Neoliberalism and Diversity as Property: Extending Whiteness as Property Into the New Latinx Diaspora Free

In 1993, Harvard Law Review published a piece entitled, “Whiteness as Property,” written by Cheryl Harris, in which she posits that racial identity is intricately entwined with the concept of property. In the era of slavery, Whiteness was directly associated with one’s status as a free person. Therefore, not only could White individuals own slaves as property, but they also possessed Whiteness as property. Harris explains, “White identity conferred tangible and economically valuable benefits, and it was jealously guarded as a valuable possession, allowed only to those who met a strict standard of proof” (p. 1726). Thus, Whiteness as property can be seen as a type of racial currency only available to White people.

Wise (2002) draws on this idea stating, “The virtual invisibility that Whiteness affords those of us who have it is like psychological money in the bank, the proceeds of which we cash in every day while others are in a state of perpetual overdraft” (p. 108). The characteristic invisibility of Whiteness as property will be addressed in this article. Issues related to White privilege, a phenomenon which is widely repudiated, act to reify the tangible rewards associated with this intangible advantage. This article examines a specific type of Whiteness as property, namely diversity as property. Findings from a larger study (Sierk, 2016) indicate that students and school personnel from two nonurban, new Latinx Diaspora high schools in the Midwestern United States (pseudonyms: Springvale and Stockbridge) viewed diversity mostly in terms of its derived benefits, which were almost exclusively available to the schools’ White students. I suggest that schools move beyond the current model of exposure to difference, to one that challenges students to critically encounter their school’s diversity. I propose that the current one-way exchange must be converted into a two-way exchange where all students, including students of color and immigrant students, have something to gain from attending a racially and ethnically diverse school.

The type of commodification that happens when students and school personnel look at diversity as a type of property relies heavily on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has been studied in the realm of education in a myriad of ways: higher education (see Giroux, 2002); school reform (see Slater, 2015); accountability (see Ambrosio, 2013); and settler colonialism (see Tuck, 2013), among others. According to Harvey (2007), “Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (p. 3). Similarly, Lipman (2011) contends that “neoliberalism is a process that works its way into the discourses and practices of the city through the actions of local actors, not just elites, but also marginalized and oppressed people acting in conditions not of their own making” (p. 145). However, many researchers, including those highlighted above, critique neoliberalism’s influence on education. Along these lines, Apple (2004) states that “rather than taking neoliberal claims at face value we should want to ask about their hidden effects that are too often invisible in the rhetoric and metaphors of their proponents” (p. 19). This article adds to the existing literature by describing how neoliberalism is at play in how school personnel and students in New Latinx Diaspora schools view diversity.

Walker Johnson (2012) posits that neoliberal policies shift the purposes of schooling from democratic purposes to those that are economic. As such, a neoliberal view of diversity, at its best, is likely to view minoritized students as a way to attract or appease middle- to upper-class White families who espouse a cosmopolitan worldview.

However, Sleeter (1996) critiques our society’s overreliance on discussing diversity as a method of avoiding conversations about racism. “Discussing racism is less evasive than discussing diversity. Cultural differences do exist, of course, and ought to be discussed. However, Whites transmute many issues of racism into depoliticized questions of cultural difference” (p. 259). Castagno (2014) refers to diversity as a buzzword that doesn’t have a set definition. “For example, it can mean race, or culture, or all forms of diversity” (p. 2). This ambiguity depoliticizes the discourse surrounding racism and leaves the stratified status quo intact.

Many individuals living in demographically changing communities acknowledge certain advantages associated with living in diverse neighborhoods and sending their children to diverse schools. In a study conducted by Matlock and DiAngelo (2015), almost a third of participants admitted to moving from a majority White neighborhood to a racially diverse neighborhood either before they had children or when their children were young. However, they also acknowledged that these racially diverse neighborhoods were in the process of gentrification. In the same study, almost half of the parents sent their children to a racially diverse school. However, their children tended to be in programs that served a Whiter demographic within the school (e.g., honors, alternative, Montessori, International Baccalaureate, etc.). Matlock and DiAngelo contend that these parents’ actions are examples of unconscious, aversive racism. “This form of racism allows Whites with progressive identities to enact racist practices while still maintaining that identity. For example, the pride expressed in choice of neighborhood (‘the most diverse zip code in the country’), yet the maintenance of racial separation within that neighborhood” (p. 87). Thus, these parents embrace diversity in ways that still allow them nonetheless to draw on their White privilege.

