RESEARCH
My research is theoretically rooted in Indigenous feminisms and makes critical interventions into the fields of settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and educational research by historicizing how the discursive construction of “benevolent whiteness” informs the contemporary perpetuation of white supremacy vis-a-vis loving intentions and a performative clinging onto a social justice ethos by white women teachers. Broadly speaking, I explore issues of genderedsettler colonialism and anti-blackness as enacted and reproduced by schooling. Specifically, my ethnographic and archival research engage both European post structuralism, particularly Foucauldian theory, and Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) genealogical methods to make visible both ruptures in continuity, and the continuity present in ancestral or historical lineages. Combined, these modes of inquiry help us understand how power is enacted on bodies to reconstitute particular bodies as either heroic (white women) or problematic (Black and Indigenous children).
Merging history, theory, and practice I co-lead a Spencer Foundation funded participatory action research project with my colleague, Wanda Watson, exploring the impact of ethnic studies curriculum with practicing elementary school teachers. This project allows me to make productive use of the theoretical and historical work of my research to affect change in real time with teachers in Bay Area public schools through a practice we have named “critical race inquiry” (Bauer & Watson, forthcoming). Below I explain the genesis of and connections between my theoretical and qualitative research.
Book Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood (Routledge, 2022)
Within educational research, the over-disciplining of Black and Indigenous students is most often presented as a problem located within pathologized or misunderstood communities. That is, theories and proposed solutions tend toward those that ask how we can make students of color from particular backgrounds more suited to U.S. educational standards rather than questioning the racist roots of those standards. Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood, takes as a provocation this “discipline gap,” in exploring a thus far unconsidered stance and asking how white women (the majority of U.S. teachers) have historically understood their roles in the disciplining (in both the literal and Foucauldian sense) of Black and Indigenous students, and how and why their role has been constructed over time and space in service to institutions of the white settler colonial State.
Tender Violence in US Schools contemplates several theoretical and practical questions. What does it mean, and how is it useful to conceptualize white women as agents and schools as sites of settler colonialism? How does an ideological and historical understanding of gendered whiteness (in relation to gendered settler colonialism) allow for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary teacher identities and raced and gendered relationships in schools? How viable is a theory of gendered benevolent whiteness given the fluidity and performative nature of both whiteness and gender? How might we understand the (over)disciplining of Black and Indigenous (Native American and Native Hawaiian) youth as a consequence of what have been historically framed as benevolent intentions enacted through what is essentially feminized white supremacy? In considering these questions, the book helps to fill an often overlooked void in the contemporary conversation on raced and gendered student-teacher interactions in schools specifically, and more broadly it provides a much-needed gendered analysis of and intervention into to the fields of settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and critical ethnic studies. Additionally, the book considers how Indigenous futurities might propel the work past critique and into imagining what decolonizing, antiracist white teaching might look like. Toward this end, the book puts forth a theorization of “benevolent whiteness” as the feminized, loving arm of empire and an intentionally hidden weapon within the U.S. settler colonial “army of whiteness.”
In order to construct a genealogy of benevolent whiteness, this book employs critical discourse analysis of primary and secondary sources written by and about white women missionary teachers in the 19th century which I use in tracing the discursive construction of heroic white womanhood. Following Foucault, I ask how and why a specifically gendered benevolent whiteness has been “put into discourse,” and what effects that has had over time in constructing normative ideas and beliefs about the relationship between white female teachers and Black and Indigenous students. Throughout this work I bring together Indigenous and post-structural epistemology, mindful of the tensions and relations of dominance between the two: Benevolent Whiteness takes seriously the Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) tradition of storytelling and genealogy as legitimate research methods emphasising the importance of understanding one’s place in the world contemporarily, historically, and interrelatedly, an understanding that stands in diametric opposition to a western understanding of the self as independent individual disconnected from land, history, and consequence (cf. Kauanui, 2018). Kanaka genealogical methods – Moʻokūʻauhau as Methodology – allow us to trace an ancestral and historical lineage of Native and Black resistance to and survivance within settler colonialism; more importantly, it guides us in imagining a way out, forward, and back to ourselves.
