Anti-Black Wolf in Liberal Clothing: “Nice White Parents” Attempt to Derail Educational Repair Efforts

• In Event: Education, Reparations, and the Elusive Quest for Black Educational Justice in Evanston, Illinois

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines the efforts in a school district in Evanston, Illinois to address the enduring harm from school closures and bussing implemented after Brown v. Board of Education. It focuses on how a self-proclaimed progressive community navigates racial equity issues during the school board's planning and voting process to reopen a neighborhood school in a historically Black enclave. It explores the tensions, limitations, and explicit and implicit anti-Blackness in the discourse of community members toward school board and district leadership. The paper reveals how covert discursive moves are used as instruments of anti-Black rhetoric. Specifically, it asks:
● How did discursive tools shape community discourse about Black leaders, board members, and racial equity initiatives?
● How is anti-Blackness demonstrated in local media and public reactions? And how does the Black community resist it?
● How does this public discourse reinforce or resist racial and educational inequities for Black students?

Perspectives
School leadership scholars have long demonstrated that racial dynamics influence a school's culture and the outcomes of students, educators, and administrators (Brown, 2005; DeMatthews & Mawhinney, 2014). However, education leadership literature on Black school leadership is still developing (Gooden, 2005) and has not dwelled on the specificity of how anti-Blackness affects leaders. Drawing on theorizations that recognize how Black people have been socially positioned in a structurally antagonistic relationship with humanity (Dumas, 2016), this paper highlights how Black leaders continue to be "imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago" (Hartman, 1997, p. 6).

Methods & Data Sources
Utilizing critical discourse analysis of school board meeting transcripts, local news media, and public social media posts by the local community, this study employs Blackcrit theories to analyze how the community's conversations were saturated with anti-Blackness, even as they perform so-called liberal social norms. The analysis focused primarily on discourse in the data that related to race, equity, historical racial factors, and comments pertaining to Black school leaders and board members.

Findings
Three overarching themes emerged:
● While some parents verbalized full support for the new school publically, they actively organized and synchronized messaging to delay, rework, or rethink the plan for funding, building, and opening it.
● Affluent white parents weaponized Spanish-as-a-first-language students in a fight for resources, threatening to derail the school plan. These moves exemplified interest convergence (Bell, 1980; Harris, 1993) and the commodification of non-white bodies (Leong, 2012), highlighting the tension between neoliberal-multicultural initiatives and Blackness (Dumas & ross, 2016).
● Black leaders in the school district faced critiques that used dehumanizing and degrading language that focused less on their actions but instead revealed a disregard for Black humanity (Wilderson, 2010).

Significance
In today's educational landscape, where Black educator retention is a challenge, and anti-CRT legislation is spreading, it is crucial to theorize and understand both the threats to Black educational leadership and their resistance to anti-Blackness. Gaining a clearer understanding of how anti-Blackness thwarts racial equity, even among well-meaning white parents, is essential to create educational systems that don’t systemically undermine improvements to Black education.

Author

• Karla R. Thomas, Northwestern University