On “Ceding Space”: Pushing Back on Idealized Whiteness to Foster Freedom for Students of Color

Teachers’ ontological and epistemological orientations toward their pedagogy and practice are critically important for educating in ways that support the self-determination and agency of all learners, particularly Students of Color. Given that the teaching workforce is predominantly white and female there is a need to continue working with white teachers to deconstruct deficit and dehumanizing ways of being and knowing that they often employ in K-12 classrooms. Further, we must simultaneously advance antiracist orientations and emancipatory practices of Teachers of Color and white teachers. In this chapter, we describe the ways that many white teachers’ ontologies and performative emotions undermine efforts at antiracist and emancipatory teaching and learning and perpetuate education violence against Students of Color. Drawing on the work of Shange (2019), we begin by describing emancipatory and antiracist pedagogy and what it means to enact such pedagogies to counter systemic racism in K-12 schools. Shange’s notion of ceding space, which asks teachers to “give room(s), release authority, subvert settlement” (p. 106), offers an emancipatory alternative to holding on to the unearned power and control afforded by whiteness. We then interrogate how whiteness serves as a proxy for all things good, smart, and successful in school, thus undermining racialized students’ access to and experiences with schooling that is freeing. We describe the ways that white teachers’ performative emotions and commitments to white perfectionism undermine their efforts to uphold antiracist and liberatory pedagogies and practices that cultivate joy and wholeness for Students of Color. Specifically, we examine how ontological proximity to whiteness, white fear, white wokeness, and commitments to white perfectionism operate as forms of violence against Students of Color, and we offer pedagogies and practices that counter this as a way to foster learning environments that are freeing and dismantle systemic racism.