A Foucauldian genealogical method likewise is useful in asking not what a thing-in-itself was like in history, but how we came to thinking of certain behaviors and actions as constituting the thing. In other words, it starts with the present understanding of “the thing,” with the thing in this case being the trope of the benevolent white mother-savior-teacher. Thus, a genealogical analysis seeks to uncover how we came to define and understand teachers as heroes. Here, I employ the term “genealogy” as described by Foucault in a 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow and Herbert Dreyfus as having three possible domains. I specifically focus on the second possible domain, “a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others,” (Foucault and Rabinow, 1984). In theorizing settler colonialism through benevolent whiteness from an archival/historical perspective, Foucault is particularly useful for his focus on ruptures in genealogy as opposed to the traditional continuity of historicism. Reading missionary archives through a Foucauldian lens requires making visible these ruptures and disrupting the dominant narrative of loving, maternal heroism by reading against the dominant interpretations of the archives and their histories as universal truths. A Foucauldian genealogical method allows me to ask what else these missionary documents might reveal. What are the dead ends or erasures that have not been pursued in traditional histories of missionary schooling? How do we trace benevolent whiteness and love language as a gendered technology of power that has existed over time?
In constructing this genealogy of benevolent whiteness, I analyze three main historical archives that span the globe and several decades within the 19th century with a precise focus on the missionary roots of what would become our contemporary U.S. educational system. I analyzed several hundred physical and digitally archived documents including newspapers, letters, diaries, pamphlets, and public records located in the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives under the auspices of the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society (HMCS) in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and in the Eastman-Goodale-Dayton Family Papers, located in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and archives of the American Missionary Association and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. Rather than using these women’s writings to give voice yet again to whiteness, I conduct close readings of their journals and letters and use their own words to tell the story of the discursive construction of benevolent white womanhood with a re-centered focus on whiteness following Leonardo (2009), to re-center whiteness as a means of shining light on its normative nature.
Tender Violence in US Schools employs analytical tools from settler colonial studies theory and feminist of color theory to inform its epistemological framing of power as a site of multidimensionality existing across space and depth (Sandoval, 2000) and comprised of mutually constructed system of oppression (Collins, 1999); I couple this with my understanding of schooling as one of the many tools of settler colonialism used to enforce anti-Blackness and support indigenous genocide. This is important because historically our understanding of the violence of settler colonial empire and imperial expansion is generally gendered male. That is, this period in our history (the 19th century) is imagined as militaristic and physically violent acts carried out by armies of men. While this is historically accurate, what it erases as a stand-alone imagination is the role white women played as the feminized arm of empire. Unlike the more recognizably violent phases of colonialism: the murder and displacement of Indigenous peoples for the purpose of furthering U.S. manifest destiny, internal (maternal) colonialism consists of women’s work focused on the management of Indigenous women’s bodies and homes (including their children). The missionary woman’s task was and still is to attempt to sever children’s ties between family and culture so as to educate them and indoctrinate them into a narrowly defined, white, middle class, Protestant ideal (Jacobs, 2005, 2008).
To further theorize benevolent whiteness, I first build upon Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977/1995) – specifically his theorization of a “gentler” way of controlling society via normalizing judgment of internal monitoring in place of public and physical punishment. In other words, I apply this conceptual framework of “gentler” internal monitoring to the affective control so associated with the “maternal white savior” model of the educator. I also rely on the ways in which Brodhead (1991) uses Foucault’s work to theorize “disciplinary intimacy” within the creation of the first public (common) school movement, and I connect this notion of disciplinary intimacy with the feminization of teaching and disciplining.
