“Things get glossed over”; Rearticulating the silencing power of whiteness in education.

Haviland, V.S. (2008). “Things get glossed over”; Rearticulating the silencing power of whiteness in education. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(1), 40-54.


How tough it still is to talk about racism! As a white teacher educator, one who has spent time in schools where I was in the minority racially, I related to the painful awkwardness that Haviland reports.

Haviland looked at discussions of race, racism and White supremacy as they occurred in two all-white educational settings: an affluent, predominantly white middle school and a teacher education seminar which she taught. Haviland portrays the various ways in which whites work to distance themselves from racism and position themselves as “good” whites, thus failing to interrogate the pervasive racism in our society and thereby perpetrating it. The idea of a white “culture of niceness” particularly resonated with me. We work so hard to make people feel good that we let important things go by—like racism. Yet for change to occur, we will need to have some negative feelings like shame and outrage and anxious uncertainty.