boler (1999) corroborates this when she claims “feeling power refers to the ways in which our emotions, which reflect our complex identities situated with social hierarchies, ‘embody’ and ‘act out’ relations of power” (p. 3). Henceforth, emotions are not expressed or felt in a vacuum, isolated from the context and the power structures that are embedded in those contexts. Rather, emotions become a process of social interaction, one that is bound by the rules of power. Race, for example, is one structure, which has a hierarchy of power wherein Whites are positioned as “normal” and “superior,” whereas people of color are categorized as “different” and “inferior.” In order for the structure of race to manifest systemically, the process of White supremacy ensues via enactments of Whiteness. Allen (2001) suggests “whites, whether knowingly or not, act as agents of whiteness in the surveillance of white territories, thus constructing psychosocial spaces of trauma and alienation, such as schools, for people of color” (p. 480). It is within these domains that emotions are situated and thus cannot escape the subtleties of White supremacy.

To illustrate, consider the often-invoked emotions of guilt, anger, and denial when engaging a critical race dialogue with White students. Such emotional expressions are often categorized as White resistance that are routinely and “performatively staged in the classroom” (Ringrose, 2007, p. 328). Left unexamined, these emotions become recentered “in ways that serve to reinscribe whiteness as the normative centre for discussion while continuing to marginalize other social groups (Solomona, Portelli, Daniel, & Campbell, 2005, p. 166). As such, it behooves this reflective pedagogical analysis to reconsider the complexities of emotions, particularly the emotionalities of Whiteness, if we, as antiracist educators, are to engage in prolonged projects of racial justice. Coupling both critical Whiteness studies and critical emotion studies provides a more nuanced interpretation of the effectiveness of racially just teacher education because it acknowledges both the racial and the emotional dynamics that take place when deconstructing racism, White supremacy, and Whiteness in a predominately White teacher education course. Instead of emotionally distancing oneself from the content, digital storytelling becomes a pedagogical application that cultivates students’ personal investment with the material.

All three theories provide a foundation for why and how we analyze the digital stories. Although we are not preoccupied in aligning how each aspect of the analysis corresponds to a specific guideline or tenet of each theory, we are using the theory to drive our interpretation of the analysis.

Reflective Methods and Methodology: Explications of a Production

We draw upon the tradition of teacher reflection because it leads us “into a deeper understanding around the areas that might otherwise be ignored” (Milner, 2003, p. 173). As race, moreover Whiteness, is often ignored, we opted to engage in teacher reflection to gauge our own pedagogical effectiveness. Specifically, the digital stories collected in one of the author’s teaching experience were considered a data set and, upon re-watching them all, we critically reflected on the messages each digital story had and how it may contribute to deconstructing Whiteness. In this process, we deciphered common themes across the videos. As each author specializes in Whiteness and emotion studies, respectively, we came together to offer a more holistic interpretation of these digital stories with respects to how it debunks Whiteness through emotions in teacher education. As such, we, as Gallagher (1992) suggests, applied a critical hermeneutical approach with respects to emotions and Whiteness, to interpret the meanings behind the videos. In this interpretation, there were several themes; of them we focused on three for the purpose of this article and addressed our question above. They are as follows: (a) Personalization: Stopping Emotional Distancing, (b) Debunking Colorblind Ideology, and, (c) Engaging Emotions: Analyzing Emotions to Understand Whiteness.

