Journal article
Complexifying White Racial Identity: Placing Veronica Watson and the Reverend Thandeka in Dialogue with Janet Helms
The New educator
04/29/2026
DOI: 10.1080/1547688X.2026.2656151
Abstract
In this article, we synthesize the work of two prominent African-American critical Whiteness scholars, Reverend Thandeka and Veronica Watson who over a nuanced and contextualized understanding of White identity development. We argue their work, not widely circulated in education and teacher education, could complement Helms’s prevailing model for White racial identity, a popular pedagogical tool in these felds. Thandeka and Watson pay close attention to the psycho-social racial identity development that occurs when White children and adults are implicitly and explicitly policed away from people of color and/or choose to abandon their desires for cross-racial relationships. We rely on a careful study of Thandeka and Watson’s work to suggest possibilities for extracting a process model of White racial identity development from their theorizations to complement the prominence of Helms’s existing model in education contexts.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Complexifying White Racial Identity: Placing Veronica Watson and the Reverend Thandeka in Dialogue with Janet Helms
- Creators
- Erin T. Miller - University of North Carolina at CharlotteSamuel J. Tanner - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The New educator
- DOI
- 10.1080/1547688X.2026.2656151
- ISSN
- 1549-9243
- eISSN
- 1549-9243
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 04/29/2026
- Academic Unit
- Teaching and Learning
- Record Identifier
- 9985161338702771
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