As anthropologists remind us, Black feminists have long asserted that “race is a gendered experience” and gender is a racialized experience.Footnote ² Although historians of education examining women of Color, Black women in particular, have long illuminated this simple yet fundamental and routinely overlooked contention, it is fair to say that our field as a whole has been reticent to look at systemic power from the vantage point of those with said power vis-à-vis gender and race. This inattention to structural domination from the perspective of those at the top of the social hierarchy prevents us from deconstructing frameworks of power.Footnote ³ This deconstruction is vital to advancing any meaningful social change, including intersectional racial justice. More precisely, the field contains scant analyses of power, oppression (i.e., deprivation), or privilege from a white or masculine viewpoint, a concerning limitation that obscures how power works to reinscribe, sustain, and proliferate itself.

Thus, in this short essay, I want to discuss why I find this inattention to power—which I define here as systemic and structural control of society from the top of the social hierarchy—detrimental to our field, and to propose some pathways forward that might allow us to address this gap with an eye toward its implications for contemporary issues in education and society. Thanks to emerging scholars, exceptions to this absence are growing, but more are crucially needed. Alongside some of my own work, which I discuss later in the essay, Alexander Hyres has recently published an article on Black boys and young men in school desegregation, starting an important conversation about the role of Black boyhood, Black masculinities, racialized patriarchy, and sexism in a narrative long defined primarily by race.Footnote ⁴ Hyres examines the very real vulnerability of Black boys in lieu of their—albeit limited—access to patriarchy within the context of gender privilege.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, these racialized topics have long warranted study and stand to also pave the way for more investigations of other groups in this area, particularly queer and nonbinary people. There is still, nonetheless, much ground to cover, and Black feminist scholars have been urging us to broach this subject.

Feminists scholars of Color, especially Black feminists, have for decades been underscoring that social categories, namely, gender and race, are tightly tethered and, therefore, difficult to neatly disentangle. In 1982, when Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith published All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, they were overtly critiquing in that book’s title the way that scholars routinely assign whiteness to those categorized as women and manhood to those categorized as Black.Footnote ⁶ This practice of erasure and marginalization implicates the many social groups that are neither men or boys nor white. Speaking to this point, Asian American legal scholar and critical race theorist Mari Matsuda encouraged us to “ask the other question,” because “no form of subordination ever stands alone.”Footnote ⁷ She challenged us to consider, for instance, patriarchy’s part in an action or circumstance that appears to be racist. Collectively, the insights offered by these and other feminist scholars of Color are instructive to the field of the history of education, pushing us to more closely and conscientiously examine power, not just from the bottom, but—equally as important—from the top.

Historians of education studying Black women provide an analysis of power that reflects how “all the women are not white” and “all the Blacks are not men.”Footnote ⁸ Black feminists urge us to investigate the nuances of power so that we address not only how systems of privilege and oppression intersect, but how they specifically overlap in people’s everyday lives.Footnote ⁹ A Black feminist lens clarifies just how few people’s lives are defined strictly by subjugation. In fact, a small but mighty body of scholarship in the history of education has done just this. Black feminist historians of education have acknowledged the ways middle-class status shaped many successful Black women’s lives and career prospects; in particular, their status enabled them to navigate gendered racism in ways that working-class or impoverished African American women could not. To be clear, however, the scholars’ work illustrates that middle-class status failed to shield Black women from patriarchal antiBlackness. Indeed, there are opportunities for this kind of nuance to also influence studies of, for instance, Black men in the history of education.

Such lessons also remind us that analyses of power are vital, and power—in its differential state especially—is far from static. Because power can shift according to changing circumstances, the history of education is a ripe field for examining not only the issues facing individuals who were oppressed, in one way or another, but also those facing individuals who themselves served as oppressors, in one instance or another. Historians of education, particularly those of us who focus on social history, generally accept that the power of marginalized groups has been scarce across societies, and thus that equality has been scarce as well. We have arrived at this observation, however, by engaging the concept of gender euphemistically to refer to women or girls who withstand rather than perpetuate patriarchal oppression. This approach means that examinations of gender rarely center on men or boys, rendering assessments of sexism and patriarchy from a masculine perspective virtually absent. To fully understand power differentials, however, and to capture a comprehensive image of educational players and processes, gender analyses must critically analyze patriarchal masculinity, particularly as it has historically interacted with other social structures of difference.Footnote ¹⁰ Drawing from gender studies scholars, “patriarchal masculinity is the dominant cultural and social conceptualization of masculinity in the United States,” and it “encompasses a set of White heterosexual capitalist values, orientations, and expectations that men negotiate.”Footnote ¹¹