The Context of the Digital Stories

The pedagogical application of digital storytelling is employed in the first course of an urban and diverse teacher preparation program about cultural diversity in urban education. As the program is located in the only urban city near the west, it promotes curricular and philosophical inclusions of urban education, culturally responsive pedagogies, and social justice. The course is organized in a cohort style and has multiple sections offered each semester: fall, spring, and summer. In the course, teacher candidates investigate the systemic power behind race, gender, class, and heterosexism in society and how they apply to their role as an urban classroom teacher. A majority of the teacher candidates are White females. Because the course is predominantly White and middle-class, the curricular inclusion of Whiteness and emotionality was formalized, especially after a study conducted on the program’s graduates suggested that the teacher candidates were indeed using culturally responsive and multicultural educational vocabularies but in ways that continued to reinforce Whiteness (see Matias et al., 2014). Although there was curricular and philosophical inclusions of Whiteness and emotionality, there was not an identified pedagogical strategy that allowed for constant critical self-reflection of a teacher candidate’s emotional journey in learning about race, a necessary process for a student to learn and emotionally self-invest. In the past we have used one-page reflection papers but the two-dimensional aspect masked some of the deep-rooted emotions students were facing (see Matias et al., 2014). Meaning, they were using the politically correct words of racial justice but not deeply feeling connected to those words than simply for a grade. This became problematic because to do the work of racial justice, students needed to emotionally invest in the work itself. As such, digital storytelling was adopted.

As digital storytelling “allow[s] students the opportunity to utilize various modalities (e.g., images, narrative, video, and/or music) as a means for creating and sharing their experiences” (Rolón-Dow, 2011, p. 171), it also becomes a perfect medium for which teacher candidates can document their emotional experiences in learning about race (see Gachago, Ivala, Chigona, & Condy, 2015). Instead of using digital storytelling in ways that expose “microaggressions and racial stock stories²” for students of color; digital storytelling becomes a medium for which White teacher candidates can deconstruct their own complicit roles in microaggressions and as spectators of racial stock stories via their investment in Whiteness (Rolón-Dow, 2011, p. 171). Suffice it to say that instead of a decolonizing pedagogy that decolonized the mind-sets of racially colonized students (students of color) for the sake of social justice education (see Tejeda, Espinoza, & Gutierrez, 2003), the applications for this study attempts to decolonize, as Memmi (1965) would suggest, the mind-sets of the racial colonizers (White students). However, a unique racial dynamic occurs when the professor who is supposedly decolonizing a racial colonizer’s mind is herself categorized as a part of the racially colonized group. It is one thing for White professors to teach White teacher candidates about Whiteness; it is another for a female professor of color to teach White teacher candidates about Whiteness, especially when she is the only person of color in the room. Instead of lecturing and providing evidentiary literary to explicate Whiteness which is often emotionally resisted, the classroom content becomes as marked as the professor of color herself (de Jesus & Ma, 2004; Orelus, 2011; Stanley, 2006). Therefore, a pedagogical process that turns the onus of race off of the racialized identity of the professor of color and onto the hegemonic enactment of White identities brought about by the predominantly White teacher candidates must be articulated. Thus, digital stories is particularly suited for helping White teachers deconstruct their own Whiteness because as they engage with the literature they must present this reflection in a visual form that is applied to their own identities instead of juxtaposing it off their professor’s identity. Essentially, the digital story becomes a microscopic looking glass that re-examines their own life on their own terms.

Although beneficial for White teacher candidates, the use of digital storytelling was also beneficial for teacher candidates of color. For one, some teacher candidates of color deconstruct how they too have adopted Whiteness ideology (see Matias & Mackey, in press). Other times, teacher candidates of color deconstructed how Whiteness has impacted them and how they had to re-empower their own identities away from Whiteness. In the end, the use of digital stories provided a viable medium for the teacher candidates to deconstruct their own identities.

The Selection of the Digital Stories as Exemplars

The approximately 150 digital stories viewed in this study come from 4 years of teaching the specified course. However, for this article we intentionally highlight three digital stories as case studies to highlight the impact of the digital storytelling process on the emotionality of Whiteness. We did so deliberately to capture the essence of each video instead of incorporating too many various digital stories to prove a point. The focus of our analysis is on the image selections, the graphic designs, music, and message that stems from the culmination of all these digital story elements. We chose these three cases because they were reflective of the major themes of most of the 150 stories (the themes are explained in the findings discussion). That is, most of the digital stories were similar in that they addressed one’s own identities and as most of our teacher candidates were White, the videos often delved into their own Whiteness. In this respect, the videos had the same ultimate goal: deconstructing the self based off the curriculum of Whiteness. However, these three digital stories executed the visual imagery, music, narration, and storyline most clearly and stylistically. Though print articles does not have the capacity to show the films, we try our best here to capture the multidimensionality of the films by sharing the visual frames, music chosen, quotations included, and narration tone at length. And, in doing so, it limits us to fully capture three digital stories. As such, we opted to focus in on three digital stories to capture the essence of their videos. Information regarding the digital story assignment includes³

