Race and Education

How does Ahmed (2007) define whiteness as a structural orientation?

"An ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they 'take up' space" (Ahmed, 2007, p.150)

What is Ahmed's (2007) key claim about what a phenomenology of whiteness achieves?

A phenomenology of whiteness "helps us to notice institutional habits" — bringing what "does not get seen as the background to social action, to the surface" (Ahmed, 2007)

How does Ahmed (2007) theorise mobility and belonging in white institutional spaces?

"The politics of mobility… can be re-described as the politics of who gets to be at home, who gets to inhabit spaces, as spaces that are inhabitable for some bodies and not others" (Ahmed, 2007, p.162)

What does Ahmed (2007) argue about colonialism and bodily inheritance?

"Colonialism makes the world 'white', which is of course a world 'ready' for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories" (Ahmed, 2007)

What is racial phenomenology, and what does it add to understandings of whiteness in education?

Racial phenomenology theorises race as lived, embodied experience rather than numerical fact. Drawing on Fanon, Ahmed (2007) shows proximity to whiteness shapes what bodies can do and reach — surfacing the invisible 'background' of whiteness to reveal how the same institutional space is experienced radically differently by racialised bodies.

What are Ahmed's (2007) 'stopping devices', and how do they operate in universities?

Mechanisms that restrict non-white bodily movement by communicating non-belonging — stop-and-search, porter questioning, campus surveillance (Harper, 2020, cited in lecture). Wright (2022) extends this to immaterial stopping: portrait walls and statues that trigger internalised hyper-visibility and spatial contraction, redirecting bodily movement without a word being spoken.

How does Ahmed (2012, cited in lecture) describe diversity initiatives in PWIs?

Diversity in PWIs is embedded within a "performance culture" — institutions perform inclusivity without restructuring the racialised distribution of power, extending Ray's (2019) argument that diversity serves a "ceremonial public relations function."

How does Fanon (1952) describe the racialised collapse of the corporeal schema?

"Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema… provided for me not by residual sensations… but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details" (Fanon, 1952, p.111)

What does Fanon (1952) mean by triple existence?

"I existed in triple: I was responsible at the same time for my body, my race, my ancestors" (Fanon, 1952, p.92)

How does Fanon (1952) describe overdetermination by race?

"I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the 'idea' that others have of me but of my own appearance" (Fanon, 1952, p.90)

How do Gillborn et al. (2015) challenge the assumption that class transcends race?

"To be White and middle class is not the same as being Black and middle class"; "Being middle class offers little protection from the lower than average attainment levels experienced by Black students generally" (Gillborn et al., 2015, pp.1, 4). Carter (2003, cited in lecture) adds that Black cultural capital holds symbolic value in Black peer contexts but is systematically devalued in white institutional space.

What do Gillborn et al. (2015) say about the emotional cost of navigating white educational spaces?

"Constantly assessing and navigating these various public terrains can be exhausting"; "You are constantly having to prove yourself all the time on a number of levels" (Richard, in Gillborn et al., 2015, p.151)

How do Gillborn et al. (2015) describe the consciousness required of Black middle-class individuals?

"The Black middle classes are living through not a double consciousness… but instead through a set of multiple consciousnesses as they move back and forth between the class and race divides" (Gillborn et al., 2015, p.150). Moore (2008, cited in lecture) frames this through Black habitus — a "cultural reservoir that informs the performance of race and class identities" — and the politics of respectability: "the wielding of morality and positive self-presentation as a form of status."

What do Gillborn et al. (2015) argue about the demands whiteness places on the Black middle classes?

"That this society remains oblivious to (or uninterested in) the demands it places on the Black middle classes speaks to the unexamined power and privileges embedded in Whiteness" (Gillborn et al., 2015, p.153)

What does Sandrine's 'mask' anecdote in Gillborn et al. (2015) evidence about racialised emotional labour?

"I started doing it consciously… in the mornings I would get in my car and I would have very loud reggae music… When I get off the tube and I walk up to the doors [of my work building]… the mask is on" (Gillborn et al., 2015, p.151) — illustrating the daily performance of racial palatability as a mandatory code of entry to elite spaces.

How do Evans & Moore (2015) frame emotional labour in white institutional spaces?

"Participation in white institutional spaces requires… a process of emotional labor that gets added to the normal labor of schooling and work" (Evans & Moore, 2015)

How do Evans & Moore (2015) describe the double bind of emotional expression for people of colour?

