More Than a Knapsack: The White Supremacy Flower as a New Model for Teaching Racism

More Than a Knapsack: The White Supremacy Flower as a New Model for Teaching Racism

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 1, Number 1
pages 192-197
DOI: 10.1177/2332649214561660

Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York

This article suggests that White supremacy versus White privilege provides a clearer and more accurate conceptual understanding of how racism operates, evolves, and sustains itself. This article suggests a specific model for teaching White supremacy, the White supremacy flower, and describes the application and benefits of the model.

Teaching race and racism, particularly to undergraduate students who are often learning this type of information for the first time, can be especially trying for professors (Jakubowski 2001; Lucal 1996; Moulder 1997). This difficulty has spawned many teaching articles that address race but relatively few that provide instruction on teaching racism (Khanna and Harris 2009; Kwenda 2012; Sharp and Wade 2011). Furthermore, while the articles that do suggest strategies for teaching racism are insightful, most center on the concepts of “White privilege” or “advantage” as the guides for conversation (Gillespie, Ashbaugh, and Defiore 2010; Pence and Fields 1999; Wooddell and Henry 2005). Thus, some scholarship is attentive to teaching race but neglects racism while others focus on White privilege at the expense of White supremacy. This article addresses both of these concerns by teaching racism using a particular model of White supremacy.

In this article, I first review how and why White privilege and White supremacy should not be conflated. Second, I argue that White supremacy should replace White privilege as the primary concept to teach racism. Third, I propose a specific model for teaching White supremacy, the White supremacy flower model…


Figure 1. The White supremacy flower model.

Read the entire article here.

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