Nice white teacher: How niceness and whiteness prevent anti-racist pedagogy in the classroom

Abstract

My study brought together a group of white educators in sustained critical narrative inquiry groups to tease out, investigate, and interrogate why we, white educators, especially white women, may hold on to an ideology of Niceness (cf. Castagno). Niceness seeks to continue and reinforce “ideologies of dominance across lines of race, gender, and class,” protect and shield white educators, mainly white women, “from doing the hard work dismantling inequity,” and acts as a “disciplining agent” for educators “who attempt or even consider disrupting structures and ideologies of dominance” (Castagno, 2019, p. xiv). The study sought to understand how white educators are called in, or call one another in, to forgo Niceness and instead choose to continually dismantle white supremacy and promote anti-racist pedagogy in their classrooms and education institutions. This study examines how white educators moved beyond lines of white solidarity instead of embracing the joys of being in a community of “feminist killjoys” (Ahmed, 2017). The collaborative nature of this study allowed for accountability among the participants and me to hold each other in discomfort. My analysis of our collective work produced theoretical and practical insights for teacher educators to disentangle from Niceness.