This book explores tensions between
critical social justice
and what the author terms
white justice as fairness
in public commemoration of Minnesota’s US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional
white public pedagogy
demanding “objectivity” and “balance” in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive
, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists
critical social justice education
, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolicwhite ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.