Dear "Good" Schools: White Supremacy and Political Education in Predominantly White and Affluent Suburban Schools

• In Event: Education and the Political: The Possibilities of Civic Education in an (Un)Democratic World

Abstract

Amidst protests occurring throughout the US in the spring and summer of 2020 that brought global attention to issues of antiblackness, White supremacy, and racism in society, suburban students in a predominantly White and economically well-off central Ohio high school launched an Instagram account to expose the racism occurring in everyday life at their school (Neese, 2020). A rif off the film and television series Dear White People, @dearolsd account creators allowed for anonymous submissions and posted student testimonies spanning racist interactions with peers and teachers to moments of system-wide inaction by administration. Other accounts in surrounding suburbs soon followed all making followers aware of the lived realities youth of color and other marginalized students endure on a day-to-day basis within their “good” schools.

As discussions of “civic opportunity gaps” (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008) between urban and suburban schools motivate efforts to increase civic learning opportunities in poor, urban schools, it is crucial that education researchers and practitioners interrogate the political ideologies that circulate and are nurtured in “good” and predominantly White schools about society, race, government, and politics. This need is made ever more urgent given the recent surge in White nationalist rhetoric, documented increase in right-wing motivated violence, and recent research into the relationship between schooling and White adolescent racial and political attitudes that finds increased hostility toward and silencing of left-leaning and minoritized students (Belew, 2019; Miller-Idriss, 2020; Rogers, 2017). While recent conversations have focused on what can be done to deradicalize right-wing extremists on a national scale, I consider ways predominantly White schools serve as spaces where seemingly banal White supremacist ideology is fomented and tolerated and whether and how they can then serve as potential sites of de-escalation.

This paper highlights testimonies selected from the combined 636 total posts across 3 of these Instagram accounts to draw a composite experience of the hostile civic spaces that exist in these suburban schools and how these serve to structure students’ political education. The first group of testimonies focus on student-to-student interactions and the second focus on testimonies that highlight administrative and faculty support of such ideas and actions. I argue that these posts alert us to the ways White Supremacy shapes the public sphere of school where students of color and other students who deviate from the White, heteropatriarchal, Christian norm experience a differentiated citizenship that serves as a particular type of “lived civics” (Cohen et al, 2018) and the ways teachers and administrators respond (or fail to do so) forms part of all students’ political education. Lastly, I offer thoughts on what education scholars and practitioners frame as problem in schools; specifically, how we might reconceive of what (and who) we think of as “at risk” in light of the rise in right-wing and White nationalist extremism.

Author

• Dinorah Sanchez Loza, The Ohio State University