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The founders and officers of the Virginia Military Institute, one of the few American engineering schools in the antebellum period, embedded a particular engineering culture into the curriculum and discipline of the school. This occurred, in some cases, as a consequence of struggles by the elite of western Virginia to gain a greater share of political power in the commonwealth and by the officers of VMI for authority within the field of higher education. In other cases, the engineering culture was crafted as a deliberate strategy within the above struggles. Among the features embedded was the key feature of requiring the subordination of one’s own local and individual interests and identities (class, regional, denominational, etc.) to the service of the commonwealth and nation. This particular articulation of service meant the performance of “practical” and “useful” work of internal improvements for the development and defense of the commonwealth and the nation. The students learned and were to employ an engineering knowledge derived from fundamental physical and mathematical principles, as opposed to a craft knowledge learned on the job. To carry out such work and to even develop the capacity to subordinate their own interests, the cadets were disciplined into certain necessary traits, including moral character, industriousness, selfrestraint, self-discipline, and subordination to authority. To be an engineer was to be a particular kind of man. The above traits were predicated upon the engineers being white men, who, in a new “imagined fraternity” of equal white men, were innately independent, in contrast to white women and blacks, who were innately dependent. Having acquired a mathematically-intensive engineering education and the character necessary to perform engineering work, the graduates of VMI who became engineers were to enter their field as middle-class professionals who could claim an objective knowledge and a disinterested service to the commonwealth and nation, rather than to just their own career aspirations. / Ph. D.

In the United States, the largest group of educators, historically and presently, are white middle-class women, yet there is a rising population of racially diverse students creating a persistent dissonance and disconnect between the culture of the white teacher and their students. In this study, I sought to discover how the racial identity development of novice white female educators evolved, given their common participation in the Teach for America program. Using the conceptual frameworks of critical race theory, critical feminist theory, and the body of scholarship in critical whiteness studies, I conducted a critical narrative inquiry of eight novice white female educators. From the participants’ stories, three themes emerged: (a) relationships matter; (b) the privilege to want something different; and (c) intersection of whiteness and power. Further analysis was conducted to address the ideas of race-consciousness building through defining moments and sustained connection, and white dominance through an ascription of power and an analysis of gender. This study represents an effort to address the phenomenon of white teacher dominance by listening to the voices of white educators who experienced race-based development. Ultimately, this study aimed to contribute to the scholarship that informs how white educators develop their own racial identities so as to not do additional harm and trauma to racialized communities.

Changing the existing framework for how schools operate and the "deficit frame of reference" for students of color begins with teacher awareness of differing social and cultural norms and values that privilege some and oppress others (Villegas and Lucas, 2002). These normalized cultural values are exacerbated by the fact that they are generally "invisible" to the white teacher majority. Quaye (2012) and Zuniga et al. (2002) use the term "consciousness-raising" to describe the process of developing an awareness of these norms and values. Using a Critical Race Theory lens, this study aimed to capture the process of "consciousness-raising" in a white teacher book club examining ten different African American children's picture books. The study design was supported by an Intergroup Dialogue model, developed by Zuniga et al. (2002) and adapted for white facilitators by Quaye (2012). Data Analysis was guided by a continuum of white racial identity developed by Helms (1990) and modified by Lawrence and Tatum (1998). Transcripts of participant narratives were analyzed for signs of status change along the continuum and each teacher demonstrated varying degrees of socio-cultural awareness. The researcher journal was analyzed to capture reflections on the Intergroup Dialogue Model for facilitation. Principal findings of the study include the replication of themes found in the existing whiteness literature as well as the value and limitations of the continuum of white racial identity as a tool for analysis. / Ph. D.

