THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY COLLOQUIUM SERIES PRESENTS:

Assistant Professor, College of the Holy Cross

Professor Melissa F. Weiner

Exploring Racialization by Investigating Whiteness:

Race in Dutch Classrooms and Curriculum
Throughout much of what is considered the Western world, immigration has brought, and continues to bring, students from around the world into previously all white classrooms. In some classrooms, in cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, and London, white European children are in the minority and in some they do not exist at all. However, schools located in Europe (or the U.S. or Canada) are often dominated by Western/European cultures and curriculum. This white culture and curriculum is often oppressive to minority groups as it not only fails to consider non-European cultures as valuable and excludes minorities from the national history, but features derision of those linguistic, cultural, religious or racial minorities. But because many European scholars eschew the use of the very word race, research about racism in shaping educational and other socioeconomic outcomes is largely absent from published scholarship. This presentation engages arguments for a Global Critical Race Theory to be utilized to address this problem that I describe in a recently published article and applies them to the Netherlands, a nation where scholars largely refuse to address racializing mechanisms in their society, in general, or the schools, specifically. Fieldwork in a diverse Dutch primary school and depictions of slavery in Dutch primary school history textbooks reveals racialized norms of white supremacy infuse not only curriculum but classroom norms. These phenomena likely contribute to the socioeconomic racial hierarchy in the Netherlands allowing white Dutch to maintain epistemic privilege and access to important social, political, and economic resources.

Friday, October 12th, 2011 at 3:00pm Mundelein 616