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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents discursive strategies that render white race talk nice and manage not-nice educational inequality. I draw on 18 months of fieldwork in German schools to argue that distancing, minimising, and defending keep whiteness nice, and expressed happiness/sadness signal niceness to others.

Paper long abstract:

Research on white race talk often focuses on dismissals, discomfort, and ignorance - not-nice moments and manoeuvres. The paper argues that this focus risks obscuring how race talk can happen nicely, even happily, and how this helps manage the not-niceness of racialised inequality especially in such a ‘nice field’ as education.

The paper draws on 18 months of fieldwork in and around schools in a mid-size German city, including work and volunteering as a classroom aide, participation in school open days, and interviews with educational staff/administrators (55) as well as parents (33). Transcripts and field notes were analysed in the tradition of critical discourse studies and coded thematically using NVivo.

I argue that distancing, minimising, and defending offered ways to deal with not-niceness, read (accusations of) racism, and kept whiteness nice. These strategies acknowledged racism but made it palatable; kids’ slurs were “playful”, teachers “not possible” to accuse. Expressions of laughter, happiness, and sadness, meanwhile, performed that innocent white people not only said nice things but did so the nice way: with a smile, a chuckle, a heartfelt yet helpless “things are unfair.”

This paper adds to the growing body of critical work on niceness in education by exploring its discursive dimension and underlines how it protects whiteness. I highlight how nice talk was race evasive not in semantics, as ‘colorblind’ speech is often characterised to be, but in consequence. Nice-washed race was rehabilitated as a conversational topic, but critical, anti-racist speech got curtailed and racism remained out of focus.