Date of Award
5-1-2024
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Frankowski, Alfred
Second Advisor
Reed, Jean-Pierre
Abstract
This thesis seeks to properly identify and illuminate the disciplinary practices of the K-12 classroom that necessitate, cultivate, and perpetrate colonial violence to maintain the established order (anti-Black racism) of our modern American society. To accomplish this, the relationship between the white teacher and non-white student is problematized by combining the conceptual frameworks of George Yancy’s white gaze and Maria Lugones’ racist/colonial gaze. This analysis highlights the ulterior motives of the “teacher look,” an action that utilizes shame to instruct students on how to behave properly in the classroom, through the authoritative role of whiteness in managing knowledge, understanding, and subjectivity. From these conclusions, it is shown that whiteness is granted perceptual authority over the Other through the rhetoric of modernity. This rhetoric disillusions the public of the ideological structures that ensure white supremacy and the white subject as a self-contained substance existing independent of some Black qua inferior. In attempting to overcome this disillusioned state, multiple decolonial avenues and pedagogical practices are employed to dismantle the authoritative role of whiteness and the instrumentality of shame in the disciplinary prospects of the “teacher look.” By approaching the problem of race in America through the disciplinary mechanism of its education system, this project seeks not only to ascertain the institutional and systematic ways that white teachers and white students uphold and inscribe racist ideology through their social practices and relationships, but also to empower students of color to resist and transcend the limitations imposed upon them from the white world.
Access
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