This thesis seeks to properly identify and illuminate the disciplinary practices of the K-12 classroom that necessitate, cultivate, and perpetrate colonial violence to maintain the established order (anti-Black racism) of our modern American society. To accomplish this, the relationship between the white teacher and non-white student is problematized by combining the conceptual frameworks of George Yancy’s white gaze and Maria Lugones’ racist/colonial gaze. This analysis highlights the ulterior motives of the “teacher look,” an action that utilizes shame to instruct students on how to behave properly in the classroom, through the authoritative role of whiteness in managing knowledge, understanding, and subjectivity. From these conclusions, it is shown that whiteness is granted perceptual authority over the Other through the rhetoric of modernity. This rhetoric disillusions the public of the ideological structures that ensure white supremacy and the white subject as a self-contained substance existing independent of some Black qua inferior. In attempting to overcome this disillusioned state, multiple decolonial avenues and pedagogical practices are employed to dismantle the authoritative role of whiteness and the instrumentality of shame in the disciplinary prospects of the “teacher look.” By approaching the problem of race in America through the disciplinary mechanism of its education system, this project seeks not only to ascertain the institutional and systematic ways that white teachers and white students uphold and inscribe racist ideology through their social practices and relationships, but also to empower students of color to resist and transcend the limitations imposed upon them from the white world.

My dissertation uses an interdisciplinary American Studies approach that blends literary and historical analysis to investigate social mechanisms that position white, straight, affluent men atop the American social hierarchy. Each chapter complicates myths about white American manhood, namely that hegemonic masculinity is (or ever was) a stable marker of privilege. Instead, I treat masculinity as a form of anxiety–creating panic. The project examines a series of historical moments when myths of manhood collapse. Chapter One situates the writing of William Dean Howells as the product of anxious manhood following the Civil War. Previous models of manhood, specifically those of Thomas Jefferson, exclude African-American men from manhood by denying citizenship. Rather than citizenship, Howells turns to Darwinian evolution to argue that white American men are an entirely new species. In Chapter Two, I discuss Theodore Roosevelt's oscillation between Darwinian evolution-"survival of the fittest" - and Lamarkian evolution, which contends that characteristics shaped by individual experience can be passed down from one generation to the next. Chapter Three examines the rhetoric of Benton Mackaye, the founder of the Appalachian Trail, and Stephen Mather, first director of the National Park Service, to show two distinctly different attempts to salvage agrarian manhood during American urbanization. Mackaye suggested a "barbarian invasion" of cities, and Mather paved the way for spiritually restorative auto-tours of the national parks. Chapter Four juxtaposes John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath with Dorothea Lange's photograph, "Migrant Mother". While Congress debated whether Steinbeck's Depression-era novel was true, Lange's photograph was immediately placed in the national archives as an example of documented reality, despite its having been carefully staged. Steinbeck's novel undercuts patriarchal authority while Lange's renders it temporarily short-circuited, a dynamic that accounts for drastic differences in reception. Finally, Chapter Five places John Cheever's satirical take on 1950s gender in the short story, "The Country Husband", against the iconic post-WWII photograph, "War's End Kiss". The story challenges white American male authority and shows manhood as inherently contradictory and unstable in the post-war period, while the photograph seeks to restabilize masculinity.

This study is about the group of transnational adoptees, which means adoptions that includes a transfer of children to families who racially and culturally different from them. The Swedish research regarding to this group of adoptees is relatively limited. Especially in relation to the phenomenon like race, whiteness and racism. There is a need for more knowledge about what it means to be Swedish and non-white, something that the group adoptees has experience of.                      The purpose of this study is to examine if, and in that case how, it is possible to discern a pattern of Swedishness boundaries using the adoptees experience, and to find out how notions of race interacts with these experiences. The study is based on a qualitative approach and the empirical material consists of interviews with four adoptees. To understand my empirical data I have chosen to work with several different theoretical perspectives to illustrate the phenomenon as can be seen as border guards of Swedishness concerning to the adoptees. These phenomenon’s are: race and whiteness, and racialization and (everyday) racism. I am also inspired by the American research field of critical race and whiteness studies, but from a Swedish context.                       The results show that the main limit for Swedishness goes at the adoptees non-white bodies. It is also by their non-white bodies as they get their belonging in Sweden questioned and can be considered as almost Swedes. It is also their non-Swedish appearance that allows them to be exposed to racialization and racism in everyday life. Thus, it is possible to argue, on the basis of the adoptees stories, that race as construction exists and that we must speak of it to be able to understand how it, as adopted (Swedish), is to live in a non-white body in Sweden today.