If they respond with "normal human emotions — anger, frustration, sadness — they reify the white racial framing of themselves as overly emotional or emotionally 'deviant'" (Evans & Moore, 2015)

What does Wright (2022) find about academic portraiture, and how do students of colour physically respond?

Students at Yale School of Medicine found portrait walls reinforced "whiteness, elitism, maleness, and power" and produced feelings of being "judged and unwelcome" (Wright, 2022). Crucially, students coped by "avoiding the places where they were located" — spatial contraction constituting an immaterial stopping device, extending Ahmed's (2007) concept to architecturally encoded whiteness.

What does Harper (2020, cited in lecture) find about racialised surveillance in PWIs?

"Black students in predominantly white universities were 18% more likely to have been profiled by campus police than white students" (Harper, 2020, cited in lecture)

How does Ray (2019, cited in lecture) describe the limits of diversity initiatives in PWIs?

"Diversity policies often serve a ceremonial public relations function but do little to change the racial distribution of organisational power" (Ray, 2019, cited in lecture)

What does Ray (2019, cited in lecture) mean by 'racialised organisations'?

Race shapes "organisational formation, hierarchies and processes" — white organisations are seen as normative and neutral, but racialised logics structure staffing, curricula, and cultural norms in ways that systematically advantage whiteness, even without explicit discrimination.

How does Faulk (2024) frame the sociocultural necessity of navigating white space?

"The ability to navigate society, maneuver White spaces, socially advance, and survive physically and psychologically is often contingent on this reality and necessitates a sociocultural toolkit" (Faulk, 2024, p.32)

How does Faulk's (2024) 'flip it from urban to corporate' finding evidence the anticipatory nature of racialised emotional labour?

"We just wanted to make sure that our kids had the experience. They can flip it from urban to corporate" (Tanya, cited in Faulk, 2024, p.40) — encoding codeswitching as a prerequisite for professional survival, illustrating how the demands of white institutional space are reproduced intergenerationally.

How does the Confederate arch at UGA exemplify the active celebration of whiteness in campus architecture?

The primary entrance arch commemorates Confederate soldiers under the framing of 'Southern Independence' — invoking 'Lost Cause' discourse that erases slavery from the Civil War narrative (Inwood & Martin, 2007). This foregrounding of a violent iteration of whiteness at the literal threshold communicates who the institution was built for before students have even entered.

How does the placement of the Civil Rights memorial at UGA exemplify whitewashed collective memory?

The exhibit commemorating the first Black students was confined to a residence hall: "hidden, private… neither open nor visible to the public" (Inwood & Martin, 2007). Hale (1999, cited in Inwood & Martin, 2007) notes this replicates the gendered logic of Jim Crow — spatially reproducing the very confinement Hunter's enrolment transcended.

How does Inwood & Martin (2007) evidence the foundational erasure of Black labour from UGA's institutional memory?

Coulter (1983, cited in Inwood & Martin, 2007) documents that slaves cleared land, built infrastructure, and served as bell-ringers — the only permitted Black presence on campus. Yet the main history page features a painting of slaves loading cotton "without commentary," simultaneously representing and ignoring Black presence from the institution's inception.

How does digital space extend the spatial logic of institutional whitewashing (Inwood & Martin, 2007)?

Black history at UGA is relegated to a "website link" on the main institutional history page — a "virtual world historical narrative" reducing African Americans to "an insignificant sidebar" (Inwood & Martin, 2007). Whitewashing operates across both physical and digital space simultaneously.

What does the Cecil Rhodes statue at UCT evidence about the affective reproduction of colonial whiteness?

Cornell & Kessi (2017) found participants described the statue as inducing visceral colonial power: "Standing in front of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, I still felt the power of the colonisers on my colonised forefathers and myself… the internalised inferiority that is imbued within my psyche." This illustrates Fanon's (1952) triple existence enacted through architectural space. Read through an afro-pessimist lens, such histories of violence are not past but persistently encoded in the present institutional landscape.

How do Blackshear & Hollis (2021) describe the gendered dimensions of exclusion across both PWIs and HBCUs?

"Whether at a PWI or HBCU, the higher education sectors customarily ignored and diminished Black women's presence" (Blackshear & Hollis, 2021) — HBCUs were originally founded and governed by white men, their curriculum designed for Black men only.

How do Ogunbiyi & Kwakye (2019) frame the political act of occupying white educational space?

"As a minority in a predominantly white space, to take up space is itself an act of resistance" (Ogunbiyi & Kwakye, 2019)

To what extent can HBCUs be understood as counter-spaces to institutional whiteness?

