Thread by @MsAbeja

“There is a growing body of empirical evidence pointing to the connections btwn educators’ well-meaning dispositions & their role in sustaining inequitable educational outcomes. Silence, passivity, denial, and avoidance are all tied to these patterns.”

“Niceness is one mechanism for reifying structural arrangements & ideologies of dominance across lines of race, gender, & social class.”

“[Niceness] functions not only as a shield to protect (white, female) educators from having to do the hard work of dismantling inequity but also as a disciplining agent for those who attempt or even consider disrupting structures & ideologies of dominance.” 👏👏👏

I’m not even through the introduction yet, and this book is hitting it out of the park.

“Niceness requires that I view my students as needing help, incapable on their own, missing something that I can provide.

This is a deficit framework… tied to individualism in the sense that it locates issues or problems within individuals.”

“Deficit frameworks teach kids to adapt to systems that are broken rather than requiring broken systems to adapt or even be fixed”

As a white #ELD teacher, this hits like a ton of bricks. I’m questioning everything I learned in grad school.

The first chapter, by Frederick W. Gooding Jr, sets discusses “how our nation’s educational socialization process is essentially a socialization process into Whiteness” & how “defending Niceness is actually defending Whiteness to the detriment of all students involved.” (p5)

In this chptr a number of “racially charged” incidents w/in k-12 school settings across the US illustrate how the idea of Niceness is unevenly applied to give white perpetrators the benefit of the doubt (“assume good intentions”) without affording the same to marginalized kids.

A white teacher berated a Latinx child for not correctly explaining how she solved a math problem & “although all agree that the tchr’s conduct was unbecoming, explanations & justifications suddenly abound to mitigate the mean behavior exhibited by the white teacher.” (p13)

“All students are socialized along a White racial frame given the historical & current demographic dominance of Whites w/in education... The White racial frame interprets Niceness in favor of Whites, even when Whites engage in conduct that is far from nice.” (p14)

The second chapter is all about how Whiteness functions even within attempts to implement multicultural & social justice education—and not just in the way that “multicultural education” has been co-opted & reduced to add-on lessons about “food, festivals, & fun.”

Even within schools that explicitly embrace a Social Justice mission, practices are often still rooted in Whiteness and Niceness, and “the imagined audience of social justice-oriented lessons is the relatively privileged students.”