Complexifying White Racial Identity: Placing Veronica Watson and the Reverend Thandeka in Dialogue with Janet Helms

In this article, we synthesize the work of two prominent African-American critical Whiteness scholars, Reverend Thandeka and Veronica Watson who over a nuanced and contextualized understanding of White identity development. We argue their work, not widely circulated in education and teacher education, could complement Helms’s prevailing model for White racial identity, a popular pedagogical tool in these felds. Thandeka and Watson pay close attention to the psycho-social racial identity development that occurs when White children and adults are implicitly and explicitly policed away from people of color and/or choose to abandon their desires for cross-racial relationships. We rely on a careful study of Thandeka and Watson’s work to suggest possibilities for extracting a process model of White racial identity development from their theorizations to complement the prominence of Helms’s existing model in education contexts.