The White Public Pedagogy II: Taking the Justice-as-Fairness View to History

This chapter continues to analyze Minnesota’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and its demands for “objectivity” in regional teaching and commemoration. First, the chapter looks at the specter of white victimhood and its power providing certain “facts” designed to silence critical social justice teachings. The chapter then historicizes this effect by going back to the war’s 1912 semicentennial when “old settlers” engaging in public commemoration made bold claims to objectivity while fashioning their collective white identity as epistemologically supreme vis-a-vis Dakota identity. After exploring foundations of this dynamic in settler society’s socio-racial contract, the chapter demonstrates how it lives on in today’s evolved, pluralist forms of teaching and commemoration, with whites positioning themselves as especially “objective,” “balanced,” and “neutral” regarding 1862. The chapter theorizes this impulse as white justice as fairness and provides evidence of it as a pedagogical approach hostile to critical social justice education.