Forum: Reflections on White Racial Identity in the ABE Classroom - Part 2 of 4 - “Race”ing White Instructors: Beyond the Black-White Binary

Oct 15, 2026

Race-focused reflections on adult literacy education in ABE classrooms, centered on instructor whiteness and its role in sustaining structural racism. The discussion engages Brookfield’s argument that white identity is linked to power and learned blindness to racial inequality, while questioning his binary and decontextualized treatment of race and proposing an intersectional framework including race, class, gender, nationality, and citizenship. It situates the author’s South Asian American perspective, examines literacy as culturally embedded knowledge, and links classroom normativity to risks for predominantly nonwhite learners.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages4

Reading Time10 min

AccessFree to download

“Race”ing White Instructors: Beyond the Black-White Binary

White normativity and structural racism in ABE

Moving beyond the black-white binary with intersectional analysis

Literacy as socio-cultural knowledge

Implications for predominantly nonwhite adult learners

ADULT LITERACY EDUCATION Fall 2019 Forum: Reflections on White Racial Identity in the ABE Classroom (Part 2 of 4) “Race”ing White Instructors: Beyond the Black-White Binary Edith Gnanadass, University of Memphis With the rise of overt racism, xenophobia, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and religious discrimination accompanied by attacks against women’s rights in the United States and other parts of the globe, Brookfield’s “Why White Instructors Should Explore their White Racial Identity” is a needed contribution to ABE. He shows how white normativity and the ensuing universalizing of the white experience promotesand sustains white supremacy, and thereby, structural racism. Brookfield uses Yancy’s (2018) argument to show how whites are complicit with structural racism by stating that “ it’s a 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.” Brookfield’s analysis using race and structural racism clearly shows how whites asa group benefit from white supremacy by being “embedded in a pre-existing social matrix of white power” and how that confers privileges on the group as a whole. This, in turn, Brookfield contends has led to the idea of whiteness, the white experience being the norm, and the belief that white is not a racial identity. He argues that whites are raced and that race is a white problem, not just a problem for people of color, thus calling on white instructors to reflect on their racial identity to be better teachers and help students learn. With this in mind, I found Brookfield’s analysis and call for action a persuasive intervention; however, I would like to problematize and broaden his decontextualized, essentializing, and binary theorization and stated practices of whiteness by suggesting that we go beyond a binary conception of race by adding an intersectional analysis (Berger & Guidroz, 2009; Crenshaw, 1990) that includes race, social class, gender, nationality, and citizenship. Otherwise, we as ABE researchers and practitioners, will once again default to centering whiteness and the white experience while pushing all other racial identities and experiences to the margins and reducing racial relations and racism to the “white-and” binary paradigm of race. As Brookfield acknowledges in his paper, he speaks from a place of white male privilege, and based on this privilege and his experiences, there is both an essentializing of race and whiteness and binary perception of race, both of which stem from a particular cultural-historical perspective. I want to start by situating myself and providing readers context about my perspective. First, I am an adult educator with a multiplicity of identities: Indian woman, Malaysian, postcolonial feminist, professor, American, Christian, etc. Second, I racially identify as South Asian American.“Asa South Asian American, I am not white, but Correspondence: Edith Gnanadass, [e.gnanadass@memphis.edu](e.gnanadass@memphis.edu) 57 neither am I historically and culturally black”(Gnanadass, 2016, p. 2), so I do not see myself in the black-white binary paradigm of race. Finally, this critique is crafted from a U.S.-centric perspective on race. Keeping this in mind, I critique Brookfield’s conceptualization by going beyond his call for reflection on whiteness. Brookfield highlights the hegemony of the white experience as the norm and the power and privilege that this entails. This unquestioned normativity of the white experience which he defines as “the idea that the norms and standards by which we judge what is acceptable and normal in the world are colored white,” privileges white ways of knowing and teaching in the classroom. This translates to ABE as the privileging and conceptualization of literacy as a decontextualized set of portable skills (St. Clair & Belzer, 2010), in other words, s

FAQs

What is Brookfield’s central claim about white instructors and racial identity in ABE?

Brookfield argues that exploring one’s white racial identity is necessary because white normativity universalizes the white experience and sustains structural racism, including forms of structural exclusion.

How does the author broaden Brookfield’s approach?

The author critiques Brookfield’s decontextualized, essentializing, and binary framing and calls for an intersectional analysis that includes race, social class, gender, nationality, and citizenship.

Why does the author say literacy instruction should be contextualized in ABE?

Autonomous views treat literacy as portable, decontextualized skills and dismiss other literacies. The author emphasizes literacy as embedded in socio-cultural context so learners can make meaning based on their lives and interactions.

Oct 15, 2026

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