The attitudes of the parents in Matlock and DiAngelo’s study exhibit the ideals and values associated with liberal multiculturalism, which Vavrus (2015) contrasts with critical multiculturalism. Liberal multiculturalism’s recognition and “celebration” of various cultural groups focuses on individual contributions, cultural tolerance, and eventual assimilation into an existing common culture. Although diversity is recognized by liberal multiculturalists, political, economic, and social inequities are not acknowledged or problematized. Critical multiculturalism, like liberal multiculturalism, envisions the formation of a unified culture; however, critical multiculturalism seeks to redistribute rights and privileges within this diverse, yet unified society.

Furthermore, Nieto (2010) contrasts the different levels of multicultural education support (i.e., monocultural education, tolerance, acceptance, respect, and affirmation, solidary, and critique) that exist in U.S. schools. The levels of tolerance, “differences are understood to be the inevitable burden of a culturally pluralistic society” (p. 251), and acceptance, “differences are acknowledged and their importance is neither denied nor belittled” (p. 253), are most consistent with the goals of liberal multiculturalism. In contrast, affirmation, solidarity, and critique, “differences that students and their families represent are embraced and accepted as legitimate vehicles for learning” (p. 257), is most in line with the views of critical multiculturalism.

Relatedly, Menkart (1998) challenges schools to go deeper than liberal multiculturalism’s usual focus on heritage month celebrations. Rather than a narrow, superficial focus on crafts, music, and food, Menkart suggests that schools address the current reality and power relations that shape a culture while acknowledging that culture lives on in the present, as opposed to being trapped in a distant past. Also related to liberal multiculturalism, Castagno (2014) discusses individualism, egalitarianism, and meliorism:

Redistributing rights and privileges (a view promoted by critical multiculturalists) is directly counter to individualist, egalitarian, and meliorist beliefs, as it acknowledges that the condition of the collective matters more than the condition of the individual. As Vavrus (2015) states, “Critical multiculturalism turns its focus away from liberalism’s individualist ideology of meritocracy and equal opportunity and instead looks to claims for justice, equity, and community by historically marginalized groups” (p. 47). By privileging equity over equal opportunity, critical multiculturalism sets up an environment where two-way acculturation, not assimilation, is the norm.

The assimilative goals of society often stand in direct contrast to persistent segregation, including the White/Latinx divides in the two communities discussed in this paper. Nieto and Bode (2012) contend that although there was a movement toward desegregation after the Civil Rights movement, there has since been a shift back toward resegregation, creating an increasing number of ethnic enclaves and homogenous subpopulations that stand in stark contrast to one another. This resegregation also includes “White flight” from communities, like Springvale and Stockbridge, that have recently attracted workers of color and their families.

Mitchell et al. (2010) analyzed ethnicity data from the last five decennial census reports and school enrollment data from two large metropolitan school districts in California, one of which desegregated early and voluntarily, contrasting the other’s slow, contested desegregation mandated by a court order. They found, “Housing segregation— created by a combination of social class and racial biases in the housing market and often reinforced by the gerrymandering of school attendance boundaries—remains a potent factor influencing school segregation” (p. 169). However, Mitchell et al. point out that segregation has evolved from previous de jure segregation processes. Today’s de facto segregation often involves manipulating catchment area boundaries, selecting new school sites in specific neighborhoods, building small school facilities, using portable classrooms, and crafting school transfer policies to favor the preferences of middle-class, mostly White families. These authors also reference strategies meant to promote desegregation, including school magnet programs, student busing, and lottery systems. However, as Green (2008) points out, these school choice policies often operate “without desegregation or integration as a goal,” illustrating “the color-blind position which permeates our public discourse and our public educational and social policies” (p. 395). Unfortunately, if color indexes inequality in a system, colorblindness blocks seeing the racialized dimensions of that stratification and thus inhibits their contestation.