The Digital Story project is a culminating product for this course. It is designed to provide a multimedia platform for you to answer to the essential questions for the course by drawing upon your learning from the course readings, activities, discussions, Jing video reflections, community visits, session reflections, group project, and in-class interactions. As such, you are expected to include past assignments/activities, reading quotes, and your analysis and application of these quotes to your life to demonstrate growth in learning. This is NOT a video scrapbook of your life. Rather, this is demonstrating how you re-evaluate your life after learning these concepts. There must be a coherent storyline (from syllabus).

Scaffolding Digital Stories

To scaffold the project, teacher candidates used a free program called Jing Videos so that they get used to capturing visual representations of their reflections and applications of the readings, lectures, field trips, and activities throughout the course. This provided them with a multidimensional approach to reflecting on the curriculum and pedagogies. Near the end of the semester a technology expert also provided a digital story in-class workshop where students already had their images, storyboard, and music prepared to fuse together into one film. The students were instructed to use all their prior assignments as evidence of development, growth, and/or learning.

Analyzing the Digital Stories as Racial Justice: The Plot Thickens

There are various elements of Whiteness (e.g., colorblindness, as property, as law or natural, etc.) that maintain White supremacy that should not be mistaken for traditional methodological codes. These elements are to be considered contexualizations of Whiteness that stem from the literature on Whiteness. However, as we fuse emotion theory with Whiteness studies, we conceptualize some of the elements in emotional ways. Some of these elements included emotional distancing, denying the emotionalities of Whiteness, and the refusal to share in the burden of race. By “refusing to share in the burden of race” we mean that teacher candidates saw race as a problem of the Other and not of all, including themselves. However, the digital storytelling process allowed the teacher candidates to first identify them and consequently disrupt them. Below we share snippets of the three digital stories of focus told by White teacher candidates and how the process of digital storytelling served as a medium to self-interrogate their own emotional investment and disinvestment in Whiteness.

Personalization: Stopping Emotional Distancing

Digital stories, as McShay and Gilchrist Fath (2008) suggest, is a medium that can aid in the process of discovering one’s own identity, especially with respect to larger institutional systems such as race, class, gender, and so on. Fortuitous is this in that the mechanisms of Whiteness operate in ways that racially privileged individuals do not have to process—let alone acknowledge—their racially privileged identity. To investigate White privilege then, teacher candidates are asked to do a culminating project about their learning journey through the digital storytelling course. By doing so, they are to consider the larger system of race, specifically Whiteness, and how it may have influenced how they view the world, their role as a teacher, and how they may interact with their urban schools and urban students of color. Pedagogically, the process of digital storytelling arrested their emotional distancing of race and racism.

Christy’s Digital Story

After sharing her experiences growing up in an upper-class, White community in Madison, Wisconsin, Christy talked about how graduating from one of Colorado’s premier universities left her feeling well-educated, until she took the following course in the urban teacher education program:

In 2010, I graduated with a degree in political science. I thought of myself, at the time, as a person who was informed with what was going on politically in this country and had a good grasp on how politics works. While I have learned a lot about politics, in my courses the issues of race was always skirted around as an economic or urban issue. Never have the words “Whiteness,” “White privilege,” “colorblindness,” “racism,” and “race” as it exists today have ever been touched on or ever been mentioned in any of my classes or experiences. How is it possible that I was handed a degree in political science without ever talking about race or say the words “Black,” “White,” “Brown,” and “People of Color”? How are we to get to the roots of these issues if we don’t ever talk about them? I thought I was in the know, but I have yet to be exposed.

