From Desegregation to BLM: Racial Threat, Discourse, and Consolidation of Power in a Missouri School District

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Explaining Movement Participation: Threats, Grievances and Emotions

Abstract

The re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and publication of the 1619 Project brought a cultural shift with how our nation talk about and understands racism. Within the K-12 public schools, this led to a review and reconsideration of how race has been addressed through curriculum, in staff representation, and programmatically through support of students of color (Dunivin et al, 2020). Yet within a few short years, over 560 measures aimed at limiting conversations around race were introduced in local and state governing bodies across the country (Clark, 2022). What does this shift say about how white power is negotiated and mobilized around during moments of perceived racial threat? I build upon critiques of traditional racial threat literatures (Brown, 2010; Cunningham, 2012) to offer a more expansive conceptualization of how racial threat is perceived, communicated, and navigated over time. In this paper, I examine one instance of contestation occurring in the political context of a Missouri school district from 2019-2024. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis, I draw upon election forums, interviews, and news reports to study the dynamics of threat-based mobilization as reflected in local school board elections. By integrating racial threat, contentious politics, and boundary work literatures, I find that white powerholders mobilized against perceived racial threat by utilizing discursive mechanisms to contract community boundaries, placing parents and education stakeholders in opposition to one another. Over time, elite movement victories become institutionalized and racial threat is suppressed, leading the community boundaries to appear expansive once again. While this positioning is discursively reflected as a movement towards unity and normalcy, we instead find a consolidation of power and return to colorblind discourse. Broadly, these findings suggest that the decline in extreme and divisive discourse was the product of suppression of opposition, rather than political positioning itself. Within our polarized political climate, this research encourages us to think critically about the power of discursive mobilization.

Author

• Molly Aline Schneider, Washington University in St. Louis