Siegel-Hawley (2013) used geographic information systems with data from the National Center for Education Statistics in her case study of a racially changing suburb in the South involved in a school rezoning process. She found:

Siegel-Hawley went on to assert, “Throughout the very political process of gerrymandering attendance boundaries, seemingly race-neutral decisions had profound effects on racial isolation” (p. 606). Similarly, Holme et al. (2013) conducted a case study of a large, rapidly changing district in the San Antonio Metropolitan area. They found that efforts made there to reduce the growing segregation between schools were “thwarted by elite (middle-class and mostly White) parents who pressured administrators to draw attendance boundaries in a way that furthered segregation” (p. 59). These parents, drawing on their White privilege, were able to directly impact school policy in a way that disadvantaged students of color.

In addition to lax enforcement of desegregation plans and the continuation of segregated housing patterns, Nieto and Bode (2012) also attribute the trend toward resegregation to “‘White flight’ (that is, the movement of Whites to rural or suburban areas and to private schools)” (pp. 66-67). Similar to White flight, Clotfelter (2004) references a phenomenon that he calls “White avoidance.” The White avoidance explanation claims that “Whites prefer to avoid racially mixed schools” as indicated by “changes in interracial contact in schools followed by abnormally large declines in White enrollment” (p. 91). This is a phenomenon that has been evident in Midwestern meatpacking communities like the two I have studied. Since opening a beef processing plant in 1988, an event that precipitated making it Nebraska’s most Latinx community, Lexington Nebraska Schools have seen a dramatic decline in their White enrollment, while neighboring districts have seen small increases (England & Hamann, 2013).

Clotfelter identifies two forms of White avoidance behavior that occurred in response to schools’ desegregation efforts: residential location and academic tracking. Residential location is traditionally connected to White flight. With respect to academic tracking, since higher tracks are generally populated mostly by White students (Lucas, 1999; Oakes, 2005), White parents see them as a way to minimize their child’s exposure to students of color, as illustrated by Matlock and DiAngelo (2015).

Part of a larger study (Sierk, 2016), this qualitative research utilized ethnographic methods to answer the question: How do school personnel and students conceptualize diversity in two New Latinx Diaspora schools in the Midwest? Sanjek (2014) declares, “Ethnographers aim to document how the people see and talk about their everyday social activities and groupings and about the wider worlds in which they live” (p. 65). As such, the ways in which students and school personnel discussed the meaning and perceived value of diversity were of particular interest.

Fasching-Varner (2014) speaks to the importance of acknowledging one’s own position in the study of Whiteness asserting, “When we interrogate our own Whiteness, we are better able to capitalize on our positionality and privilege as White researchers, examining race to use our race for purposes of good as opposed to bad” (p. 163). Thus, in the spirit of interrogating my own positionality as it relates to the present study, I identify as a White, native English-speaking female who was raised in a lower middle class family by a single mother. I was also born in the United States, automatically making me a U.S. citizen.

Given this paper’s focus on how attending a “diverse” school is often used as form of cultural currency accessible to White students, it is important that I reflect on my own positionality. I grew up in a community that, while I was living and attending school there, transitioned from being a majority-White community to one that is majority-Latinx. When I began attending kindergarten in 1992, there were only a few Latinx families living in my hometown in Nebraska. By the time I graduated high school in 2005, the school district I attended was around 50% Hispanic, becoming majority-Latinx the following year (2005-2006). Many communities experiencing demographic shifts experience forms of White flight or White avoidance. For some White families staying is an economic necessity. My mother, however, chose to stay because she saw value in her daughter being raised and attending school in a diverse environment.

As Spradley (1980) suggests, “Doing ethnographic fieldwork involves alternating between the insider and outsider experience, and having both simultaneously” (p. 57). I derived, and continue to derive, benefits from this diverse upbringing and schooling experience, even through the research I now conduct. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I see what I call diversity as property as something we need to critique. However, while I have my own experiences with this topic, it was important for me to remain as objective as possible, to allow my participants’ stories to come through unadulterated by my “insider” knowledge.