Supplementing Christy’s narrative are images of her getting her degree, the campus, and the capital building in Denver. When discussing how she “learned a lot about politics in [her] courses” but never learned about race, she includes a slide with a quotation about White privilege:

In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth. (Referenced from McIntosh, 2001, p. 99)

Embedded in her own self-analysis is how she reconsiders what she thought she knew when she acknowledges Whiteness. That is, because she was an upper-class, White female, she felt competent in her knowledge set of society despite never having talked about issues of race and her own White privilege. When she unveils her Whiteness, she begins to question,

How is it possible that I was handed a degree in political science without ever talking about race or say the words “Black,” “White,” “Brown,” “People of Color”? How are we to get to the roots of these issues if we don’t ever talk about them?

Instead of opting for emotional frozenness (Tatum, 2008), Christy forges emotionally deeper to critique her own Whiteness by stating, “I thought I was in the know but I have yet to be exposed.” As the preceding comment was about her lack of understanding of race, her acknowledgement of this lack of understanding both critiques her education and the hegemonic Whiteness embedded in her education.

Further into Christy’s digital story she applies a critique of Whiteness when she disrupts the normalcy of Whiteness in one of her personal experiences. For example, she relays a story about how the company she was working for at the time used images of people of color on their company calendar, a misrepresentation of the true racial make-up of the company. She then questions aloud, “What is driving my company to give this false perception? Why do they want to give this perception when it’s not the reality?” Christy’s line of inquiry demonstrates how she personally invests in her quest to disrupt Whiteness. Instead of blindly accepting the usage of people of color on brochures, a common practice of many institutions, she engages in a personal critique as she tries to unveil the hegemonic practice of Whiteness in her life. Although we cannot ascertain whether or not her quest continues (as it is beyond the scope of this particular study), we can assert that she at least attempted to disrupt Whiteness by acknowledging it, identifying it, and critiquing it via the digital story-something she noted earlier she never had to do.

Christy then applies her knowledge of Whiteness to her understanding of herself, and how by emotionally addressing it she no longer emotionally deflects it, often an emotional process of Whiteness that upholds White supremacy. She begins by narrating her thought process of Whiteness with an image that shows a female reflecting out of a window.

Throughout my experiences I have come in and out of my own consciousness of my own White privilege. At times, I felt it inside and felt ashamed but I have always shied away from dealing with it before this class. Since the start of this class, my own self-perception has evolved and my view of how I engage in society has become more mindful. I realize I have to remain conscious and actively seek to challenge the status quo within classrooms and society. For me, becoming a teacher has been more than a professional change; it has become a part of me and how I live.

Christy’s reflections reveal her commitment to emotionally investing in the process of unveiling Whiteness instead of emotionally distancing herself from it. She acknowledges that she initially felt shameful in the process of acknowledging her privilege, yet now realizes that it is an emotion she must deal with to become the socially just teacher she hopes to be. With respect to critical Whiteness studies and CRT, one avenue for racial justice is for Whites to realize their Whiteness (see Preston, 2013) because the enactments of Whiteness preserve a state of White supremacy that ultimately impacts people of color. In taking on this onus of race, Whites do their part in dismantling the overwhelming presence of Whiteness.

I See Color!: Debunking Colorblind Ideology

Tendero (2006) claims that “[d]igital storytelling efficiently . . . develop[s] a teaching consciousness” (p. 175). Developing a consciousness helps in addressing another particular element of Whiteness known as colorblind ideology, which Bonilla-Silva (2010) suggests is a poorly grouped set of ideas, beliefs, stories, and rationales used to “help whites justify contemporary white supremacy” (p. 262). In knowing that a majority of teachers are White and invoke the “I don’t see color” ideology, it then behooves teacher education to revisit how they directly combat racism in education if their teacher candidates choose to deny constructs of race (Solomona et al., 2005). To promote antiracist education, “we need to nurture a large cohort of antiracist whites to begin challenging color-blind nonsense from within” (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 267). Yet challenging “from within” is harder when there still exists an overwhelming presence of Whiteness among faculty who do not discuss race, racism, and White supremacy directly. Even more difficult is broaching the topic of White supremacy when the professor is the only person of color in the teacher education classroom. Therefore, developing a critical inquiry from within requires a great deal of critical reflection that must first be modeled to students so that they can apply the process of critical race and Whiteness critique onto their own lives and future practices. The digital stories in the course became a repository documenting the teacher candidates’ emergence from colorblind ideology into critical awareness of a racialized society, including a racial critique of their own Whiteness. One such story comes from Laura who tells her narrative of emerging past colorblindness.

