Defense Date
2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Education
First Advisor
Kendra Johnson
Abstract
This study examined how whiteness has shaped curricular representations of Black resistance during the Civil Rights Movement across a state-adopted U.S. history textbook and a popular digital learning platform. Using a qualitative comparative discourse analysis grounded in Critical Race Theory, Whiteness as Property, and Critical Whiteness Studies, and operationalized through Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study analyzed how transitivity, agency, and evaluative language encode racial meaning at the clause level.
Findings revealed three dominant patterns: (1) Moralizing Whiteness, where nonviolence is framed as civic virtue while Black militancy is cast as morally suspect; (2) Containment of Black Anger, in which lexical and linguistic choices delegitimize Black resistance and prioritize white comfort; and (3) Illusion of Inclusion through Erasure, where progress-oriented narratives flatten structural inequities and recenter whiteness as the universal civic subject. Digital curriculum amplified these patterns through brevity, narrator tone, multimodal compression, and interface features that project neutrality while constraining interpretive agency. This study contributes a replicable linguistic method for analyzing racialized curriculum discourse and advances theorization of digital whiteness, highlighting the need for clause-level scrutiny in curriculum studies.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
12-5-2025
Included in
Black History Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Junior High, Intermediate, Middle School Education and Teaching Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons, Online and Distance Education Commons, Secondary Education Commons, Secondary Education and Teaching Commons, United States History Commons