The two communities in which this research took place were purposefully selected due to their location in two nonurban, new Latinx Diaspora communities in the state of Nebraska. Both communities have experienced significant demographic change in the last 10-20 years. Compared to the approximately 11% of the Nebraska population that identifies as Hispanic (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018), these two school districts are comprised of demographics that are significantly more Hispanic than those of the state of Nebraska writ large. Given the demographics, the way students conceptualize race, and more specifically Whiteness, in these settings is likely to differ from how students from majority-White settings may think about the same topics. Furthermore, the nonurban nature of these two communities may also influence how students experience living and attending school in a diverse (namely in terms of race, ethnicity, language, and religion) community.

Although these two communities are similar due to their new Latinx Diaspora label, they differ in size and other contextual factors. The larger of the two, Stockbridge, is part of a micropolitan community. It has a school enrollment that is about two-thirds Hispanic and a quarter White, with a modest and growing (approximately 5% during the 2014-15 academic year) Black population that includes more African refugees from Somalia and Sudan than African Americans. The smaller of the two, Springvale, is a rural community with a population that is less than a tenth of the size of Stockbridge and a school enrollment that is almost half Hispanic.

Another contextual difference between the communities has to do with English learners. In Stockbridge, the percentage of students identified as English learners has been steadily decreasing in the last 5 years. In contrast, between 2010 and 2014, Springvale’s EL population remained relatively steady; however, during the 2014-15 school year, the school saw a spike in the number of EL-identified students, as this population more than doubled. These contextual differences are important to this study’s examination of how Whiteness manifests itself in response to varying circumstantial details.

Prior to the present study, I had served as a researcher in both communities. I began my role as a researcher in Stockbridge in 2008 using qualitative methods to examine Stockbridge’s response to demographic change by interviewing administrators, teachers, guidance counselors, and other district stakeholders. In 2013, my role as a researcher continued in Stockbridge and simultaneously began in Springvale when I conducted research on the ten most (proportionally) Latinx high schools in the state of Nebraska. These prior experiences provided me with the opportunity to continue exploring schooling’s response to demographic change and introduced me to Springvale as a potential research site.

I returned to Springvale in spring 2014 to conduct a pilot study. Casting a wide net, I observed everything from seventh-grade life science to senior American government during my 4 days of fieldwork. During the pilot study, I also conducted two pilot interviews. Eventually, I narrowed my focus to the senior class, observing them in a variety of their classes, and decided to add Stockbridge as a second site. My previous experiences at both schools afforded me access to gatekeepers, through whom I began the recruitment process in fall 2014.

After acquiring school district permission from both Stockbridge and Springvale, I was granted institutional review board approval and began the recruitment process by speaking to students in American government classes at both schools and economics classes at Stockbridge. Throughout the semester, I also recruited school personnel (e.g., teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators) who regularly interacted with my student participants by having one-on-one conversations with them at a mutually convenient time (e.g., before/after school or during their plan period). All participants were given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.

Fourteen students from Springvale and 7 students from Stockbridge volunteered to participate. Thirty-one school personnel, including 24 teachers (9 from Springvale, 15 from Stockbridge), 5 guidance counselors (1 from Springvale, 4 from Stockbridge), and 2 administrators (1 from each school), agreed to participate. All the school personnel self-identified as racially/ethnically White, which is fairly representative of all school personnel at the two schools (i.e., 100% White at Springvale, 93% White at Stockbridge). For the purpose of this article, I have highlighted the participants featured in the findings below in Table 1.

I conducted participant observations (Spradley, 1980) for 27 days during spring 2015 (14 at Springvale and 13 at Stockbridge), for a total of about 102 hours of observation. I observed on various days of the week and in different settings (e.g., Stockbridge’s “grand march” before prom, assemblies, school hallways, homeroom periods, and classrooms), as well as in 40 different classes (23 at Springvale and 17 at Stockbridge), representing a variety of subject areas, both core and elective. I also conducted ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979) with all 52 participants (21 students and 31 school personnel) during April and May 2015. I designed interview questions to be open-ended and interviews were semistructured. I did follow-up interviews with 13 student participants (10 from Springvale, 3 from Stockbridge) on a voluntary basis in October and November 2015.

