We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education. Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in expressions, images, or entire fields. Even time itself has been declared racist. Now, however, academics have found another undiscovered continent of white privilege: niceness.
When I saw a story in The College Fix on a study of “niceness as Whiteness,” I was skeptical and decided to take a look. The study by Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Research Fellow Abigail Beneke, Professors Benjamin Fisher (U. Wisconsin-Madison), F. Chris Curran (U. Florida), and Samantha Viano (George Mason) was first flagged by Dr. James Nuzzo.
The paper “Niceness as Whiteness in School Police Officers’ Perceptions of Student Arrest” addresses the “perceptions of arrest” by school resource officers, or SROs) in two school districts.
The officers appear to be precisely what you are looking for in an SRO: empathetic and reluctant to make arrests. The researchers admit that they try to avoid arrests. However, according to the authors, hidden behind those sympathetic approaches was, of course, a boiling caldron of racism in terms of the racial disparity of those arrested.
Indeed, the researchers realized that it was the niceness itself that was the evidence of oppressive “Whiteness.” Indeed, the officers may not want to be engines of racism and use “niceness” as a “coping mechanism,” but do so by deluding themselves and others that they are nice:
“Nice SROs did not want to arrest children. Nice police officers thought of themselves as well-meaning. Yet, they expressed being required to arrest children because of real or imagined mandates. They used niceness as a strategy for upholding a system of Whiteness that systematically privileges White people and excludes those who fall outside of Whiteness. Niceness hinders possibilities for the types of political, communal relationships central to authentic care.”
The paper makes it sound like everyone would be better off, or at least more honest, to return to hostile, racist-spewing officers. The reason is that niceness is an “enduring component of Whiteness” which “allows predominantly White people to elide how their own actions contribute to inequality by maintaining a sense of their own benevolence.”
The evidence of niceness includes such findings as how officers work at “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.)
Then there is the fact that these officers have good relationships and perspectives of the students. Again, it is just a shield of “whiteness”:
“SROs used niceness as Whiteness in their recounts of arrest … by highlighting the positive relationships they had with students they arrested…As with highlighting their own goodness, highlighting these positive relationships reframes violence (i.e., arrest) that contributes to racial inequality as a positive, since students still like the SROs. This strategy emphasizes the officer’s ability to retain his niceness—by virtue of the maintained interpersonal relationship—despite having arrested the student.”
The paper is an example of ideological screeds posing as academic research. Based on a few interviews, the researchers simply declare the empathy and relationships to be shields perpetuating “whiteness.” They cite other studies identifying niceness as a whiteness tactic:
“Prior research has demonstrated how primarily White women educators use niceness to uphold Whiteness in their work with children (Bissonnette 2016; Drake & Rodriguez 2022; Gardiner et al., 2023; Vlach et al., 2022; Wiborg, 2022). We found niceness was also present in the work of SROs, suggesting the potential for broader application of niceness to well-intentioned actors working in structurally violent systems. In addition to framing niceness as a means of excusing behavior that upholds Whiteness, we equally center the structural binds that delimit SROs’ capacity for providing care. In doing so, we identify niceness as a coping mechanism for arresting children.”
At these universities (Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, George Mason, and the University of Florida), these faculty members and their obvious agenda are viewed as ideal choices to teach their students.
With four kids, I found the SROs at their schools to be extraordinary and popular figures. They would routinely intervene with kids to see if they were having trouble or try to direct them away from trouble. It turns out that everything that parents valued in their SROs was a perpetuation of privilege, according to these researchers.
While the researchers insist that “we do not intend to demonize individual SROs,” they reward the cooperating officers by twisting their every comment as revealing their deep white privilege. Presumably, they conveyed to the SROs that this would be a fair, unbiased study. It was neither, and, perhaps reaffirming their own triumph over racism, they were not a bit nice about it.
They just don’t understand consequences, they think it’s people being mean to them.
Maybe it’s time white people stop being so nice
It is well past time.
I for one am happy that these so called scholarly types just stay at school and keep studying whatever they want just to keep them away from the normal part of society where no one has time for any of this obvious nonsense. We need a big fridge to post there ‘work’ and give them the relevancy they crave.
