BUZZ
Officers ‘avoid arrests when possible,’ but when forced to do so use that ‘enduring component of Whiteness’: niceness
A study that came out in May but just recently came to light on social media argues that police officers stationed in schools use a technique dubbed “niceness as Whiteness” to justify arresting students for various infractions.
The paper “Niceness as Whiteness in School Police Officers’ Perceptions of Student Arrest” by Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Research Fellow Abigail Beneke (“studies how schools provide care under racial capitalism”) and Professors Benjamin Fisher (U. Wisconsin-Madison), F. Chris Curran (U. Florida), and Samantha Viano (George Mason) was highlighted last week by Dr. James Nuzzo.
According to the paper’s abstract, the researchers used the “perceptions of arrest” by school cops’ (known as school resource officers, or SROs) in two school districts, and found police “generally expressed trying to avoid arrest.”
But when relating anecdotes about arrests they had made, the SROs used “niceness as Whiteness to justify arresting young people.” (The academics use a capital “W” for “whites/whiteness” throughout their report.)
The researchers claim niceness is an “enduring component of Whiteness” — it “allows predominantly White people to elide how their own actions contribute to inequality by maintaining a sense of their own benevolence.”
In addition, they allege “some people of color” also make use of niceness in order to “uphold Whiteness.”
Despite SROs in the study noting “they avoid arrest[s] when possible,” Beneke et. al. say that when SROs do make arrests, they demonstrate whiteness by:
1) not taking responsibility for them. (One SRO said he arrested a student at the mother’s request as she was “at rope’s end”; the researchers claim this SRO “used niceness to shift responsibility to the boy’s mother” and “minimized his own role in maintaining Whiteness in a school district where Black students were arrested at three times the rate of White students.”)
2) “minimiz[ing] the negative impact of arrest by highlighting their own goodness.” (This includes saying things like “You want to listen to the radio? You want the window down? Is there a station you want to listen to?” after an arrest.)
3) noting the “positive relationships with children whom they had arrested.” (Highlighting such “reframes violence, i.e. arrest, that contributes to racial inequality as a positive, since students still like the SROs.”)
The SROs “used niceness as a strategy for upholding a system of Whiteness that systematically privileges White people and excludes those who fall outside of Whiteness,” the scholars conclude in the paper’s discussion section.
Vanderbilt’s Beneke (pictured) is part of the Pedagogies of Punishment project, which gets “major” funding from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Ethics & Education. On the project’s blog section, she contributed the article “Restorative Justice: Perpetuating or Challenging Inequality in Schools?”
On X, Nuzzo ripped the SRO study, writing “untalented academics in humanities departments love inviting male and/or white participants in for interview studies and then ridiculing the participants’ responses.”
In this case, they “criticised the School Resource Officers for allegedly trying to make themselves sound too nice,” along with their “honest responses regarding the challenges of their work.”
MORE: ‘Restorative justice’: Whites, conservatives, police need not apply
MORE: Elementary school ‘whiteness’ lesson: Sympathizing with police is ‘racist’
