Understanding Critical Whiteness Studies: Harmful or Helpful in the Struggle for Racial Equity in the Academy?

Abstract

Focusing on the hazards and benefits that come with a critical interrogation of Whiteness, the chapter outlines its purpose and framework, and draws attention to the crucial need for it to be symbiotic with intersectional analysis and anti-colonial, anti-capitalist scholarship. This chapter concludes with a schematic framework that offers a way through the problems encountered by fixations with White personal shame or growth, towards an eradication of anti-Black racism in higher education that is served—not blunted—by individual grapples with White privilege, White guilt and White fragility. Cole also offers a practical insight into his own attempts at anti-racist praxis in the Higher Education. Cole proposes an anti-colonial schema of authentic engagement with Critical Whiteness Studies that centres Black radicalism for a positive way forward.