Fasching-Varner (2014) suggests a twofold approach to data analysis when researching Whiteness. Following this approach, I first “look[ed] carefully at each participant’s dataset to read and code for significant ideas” (p. 164). This involved constructing a detailed description of each individual participant drawing from multiple data sources (i.e., observations, interviews, and collected artifacts). Once codes were developed individually, cross-case comparisons were made to “refine those codes based on similarity [and difference] across cases.” Fasching-Varner asserts, “An individual’s manifestation of something is important, but seeing how the manifestations remain across participants within a study is significant” (p. 164). This approach allowed me to see the interconnectivity of my participants’ narratives, thereby locating Whiteness and diversity within the lenses of the lived experiences of students and school personnel from Springvale and Stockbridge.

In further justification of this approach, Brown (2014) states, “To make sense of localized, microlevel actions observed in the field, one must recognize how individual practices manifest in relation to larger institutionalized ways of acting on and understanding the world” (p. 220). The juxtaposition of the micro (i.e., individual cases) and macro (i.e., crosscase comparisons) in Fasching-Varner’s twofold approach does just that. Thus, in my analysis, codes from the analysis of individual participants’ datasets were validated through the interconnectivity of participants’ narratives when patterns of behavior emerged during the cross-case comparison phase of data analysis. Brown goes on to suggest that in order to center race in the context of ethnographic research, one must “actively attend to and purposefully notice how race plays out when doing fieldwork” (p. 220). Therefore, she insists that researchers reject color-blind ideologies during their data collection and analysis; instead recognizing race as “an important or viable factor to consider when interpreting interactions in the social world” (p. 220). In the context of this study’s data analysis, I coded data with special attention given to issues of race, and the related identity constructs of ethnicity, gender, language, and citizenship, among others.

At Springvale, attending a diverse school was seen as preparation for the real world. Although this was most often articulated by school personnel, students like Will, also acknowledged the benefits they derived from being part of Springvale’s diverse student population:

With the school’s focus on acceptance, students’ firsthand training in diversity was limited to exposure, as Will’s statement suggests. While this exposure may benefit White students, its uncritical nature tends to reinforce, rather than combat stereotypical, monolithic notions of what it means to be Hispanic. Will highlighted that his exposure to “other people’s cultures” taught him about their struggles, a deficit viewpoint. He also emphasized how different Hispanic families are, suggesting that he sees his Hispanic classmates as varying from White community norms, thereby making them the “other.” Mrs. Logan also emphasizes the idea of “people who are different” stating, “I see [Springvale] being more open to people who are different…. The kids too. Just growing up here where they do have such a different culture, they’re a little bit more open and it’s not such a shock” (interview, May 11, 2015). Again, Whiteness is set up as the norm. Anything that deviates from that norm is deemed different, which participants indicated would normally be shocking.

Mrs. Langley suggested that the diversity present in Springvale benefited all students stating, “I’m very thankful for the diversity because that can’t do anything but help all of our students” (interview, May 11, 2015). Logistically speaking, however, Springvale’s Hispanic students would be exposed to mainstream, “White” culture regardless of where they attended school; whereas, if Springvale’s White students attended one of the neighboring majority-White schools, they would likely not have the same experience. When asked what made Springvale different from surrounding area schools, Mrs. Ferguson shared, “We’re exposed to the quinceaneras, the different foods that kids are willing to bring and make” (interview, May 14, 2015). While this exposure, again, focuses on a narrow conceptualization of what it means to be Hispanic, it shows a one-way cultural exchange. In the case of her statement, “we” represents Springvale’s extant White population. Furthermore, her examples indicate that the focus remains on a “Heroes and Holidays” approach to multicultural education (Menkart, 1998), rather than deeper aspects of culture.

The benefit of this exposure to Hispanic culture draws heavily on colorblindness. Attending Springvale High essentially acts as training for how to not see race in their future endeavors.

While the exposure Springvale provides to its White students does make them potentially better prepared for other diverse environments, it does not facilitate much in the way of solidarity between Springvale’s White and Hispanic students. By stating “that’s just the way it is,” Mrs. Falk promotes an uncritical view of why Springvale is nearly majority-Hispanic when other towns less than 10 miles away have Hispanic populations of less than five percent. While students are aware that the local food processing plant is largely responsible for the town’s relatively recent diversification, they are not encouraged to question why that is the case.

