"Might as Well Save Somebody's Feelings": Chicanx Schooling Experiences With Whiteness (as Niceness)

• In Event: Critical Readings of Whiteness, Race, Space, and Identities

Abstract

This qualitative study describes Chicanx student perceptions regarding teacher avoidance to engage in studying Arizona’s SB 1070 and attendant issues involving race and ethnicity. In addition, the effects of this silence on their schooling experience are investigated. Employing critical whiteness studies as its theoretical and analytical frame, findings include the perception that teachers avoid such study to maintain their own and their white students’ comfort as a matter of being nice. Chicanx students also reveal the discomfort they feel as a result of SB 1070 and the lack of opportunity to assuage this discomfort as a result of avoidance of SB 1070 study. Thus, the niceness of whiteness (Castagno, 2014) is employed and yields the (re)creation of unequal schooling experiences.

Author

• Richard A. Orozco, The University of Arizona