Allied Attestations: Troubling a Progressive Goodwill and ‘Duty to Speak Out’

Abstract

Increasingly fraught disputes over education have elevated local school boards as key sites of inquiry. In this critical ethnography, we examine how ostensibly neutral school board rules, routines, and relations play out in practice. We asked, How do (queer) youth of color proponents, white opponents, and white allies of an anti-oppressive educational program exercise their agency within the organizational contexts of one suburban California school board? Drawing on our field notes and 146 school board testimonies, we argue that white allies leveraged their social positioning (e.g. “As a white male …”) to counteract white opponents’ reactionary grassroots campaign. These allied attestations expressed progressive goodwill and yet reified violent hierarchies of human being that naturalized (queer) youth of color as illegitimate knowers. We discuss how an ethic of co-witnessing might interrupt hierarchies of truth and being encoded in school board organizational settings.