Forum: Reflections on White Racial Identity in the ABE Classroom - Part 1 - Why White Instructors Should Explore Their White Racial Identity

Oct 15, 2026

Forum text examining how adult basic education (ABE) instructors should engage their own white racial identity in multiracial classrooms. Argues whiteness functions as a socially constructed identity tied to power, structural exclusion, and normalized brutality, and that a “colorblind” perspective sustains biases by presuming the ability to set them aside. Emphasizes culturally responsive teaching, warns against universalizing white experience, and explores contradictions in how white instructors can become aware and teach others.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time13 min

AccessFree to download

Why White Instructors Should Explore Their White Racial Identity

Whiteness, power, and structural exclusion

Stopping universalizing white experience

The contradiction of white awareness

Color Blindness

Problems with colorblind ideology

ADULT LITERACY EDUCATION Fall 2019 Forum: Reflections on White Racial Identity in the ABE Classroom (Part 1 of 4) Why White Instructors Should Explore Their White Racial Identity Stephen D. Brookfield, University of St. Thomas Why should white instructors in multiracial ABE classrooms explore their own whiteness? If racial identity is largely a cultural, not biological, construct, then why focus on any form of racial markers? Doesn’t this constant harping on race create unnecessary divisions and stop us all from getting along? Well, it’s not talking about race that disrupts social harmony; it’s the fact that whiteness as an identity is connected to power, particularly to the way that a learned blindness to racial inequality helps maintain a system that exhibits structural exclusion and normalizes brutality. Whiteness buttresses power in a taken for granted, unnoticed way. As George Yancy (2018) writes, this is because racism is not the process of individually demeaning or diminishing others,“a site of individual acts of meanness”(p. 74); rather, it’s being “implicated in a complex web of racist power relationships … heteronomous webs of white practices to which you, as a white, are linked both as a beneficiary and as co-contributor to such practices”(Yancy, 2018, p. 75). Since my whiteness constantly benefits me, and since that benefit accrues to me because we’re defined in relation to the supposed “stigma” of blackness, Iam racist. I don’t go about hurling racial epithets, but I am “embedded in a pre-existing social matrix of white power”(Yancy, 2018, p. 76) that gives me advantages of which I have only an occasional awareness. To feel safe is my norm, to be “systemically racially marked for death”(Yancy, 2018, p. 102) is Yancy’s. I have been struck over the years by the fact that people of color tell me that the most helpful thing whites can do in terms of fighting racism is to become aware of what it means to be white. They say it’s much more important for whites to learn that they have a particular racial identity, and to examine how that identity operates in the world, than it is for them to learn about the cultures of racial minorities. Yet in a multiracial classroom, it seems to me that culturally responsive teaching that varies instructional modalities to take account of say, collective modes of generating knowledge, is crucial. I guess the point of focusing on white identity and white ways of knowing is to stop universalizing white experience as the norm for all humanity. It helps us realize that what appear to us as common-sense approaches to teaching are racially and culturally constructed. For example, the emphasis on individual, not group, assessment reflects the dominance of a Eurocentric paradigm that privileges individualism and selfdetermination as the natural end point of human development. Realizing that individualism is a Correspondence: Stephen D. Brookfield, [sdbrookfield@stthomas.edu](sdbrookfield@stthomas.edu) 52 core element of white epistemology helps open us up to more collaborative, group-based forms of assessment. In tribal, indigenous and Afrocentric culture it is the collective that validates knowledge and takes the responsibility for moving knowledge forward. In trying to engage the fact of whiteness and the reality of a white racial identity we are, of course, engaged in a contradiction. If one of the most cited indicators of white identity is being unable to see that whiteness constitutes a racial marker, then how can a white person possibly become aware of his or her own racial being and think she can teach other whites about it? Don’t we need scholars of color to write from a different racial perspective that throws whiteness into sharp relief? I argue that it’s a question of both-and. When people of color highlight elements of whiteness we learn more of how white supremacy operates to circumscribe and devalue lives in a world where whiteness is the norm aroun

FAQs

Why should white instructors explore their white racial identity in multiracial ABE classrooms?

Because whiteness operates as a socially constructed identity connected to power and structural exclusion. Exploring it helps instructors see how norms shape teaching and assessment beyond a supposed neutral norm.

What does the text say about the effect of “talking about race” on social harmony?

It argues that disruption does not come from discussing race itself, but from the way whiteness as an identity is linked to power. Learned blindness to racial inequality helps maintain exclusion and normalize brutality.

What are the main flaws of a colorblind perspective described in the text?

It claims the perspective assumes whites can quickly put biases aside and see people in an unraced way. It also assumes a level playing field where whites interact with people of color as moral and political equals.

Oct 15, 2026

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