Instead, the focus is on students ushering in a new age of acceptance, as illustrated by Mr. Vogel and Mr. Benson’s comments below:

Mr. Vogel draws on the idea that racism is not an innate behavior when he states that it’s not an issue with little kids. Thus, racism is acknowledged to be a socialized behavior, one that Mr. Benson argues has been effectively circumvented due to White and Hispanic students growing up together in Springvale. However, simple exposure is not enough to combat oppression. Instead, exposure fosters monolithic, deficit views of Hispanic cultures, colorblindness, and the perpetuation of ideological Whiteness.

After their exposure to “other” (i.e., Hispanic) cultures in high school, some of the White Springvale students I followed up with during their first semester of college commented on the lack of, or presence of different, diversity on their college campuses:

For Tiffany, college gave her experiences with different racial and ethnic groups that were not present at Springvale. The college Tiffany was attending was roughly 82% White, with the next largest racial/ethnic group being Hispanic/Latino (7%). Thus, her saying, “I don’t see as many Hispanics,” is likely a comparative statement since, relative to Springvale, her college campus’s Hispanic population is substantially smaller; whereas, her college’s Asian (between zero and one percent) and African American (about 3%) populations are greater than that of Springvale High, which did not enroll any Asian students and had a relatively small population of about 1.5% Black/African American students (Nebraska Department of Education, 2015). However, she objectifies her Asian and Black classmates when saying “you’ll see a few of those around campus.”

Chloe, attending a majority-White community college, also commented on her school’s lack of diversity and the presence of racial/ethnic groups with which she had less prior contact:

Similar to her exposure to Hispanic cultures in high school, in college Chloe was being exposed to other cultural groups (e.g., “Black people” and “foreign people”). Again, this exposure acted to give Chloe a shallow level of understanding, but it simultaneously reified certain stereotypes and judgments (e.g., Black people are good at basketball). Regarding her relationship with her Black African exchange student roommate, Chloe was unable to tell me which country she was from or what language she spoke, only that it was “weird.”

African students also came up in my conversation with Elizabeth. She talked about a conversation she had with her new college classmates about Springvale’s Hispanic population, in which she contrasted her high school experience with her new experiences in college. She said that in Springvale, Whites are almost the minority. In contrast, she said that there was more diversity at Springvale High, than in her college lecture of one hundred students. However, even with the relative lack of diversity on her university campus, she did point out that she had met several students from Rwanda in her program. She told me that their perspective about global agriculture was different, making for some interesting conversations in class. She said she really had to listen to them though because she sometimes struggled to understand their English (interview, October 16, 2015).

Alexis, who attended the same university as Elizabeth, contrasted the agriculture campus at their university with the main campus:

Again, growing up in a diverse community was viewed as a benefit, something that differentiated Alexis from her college peers who grew up in majority-White communities. She contrasted her awareness of the lack of diversity on campus, with her classmates’ apparent oblivion, while interestingly calling upon a neoliberalism-inspired idiom, business as usual.

Grace, on the other hand, contended that the university she attended is “really diverse”; however, she also acknowledged that that diversity differs from what she experienced in Springvale:

Similar to Tiffany’s assessment of her college’s campus, Grace’s estimation of which racial/ethnic minority population was largest was inaccurate, likely due to the relatively small size of her university’s Hispanic population when compared to that of Springvale High. Grace also appropriates colorblindness when discussing the diversity present on her university’s campus, something she contends she learned from attending school in Springvale. While her university has not made the news for racial incidents like the University of Missouri recently had,¹ Grace’s assertion that there haven’t been any issues ignores the pervasive nature of racism. Despite her use of colorblind rhetoric, Grace’s understanding of certain issues related to race had developed while in college. She discussed a lecture she attended at her university about a documentary film on the topic of immigration:

Simple exposure to a classmate touched by the issue of “illegal” immigration was not enough to move Grace to empathy. Exposure is not enough to change the hearts and minds of White students, however young. Even with this new level of understanding, Grace still engaged in the Othering of immigrant populations by referring to them as “those people.” However, it is noteworthy that her perspective did shift as she critically encountered her own beliefs due to her college’s diversity and inclusion efforts that addressed issues related to immigration more explicitly than her high school classes at Springvale did.

