Disrupting the pedagogy of hypocrisy: How do we move beyond teaching students how to survive white supremacy?

Abstract

This article discusses the ways that four educators experience the impacts of white supremacy in classroom spaces. We discuss the ways we navigate the tension created when we desire to foster antiracist spaces but are required to work within an academic system that is underpinned by white supremacy. Using tenets of Griot storytelling, we describe our points of origin, provide narrative examples of student interactions, and detail the reflexive lenses through which we processed these interactions. Our narratives specifically seek to center Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and discuss the ways that our training and education has limited our ability to support them in academic spaces. We conclude with an invitation for the reader to sit with us in this space of tension, and some reflexive questions to consider as we exist in this space together. We hope to offer this as a way to continue dismantling the internalizations of supremacy. We also offer this as an opportunity to move away from the problem-solving mentality often applied to issues of racism in favor of fostering a continued, collective healing from the wounds created for all of us by white supremacist systems.