Pedagogy Oct 2025

Discussing Race and White Privilege

Pamela B. June

Abstract

Abstract Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) offers a feminist critique of marriage conventions and the Cult of Domesticity that prevailed in the nineteenth century. Yet hidden behind protagonist Edna Pontellier's entrapment in marriage and domestic life lies another systemic hierarchy: white privilege sustained by African American labor. Building from existing scholarship and from sources on teaching race, this essay explores the hidden Black labor that allows Edna's “awakening” to happen at all, given that the entire system is built around white privilege. This essay considers ways to teach The Awakening to a college literature class, illuminating the historical silencing and limitations of Black people in the United States and identifying the mechanisms of white privilege. The essay poses a key question for students: how do the silent Black bodies in The Awakening reinforce white privilege? Using various pedagogical approaches, this essay aims to help students investigate, uncover, and confront white privilege in other texts and in their world.

Journal
Pedagogy
Published
2025-10-01
DOI
10.1215/15314200-11874347
Open Access
Closed
Topics
race and writing multilingual writers

Citation Context

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Also cites 13 works outside this index ↓
  1. Ammons (1991)
    Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century
     ↗
  2. Barrish (2000)
    The Awakening's Signifying ‘Mexicanist’ Presence
    Studies in American Fiction  ↗
  3. Birnbaum (1994)
    ‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race
    American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography  ↗
  4. Dyer (2002)
    Reading The Awakening with Toni Morrison
    Southern Literary Journal  ↗
  5. Frankenberg (1993)
    White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
     ↗
  6. Gates (1985)
    Editor's Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes
    Critical Inquiry  ↗
  7. Gilman (1985)
    Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-…
    Critical Inquiry  ↗
  8. Gilmore (1988)
    Revolt Against Nature: The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening
     ↗
  9. Martin (1988)
    Introduction
     ↗
  10. Pegues (2010)
    Fear and Desire: Regional Aesthetics and Colonial Desire in Kate Chopin's Portrayals of t…
    Southern Literary Journal  ↗
  11. Sánchez-Eppler (1988)
    Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolitionism
    Representations  ↗
  12. Showalter (1988)
    Tradition and the Female Talent: The Awakening as a Solitary Book
     ↗
  13. Spillers (1989)
    Notes on an Alternative Model—Neither/Nor
     ↗
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