Sexuality Education, Race, and the California Healthy Youth Act in Neoliberal Silicon Valley

• In Event: Co-Opting Justice: How Neoliberalism Profits From Race in Educational Reform Projects

Abstract

On January 1, 2016, AB 329 The California Healthy Youth Act went into effect, requiring that public schools teach comprehensive sexuality education to students in grades 7-12. Since then, California school districts have partnered with consultants in sexuality education organizations to develop implementable curricula. This activity has been accompanied by notable -- and at times vociferous -- debate among parents. This paper examines these debates on sex education in California’s diverse and segregated Silicon Valley public schools through the perspectives of local parents, teachers and news media. It illuminates how race contours the discourse that is simultaneously shaped within a context of superdiversity (Vertovec, 2007) and neoliberal formations of education. The minimal attention that has been afforded to the relationship between race and the policy discourse of sex education curriculum belies the significance of race in the shaping of the curriculum.

I draw on Bonilla-Silva’s (2012) concept of “racial grammar” and Goldberg’s (2009) theory of “racial neoliberalism” to apprehend the significance of the racialized language of the sexuality education debates. I argue that the combination of the marketization of education in combination with the local context of superdiversity structures neoliberal racial grammar into the discourse of sex education. The marketization of education has two relevant effects. First, it positions school actors as consumers of sex education, inciting competition among organizations vying for a sale. Second, it promotes a vocabulary of individual choice that centers a parent’s right to influence decisions on curricular content that is expressed through a neoliberal racial grammar. The rule of such grammar assumes whiteness as the normative, invisible universal standard and “evaporates” a language of race (Goldberg, 2009). I explore three specific manners through which this grammar organizes the Silicon Valley sex education conflicts: 1) the word “culture” is almost unvaryingly used to colorblind “race”; 2) “cultural difference” is relied upon to explain Asian American disagreement with curricular content; and 3) cultural deficit-based achievement ideology is used to evidence the urgent need for sex education for Latinx students.

Semi-structured interviews (N = 23) from a 2017 study conducted with Silicon Valley parents and teachers comprise the corpus of data for this paper. In addition, I examine the media discourse covering the debates over adopting and implementing a sex education program in the Silicon Valley. While such conflicts over sex education are century-old ones (see Fields, 2008; Irvine, 2004; Luker, 2007; Zimmerman, 2015), in the local context of superdiversity -- where the spectra of race, class, gender identities and expressions, language, sexual orientation, immigration status, and religion are vast -- these discursive contours are even more complicated. Articulated concerns about sex education sustain differing and often competing beliefs amid diversity and segregation, particularly with respect to which aspects of sexuality should be taught, by whom, when, how, and why. Yet, few studies have forefronted a race analysis. When race is understood as the significant influence that it is, then the debates over sexuality education can be interpreted as a discourse that organizes its possibilities for educational equity.

Author

• Erica Misako Boas, Santa Clara University