“People don’t talk about race:” Being Black in a Color–Evasive Place

Research has shown that racially diverse school districts can face many challenges in terms of student interactions, resource inequities, and unequal access to educational opportunities and outcomes. Yet, less work has examined students’ perceptions of race, place, inclusion, and exclusion in a district that prides itself on ‘diversity’. We conducted a comparative analysis of how Black, Latinx, and white students at Morristown High School in New Jersey understand the benefits of diversity and how they articulate their experiences with racism. We found that the district’s diversity discourse enables white stakeholders to maintain hegemonic control over the process and terms as well as articulate acceptable forms of diversity, which are predicated on anti-Black colour-evasiveness. This research has important implications for school leaders and educators to challenge the civility and colour-evasiveness that can trump any real attempts to change the status quo of whiteness in the Morris district and beyond.