HBCUs provide affirming spaces where Black identity is 'celebrated and not frowned upon' (Faulk, 2024) and culturally affirming pedagogy is enacted. But Ray (2019, cited in lecture) notes Jim Crow supporters controlled HBCU boards and some expelled Civil Rights participants. Blackshear & Hollis (2021) add that HBCUs were originally founded and governed by white men, their curriculum initially designed for Black men only.

What is the 'deferred haunting' argument about HBCUs, and why is it analytically significant?

Even at elite HBCUs, the anticipated emotional labour of white professional spaces haunts the student experience — parents describe HBCU attendance as a 'curse' precisely because it defers rather than eliminates white-space navigation: "a lot of the crap that you might not have to deal with… It's a curse because you don't have to deal with things that you will see every day" (Kenneth, cited in Faulk, 2024, p.43). Whiteness operates through anticipation — elitism and whiteness remain inseparable even in spaces that appear to resist them.

How does intersectionality complicate Black educational experiences?

Race, class, and gender produce layered, non-additive disadvantages. Blackshear & Hollis (2021) show exclusion operates at both PWIs and HBCUs for Black women. Evans & Moore (2015) document that emotional labour falls disproportionately on people of colour — compounded by gender at every level: architectural (portrait walls are gendered male), curricular (HBCUs originally designed for Black men), and affective.

How do racialised experiences of education challenge meritocracy?

Meritocracy frames educational success as a product of individual effort, obscuring how institutional whiteness — through spatial logics, racialised emotional labour, surveillance, and devaluation of Black cultural capital — structurally disadvantages students of colour regardless of class. Evans & Moore (2015): institutions "professed neutrality, impartiality and objectivity" as central to their rules, but this conceals the reproduction of white institutional power.

What is Lipsitz's 'white spatial imaginary' and how does it operate in educational institutions?

The white spatial imaginary "idealizes 'pure' and homogenous spaces… It is inscribed in the physical contours of the places where we live, work, and play, and it is bolstered by financial rewards for whiteness" (Lipsitz, cited in Evans & Moore, 2015). It does not require white bodies to be physically present — whiteness is structurally embedded in the aesthetic, spatial logic, and resource distribution of institutions themselves.

How does institutional whiteness operate through knowledge production, and is a decolonised sociology possible within the university?

The lecture identifies colonial knowledge production as a key manifestation of whiteness in PWIs — reading lists disproportionately feature white authors, and Collins' (1986, cited in lecture) 'outsider within' theorises how Black feminist scholars produce knowledge from a structurally marginalised position. Ray (2019, cited in lecture) suggests decolonisation requires not merely curriculum reform but a fundamental reorientation of what counts as legitimate intellectual authority.

Is education a site of racial reproduction or social mobility?

Both simultaneously. Racial reproduction operates through spatial logics, devaluation of Black cultural capital, and the emotional labour demanded by white institutional space (Evans & Moore, 2015). Yet education has also been a site of active counter-organisation: Gillborn et al. (2015) cite the Black supplementary school movement, which "emerged to counter the shortcomings of the British educational system and to provide a cultural grounding for younger generations through the teaching of Black history."

How is educational elitism gendered as well as racialised?

Blackshear & Hollis (2021): HBCU curricula were originally designed for Black men only — "whether at a PWI or HBCU, the higher education sectors customarily ignored and diminished Black women's presence." Wright (2022) shows the portrait wall is explicitly gendered — 'whiteness, elitism, maleness, and power' are co-constituted. Emotional labour also falls disproportionately on Black women (Evans & Moore, 2015) — the racialised toll is compounded by gender at every level.

What is the 'talented tenth' and what are its key critiques?

Du Bois (1933): the top 10% of intellectually promising Black people should be 'leaders of thought and missionaries of culture', nurtured through liberal arts education. Key critiques: reproduces elitism and individualism; later repudiated by Du Bois himself; Morris (2014, cited in lecture) calls the Du Bois/Washington debate a reductive 'accommodationist vs. anti-racist' framing of a far more complex theoretical history of Black education.

What is 'whitewashed collective memory' (Inwood & Martin, 2007) and how does it operate in elite universities?

Campus landscape simplifies desegregation, shunting "more complex and painful aspects… to individualised daily experiences, private dormitory spaces, or a virtual world" (Inwood & Martin, 2007). Architecture actively celebrates whiteness — Confederate soldiers at the entrance — while invisibilising Black history: Civil Rights memorial in a private dormitory, Black history reduced to a website link.