Schools as Sites of Progressive White Supremacy: A Racial Spatial Analysis

• In Event: Against Mundane White Supremacy: Revealing the Affective, Relational, and Spatial Dynamics of Everyday Racism

Abstract

Overview
This paper examines how—even in politically progressive communities and districts—schools maintain white supremacy via racial spatial logics rooted in whiteness as property and antiblackness.

Theoretical Framework
Societal spatial arrangements are established for stated purposes of order but actually serve to invest in certain people and divest from others (Lefebvre, 1974/1991). In the U.S., that occurs via the racialization of space (Calmore, 1995), a process where race determines the status of neighborhoods and the people in them. The racialization of space relies on whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) to secure the status of whiteness and white people. It also relies on antiblackness to protect the purity of idealized white space (Lipsitz, 2011) from Black bodies, which are perceived as inherently criminal (Yancy, 2016). Schools spaces are similarly racialized. Personnel use intersecting conceptualizations of race and space—racial spatial logics—rooted in whiteness as property and antiblackness to mediate access educational spaces and resources (Blaisdell, 2020).

Methods and Data
This paper draws on an eight-year ethnography at City Elementary, a racially-integrated school in a small, politically progressive city. I spent over 1,000 hours with City’s equity team using racial spatial analysis—a methodology that combines CRT and spatial analysis to examine how racism manifests in daily practice (Blaisdell, 2016). That work led to a variety of antiracist initiatives, including equity coaching to raise racial literacy, an antiracist curriculum, and pedagogy to center Black genius.

Arguments
Despite those initiatives, City also employed a cycle of regulation, removal, and reentry for Black students with regard to classroom space. Teachers regulated Black students’ by hyper-surveilling (Annamma, 2018) their physical and verbal expression (e.g. loud verbal expressions were labeled “dangerous”). When regulation did not work, they sought removal, e.g. via office referrals. When referrals did not result in long-term removal from the classroom, they enlisted parents and the district in attempts to enforce “legally imposed spatial exclusion” (Beckett & Herbert, 2010. p. 1). Finally, in some classrooms, reentry into classroom space was contingent on white supremacy, where Black students had to change their modes of expression and/or submit to verbal reprimands from the teacher.
Teachers rationalized those practices with racial spatial logics rooted in whiteness as property and antiblackness. For instance, language such as “we don’t do that here,” “this is not the place for that,” and “he is making this an unsafe place for the rest of the students,” all indicated space but were used to mark blackness as inherently criminal (Yancy, 2016) and protect the white status property of the classroom.

Significance
Teachers enacted the above practices simultaneously with antiracist practices (e.g. lessons centering Black genius). Shange (2019) labels this phenomenon antiblack carceral progressivism, a contradictory dynamic where supposedly equity-driven practices rely on antiblackness to target and divest from Black students. By better understanding how teachers employ racial spatial logics, researchers and school leaders can better intervene in these progressive forms white supremacy in their school sites.

Author

• Benjamin Blaisdell, East Carolina University
  Presenting Author