Similar to Springvale, growing up in a diverse community was seen as a benefit to Stockbridge students, specifically White students. Brad explained how Stockbridge’s diversity had personally impacted him:

Once again, we see the objectification of the “Other” through Brad’s use of “those kind of people.” Furthermore, the diversity of Stockbridge High was seen as something that would prepare students to enter the real world, helping them to avoid “cultural shock,” according to Mrs. Avery, who relayed why she was glad to send her own children to Stockbridge for school:

Mrs. Avery thought that parents who chose to open enroll them kids in less diverse (i.e., more White) schools in neighboring communities were sheltering them from reality. According to district-collected data tracking open enroll requests, the three most common reasons given for wanting to open enroll out of Stockbridge were other/no reason given, prefer smaller school, and always attended/recently moved.² Given the demographics of nearby “smaller schools,” Mrs. Avery’s statement is a legitimate concern. Thus, open enrolling out of the district may be another form of White flight occurring in Stockbridge.

However, the number of open enroll requests out of the district represented a small proportion of the district’s student enrollment (about 3%). The more likely response to diversity was a positive, albeit colorblind, one. Mrs. Kimball chronicled an ebb in tension that she had observed since Stockbridge High became a majority-Latinx school:

Similar to Mrs. Kimball attributing the observed decrease in tension to greater familiarity among different racial and ethnic groups at the school, Ms. Artz stated, “If they’ve been here, they’ve grown up around it. To them, it’s not new or different” (Interview, May 15, 2015). White students and school personnel had at the very least, resigned themselves to the fact that Stockbridge was and would likely always be a diverse school, a reaction most aligned with tolerance (Nieto, 2010).

The hopes of school personnel that students attending a diverse school would be better socially prepared to enter college or the workforce did not go unrealized. Brad (like some of the Springvale students) commented that the university he was attending was significantly less diverse than Stockbridge High:

However, the associated benefits of being a diverse school were not just realized by students. About half of the participating school personnel at Stockbridge had attended high schools whose enrollments were significantly less diverse than Stockbridge’s. Thus, teaching at a majority-Latinx school was a very different experience for school personnel as well. For example, Mrs. Dixon contrasted her own high school experience with that of her students, emphasizing that the main difference was the presence of diversity:

Mrs. Dixon’s encounters with diversity as a Stockbridge High teacher had made her question some of her own assumptions about diverse schools, so much so that her bias had reversed itself to one against small schools, specifically those will majority White enrollments.

The relative silence around issues of race at Springvale and Stockbridge was effectively replaced by rhetoric about the benefits of diversity. Similar to Harris’ (1995) concept of Whiteness as property, diversity was commodified in Springvale and Stockbridge, as school personnel and students often mentioned the benefits associated with attending a racially and ethnically diverse high school. Similar to Matlock and DiAngelo’s (2015) results, while White school personnel, specifically in Stockbridge, generally acknowledged the advantages of diversity, their choice to work and send their children to a majority-Latinx school was tempered by their choice to live in areas of town that were significantly more White and marked by higher housing prices (e.g., a new, predominantly White subdivision on the outskirts of town where median property values were about two and a half times that of the community writ large). Thus, while their expressed beliefs were overtly progressive, their actions demonstrated their largely unconscious buy-in to systems of privilege associated with their race and class backgrounds, consistent with aversive racism.

Other than the neoliberal benefits that diversity as property afforded White students, their exposure to diversity did offer them “the spark of knowledge that comes from people of color” to “learn to see how Whiteness functions” (Allen, 2004, p. 124). White students like Alexis, Brad, Elizabeth, Grace, and Tiffany actively noticed race on their college campuses in ways that some of them contended their new peers who had attended majority-White high schools did not. However, while their exposure to counterstories of their high school peers of color (e.g., Grace’s mention of knowing one of her classmates was “illegal”) made Whiteness more visible to them, this did not necessarily mean that they were ready to take steps toward confronting hegemony. As Nieto (2010) states, “Multicultural education without critique may result in cultures remaining at the romantic or exotic stage” (p. 257). Thus, while exposure presents some potential for building equitable relationships in schools, it is far from sufficient to achieve the goal of critical solidarity and may actually contribute to the “Othering” of students of color as White students and school personnel continue to see diversity as something foreign and exotic, which was the case for students like Chloe, Tiffany, and Grace.