I define whiteness following Zeus Leonardo, recognizing and stressing the importance of separating white people, a socially constructed identity generally assigned to those with white skin, from whiteness, a racial discourse and “structural valuation of skin color, which invests it with meaning regarding overall organization of society” (2009, p. 92). This differentiation is crucial to my theorization of benevolent whiteness because it allows for the fluid and performative nature of race and gender, thus leaving room for the reification/ reproduction/ performance of benevolent whiteness by those who might not necessarily self-identify as white. While benevolent whiteness as a feminized arm of settler colonial violence has been carried out by white women historically, its legacy has impacted the field of education, and specifically the field of teacher education, in a way that makes indelible its mark on the profession. In other words, the way most of us have experienced schooling as students in the United States has been infused with the values of 19th-century white middle-class Protestant morality, and colonialist white supremacist suppression and oppression of Black and Indigenous populations.
My theorization of benevolent whiteness has been distilled down to four key logics:
Elementary Ethnic Studies Project
Whereas my theoretical research critiques the ideologies and structures of schooling that enact violence against Black and Indigenous students and reproduce and normalize white supremacy, I also work to find and create spaces of liberatory education led by communities of color. My current project toward that end is the Elementary Ethnic Studies Project (EESP). Funded by the Spencer Foundation, this project is a multiyear collaboration between my Mills College School of Education colleague, Wanda Watson, and I as lead researchers, and a group of Bay Area teachers as participant researchers conducting their own inquiry into designing, enacting, and assessing developmentally appropriate ethnic studies curriculum in TK through sixth grade. In our forthcoming critical case study (Bauer & Watson, in press), we share insights and experiences from the perspectives of five teachers of color in our critical race inquiry group. We draw from critical race pedagogy (Lynn, 1999) and inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009) to explore how the teachers we work with embody their commitment to critical race inquiry as pedagogical stance and how this is influenced by their lives and professional development experiences. We also analyze how the teachers began taking ownership over the inquiry process, and we highlight features of our approach to professional development that they found supportive and sustaining. We conducted ongoing semi-structured interviews and focus groups to reveal a critical race inquiry process characterized by four main components: (1) reflecting on racialized experience (2) intersectional critiques of personal gaps in knowledge and experience (3) critiquing and disrupting oppressive bureaucratic demands (4) feeling supported within an inquiry-based community. This work brings a necessary change in understanding the ongoing professional development needs of teachers of color and is in contrast to the commonly held belief that simply increasing the number of teachers of color in schools will be enough to enact real change for students. Our work shows that meaningful engagement with professional development through a lens of critical race inquiry increases teacher sustainability in the profession, strengthens students’ interest and learning via an antiracist framework, and works toward decolonizing the educational process for students of color and their white peers through liberatory and academically rigorous experiences. Now in its fourth year, this project is shifting toward understanding how teachers can pivot to an effective online teaching modality while maintaining an antiracist ethnic studies pedagogy and creating equity in access for all students.
Future Projects
While my first book manuscript analyzes white womanhood in an attempt to disrupt normalization of “benevolent whiteness,” it ends with a call toward possibilities: to imagine new futurities through examining the persistence of Black and Indigenous educational resistance. My second book project will be an attempt to answer that call and further that conversation, moving from an analysis of whiteness in formalized schooling toward focusing on traditional Indigenous modes of knowledge production and dissemination and the extensive tradition of Black educational thought to imagine schooling in ways we currently deem impossible. Given the current sociopolitical context of schooling during a global pandemic that has focused on the future successes of affluent white families with private tutors and the imagined deficit for students of color who are always already left behind, in this project I propose reimagining schooling and its potential for post-pandemic reinvention through a lens of Blackness and Indigeneity as assets rather than deficits.