JT’s focus on “Nutty Proffessors” is quite entertaining yet I’m quite dismayed at what passes for education these days.
So academics are in rather close daily proximity to SRO’s so of course we need a study to measure just how racist of course they are.
“Gotta be SOMETHING there we can peg as racist…nothing? pick something! niceness?? niceness! that’s it eureka! science advances today!”
I’m doing a study of my own. My theory? these people are idiots. cite and sike.
what no professors coming by to defend the racism?
This is just more insincere lefty crap, designed to divide, that’s all this is, they don’t believe it either, it just furthers their insane agenda to destroy humanity and that’s why they invent such stupidity. There just isn’t enough racism for them to survive in the least racist country in the entire world. The desperate left will be pulling more crazy out of their hat as desperation is what is driving their lurch into crazytown. Once you understand that the left is insincere and desperate, you see this is just them grasping for power and relevance as they lose it. Death throes.
Here you are amplifying the division.
Clever girl.
Academics are so desperate for relevancy they are making up stuff to teach.
Or the commenter has zero intellectual capacity to understand the “made-up stuff”.
Oh thank you for offering to explain it here! how exactly does this niceness work anyway Mr. Academic?
Woke was a pandemic of mental illness in the form of hysterical blindness.
Sez the anon commenter who hides behind anonymity and suffers from hysteria and mental illness.
jeez, woke much pal? why not try to defend your precious woke here?
When presented with a study like this, it’s important to dig a little deeper. How did they collect their data? Did they spend hours studying body camera footage, collecting factual details and carefully blinding the study of racial hints before presenting the collected details to third party for analysis?
Or was it based on interviews, conducted by the researchers themselves? A particularly bad way to find out something about somebody is to just ask them. There is plenty of motivation for people to bend the truth, especially when there are no consequences for doing so. And human recollection is typically quite unreliable to begin with. Not to mention the overwhelming desire of the researchers for a particular result.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Bingo!
BTW, I propose Jason Arday Award for Excellence, where authors such as Abigail Beneke can be recognized and memorized for future generations.
How many times did she cite her TikTok sources?
Idiocracy supposed to be a comedy, not a documentary.
The study tells you exactly how they researched the data. They included all the references. You just have to look at the study a little deeper.
Sorry, it’s like walking past a rotting body. The stench was bad enough that there was no need to dig through the rot to further investigate a dead and rotting corpse, the nose knows!
It seems Turley is unable to deal with novel ideas and feels compelled to attack the messengers instead of dealing with the message. It smacks of an authoritarian view of education.
“ideological screeds posing as academic research”
What a well reasoned response. Something similar happens at the monkey house when a visitor upsets them enough. Flinging is the verb. Sort out the noun yourselves.
MORON ANON feels compelled to attack the messenger!! Fixed it.
The message STUNK ANON!!!
idiot scum
Those of you on the left are under the delusion that success is easy.
Only about 1 in 7 new businesses succeed. Why ? Success is hard.
If you have a new idea – for ANYTHING – the odds are it is a BAD IDEA.
It is up to YOU to prove that your idea has merit – Turley has excellent reason to think this all nonsense.
Because it is.
I notice you did not defend the topic of insane professors that we are discussing, are you one of them? are you insane? how would you know?
I didn’t hear you defend this ‘novel’ racist study. because you cannot and will not. you are one of those insincere leftys. Surprise me with a reply so I can shame you.
The watch word? Phrase? “Publish or perish” has been the mantra of academia for decades if not the last century and more. These pretenders feed each other with their drivel receiving accolades that feed the mental illness that infects them all.
Mind you, it is a well established and universally accepted fact that it is only the white devil, as Elijah Muhammad referred to “whitey”, who commit and do evil. There is no limit to his wickedness and no excuse for it.
Elijah simply murdered Malcolm X because he deserved to be whacked.
This seems like a Saturday Night Live skit
Alec Baldwin as the nutty professor, Dr. Pete Svetty🤣