Whitewashing Race: Scapegoating Culture

Abstract

Cheryl I. Harristt INTRODUCTION The images of the suffering that washed over New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina seemed to provide incontrovertible evidence of the significance of race and persistence of racial inequality in contemporary U.S. society.' The simple fact that the faces of those left to fend for

“Locking the Door Before We Got the Keys”

“…Whiteness is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others. (p. viii) Lipsitz's conceptualization of the possessive investment in whiteness only further corroborates with earlier CRT notions of the way whiteness compounds over space and time in a dialectical process of accumulation and disaccumulation (Bell, 1987(Bell, , 1988Crenshaw, 1988;Harris, 1993Harris, , 2006. Cheryl Harris's (1993) notion of whiteness as property provides a useful frame for considering the pattering of racialized inequality.…”

Interdisciplinary Notes on the Dual Nature of Disability: Disrupting Ideology–Ontology Circuits in Racial Disparities Research

“…1 Colorblindness is an ideological meta-frame. Harris (2006) defined frames as "the mediating structures that allow us to make sense of the world … determine what facts 'make sense' [and] what sense to make of the facts" … [Frames are] "pre-existing 'systems of ideas or scripts that inscribe meaning into facts" (Harris, 2006, pp. 914, 932).…”

“…914, 932). Furthermore, frames are embedded in cognition and are triggered and shaped by social situations and experiences (Harris, 2006).…”

“…That is, when inequalities are explained by deficit ideologies that document deficiencies in the bodies and abilities of racialized people, it is thus assumed that such "defects" constitute the innate nature of this community (i.e., their ontology). This logic then dictates that (borrowing from Harris, 2006), "… racial inequality will only disappear when Black [and Brown] people are 'fixed'" (p. 912)-that is, in the logic of these recent studies, more students of color ought to be placed in special education. In this way, circuits of deficit ideologies that forge visions of intrinsically defective people are perpetuated through a discourse that naturalizes disability racial disparities.…”

Antiracist Education in Theory and Practice: A Critical Assessment

“…Whites who protest that they had no control over the past reproduce a discourse that disclaims responsibility for the present. Appeals to universalistic morals, values, and principles as the foundation for intergroup relations do little more than maintain the status quo (DiAngelo 2006;Bell 2003;Ecclestone et al 2005;Harris 2006;Kumashiro 2000;Neville et al 2006;Sleeter 2001;Sowards and Renegar 2004;Tate 1997;Thompson 1997).…”