Berkeley Review of Education

While U.S. schools grapple with persistent racial inequities, we argue that niceness, a socioemotional way of being that privileges whiteness, regularly impedes “equity” and “diversity” efforts in K-12 and teacher education settings. In the Midwest, niceness is uniquely rooted in a historical “obsession with public civility” (Cayton & Gray, 2002) that advances whiteness through a “demure white supremacy” (Cleveland, 2021), particularly in education. Here, the authors theorize Midwestern educational niceness, a regionally produced and enacted phenomenon “nicely” instantiated by the predominantly overwhelmingly white, Midwestern teacher workforce that actually stymies equity efforts. The authors conceptualize the ways whiteness through niceness works through a number of other phenomena including color evasiveness (Annamma et al., 2017; Bonilla-Silva, 2003), white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018), and emotionalities of whiteness (Matias, 2016). Countering the insidiousness of Midwestern educational niceness will require a recognition that this regional form of niceness and equity are incommensurate.

The exploitation of labor has occupied a central role in historical analysis of race and racism. In considering schooling as a site of institutional racism, however, the exploitation of student labor is seldom considered seriously. This is all the more surprising given the extent to which school is organized around the efficient extraction of student work, and the amount of thought which goes into maximizing productivity, achievement, and success. Here, I discuss schooling in two ways: first, as an institution of racial control; second, as a structure of labor exploitation. I first discuss problems with dominant scholarship dealing with economic reproduction in schooling, and then highlight the historical dimensions of schooling as a site of racial labor exploitation. Next, I describe the utilities (corporate and social) of student labor in contemporary racial capitalism. Finally, I suggest that looking at schooling as a site of labor exploitation enables us to locate a ‘general strike’––that is, the ways in which students of color refuse and disrupt the daily operations of an oppressive structure. Such an analytic encourages teachers to reimagine classroom management in order to: (1) read student disruption as a radical and political move toward freedom; and (2) cede the means of production of schooling to the students themselves. This is necessary, I argue, in order to produce a truly transformational and liberatory educational space.

How do youth move in an uprising? Members of YoUthROC, a BIPOC-centered, youth-led research group with young people from both the university and the community, reflect on creating a youth-powered curriculum that processes years of activism and inspires young people to use teaching as a way to create change in their communities. To ensure the relevance of their curriculum to the current needs, strengths, and curiosities of young people, the YoUthROC team wrote and collected autoethnographies, cataloged historical artifacts, analyzed social media, and conducted public focus groups and Instagram spotlight interviews during a year of uprising and unrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Results from this research include the following themes: the centrality of collectivism, internal and collective self-determination, and young people’s already-existing commitment to analysis and change. Educators, adult activists, and youth need to see that young people are central to social movements and are already contributing profoundly to anti-racist, anti-oppression work. This reflection and YoUthROC’s ongoing work is for young people eager to engage in activism, teachers looking to create authentic student-centered classrooms, and adult researchers ready to learn from and create with youth researchers.