My research is theoretically rooted in Indigenous feminisms and makes critical interventions into the fields of settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and educational research by historicizing how the discursive construction of “benevolent whiteness” informs the contemporary perpetuation of white supremacy vis-a-vis loving intentions and a performative clinging onto a social justice ethos by white women teachers. Broadly speaking, I explore issues of genderedsettler colonialism and anti-blackness as enacted and reproduced by schooling. Specifically, my ethnographic and archival research engage both European post structuralism, particularly Foucauldian theory, and Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) genealogical methods to make visible both ruptures in continuity, and the continuity present in ancestral or historical lineages. Combined, these modes of inquiry help us understand how power is enacted on bodies to reconstitute particular bodies as either heroic (white women) or problematic (Black and Indigenous children).
Merging history, theory, and practice I co-lead a Spencer Foundation funded participatory action research project with my colleague, Wanda Watson, exploring the impact of ethnic studies curriculum with practicing elementary school teachers. This project allows me to make productive use of the theoretical and historical work of my research to affect change in real time with teachers in Bay Area public schools through a practice we have named “critical race inquiry” (Bauer & Watson, forthcoming). Below I explain the genesis of and connections between my theoretical and qualitative research.
Book Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood (Routledge, 2022)
Within educational research, the over-disciplining of Black and Indigenous students is most often presented as a problem located within pathologized or misunderstood communities. That is, theories and proposed solutions tend toward those that ask how we can make students of color from particular backgrounds more suited to U.S. educational standards rather than questioning the racist roots of those standards. Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood, takes as a provocation this “discipline gap,” in exploring a thus far unconsidered stance and asking how white women (the majority of U.S. teachers) have historically understood their roles in the disciplining (in both the literal and Foucauldian sense) of Black and Indigenous students, and how and why their role has been constructed over time and space in service to institutions of the white settler colonial State.
Tender Violence in US Schools contemplates several theoretical and practical questions. What does it mean, and how is it useful to conceptualize white women as agents and schools as sites of settler colonialism? How does an ideological and historical understanding of gendered whiteness (in relation to gendered settler colonialism) allow for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary teacher identities and raced and gendered relationships in schools? How viable is a theory of gendered benevolent whiteness given the fluidity and performative nature of both whiteness and gender? How might we understand the (over)disciplining of Black and Indigenous (Native American and Native Hawaiian) youth as a consequence of what have been historically framed as benevolent intentions enacted through what is essentially feminized white supremacy? In considering these questions, the book helps to fill an often overlooked void in the contemporary conversation on raced and gendered student-teacher interactions in schools specifically, and more broadly it provides a much-needed gendered analysis of and intervention into to the fields of settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and critical ethnic studies. Additionally, the book considers how Indigenous futurities might propel the work past critique and into imagining what decolonizing, antiracist white teaching might look like. Toward this end, the book puts forth a theorization of “benevolent whiteness” as the feminized, loving arm of empire and an intentionally hidden weapon within the U.S. settler colonial “army of whiteness.”
In order to construct a genealogy of benevolent whiteness, this book employs critical discourse analysis of primary and secondary sources written by and about white women missionary teachers in the 19th century which I use in tracing the discursive construction of heroic white womanhood. Following Foucault, I ask how and why a specifically gendered benevolent whiteness has been “put into discourse,” and what effects that has had over time in constructing normative ideas and beliefs about the relationship between white female teachers and Black and Indigenous students. Throughout this work I bring together Indigenous and post-structural epistemology, mindful of the tensions and relations of dominance between the two: Benevolent Whiteness takes seriously the Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) tradition of storytelling and genealogy as legitimate research methods emphasising the importance of understanding one’s place in the world contemporarily, historically, and interrelatedly, an understanding that stands in diametric opposition to a western understanding of the self as independent individual disconnected from land, history, and consequence (cf. Kauanui, 2018). Kanaka genealogical methods – Moʻokūʻauhau as Methodology – allow us to trace an ancestral and historical lineage of Native and Black resistance to and survivance within settler colonialism; more importantly, it guides us in imagining a way out, forward, and back to ourselves.
