{"pk":63464,"title":"Nice to Whom?: How Midwestern Niceness Undermines Educational Equity","subtitle":null,"abstract":"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.","language":"en","license":null,"keywords":[{"word":"niceness, whiteness, equity, K-12 education, teacher education"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1h89759p","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Riley","middle_name":"D","last_name":"Drake","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Wisconsin-Stout","department":""},{"first_name":"Gabriel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rodriguez","name_suffix":"","institution":"Iowa State University","department":""}],"date_submitted":"2021-05-06T04:00:01+10:00","date_accepted":"2021-05-06T04:00:01+10:00","date_published":"2023-03-13T09:31:19+11:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/bre/article/63464/galley/48875/download/"}]}