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Keeping the Ivory Tower White: Discourses of Racial Domination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Carol Schick
Carol Schick
Affiliation:
University of Regina, 3737 Wascana Parkway, Regina (Saskatchewan) S4S 0A2,schickc@uregina.ca
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Abstract

Designations of space and place are significant to the history and formation of Canada as a white-identified country. Particular places discussed in this paper are public education and post-secondary schooling, which, as regulators of public spaces, act as indicators of belonging in the production of students' identities. White students in this study need the university for its credentialing function and for its training in ideological processes of their “becoming a teacher.” Their production as legitimate citizens and teachers is authorized by requirements of the institution in which they learn to “manage” cross-cultural relations. Maintaining the status of elite sites requires surveillance of knowledge production with respect to hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Elite social relations also designate which identifications and knowledges will be considered rational and legitimate. In the research on which this paper reports, white-identified pre-service education participants depend on the racial hierarchies of elite educational spaces to secure their own respectability among the white-dominated profession of teaching. It is a respectability which their whiteness both requires and affords.

Résumé

La manière de désigner les espaces et les places est significatif dans l'histoire et la formation du Canada comme pays identifié blanc. Dans cet article, les espaces de l'éducation publique post-secondaire sont analysés comme indicateurs d'appartenance dans la production identitaire des étudiants. Les étudiants blancs de cette recherche ont besoin de la fonction légitimante de l'université tout autant que des processus idéologiques de sa formation pour «devenir des enseignants». Les exigences de l'institution d'apprendre à «gérer» les relations interculturelles les autorisent à devenir des citoyens et des enseignants légitimes. Maintenir le statut de sites d'élites demande de surveiller la production du savoir en termes d'hiérarchies de race, de classe et de genre. Les relations sociales de l'élite désignent également quelles identifications et quelles connaissances seront considérées rationnelles et légitimes. Dans l'enquête qui fonde cet article, des étudiants-enseignants identifiés comme blancs dépendent des hiérarchies raciales d'espaces éducationnels d'élite pour assurer leur propre respectabilité dans la profession d'enseignants à domination blanche. C'est une respectabilité exigée et possible par le fait qu'ils sont blancs.

Type
Law, Race and Space/Droit, espaces et racialisation
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , August 2000 , pp. 70 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 2000

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References

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48 Ibid. at 210s.