Unveiling Bias: White Educators Confronting Racism

The task of counter-hegemonic groups is the development of counter-institutions,

ideologies, and cultures that provide an ethical alternative to the dominant

hegemony, a lived experience of how the world can be different. The entry point

in terms of individual consciousness is the disjuncture between received versions

of reality and lived contradictions" (Lather, 1984, 55-56).

Racism and its effects continue to forcefully impact American society. Efforts to

combat racism have almost always addressed the issue and problems from the perspective

of the groups affected by discriminatory policies and practices. However, during the last

decade of the twentieth century, there was an increasing interest within several disciplines

in foregrounding, interrogating, and rearticulating "whiteness." Within the disciplines of

sociology, speech communication, cultural studies, critical race theory, and education,

discourses have emerged to look at racism not from the perspective of the "other" but

from the perspective of whiteness and white privilege. There have been strident calls for

an analysis of whiteness as a racialized category and for an examination of how whiteness

has (mis)shaped knowledge production in American culture (Keating, 1995).