| Description |
Antiracism and feminism are interrelated projects, and this research concerns the complex roles that White women play in their histories, development, advocacy, and fissures, specifically in the academy-a unique, contradictory place. This dissertation documents my co-inquiries with eight of my Sugarhill College colleagues-White women faculty who, like me, self-identify as aspiring antiracist feminists. My goal was to better understand how we make sense of our raced-gendered experiences and the social justice work to which we are committed personally, professionally, and pedagogically. This research provides a temperature reading of what White women have learned, and what they still struggle with, as they do this complex work with one-up/one-down identities. Since storytelling can be used to examine both privilege and oppression, my purpose was to craft critical narratives about engaging with feminism and antiracism, within and beyond the academy, while attending to the re/production of whiteness. These critical narratives take two main forms: 32 triptychs, four for each participant, that capture their thinking about race-gender, and analysis of how two themes-toggling, and paradox and contradiction-surfaced in our co-inquiries and impacted our collaborative thinking and learning. Throughout this project, I lean on the concepts of whiteness and White womanhood, antiracist White feminism, and intersectionality, and I maintain a strong citational allegiance to people of color, specifically women of color. |
