Chapter 18: Neutrality as Lightning Rod: Contextualizing Teachers’ Experiences in the 2016 Election Aftermath

In the summer of 2017, we engaged in-depth interviews with four K–12 educators from various backgrounds, political perspectives, and U.S. Mid-South school communities about their experiences teaching in the turbulent immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Our analysis illuminates various gendered and racialized ways that teachers were disciplined into shutting down students’ agitations and desires to make sense of the political traumas that affected them and their peers, intensified with the election of an openly White supremacist president. Using a metaphor of lightning as transformative learning that aims to redistribute power, our interviews suggest that despite such institutional discipline, teachers and students engaged certain strategies to undertake political study anyway. Yet, such sense-making within schools, as our interviews suggest, is always precarious and requires significant labor (affective and otherwise) to persist. Ultimately, we suggest the need to contextualize trauma/violence within a continuity of struggle against White supremacist, colonialist, and heteropatriarchal capitalism. Such a contextualization requires us to understand that schooling and its normative “neutrality” is institutionally complicit in enabling (rather than infiltrated by external) political traumas—climate collapse, rising wealth gaps, school shootings, police brutality, and so on—that we have long been differentially experiencing in the anthropocene.