Article

You Just Need More Resilience: Racial Gaslighting as “Othering”

---

Abstract

This work de-familiarizes commonsense notions of resilience by exploring the process of racial gaslighting. Through a theorizing of racial gaslighting, which operates through White demands for "more" resilience from BIPOC faculty in teacher education programs, this paper shows how everyday discourses of resilience uphold Whiteness. By centering White feelings and interests under the guise of helping BIPOC faculty "survive," racial gaslighting operates as a form of racial violence. Ultimately, this paper calls for an approach that reimagines resilience within an anti-racist context of confronting oppression by encouraging BIPOC faculty to say no to demands to "roll with the punches." This new approach, one that refuses the pathologization and "othering" of BIPOC faculty, could provide a catalyst for transforming teacher education into a more just and humane place. This work uses retrospective autoethnography as a methodology to examine racial gaslighting of BIPOC faculty in a teacher education program at a historically White university.

Keywords: Resilience, Racialized Gaslighting, Teacher Education

How to Cite:

Vasquez, R., (2022) “You Just Need More Resilience: Racial Gaslighting as “Othering””, Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis 11(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/jctp.12586