Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer
Mills College Department Chair, Race, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; Program Head, Ethnic Studies
Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer (she/hers) is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar born in Honolulu and raised between / across Hawai’i and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is associate professor of Indigenous Studies, program chair of Ethnic Studies, and department chair of Race, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Dr. Bauer taught in SF Bay Area public schools for eight years before completing her doctorate (U.C. Berkeley, 2017) and entering the Mills College classroom. Her forthcoming book (Routledge, Nov. 2022), Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood, deploys Indigenous feminist methodologies to understand the problem of the over-disciplining of Black and Native students; she does this by constructing a genealogy of “benevolent whiteness,” focusing on how white women (the majority of US teachers) have for generations understood their roles as “heroes” in U.S. classrooms, while simultaneously participating in the disciplining of nonwhite student bodies in service to the white settler colonial State.