A Foucauldian genealogical method likewise is useful in asking not what a thing-in-itself was like in history, but how we came to thinking of certain behaviors and actions as constituting the thing. In other words, it starts with the present understanding of “the thing,” with the thing in this case being the trope of the benevolent white mother-savior-teacher. Thus, a genealogical analysis seeks to uncover how we came to define and understand teachers as heroes. Here, I employ the term “genealogy” as described by Foucault in a 1983 interview with Paul Rabinow and Herbert Dreyfus as having three possible domains. I specifically focus on the second possible domain, “a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others,” (Foucault and Rabinow, 1984). In theorizing settler colonialism through benevolent whiteness from an archival/historical perspective, Foucault is particularly useful for his focus on ruptures in genealogy as opposed to the traditional continuity of historicism. Reading missionary archives through a Foucauldian lens requires making visible these ruptures and disrupting the dominant narrative of loving, maternal heroism by reading against the dominant interpretations of the archives and their histories as universal truths. A Foucauldian genealogical method allows me to ask what else these missionary documents might reveal. What are the dead ends or erasures that have not been pursued in traditional histories of missionary schooling? How do we trace benevolent whiteness and love language as a gendered technology of power that has existed over time?
In constructing this genealogy of benevolent whiteness, I analyze three main historical archives that span the globe and several decades within the 19th century with a precise focus on the missionary roots of what would become our contemporary U.S. educational system. I analyzed several hundred physical and digitally archived documents including newspapers, letters, diaries, pamphlets, and public records located in the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives under the auspices of the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society (HMCS) in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and in the Eastman-Goodale-Dayton Family Papers, located in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and archives of the American Missionary Association and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. Rather than using these women’s writings to give voice yet again to whiteness, I conduct close readings of their journals and letters and use their own words to tell the story of the discursive construction of benevolent white womanhood with a re-centered focus on whiteness following Leonardo (2009), to re-center whiteness as a means of shining light on its normative nature.
Tender Violence in US Schools employs analytical tools from settler colonial studies theory and feminist of color theory to inform its epistemological framing of power as a site of multidimensionality existing across space and depth (Sandoval, 2000) and comprised of mutually constructed system of oppression (Collins, 1999); I couple this with my understanding of schooling as one of the many tools of settler colonialism used to enforce anti-Blackness and support indigenous genocide. This is important because historically our understanding of the violence of settler colonial empire and imperial expansion is generally gendered male. That is, this period in our history (the 19th century) is imagined as militaristic and physically violent acts carried out by armies of men. While this is historically accurate, what it erases as a stand-alone imagination is the role white women played as the feminized arm of empire. Unlike the more recognizably violent phases of colonialism: the murder and displacement of Indigenous peoples for the purpose of furthering U.S. manifest destiny, internal (maternal) colonialism consists of women’s work focused on the management of Indigenous women’s bodies and homes (including their children). The missionary woman’s task was and still is to attempt to sever children’s ties between family and culture so as to educate them and indoctrinate them into a narrowly defined, white, middle class, Protestant ideal (Jacobs, 2005, 2008).
To further theorize benevolent whiteness, I first build upon Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977/1995) – specifically his theorization of a “gentler” way of controlling society via normalizing judgment of internal monitoring in place of public and physical punishment. In other words, I apply this conceptual framework of “gentler” internal monitoring to the affective control so associated with the “maternal white savior” model of the educator. I also rely on the ways in which Brodhead (1991) uses Foucault’s work to theorize “disciplinary intimacy” within the creation of the first public (common) school movement, and I connect this notion of disciplinary intimacy with the feminization of teaching and disciplining.