Laura’s Digital Story

The first scene of Laura’s digital story shows her typing out what she had once written as a class post about her identity: “My identity is socially constructed by my family, the schools I have attended, and by the community I involve myself with.” After this quote is written on the screen, she begins a barrage of childhood pictures that documents how her family is White, her schools were White, and her communities are all White. She then narrates: “I was raised not to see the color of one’s skin but the person underneath the skin.” Doing so, Laura critically reflects back on her upbringing and how she was raised to be colorblind by her parents, schools, and communities, which were all White. This racialized childrearing practice corroborates Thandeka’s (1999) assertion that White children learn to become White through such practices like colorblindness. Notwithstanding this colorblind ideology, she proceeds further in her digital story and includes a black screen on which the words “Critical Race Theory” are written. Using these words as a visual jumping off point, she then maps out her newly racialized lens by creating a visual web on the screen and narrating her emerging awareness to race:

Through the lens of critical race theory I have been able to re-examine how my identity is socially constructed and how I view others. Re-define the meanings of words like racist, colorblind, and Whiteness. And re-evaluate how I will use my new knowledge to build a socially just classroom and community.

Upon her narration, she visually writes out each of the italicized words onto the screen upon stating it. She does so to illustrate how her re-examination, re-defining, and re-evaluation stems from her exposure to CRT. She then documents her changing racialized identity throughout the course by including a picture of the Post-its she wrote each session during the course:

In my Post-it note reflections written down every day in Dr. X’s class, I noticed a subtle yet dramatic shift in how I view my own identity. I moved from thinking about my identity in the context of my own life and experiences to pushing away what I know to see other perspectives, to pulling back into my identity in order to encompass myself while I look at and react to other people’s experiences. Moving forward from here I am learning not to push my identity away like I have been doing before but to disentangle and unveil the complexity of my identity in order to work as a critical and self-reflexive teacher.

This narration includes three stick figure drawings: (a) one thinking about her identity, (b) one pushing away her identity, and (c) one putting on new glasses with the word “identity” on the lens. After her narration she includes a screen with the quote “Whiteness is unmarked or invisible, particularly from white people who benefit from it” (referenced from Yoon, 2012, p. 4). She continues her narration with a vulnerable look into her own Whiteness:

I realize now that before this class I was in fact blind to my own Whiteness. Since reading McIntosh’s list of privileges in her article, I have begun to look at everything from what I say to how I dress through a critical lens. For example, I can wear sweat pants and a hoodie out in public and people will not assume I am a thug, a drug dealer, or a criminal. Why? Because I am a White girl. I can be accepted to a college or program and people will assume that I have earned that position rather than assuming I received the position to fill a quota. As a White person in this day in age I also have the option and the privilege to not see color if I so choose. There are two major ways I can choose to not see color. For one, I can easily reside in a place where I do not have people of color as neighbors, I do not go to school with people of color, and I do not see people of color in TV. Secondly, I can claim to be colorblind and see everyone as an equal because I do not have to deal with racial microaggressions on a daily basis. Innocence is bliss and that is why I am calling the option to be colorblind a privilege; a privilege only available to White people.

By engaging in a critical self-reflexive process of interrogating her own Whiteness, Laura is able to challenge her own colorblind ideology from within. That is, instead of only learning about general dimensions of race, how it impacts people of color, and relying on people of color to inform her about her Whiteness, she better learns how to self-interrogate her own Whiteness, her complicit role in it. Although recognizing her own privilege in Whiteness is but an initial step toward racial justice, it is a necessary step one must take to later understand how her complicity in Whiteness impacts people of color. Therefore, for a teacher candidate to debunk colorblindness and, as Laura suggests, choose to see color, she/he must first see her/his personal role in the dynamics of race, how that role is interacted, and how racism is felt.

