At no point since the civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s has the subject of race been given so much attention as it is right now — from the killings of unarmed African-Americans to our "first black president" to political candidates speaking directly (or in code) about race. Samuel Jaye Tanner, assistant professor of literacy education at Penn State Altoona, who studies racial issues in the United States, acknowledges, "There's lots of work to do ... in this country" when it comes to matters of race.
It was as a high school teacher, Tanner says, that he became "interested in race and what it means to be white." After he earned a doctorate in critical literacy and English education at the University of Minnesota, "my first four years [of teaching] I taught in a mainly black school. It was the first time I was the minority." From there he moved to "a more suburban school with a theater program; they recruited me."
As part of his work as drama teacher at the suburban school, Tanner put together "an extracurricular theater program ... using elements of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in concert with playbuilding" with 40 high school students, almost all of whom were white. "I wanted to do race pedagogy with white people," he explains, and this program was his "attempt as a high school English and drama teacher to build a teacher-researcher treatment of critical whiteness pedagogy that fostered my students' consideration of ideological white supremacy for them to take up antiracist stances." The project began with YPAR researching, including researching the Whiteness Project, then writing and producing a play. The results received "national and local media attention" and Tanner's article on the project was published in English Journal 104, no. 4 (March 2015).
In the fall of 2015 Tanner began teaching at Penn State Altoona. When asked why the change after 13 years of teaching high school, Tanner says, "I think as a college professor I'm in a better position to do these things that I'm passionate about. Most of the work done on whiteness is white privilege. I'm interested in critical whiteness studies that move beyond a focus on privilege and begin to consider hegemonic systems and monolithic, racial narratives. I'm really passionate about democratic education. Plus [Penn State Altoona] feels like a liberal arts college but you're connected to a big research institution."
As part of his ongoing research Tanner contributed a chapter to a book titled "What Does It Mean to Be White in America? Breaking the White Code of Silence," edited by Gabrielle David and Sean Frederick Forbes, just published in April by Two Leaf Press. The book is "a collection of personal narratives, eighty-three different pieces on what it means to be a white person in America." Tanner's chapter in the books examines what author Toni Morrison describes as the deleterious or harmful effect that whiteness has on white people. "Yes," he says, "certain social and economic privileges are granted for those who identify as white in the United States. Still, that privilege comes with a cost."
Tanner sees no limit to whiteness as a research area. "History continues to emerge and repeat itself. I think that you can change laws but the imagination of the country still adheres to racial narratives. Until we unpack those racial narratives, I don't think it matters if we change the laws. We can pretend that we made all this progress but the narrative exists." And so, he says, "I continue to work with scholars across the country to more carefully theorize whiteness." Tanner is also working to partner with a high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — with one of the top high school theater programs in the country — to create another implementation of The Whiteness Project. As he says, "There's a lot of work left to be done to reckon with whiteness."