I define whiteness following Zeus Leonardo, recognizing and stressing the importance of separating white people, a socially constructed identity generally assigned to those with white skin, from whiteness, a racial discourse and “structural valuation of skin color, which invests it with meaning regarding overall organization of society” (2009, p. 92). This differentiation is crucial to my theorization of benevolent whiteness because it allows for the fluid and performative nature of race and gender, thus leaving room for the reification/ reproduction/ performance of benevolent whiteness by those who might not necessarily self-identify as white. While benevolent whiteness as a feminized arm of settler colonial violence has been carried out by white women historically, its legacy has impacted the field of education, and specifically the field of teacher education, in a way that makes indelible its mark on the profession. In other words, the way most of us have experienced schooling as students in the United States has been infused with the values of 19th-century white middle-class Protestant morality, and colonialist white supremacist suppression and oppression of Black and Indigenous populations.
My theorization of benevolent whiteness has been distilled down to four key logics:
- It is gendered feminine and operates through formalized schooling, carried out by teachers from outside of the students’ home community, and in most cases the students are of color and the teachers are white women.
- It literally and figuratively displaces teachers (and parents) of color within school communities, replacing them with heroic white teachers who “know better” how to reach/teach children of color.
- It is rooted in multidirectional salvation: the need to simultaneously save peoples whose salvation would always remain incomplete, as well as saving the self.
- It operates through a language of “love,” which I argue is an act of settler colonial violence when invoked by missionary teachers toward colonized and otherwise oppressed peoples.
Elementary Ethnic Studies Project
Whereas my theoretical research critiques the ideologies and structures of schooling that enact violence against Black and Indigenous students and reproduce and normalize white supremacy, I also work to find and create spaces of liberatory education led by communities of color. My current project toward that end is the Elementary Ethnic Studies Project (EESP). Funded by the Spencer Foundation, this project is a multiyear collaboration between my Mills College School of Education colleague, Wanda Watson, and I as lead researchers, and a group of Bay Area teachers as participant researchers conducting their own inquiry into designing, enacting, and assessing developmentally appropriate ethnic studies curriculum in TK through sixth grade. In our forthcoming critical case study (Bauer & Watson, in press), we share insights and experiences from the perspectives of five teachers of color in our critical race inquiry group. We draw from critical race pedagogy (Lynn, 1999) and inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2009) to explore how the teachers we work with embody their commitment to critical race inquiry as pedagogical stance and how this is influenced by their lives and professional development experiences. We also analyze how the teachers began taking ownership over the inquiry process, and we highlight features of our approach to professional development that they found supportive and sustaining. We conducted ongoing semi-structured interviews and focus groups to reveal a critical race inquiry process characterized by four main components: (1) reflecting on racialized experience (2) intersectional critiques of personal gaps in knowledge and experience (3) critiquing and disrupting oppressive bureaucratic demands (4) feeling supported within an inquiry-based community. This work brings a necessary change in understanding the ongoing professional development needs of teachers of color and is in contrast to the commonly held belief that simply increasing the number of teachers of color in schools will be enough to enact real change for students. Our work shows that meaningful engagement with professional development through a lens of critical race inquiry increases teacher sustainability in the profession, strengthens students’ interest and learning via an antiracist framework, and works toward decolonizing the educational process for students of color and their white peers through liberatory and academically rigorous experiences. Now in its fourth year, this project is shifting toward understanding how teachers can pivot to an effective online teaching modality while maintaining an antiracist ethnic studies pedagogy and creating equity in access for all students.
Future Projects
While my first book manuscript analyzes white womanhood in an attempt to disrupt normalization of “benevolent whiteness,” it ends with a call toward possibilities: to imagine new futurities through examining the persistence of Black and Indigenous educational resistance. My second book project will be an attempt to answer that call and further that conversation, moving from an analysis of whiteness in formalized schooling toward focusing on traditional Indigenous modes of knowledge production and dissemination and the extensive tradition of Black educational thought to imagine schooling in ways we currently deem impossible. Given the current sociopolitical context of schooling during a global pandemic that has focused on the future successes of affluent white families with private tutors and the imagined deficit for students of color who are always already left behind, in this project I propose reimagining schooling and its potential for post-pandemic reinvention through a lens of Blackness and Indigeneity as assets rather than deficits.
