"We Believe Ourselves to Be a Diverse and Inclusive School": The Optics of Diversity Work

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Queer Critiques of Institutions and the Status Quo

Abstract

This presentation focuses on a staff meeting at a high school in Western Canada. In the spring, the resource teacher in charge of diversity was asked to present at the meeting following a rise in explicit anti-Black racism among white teachers, including several incidents of teachers using the n-word in their classrooms. The administrators, nervous about staff reactions, used this meeting as an opportunity to abruptly come out in support of a universal washroom at the school. I interrogate the confluence of these events, grappling with the school’s promotion of a particular form of diversity work alongside its erasure of anti-Black racism. I am interested in how privileging the optics of diversity worked to uphold whiteness at the school.

Author

• LJ Slovin, The University of British Columbia