White Warnings

How white scholars engage in anti-racist scholarship is a paramount concern for the field of art education. But there is a double bind facing white art education scholars engaged in qualitative research. Reflexivity is a hallmark of trustworthy qualitative research yet being reflexive necessarily entails white people discussing their own entanglements in racism. Ironically, this reflexivity re-centers whiteness and reinvests whiteness by showing that it is capable of seeing itself for what it is. In this paper, I use an example from my own research that illuminates this double bind. To work this double bind, I propose that white art education scholars with anti-racist commitments must run towards white warnings, or cues that their praxis might threaten their social and institutional standing, as well as whiteness itself.