Furthermore, because digital storytelling places the burden on the narrator to self-reflect, it likewise creates the onus of one’s learning about race onto the teacher candidate instead of emotionally projecting onto faculty of color or faculty who critically address Whiteness and racism (see Matias, 2013a, 2013b; Williams & Evans-Winters, 2005). Such a pedagogical strategy then has the capacity to reduce the resistance that many professors who engage in race and professors of color face when introducing elements of Whiteness.

Engaging Emotions: Analyzing Emotions to Understand Whiteness

Whiteness has many emotional elements, one of which is White resistance. White resistance is often characterized as “resolute” (Matias, 2013a, 2013b), “hysterical” (Gonsalves, 2008), “racially microaggressive” (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001), and a response that indicates a person’s unwillingness to learn (Rodriguez, 2009). However, we posit that resistance stems from an emotional root (Matias, 2014). Thandeka (1999) argues that resistance is a reactive response to feeling the surfacing of White ethnic shame. Such a shame, she suggests, develops in childhood where White children are reared to deny bearing witness to race and adopt colorblind ideology to remain in the White community. This process leaves Whites feeling as if they are “someone who is living a lie” (p. 24) and when that lie of colorblindness surfaces, the natural emotional response is to self-protect through resistance.

Yet, it is this resistance that nonetheless maintains Whiteness because it positions White emotionalities above the emotionalities of others. Take for instance the study of DiAngelo and Sensoy (2012); they found that the fears of Whites who engage in interracial race dialogues are based on sentiments as opposed to people of color’s fears that are based on historical evidence of job or housing discrimination, racial violence, or racial ostracism. Despite this, the emotional resistance that surfaces among Whites during these interracial race dialogues ends up expressing itself in ways that ultimately stops the dialogue. Acknowledging this phenomenon, digital storytelling becomes a place for White teacher candidates to engage and process their emotions before emotionally reacting via resistance. To begin this progression, teacher candidates need to unlearn the common response of emotional frozenness and/or emotional projections when engaging in dialogues of race (Tatum, 2008; Thandeka, 1999) and relearn how to re-process their feelings for themselves.

Rebecca’s Digital Story

Rebecca is White female teacher candidate who engages her emotions when realizing and debunking her Whiteness and promoting racial justice. She begins her digital story with an image of the Colorado Rockies and narrates her emotions without any background music:

As professor [X] once said, “Hurt is hurt and pain is pain. A life is a life.” And I add as humanity you’re all called to serve. Oh goodness, I am not even sure where to begin because of the massive amount of learning that has taken place in the last four weeks. It hasn’t always been comfortable. It certainly wasn’t always easy and many times understanding did not come naturally.

Rebecca’s need to highlight this portion of her narrative without music or changing imagery demonstrates the importance of prefacing her digital story with these emotions in mind. That is, she was critically aware of her emotionality, especially those embedded in Whiteness. For example, she engages her learning from the course thus far and applies it by acknowledging that it will be uncomfortable and difficult to learn about race and Whiteness, and that such learning will not come naturally. Regardless to this emotional task, she remains steadfast in committing to those emotions. In doing so, she opts to cultivate an emotional fortitude needed to engage in prolonged processes of racial justice—beginning with racial dialogues—instead of emotionally resist due to feelings of shame.

The prevalence of facing her emotions were apparent throughout the entire digital story. In one section, she draws from a lecture in class to critically analyze her fear:

Coming into this program and course, if I am honest, I had two fears. One was that I have had hardly any idea of what to expect and the unknown can be scary. The second fear was that I would be inadequate and inept to teach. On the 17th the professor talked about fear. There’s the tangible fear and the sentimental one. The tangible is fear of oppression, being beaten, neglected, uncared for, hungry, etc. Those you can actually feel and absorb. Sentimental fear is that maybe I will feel uncomfortable or that my neighbor may think differently of me. I have to ask myself, “Which one is more precedent and which one more important?” And with tangible fears, I must be an ally.

