(FREE BEACON) – The Southern Poverty Law Center published an article documenting the ways in which white teachers “weaponize their whiteness” to harm black students.
The article, published by SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” division, outlines how white people weaponize their “entitlement, anger, … need for retaliation, feigned fear and, finally, white fragility.”
It suggests that teachers—particularly white, female teachers – can stop the weaponization of whiteness by relinquishing control of their classrooms when a student questions their authority. One teacher quoted in the piece says he has to “resist the urge to maintain power or control in [his] class, and especially to resist the anger that can bubble up in [him] when that control is called into question.”