White Pre-Service Teachers and "De-privileged Spaces"

In their classic article, "Culture as Disability," McDermott and Varenne (1995) retell the fable of the seeing man who, upon finding himself in the "country of the blind" thought he could easily rule it. His efforts were fruitless because he could not make sense of their world. Daily life was set up for the blind to be successful. The seeing man was shocked by the idea that what was considered a privilege (his eyes) in one setting could be his handicap in another. Although McDermott and Varenne used this story to illustrate how culturally determined the notions of "able" and "disabled" are, I believe the seeing man's arrogance has further application to how teachers and teacher educators can approach White privilege. The story I tell is my own version of the seeing man (with a gender and race twist). It is about a small group of White pre-service teachers in a mostly Latina(o) teacher education cohort as they began their first semester in the Multicultural Teacher Training (MTT) (1) program at a large public university in the southwest. It is about how Whiteness can become both a handicap and an opportunity instead of a privilege. This process, which I refer to as "de-privileging Whiteness," pushes White pre-service teachers to re-examine their own perspectives as culturally constructed (Geertz, 1973) and their version of the world as just that, a version. The White pre-service teachers I concentrate on were given a reason to see themselves as "White" and to see their own version of the world as one of many. In their early MTT classes, they were misled and ill prepared by their own cultural understanding of education, especially when it failed to give them the tools to participate successfully in class. They often made mistakes, putting their "foot in their mouth" so to speak. At the same time, the Latina(o) students were empowered to speak their mind and disagree with the White students, something that is less common in other education classes at the same campus and at other universities in the U.S. (Montecinos, 2004). How this de-privileged space was manifested in the MTT classroom is the focus of this article. Whiteness and Teacher Preparation Critical Race theorists and Whiteness Scholars (Delgado, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 2001; Pollack, 2004; Sleeter, 2003; Sleeter & McClaren, 1995; Tatum, 1999; Thompson, 2003) have been pushing teacher educators to look closely at the reproduction of White privilege, which the often quoted Peggy Macintosh (1989) defines as "an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious" (Maher & Tetreault, 1997; McIntyre 1997; Sleeter, 2001) These sets of privileges are passed from generation to generation, through the family, classrooms and other institutions in society like banks, schools, and the media. (Helms, 1990; King, 1991; Lipsitz, 1998) In her definitive article, Whiteness as Property, Cheryl Harris (1993) said "The fundamental precept of Whiteness--the core of its value--is its exclusivity" (p. 1789). In other words, Whiteness as an identity (and a marker of power) is linked to its insistence on being the only version of right, good, and worthy, to the exclusion of other versions of being. Still, we know very little about the contexts that push White teacher education students to see themselves as racialized, cultural beings. Usually, as Ladson-Billings (2004) recently said, "Most members of the dominant society rarely acknowledge themselves as cultural beings. They have no reason to. " Some argue there is an urgent need to overturn "the normalcy and neutrality of White privilege" (Villenas & Deyhle, 1999) but we have few examples of how this can happen. (See Hytten & Warren, 2003; Marx & Pennington, 2003) If we know that 85% of teachers are White (NCEI, 2005) and students of color are growing at 43%, even 57% in the west, then it seems problematic to graduate White teachers who haven't thought deeply and critically about the relativism of their own perspective. …