The small body of work situated in the history of education that offers—from a white perspective—a sustained interrogation of white supremacy explicates its tight links to gender, a viewpoint that sheds critical light on today’s political issues. Benjamin Justice’s 2023 History of Education Society presidential address highlighted how schooling has historically served as a white good to further white advantage rather than as a public good from which all are presumed to benefit, tracing the legacy of this contention from our colonial past to the present.Footnote ¹² As for book-length examinations, Elizabeth McRae and Karen Anderson have each authored a monograph on white women’s pronounced resistance to school desegregation.Footnote ¹³ It is hard to ignore the direct connections between their work and the battle of late being waged by similar groups, namely, Moms for Liberty. Led by white women on the far right, this political group was established in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic when the experience of being required to homeschool their children gave parents a direct view into the typical K-12 classroom. According to its mission statement, Moms for Liberty is “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”Footnote ¹⁴ With dozens of chapters across the United States, the organization, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “is an anti-student inclusion group” fighting what it views as “the indoctrination and sexualization of children through gender identity, the acknowledgement and acceptance of the LGBTQ community, as well as inclusive school pedagogy and curricula, including critical race theory, social emotional learning, and books that the organization deems inappropriate.”Footnote ¹⁵ Last and perhaps most important, Moms for Liberty is intent on filling school boards with its members and proponents, showing that the group’s political aims parallel those of their foremothers in the mid-twentieth century.

The perceptions of white mothers and their children exemplify the enduring relevance of white-supremacist racist ideologies in education, insights that merit more focus from a decidedly white vantage point. Through the women they feature in their work, McRae and Anderson do a commendable job discussing how whiteness and womanhood overlapped, enabling the women to weaponize their white womanhood. McRae’s and Anderson’s analyses clarify how patriarchy and racism, specifically, antiBlack racism, served white women, bolstering their ability to undermine racial justice. In ways similar to the unique power white women enslavers wielded, the white women who fought against school desegregation drew on consequential tools rooted in their white womanhood to embolden white supremacy, as revealed in Stephanie Jones-Rogers’s masterful study.Footnote ¹⁶ One of the few monographs to critique whiteness from a white youth perspective is Kristina DuRocher’s examination of white children’s socialization in terms of race and gender in the Jim Crow South, which analyzes the lessons they received through their social training.Footnote ¹⁷ Her monograph complements the work of McRae and Anderson in providing the necessary context to understand how these young white girls and future white mothers developed the perspectives they would eventually employ in fighting school desegregation. This small body of work helps explain what groups like Moms for Liberty are doing today and why. The insight the scholars bring as white women historians is valuable, and the history of education as a field would certainly benefit from more of this work.

Gender studies scholars, whiteness studies scholars, and historians whose work is conversant in one or both areas have asserted for decades that society normalizes systems of domination like racism and patriarchy to such an extent that the systems prove difficult to identify and deconstruct.Footnote ¹⁸ This body of work, when compared with that of the history of education, illustrates that we as a field are somewhat behind in working to critically account for systemic privilege from the top.Footnote ¹⁹

It is not just those suffering subjugation that warrant study; it is equally as important to unpack social privilege and power by using the lens of those with privilege and power. As someone who studies how Black communities have historically defined and sought educational justice, I must recognize that the analyses I craft only tell part of an important but incomplete story. In evading scrutiny, powerholders extend their domination and stabilize the status quo. For this reason, in any analysis that looks at gender, critical, structural assessments of boyhood, masculinities, and manhood are just as vital as those of femininity, girlhood, and womanhood.

