Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-9-2024

Abstract

This critical discourse analysis compares the ways in which White and BIPOC college students discuss their experiences of an educational intervention meant to promote better understanding of systemic racism. We analyzed reflective writing produced by 11 White psychology students from a private liberal arts college in the eastern United States and 17 BIPOC students from a Human Services program at a public university in the western United States. White students engaged in whiteness discourse that distanced themselves from the realities of systemic racism and/or relieved the cognitive dissonance associated with the self- and group-image threat related to learning about systemic racism. In so doing, they unwittingly upheld white supremacy. BIPOC students, in contrast, engaged an antiracist discourse that employed critiques of the social systems that produce systemic racism and destabilized dominant colorblind narratives, often by drawing on lived experience. From the Critical Race Theory perspective that the centrality of lived experience is a legitimate lens through which to analyze racial subordination, we discuss the importance of attending to the action orientation and constructed nature of discourse in antiracist education.

Comments

Author Posting © The Author(s), 2024. This article is posted here by permission of Wiley Periodicals LLC for personal use and redistribution. This article was published open access in Journal of Social Issues, vol. 80, iss. 2 (June 2024), https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12612.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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