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This chapter analyzes the discourse of civility—which goes under the name of “niceness” in elementary schools—as it appears in kids’ letters to Trump during the campaign and immediately following the election. In this version of the emotional intelligence paradigm, teachers and parents advocate writing letters as an exercise to help kids process and name their emotions in a manner that makes them feel like they can do something within the system. These “proper” modes of expression inevitably involve conforming to standards and rules and bodily comportment. The chapter then turns to examples of kids’ artwork from three locations in which teachers gave kids the opportunity to say and especially draw whatever they wanted; in these cultural productions, there is a much greater affective range, illustrating feelings of anger, fear, and hatred in a manner that does not adhere to the discourse of niceness.

Chapter One examines the Zion School District from the district, or central office, level. Within the district, central office leaders claimed equity as a priority but simultaneously claimed that the responsibility for failed attempts at equity resided in individual schools. When there existed a convergence of interests, some progress was made around diversity, but this progress was always narrowly defined and limited by the possessive investment in whiteness. When no such interests converged, responsibility for equity was consistently displaced elsewhere.

Chapter Two examines the ways teachers at Birch and Spruce understood and engaged multicultural education as either “powerblind sameness” or “colorblind difference.” Although these framing concepts appear to be logically inconsistent with one another, educators ascribed to both simultaneously. These two frameworks of sameness and difference serve as a dual system of support for whiteness.

Chapter Three discusses some of the meaningful silences around–and silencing of–race and sexuality in schools. Even though done with the best of intentions, efforts at maintaining politeness end up maintaining the status quo rather than facilitating social change.

Chapter Four highlights how schools differently engage diversity and, specifically, the notion of equality. At Spruce, a powerblind, colorblind understanding of equality shaped the ways educators understood excellence and the efforts they made to provide a high quality education to Spruce students. At Birch, however, educators engaged a more race- and power-conscious form of equality, but they were so constrained by the pressures of standardized accountability, that their diversity-related efforts were also limited and ultimately failed to approximate what was needed to advance equity..

Chapter Five examines current federal efforts to “turnaround the nation’s worst schools” through targeted School Improvement Grants. With a foundation in individualism and classical liberalism, this school-reform model results in the loss of students, teachers, and actual schools. The resulting neoliberal transformation exacerbates inequity and reifies whiteness.

The concluding chapter suggests that while whiteness shapes what diversity-related policy and practice look like, the resulting policy and practice, in turn, further strengthen whiteness. Thus, whiteness operates as an almost perfect system. It is effective and efficient at what it does. As a key element of whiteness in schools, niceness makes equity very difficult, so we must be awake, vigilant, and strategic.