Acknowledging that fears are different depending on social locations, such as race, Rebecca opts to remain committed to allyship. Instead of elevating sentimental fears over tangible fears—a process indicative of Whiteness—she not only realizes the differences, she also promotes allyship to take ownership of dismantling the tangible fears that often categorize the experiences of people of color. She confirms this by later stating how she commits to dialoguing about race despite being afraid and speaking up for those who are silenced:

Oh Lord, have I learned so many things, practical things; things that I can take with me to use in my classroom such as discussions of race and not being afraid to share that and speaking up for those who do not have a voice.

Finally, Rebecca engages her emotionalities of Whiteness by exploring how Whiteness impacts her identity. As Helms (1990) argues, White racial identity models a process of awareness, which must first ensue to get at a level of racial autonomy. Often times this awareness is acknowledged upon a contact stage of identity where “one encounters the idea or the actuality of Black people” (Helms, 1990, p. 55). However, because de facto racial segregation leaves communities more racially segregated than du jour racial segregation (Orfield, 2001), the one’s mere contact with people of color is unreliable. Therefore, debunking Whiteness with literature and emotional support must find ways to practice constant self-interrogation. Rebecca models this when she applies her understanding of Whiteness to her identity:

In class we were asked to reflect every day about what we have learned and address the three essential questions [for the course]. My last response was “My identity is socially constructed by generations of Whiteness including the perspectives and experiences of a privileged White girl.” There are negatives with this, such as not recognizing the struggles that people of color, people with disabilities, and people with different sexual orientations . . . have faced. My societal standards are no longer with the dominant group.

By confronting how Whiteness impacts her own identity, Rebecca is emotionally prepared to engage in the emotional processes that may surface when she engages in racially just projects. This self-interrogation puts the onus of racial justice on Rebecca’s shoulders more so than relying on the presence and interactions of people of color to push her into a stage of contact. Essentially, through engaging in her emotions and learning about race and Whiteness, she pushes herself into the first stage of White racial identity, a necessary process that debunks the overwhelming presence of Whiteness. In fact, she ends her digital story by restating a quote by Lilla Watson: “If you have come here to help me, you’re wasting your time. But if you come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Choosing this quotation indicates Rebecca’s responsibility in sharing the burden of race by first acknowledging her complicity in White supremacy through her enactments of Whiteness.

Sharing the Burden of Race

Ending emotional distancing, debunking colorblindness, and re-engaging emotions all are avenues that promote self-interrogations of Whiteness through digital storytelling. Beyond those considerations, they also show ways through which Whites can share in the burden of race. Instead of relying on people of color to shoulder the “burden of teaching teachers” about race (Williams & Evans-Winters, 2005), this process provides teacher candidates and teacher educators a way to dismantle the hegemony of Whiteness. Just as people of color need curricular inclusions to understand their racial positioning in a racist structure and pedagogical strategies to learn how to decolonize the minds and increase racial empowerment, Whites need curricular inclusions of Whiteness and pedagogical ways to self-interrogate their own Whiteness. By taking a corner of each side of the racial pillar, the burden of race is better distributed.

Pedagogical Implications

There are many implications in finding pedagogical ways, like digital storytelling, to deconstruct Whiteness in teacher education. Of most importance is revisiting Sleeter’s (2001) cautionary article that reveals the existence of an overwhelming presence of Whiteness in teacher education, one that continues to hegemonically structure Whiteness throughout the entire teaching field. To avoid this, teacher education must explore ways to identify how Whiteness maintains itself in the field of K-12 teaching and teacher education, and how to pedagogically deconstruct its stronghold. Without such a concrete process, Whiteness will, unfortunately, continue to mutate and manifest almost invisibly.

In terms of teacher education specifically, the implication rightfully problematizes the commitment to social justice in programs that do not directly deal with the issue of Whiteness. As the real disease is White supremacy and how it is maintained by enactments of Whiteness, the study of Whiteness must be included curricularly to engage in and/or profess commitment to antiracist pedagogy and education, in general. In addition, there must be institutionalized pedagogical strategies that support the curricular inclusions of Whiteness, lest it be a hopeful thought never actualized.

