Abstrakt: |
The early steps of mandated school desegregation, during the freedom of choice period (1965–1969), began with black teachers going into all-white schools and white teachers going into all-black schools. This essay takes up the memory performances of one of the first white teachers in the all-black Marian Anderson High School in rural Camden County, North Carolina. Specifically the essay explores how these performances as they reinvent the past open possibilities for interrupting historic performances of whiteness. At the same time, such performances also risk the reinstantiation of white authority in the present, particularly through the use of humor and the domestication of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |