Distancing Strategies: White Women Preservice Teachers and Antiracist Curriculum

This study describes White women preservice teachers’ talk in and about an antiracist teacher education course aimed at raising students’ awareness of racial inequities. Rather than be fully engaged participants in classroom discussions, White women distanced themselves through strategies of silence, social disassociation, and separation from responsibility. They used these strategies in response to perceptions that they were being positioned as racist, directly implicated in institutional racism, or responsible for racial discrimination. The article concludes with thoughts about how instructors might engage White women and antiracist curriculum, and therefore affect their ability to effectively teach students from various cultural backgrounds, through metadialogic approaches to race discussions.