Prof urges 'destruction' of 'whitestream intellectual habits'
A University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley professor recently called for the “destruction” of what he calls “Whitestream cherished knowledge.”
James Jupp, a scholar of critical white studies, articulated his commitment to the destruction of “Whitestream cherished knowledge” in an article published Tuesday for the “White Scholars Working Against Whiteness” issue of the journal Whiteness and Education.
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Such knowledge, Jupp explains, “refers to Whitestream subject area content and related whitened intellectual habits that form the basis of much mainstream learning and teaching in U.S. schools.”
Jupp then cites K-12 history lessons as an example, noting that many K-12 students are taught through the lens of “white privilege,” which creates problems among the future educators in Jupp’s classes, whom he teaches to “resist critical race and whiteness pedagogies.”
In an effort to fight this, Jupp, a proponent of “decolonizing education,” calls upon his fellow professors to commit to “the creative destruction of cherished curriculum knowledge” and replace it with “actionable, teachable, antiracist knowledge for race-visible teaching.”
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“Racialized curriculum recoding is important because it begins to outline the ways in which critical race or whiteness pedagogies must actually recode and replace existing cherished knowledge in process-oriented ways,” Jupp argues, saying such a tactic is important because historically aspiring “white teachers [have] denied, evaded, or diminished the salience of race in teaching and learning.”
Ultimately, by restructuring K-12 teacher curriculum to better address racial issues, Jupp hopes to fight against “the pervasive flood of representations supporting whiteness throughout American life.”
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Notably, the journal Whiteness in Education, published by Routledge, has emerged as one of the most active academic journals critical of whiteness, publishing several articles similar to Jupp’s this summer alone.
One article, for example, was written by a professor who pledged to “deconstruct whiteness” in all of her courses, while another claimed that the election resulted in “widespread white neurosis.”
Campus Reform reached out to Jupp for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter @Toni_Airaksinen
