Contradictions of power and identity: Whiteness studies and the call of teacher education

In this review essay, the author situates five recent articles on white identity and teacher education within the emergent fields of whiteness studies and critical race theory. He maintains that while the authors of these articles make a significant contribution to the field of race studies by expanding theories and methodologies of whiteness studies to education that there is a consistent failure to theorize race in the five articles. McCarthy argues instead that any effort to theorize racial identities must address the deep-seated contradictions that are produced in the unequal racial experiences that define modern education and society. He argues, ultimately, that we cannot understand race by studying race alone. It is vital in thinking about whiteness to consider factors of class, gender, sexuality, and nation - dynamics of social and cultural stratification that cut at right angles to narrow specifications of racial or ethnic community. These dynamics take on a particularly poignant quality of overdetermination and coarticulation in the modern context of the rapid movement of economic and cultural capital across borders summarized in the term “globalization.”