Book: Educated in Whiteness: Good Intentions and Diversity in Schools

Posted by University of Minnesota Press on October 27, 2014

How well-meaning educators shape and enact diversity-related policies and practices that strengthen whiteness rather than educational equity or justice

Through ethnographic accounts of teachers in two demographically different secondary schools in one urban district, Educated in Whiteness investigates how whiteness operates in ways that thwart (or co-opt) even the best intentions and common sense. The result, according to Angelina E. Castagno, is educational policies and practices that reinforce the status quo and protect whiteness rather than working toward equity.

Angelina E. Castagno’s up-close look at how whiteness operates in actual schools, and within one school district, offers a rare, ethnographic portrait of how policies ostensibly aimed at effecting educational equity actually end up reinforcing the status quo. We still have much to learn about how whiteness and racism function in everyday life, and Educated in Whiteness is unusual in the field, offering an important way of seeing how whiteness operates across the system.
— Thea Abu El-Haj, Rutgers University

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/educated-in-whiteness