>https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.18.010119
>Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures. In this paper, we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction. We name mechanisms that facilitate the reproduction of whiteness in this local context, including a particular representation of energy, physics values, whiteboards, gendered social norms, and the structure of schooling. In naming whiteness and offering a set of analytic markers, our aim is to provide instructors and researchers with a tool for identifying whiteness in their own contexts. Alongside our discussion, which imagines new possibilities for physics teaching and learning, we hope our work contributes to Critical Whiteness Studies’ goal of dismantling whiteness.
>In this paper, in most cases we choose not to capitalize white and do choose to capitalize Black, Hispanic, and Students or People of Color. (The exception is when referring to Critical Whiteness Studies, which is a formal term that is capitalized in the literature.) This choice is informed by critical scholarship and activism, such as that by Dumas and the PoC in PER group [9,10]. For example, Dumas writes that Black is a “self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships.” White, on the other hand, is a socially constructed category that was created for the purposes of dominance and exclusion; it “does not describe a group with a sense of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization or terror.”
>Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures. In this paper, we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction. We name mechanisms that facilitate the reproduction of whiteness in this local context, including a particular representation of energy, physics values, whiteboards, gendered social norms, and the structure of schooling. In naming whiteness and offering a set of analytic markers, our aim is to provide instructors and researchers with a tool for identifying whiteness in their own contexts. Alongside our discussion, which imagines new possibilities for physics teaching and learning, we hope our work contributes to Critical Whiteness Studies’ goal of dismantling whiteness.
>In this paper, in most cases we choose not to capitalize white and do choose to capitalize Black, Hispanic, and Students or People of Color. (The exception is when referring to Critical Whiteness Studies, which is a formal term that is capitalized in the literature.) This choice is informed by critical scholarship and activism, such as that by Dumas and the PoC in PER group [9,10]. For example, Dumas writes that Black is a “self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinships.” White, on the other hand, is a socially constructed category that was created for the purposes of dominance and exclusion; it “does not describe a group with a sense of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization or terror.”