Studies of race leaders in the history of education have largely focused on men. Beyond descriptions of these figures as men, little is said about the role of patriarchal masculinity, patriarchy, or sexism in their lives. Investigations of individuals such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and college presidents like Horace Mann Bond, for example, explore Blackness from a decidedly yet largely unarticulated masculine lens. Nonetheless, there remain uninterrogated questions about how masculinity and patriarchy interacted with racism and antiBlackness, not to mention sexuality and class status, in shaping this work and historical figures’ institutional navigation strategies.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, the compelling literature on Black men in the history of education could be made even more robust through an analysis of gender’s role in these figures’ personal and professional lives. Historians, like social scientists, understand that patriarchy often functioned differently in the lives of Black men and boys.Footnote ²¹ The history of education, however, has yet to deeply grapple with this contention. I look forward to engaging with work that takes up patriarchy, recognizing and wrestling with the privileges associated with manhood and masculinity, together with a focus on the multifaceted power structure that oppresses people of Color broadly and Black people in particular, while recognizing and wrestling with the privileges associated with manhood and masculinity.

Through my scholarship, I have worked to clarify how employing a dual race and gender analysis is instructive for both men/boys and women/girls—to examine the racialized dimensions of the feminine and the masculine. Two articles I have published clearly reflect my efforts in this area of study. One focuses on a Black man and Black woman who in 1976 together became the city of Waco’s first Black school board trustees.Footnote ²² Highlighting the ordinary yet pernicious white supremacy of a white male superintendent during school desegregation, my other paper took up the antiBlack patriarchy that shaped his leadership.Footnote ²³ Part of what motivated me to do this work was my increasing frustration with how infrequently the field of the history of education centers analyses on powerholding groups, namely, men and boys in general, white people in general, and white men and boys. It occurred to me that we know a lot about, for instance, the education of communities of Color both in terms of oppression and resistance, narratives that often focus on men; but we know relatively little about the influence of white or patriarchal masculinity in the lives of white male educational vanguards like John Dewey and Horace Mann. My articles link two key issues, revealing the through line connecting present-day educational leadership battles centered on white supremacy to those of the past.Footnote ²⁴ They also expose how identifying multiple social differences is often necessary in order to explain how and why people differ on pressing social issues that are relevant but not exclusive to leadership and are simultaneously gendered and racialized.

In hopes of extending these conversations, I close by offering questions that I feel represent possibilities for the field to consider in moving to enrich our analysis of power. I envision that addressing these and related questions may help us make our work more conversant with current issues facing learners, educators, and community stakeholders in and around schools. Many of us acknowledge that whiteness, patriarchal masculinity, patriarchy, and white manhood are wreaking havoc on this nation, so enhancing our perspective on these topics will only strengthen the utility of our work and the insight we have to offer on many of today’s most pressing issues. In the context of the history of education, I would be delighted to engage with scholarship that pursues questions such as the following:

• • How do structural analyses of privilege, deprivation, and power from the perspective of those with said privilege and power advance the field’s perception of intersectional racial justice?

  1. o How do analyses of whiteness and white supremacy from the perspective of those who possess whiteness and wield white supremacy render the field’s account of racial power more complete?

  2. o How do analyses of masculinity, patriarchy, patriarchal masculinity, and sexism from the perspective of men and boys enhance the field’s engagement with gender studies?

• • What roles have patriarchy and sexism historically played in the professional lives of Black male learners and educators?

• • What roles have racism and whiteness historically played in the professional lives of white educators and learners?

• • How can one face racism while benefiting from patriarchy?

• • How can one face (cishetero)sexism, classism, or queer antagonism while benefiting from racism and white supremacy?

• • Which affordances of patriarchal masculinity are restricted to white men and boys and, thus, inaccessible to men and boys of Color?

  1. a. How has patriarchy historically manifested itself differently, and perhaps less advantageously compared with white men and white boys, in the lives of Black men, Black boys, and men and boys of Color more widely?

• • How has (cishetero)sexism, classism, or queer antagonism historically manifested itself differently, and perhaps more advantageously, for and in the lives of white educational stakeholders in the history of education?

It is exciting to think about all that the field can gain from critical assessments of white masculinity given its centrality to the history of education. Exploring how, for example, patriarchal masculinity influenced the work of trailblazers like Horace Mann and John Dewey represents a thrilling possibility that historians of education are well suited to undertake. Fortunately, there are many white male historians of education whose work has historically examined communities of Color; to jumpstart this new direction in scholarship, they might consider drawing on their insider perspective of whiteness and masculinity to contribute new insights regarding white masculinity from an emic white masculine perspective. This is, of course, just one of many possibilities, as white men are but one group who could productively approach this subject. Indeed, our future is bright if we can only be brave enough to ask and find answers to hard questions.