Getting read as rad: Performances of “nice white lady” and tensions in teaching about white supremacy

Two white women professors who teach courses on diversity in education in different social, political, and geographical contexts analyze our performances of our experiences with students. We individually and collaboratively explore how our students read us in gendered and racialized ways while we enacted anti-racist pedagogies in our white, female bodies. We draw on performance studies and our shared history with collective memory work to analyze our experiences, with the aim of offering tools for analysis that go beyond the personal to include recognizing the ways cultural scripts live in our bodies, and working to understand, disrupt, and rewrite them.