Washing The World In Whiteness:
International School Policy
WASHING THE WORLD IN WHITENESS:
INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL’S POLICY
Article reviewed by Dr Stephen Whitehead
As we go deeper into the 21st century it cannot have escaped your notice that there are those among us, white-skinned, who are less than comfortable with the notion of racial equality, and even more who are discomforted by the concept of white privilege and, consequently, unwilling to acknowledge it in themselves.
It would be tempting (and assuaging, perhaps) to dismiss such racially-unsettled individuals as invariably white members of the underclass, proletariat, or disenfranchised (uneducated) working classes.
That would be a mistake.
There are a good many such individuals, highly qualified professionals, working in education, not least independent and international schools. To state otherwise would not only be doing a disservice to those white teachers who are fully cognitive of their white privilege and active in ensuring it does not permeate into their teaching and learning, it would be doing an even greater disservice to the many Black teachers who have suffered, and continue to suffer from discrimination, whether ‘unconscious’ or not.
One of the most important functions of academics, especially sociologists, is to draw attention to inequalities in society wherever they exist and however they operate. Sociologists are not required to support the status quo, reinforce ideologies, nor pay lip service to those cultural values which diminish others. Sociologists have a much greater responsibility and that is to tell truth to power no matter where such power exists and regardless of the form in which it manifests.
One such sociologist is Alex McTaggart, the author of this article on ‘whiteness in international schools’.
Alex adopts an uncompromising stance, one which immediately challenges all international educationalists and their schools to critically examine any possible disconnect between their avowed mission and their practice.
“…Directors of international schools command a paradoxical space of progressive futures, cloaking injustice and whiteness. This is enacted through daily policy, recruitment, teaching and renumeration which privileges the empowered, exploits the marginalised and thereby delivers a critical education of questionable efficacy.” (p.1)
Strong stuff.
But as Dr Sadie Hollins so eloquently puts it in her article in this EDDi Special Edition:
“it is time to get comfortable being uncomfortable, that’s where the growth is”.
If you are an international school teacher or leader reading this then no doubt this last twelve months have caused you some discomfort; reflecting on your own ‘unconscious bias’, collusion in inequality in your school, or unwitting complicity in practices which, if you were honest with yourself, you know full well to be anything but progressive and equitable.
If so, then hopefully you’ve also experienced growth, because every white educationalist, without exception, needs to.
If you believe you don’t need to grow then that alone is evidence of the need.
As this article indicates, it is one thing white disenfranchised working-class folk wondering how on earth they are privileged by being white, and quite another for white professional educationalists to fail to recognise it. International schools are not only privileged by definition and intent, they are places of hope, change, multiculturalism, global-mindedness, enlightenment and liberalism. At least, that is what they claim in their mission statements. In which case, those of us fortunate enough to be working in such communities have no excuse. We have to be mindful and we have to be political about it.
There can be no comfortable neutrality for international school teachers, leaders, owners. And nor should there be.
“This paper is significant because international schools hold great potential as transformative places to initiate planetary action for peace, equality, just and environmental change.”
“IB international schools address global issues through emancipatory values and critical thinking, yet also operationalise and model a form of implicit racism which is blind to, and uncritical of, whiteness power:
How often did we, as international students feel unrepresented in the course topics that were assigned to us? How many of us, upon the death of George Floyd, felt the jolt of realisation that we know nothing about systemic racism, colonialism and its undiscussed modern successor?’ (Xoa, 2020, p. website)
The Black Lives Matter protests of April last year were a global catalyst, but they merely forced us all to examine our assumptions and behaviours. The problems were deeply rooted long before then.
How deeply rooted I myself discovered while delivering anti-racist training for independent schools in the UK and South East Asia during the latter part of 2020. Some of these schools were tentatively embarking on the very first steps on a long journey of critical self-discovery regards ‘whiteness power’ only because they’d been shocked to receive letters from alumni and ex-staff complaining of systemic racism, often going back decades. They’d been jolted into reacting, they’d been forced to feel uncomfortable, and many of the leaders of these schools certainly were uncomfortable – the school they imagined they were leading was nothing like the school that many of their BAME staff and students were experiencing.
The BLM movement encouraged the hitherto silenced voices to rise and rise they did. They are still rising, still demanding to be heard. None of this has gone away and nor will it go away simply with good intentions and a few hours agreeable professional development in ‘unconscious bias’ (whatever that is).
But we also need to recognise the challenges here; critical reflection and change won’t come easy, especially for white leaders who have built up prestigious careers in international and independent schools. To suddenly be confronted with evidence that all is not as well in one’s institution as one had assumed can be highly disconcerting. But that feeling of being uncomfortable is the vital first step to ensuring whiteness power disappears. Just don’t forget that always lurking behind your good intentions, like Gollum following The Ring, is profit.
Indeed, this is one of the outcomes of Dr Taggart’s research:
“[the research] Participants’ remarkable field success as notable Directors goes hand in hand with their blindness to whiteness…[but]…Such whiteness and Englishness cannot be learned, it must be lived. In this way, the dominance of this cultural capital and symbolic power supplies the international gaze with vision and enacts symbolic violence against those who cannot partake in its whiteness, and Englishness. It is therefore, a simple matter to see how this symbolic capital is reified and sold on the global market. This is the product international schools offer, and the Director is the face of the firm. In this way, the international gaze meets symbolic violence, and the market turns whiteness and Englishness into profit…[Indeed] whiteness IS the product.” (p. 18, original emphasis).
This superb article by Dr Alex Taggart inspired EDDi to put together a Special Edition on ‘whiteness in international schools’, and we are fortunate enough to be able to include in this edition not only a second article by Alex, but also equally AN important reflection on this most important topic by Sadie Hollins.
The contributors to this Special Edition are simply adding their voices to the growing demand that international and independent schools change, become more honest. Because it is at the very least disingenuous to continue claiming to teach international mindedness and global citizenship when the reality is your school is promoting whiteness.
The ‘cultural hegemony that promotes white epistemic and ontological ascendency’ is firmly established in elitist education around the world.
This has to stop. And every one of us has a part to play in ensuring we put an end to it.
reference
Alexander Charles Gardner-McTaggart (2020): Washing the world in whiteness; international schools’ policy, Journal of Educational Administration and History
source
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220620.2020.1844162
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