In this qualitative study, I examined how Whiteness and White supremacy are woven into the public identities of Reformed Christian schools as well as in parents’ motivations for sending their children there. I constructed two different data sets. First, I spent time observing the public space of three different Reformed Christian elementary school buildings in a medium-sized city in the U.S. Midwest. I used the critical lens of public pedagogy to construct a curriculum of Whiteness at each school. Second, I conducted interviews with nine different sets of White parents who send their children to those schools (three from each school) about their motivations for choosing Christian schooling for their children as well as for choosing the specific school their children attend. I interpreted those interviews with the help of the psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and melancholia. I proposed that the public spaces of the three Reformed Christian elementary schools I visited reflected the curricula of conservatism, settler colonialism, and respectability politics. I proposed that White parents demonstrate a narcissistic commitment to Christian schooling and a melancholic engagement with issues of race and diversity that precludes an honest reckoning with both the White supremacist pedagogies of their children’s school spaces as well as how Whiteness is embedded in their theology and personal identities.
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