(DE)CENTRING OF WHITE RACIAL IDEOLOGY THROUGH EDUCATION IN ERNEST J. GAINES’ A LESSON BEFORE DYING

ABSTRACT : This paper, grounded on the Derridean approach, deals with race relationship in a hostileenvironment for black characters. These characters are granted an education in a plantation school. In thisframework, education can be grasped through a binary paradigm. On the one hand, thriving to implement theirhegemony, white people resort to education to reinforce their privileged status. It shifts to be an ideological toolfor structural violence against black learners. The discriminative measures of the board of education deterioratesthe quality and quantity of teaching. White supremacists also resort to racial discourse to set, re-establish racialdifferentiation, and perpetuate the imposed complex of inferiority on blacks. On the other hand, education is readapted, reinvented to decenter racial hegemony; it subverts white racial superiority as it helps agents of socialchange to acquire progressive values. Education fosters enlightenment and self-assertion. Grant challengescultural inferiority through linguistic production that casts doubt on black people presumed ignorance andinferiority. The linguistic performance decenters knowledge and destabilizes white hegemony. Moreover,education informs and affects leadership and commitment Education is meant here to undermine whitesuperiority and assert black subjectivity.

KEYWORDS : blacks, commitment, deconstruction, de-centering, education, white racial hegemony