The discourse of denial: how white teacher candidates construct race, racism and ‘white privilege’

This qualitative study focuses on a representative sample from 200 teacher candidates' responses to Peggy McIntosh's article, ‘White privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack’. The notion and understanding of whiteness and white privilege were explored revealing several strategies that teacher candidates employed to avoid addressing whiteness and its attendant privileges in Canadian society. We analyse three primary strategies that the teacher candidates employed: ideological incongruence, liberalist notions of individualism and meritocracy, and the negation of white capital. Some implications of this study are that teacher education must help candidates understand their own racial identity formation and provide the learning space to work with the range of emotions and feelings of indignation that evolve from an exposure to white privilege and the ‘myth of meritocracy’.