Beyond philosophical problematization of social justice and antiracist education, the study of Whiteness and its pedagogical applications have implications on how teacher education frames the purpose of culturally responsive teaching. If the purpose of teaching culturally responsive teaching practices is to raise students of color’s access to quality education with the presumed hope for better job opportunities, then what is to be understood about the overarching system of race which structurally performs job discrimination, unequal access to higher education, and dominant society’s inflated sense of racial quotas which render those students of color, now job candidates of color, as mere affirmative action hires? Plainly stated, it is one thing to provide students of color culturally responsive pedagogies that affirm students of color’s background and identities; yet, it is another thing to structurally deconstruct the hegemonic presence of Whiteness which initially ignored students of color’s background and identities. Beyond awareness, education, as defined in this manner, should also incorporate the necessary skill sets needed to teach one how to engage in self and group advocacy. That is, if education, as Giroux (1988) states, plays “a powerful role in providing the leadership necessary for American democracy to create a self-confident, organized, and empowered citizenry” (p. 175), then awareness is not enough. Giroux further argues that critical awareness that remains separate from social empowerment renders hope “untenable and impracticable” (p. 211). As such, one major implication of studying Whiteness and its modes of deconstruction is to problematize teacher education’s commitments to how and why we teach culturally responsive teaching in the first place if it lacks an overarching analysis of White supremacy and presentation of advocacy skills.

A final implication is further acknowledgement that the dynamics of racialization continue to manifest even during higher education courses that take up issues of race and antiracism (e.g., Grosland, 2013). Nowhere is this more relevant than in a teacher education course where the national majority of teacher candidates are White and there are few faculty of color. Instead of placing the onus of learning about race at the expense of teacher candidates’ future students of color—that is, learning about them, their culture, their languages—how can teacher candidates learn about race for themselves and realize their complicity in the racial construct regardless of whether one’s intentions are good? As Helms (1990) so cogently puts it, one cannot think of aiding in the positive racial identity development of students of color unless they too have gone the racial identity “jungle” themselves (p. 219). Therefore, understanding race from marginalized perspectives is necessary, but when done without an overarching analysis of White supremacy and Whiteness, it inadvertently places the burden of race back on the shoulders of people of color. To avoid this, studies on Whiteness not only should be included, they should also explore more pedagogical ways, such as autobiographical digital storytelling, to get the majority of White teachers and White teacher candidates involved in a process of antiracist education.

Conclusion

In the forever commitment to antiracist approaches in education, investigations into how Whiteness manifests itself in teacher education is a much needed antiracist praxis that, when used consistently, re-commits to the goals of socially just education. One such way to investigate Whiteness is through the use of digital storytelling, for it is a digital hope used to combat racism by providing a space for teacher candidates to self-reflect on their emotional journey of learning about race. Essentially, it becomes an ongoing repository that prolongs courageous conversations of race beyond minor discomfort and into a realm of emotionally therapeutic healing. Notwithstanding the overwhelming presence of Whiteness, the direct curricular inclusion of critical Whiteness studies and emotionality, coupled with pedagogical practices like digital storytelling, provides some deconstruction; for how can we dismantle this overwhelming presence if we, as educators, refuse to identify and learn about it first? To emotionally disinvest in the maintenance of Whiteness in teacher education and reinvest in racially just projects in education, teachers and teacher educators must have the emotional fortitude to withstand the discomfort with self-interrogating Whiteness. Until then, will we as a field finally find one answer to Sleeter’s (2001) concern over 10 years ago?

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

To teachers who do the emotional work of racial justice by continually self-interrogating their Whiteness and its impact on people of color, like Julia. To students of color, may you be forever strong amidst a colorblind racist educational system.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Cheryl E. Matias is an assistant professor in the School of Education and Human Development at University of Colorado Denver. Drawing from critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and feminism of color, her research focuses on the emotionality of whiteness in urban teaching. She is a motherscholar of twins.

Tanetha J. Grosland is an assistant professor in Urban Educational Leadership at Morgan State University. Her research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary and focuses on critical theory, critical race theory, social justice pedagogy, intercultural education, and antiracist education in particular.

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