Responding to a MAGA Hat on Campus: Toward Understanding the Interplay of Liberal and Right-Wing Racisms in Places of Schooling

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Class, and Colonialism in U.S. Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper furthers understandings of the relationship between liberal and right-wing racisms within U.S. schools in liberal, racially diverse places. Based on pláticas and interviews from an ethnographic study of a college preparation program for Latinx youth, this paper considers the following: echoes of national right-wing, white supremacist discourses, represented by MAGA hats worn around a SF Bay Area high school; liberal and “race radical” (Melamed, 2011) teacher responses to campus racisms; and BIPOC youths’ responses to right-wing racism as they reflected upon MAGA hat wearers towards the end of the Trump administration. Centrally, it examines empirically how liberal values such as equality and fairness work in tandem with right-wing versions of white supremacy when decontextualized from existing social relations.

Author

• Theresa Burruel Stone, Sonoma State University