Doing Whiteness: marking discursive silence around race in an education movement

ABSTRACT

In recent years, diverse actors around the world have protested the growing dominance of standardised testing in education policy and practice, citing racial equity as one reason, among many, to oppose standardised tests. Education activists have also argued, on the other hand, that standardised assessments can be used to bring attention to systemic racial inequities. This study explores these dynamics in a United States context, asking, ‘In what ways was race discussed, and not discussed, in conversations among opt-out activists, and what were the potential consequences of such references and omissions?’ We focus on a small-group dialogue of White opt-out activists (activists protesting standardised tests) in order to explore how a ‘color-evasive’ ideology operates through discourse. Findings from this study suggest that there are ways in which the topic of race was elided in the opt-out movement and that elisions, or silences, around race can be contagious in White-majority spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• education activism
• Whiteness
• opting-out
• color-evasive
• color blindness

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Susan Jurow, Ben Kirshner, and Daryl Maeda for their feedback on early drafts of this article. And we would like to thank other members of the larger opt-out research project team who informed our thinking: specifically, Amy Burkhardt, Ana Contreras, Matthew Hastings, and Wagma Mommandi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this paper, we broadly apply the terms ‘activism’ and ‘activist’ to those working for social change, regardless of the particular outcomes of that change.

2. By ‘White’ here, and throughout this article, we operate on the premise that race is not always a matter of self-definition. It is also socially, historically, and interactionally constructed, and so how one is perceived, racially, matters (Omi and Winant 1994).

3. A state in the northeastern part of the United States.

4. As Kendi (2019) explains, race is a ‘[a] power construct of collected or merged difference that live socially’ (35), while colour refers to skin pigmentation.

5. We have Institutional Review Board approval through the larger team’s proposal (approval #: 17–0164).

6. A state in the western part of the United States.

7. All proper nouns – with the exception of Colorado and New York – are pseudonyms.

8. In an effort to capture the salient reasons for opting out, we include here only those reasons voiced by more than one participant.

9. Such deficit framing and dismissal specifically linked to documentation status merits study, but is beyond this study’s scope.

10. It is impossible to know if all of the words in quotation marks were in fact intended by speakers as quoted speech. For ease of reading, we represent the quoted speech as continuous; these distinctions are not consequential for our analysis.

11. By ‘instance,’ we mean a period of sustained talk, with no change of speaker. We include these instances in the order they appeared in the dialogue; italics are added for emphasis.

12. See Appendix A for transcript conventions.

13. Spencer used the race label ‘White’ in his next talk turn. We include Spencer’s talk in this table, as Spencer, while he did mention race during the dialogue, potentially revealed a facility for race-evasiveness – more specifically, an ability and willingness to take it up.

14. As of 25 March 2020, TFA described, on its website, ‘Our Approach’ as ‘find[ing] outstanding leaders who commit to expanding educational opportunity, beginning with at least two years teaching in an under-resourced public school.’

15. Spencer used the race label ‘White’ in this talk turn, perhaps showing an ability and willingness to both evade and name race in a single statement.