I felt as though blinders had been removed. There I was, realizing at the age of 22 that I had been walking around with this knapsack for my entire life, accessing its contents constantly, never knowing it was there. I remember sitting in the library reading Peggy McIntosh’s The Invisible Knapsack and being struck by McIntosh’s image of the knapsack of whiteness: an unearned package filled with special tools, privileges, and codes that others did not have access to, but that I did because of my racial identity (McIntosh, 1989, p.
When you exist in a culture that reflects you and gives you power, it’s easy to be unaware of your privilege-to think that your identity is the “default,” the “norm.” Hegemony is the air that we breathe. I have to start by recognizing the air that I breathe. The first phase in actively disrupting racist and hegemonic systems requires me to look inward to interrogate the multiple aspects of my identity and understand how my culture-which is deeply rooted in these identities-affects the way that I show up in the world. If I want to be anti-racist and disrupt hegemonic power structures, I need to first start with myself. Identifying and unlearning the ways that I perpetuate oppression is active, intentional work. These are not practices that I have always been attuned to, and I know there are many more that I am still not yet aware of. How often do we refer to a group of people as “guys,” thereby centering the male experience? How often do we call someone “crazy,” normalizing an ableist view of the world? How often do we fail to honor the First Nations people on whose land we stand, contributing to their systematic erasure from our collective history? No one is immune to this apprenticeship, because hegemony is the air that we breathe. Deborah Ball called this the “apprenticeship of participation” (2018), the process by which we learn, repeat, and thus normalize oppressive practices. Through our participation in these normalized practices, we learn to reproduce them. Teaching is the vehicle that helped me arrive at this “why,” and it is also the vehicle through which I work to actualize it.Įvery day, we participate in oppressive practices that systematically subjugate people based on their identities. Now, I teach to disrupt hegemonic and racist power systems.Įverything I am is the result of institutionalized practices that bolstered me along life’s journey, and I am committed to not only unlearning these practices, but intentionally and actively working against them.
For a long time, the why behind my desire to teach was self-motivated, rooted in the personal satisfaction I got from helping others. If you had asked me six years ago why I wanted to be a teacher, I would have said something about loving to work with kids about how satisfying it is when a student finally “gets” a concept. For me, the “what” has always been teaching, but the “why” has been harder to articulate. does a bit in his stand-up routine where he talks about knowing your “what” versus knowing your “why” (Michael Jr., 2015). Now I realize it is an account that I can cash in to weaken systems of unearned power in my classroom and beyond. I used to think of my whiteness as a burden.
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