Allied Attestations: Troubling a Progressive Goodwill and "Duty to Speak Out"

• In Event: The "Wicked Flexibility" of Whiteness in Progressive Educational Reform Initiatives

Abstract

This article examines how queer youth of color, conservative white parents, and progressive white allies debated the value of one local anti-racist program. We trace the uneven ways community members responded to these differentially positioned groups and consider whose values and knowledges schools ultimately respond to.

Theoretical Framework
We draw on Black feminisms to consider how broader histories of power, knowledge, and being shape the micro interactions within one school board meeting room. Black feminisms honed our attention to how whiteness “carries the weight of the natural” (Alexander, 2006, p. 209) and allowed us to interrogate how white, western, bourgeois conceptions of the human as rational (Wynter, 2003) constituted the epistemological grounds upon which education stakeholders made evaluations about legitimacy and truth.

Methods
Data for this study draws from a broader critical ethnography in one central California school district conducted between June 2019 and May 2020. Data also includes 146 school board testimonies. White conservative organizers provided an overwhelming two-thirds of total testimonies (N=99), whereas white progressive parents and educators contributed roughly one-third of total testimonies (N=42), and (queer) youth of color provided a handful of overall testimonies (N=5).

Findings
Extending Geertz’s analysis of (1994) “winks upon winks upon winks”—a flinching eye, a gesture to court another, or a mocking gesture of the second—we distinguish among (1) sighs of disgust in reaction to queer youth of color, (2) sighs of shared racial anxieties prompted by the words of conservative activists, and (3) the absence of sighs in response to what we interpreted as the reasonable words of white allies. We focus our analyses on this surprising third finding. We found that white allies expressed a moral “duty to speak out” and specified their positionality (“As a white, Christian man, I…”) in ways that appeared to allay potential anxieties about an anti-racist program. Yet in dispelling white conservative critiques that an anti-racist program was not “anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian or anti-American,” white allies shifted evidentiary basis upon which decisions about education programs were made. The value of an anti-racist program hinged less on the words of queer youth of color and more on the extent to which such programs did not threaten the purportedly reasonable interests of white society.

Scholarly Significance
We draw on these empirical findings to develop the notion of allied attestations: expressions of progressive goodwill that certify the lived insights of nondominant youth and reinscribe colonial and racial hierarchies of human being. Allied attestations express goodwill and seek to affirm the legitimacy of historically marginalized others. Yet they simultaneously reify assumptions about white identity as measured, rational, authoritative (Wynter, 2003). Findings from this study encourage critical analyses of precisely those moments that “carry the weight of the natural” (Alexander, 2006, p. 209) and reveal a need for further research concerning the distinctions between “what is better” and “what is just” (Shange, 2019, p. 56).

Authors

• Ethan Chang, University of Hawaii - Manoa

• Julie Kasper, University of Arizona

• Uriel Serrano, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Andrea Del Carmen Vázquez, University of California Santa Cruz