This neoliberal commodification of diversity reified the individualistic, egalitarian, and meliorist depoliticization that Castagno (2014) discusses, as well as the focus on liberal multiculturalism discussed by Vavrus (2015). Rather than focusing on social collectivism, the approach to diversity present within Springvale and Stockbridge focused on the benefits available to individual students as they enter the “real world.” The assumption that all students benefit from the diversity of the school environment sets each student up as an equal partner in this exchange. However, this exchange is far from equal, an effect hidden by the invisible nature of neoliberalism’s “common sense” functioning in the status quo of education. As such, schools, researchers, and policymakers should interrogate how neoliberal sensibilities around diversity obscure and distract from the goals of critical solidarity. Rather than viewing diversity as an opportunity for personal growth, we should turn our attention to viewing diversity as a call to collective action toward equity and justice.

Logistically, if White students from either school were to attend another school in a neighboring community, they would not experience the same exposure to “difference” as they did by attending Springvale and Stockbridge High. On the other hand, Springvale and Stockbridge’s students of color would be exposed to White students regardless of where they attended school in the region. Therefore, diversity was commodified for the benefit of White students, whose schooling experiences were enriched by the presence of students of color, a type of currency they could draw upon in college admission essays and scholarship applications. This hampered the meliorist ideal of future generations being able to improve their sociopolitical circumstance, as they were not able to draw on the tangible and economically valuable benefits afforded by diversity as property to the same extent as their White peers could.

In fact, since most Hispanic students attend majority-Latinx or majority-minority schools for their K-12 education, many Hispanic students are tasked with negotiating a predominantly White setting for the first time when they enter higher education (Herrera & Holmes, 2015). As such, college can be a major adjustment, making Santiago’s (2009) distinction between enrolling and serving Latinx students particularly important. Furthermore, when considering the case of undocumented students, this distinction is even more paramount. For example, while it was not an issue for Eddie (a Guatemalan student from Springvale) to be accepted to the institution of higher education which he attended (i.e., enrolling Latinx students), his undocumented status made affording his postsecondary education difficult (due to the unavailability of financial aid) resulting in him not being able to purchase the necessary books for his classes. Most of his professors were understanding; however, one of his professor’s responses (“college isn’t for everybody”) was extremely unsupportive, indicating a lack of attention in how best to serve Latinx students. Thus, while Eddie was easily able to access higher education, his retention and completion depended on the support of his professors, among other variables. Future research, then, should pay special attention to how students of color transition from majority-minority K-12 school environments to majority-White institutions of higher education, as more supports may be necessary to help these students thrive in their new environments.

As another point of future consideration, right now, Stockbridge only has one high school; therefore, housing segregation within the limits of the town does not impact which high school students attend. However, a second high school is a very real possibility given the growth the district has experienced in recent years. As shown by Mitchell et al. (2010), de jure segregation in the form of gerrymandered school attendance boundaries is a main cause of modern day school segregation. Therefore, if Stockbridge were to add a second high school, the housing segregation would likely have much more dire consequences for the education low-income students, many of whom are students of color, would receive. School districts experiencing significant growth, especially growth in student populations of color, should be wary of how they embark on expansion projects. To this end, researchers should engage in research in communities pursing district expansion in an effort to foster accountability around desegregation and equitable resource allocation.

In sum, while both schools claimed they were “making diversity work,” it’s important to ask for whom it was working. While White students were deriving the benefit of diversity as “property,” students of color made the best of a system that was, at best, not made for their success, and at worst made for their failure. To truly “make diversity work,” the one-way nature of the status quo must be converted to a two-way exchange. Tolerance must be traded in for critical solidarity.