“Don’t Touch Race”: Nice White Leadership and Calls for Racial Equity in Salt Lake City Schools, 1969–Present

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think if the author should decide if it is important to interchange colorblind and color evasive throughout their article. The term colorblind is used in the intro, but the authors don't reference scholars who have discussed alternate terms such as color evasiveness until later in the article. You use color evasiveness in the rest of the article so is there a need to use here? I think it's helpful to just use color evasiveness, unless you want to acknowledge and problematize the original term

Spell out LDS acronym at its first use.

The quote on p. 2 line 73 seems to be missing wording (we just everyone to be the same)

I think the article would benefit from more context in the last intro paragraph. The #9 citation refers to Feagin's white racial frame, but the author doesn't engage with acknowledging that work in the sentence or what it means to the study. Also provide more insight into why specifically you chose to focus on Arthur Wiscombe. Why does his leadership positionality or tenure as a leader in particular provide an ideal example of your study's framing/purpose?

I would also like to see more engagement with why you chose niceness. Is it more so being politically correct? There are specific meanings behind race neutrality or color evasiveness as ideologies that connect to whiteness. So justification for choosing the term niceness instead would be helpful.

The section where the author talks about whiteness constructing itself out of Blackness (p. 3 line 188) is a bit unclear. After engaging with quotes from scholars, might it be helpful to connect to a larger theory such as anti-Blackness to make the larger argument?

The objectives section on p. 4 should be at the end of the introduction section.

Before section 4 on p. 5, it would be helpful to have a research design section detailing the data collection and analysis procedures the author followed. also, can section 4 be explicitly labeled findings? that would be helpful for the reader to follow.

The author makes statements about niceness throughout the findings; it would be helpful to make greater connections to critical whiteness and even anti-blackness as a focus on the paper.

The discussion section could benefit from more theoretical connections to critical whiteness and other theoretical influences discussed at the beginning of the paper. How does this analysis add to our understanding of previous scholarship in these areas? Also the Dangers of Denial is a conclusion? Perhaps think about the organization of the content to maximize your discussion of the findings.

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful feedback. Please find responses to each comment in the attached document. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

My sense is that the author needs to include two very important pieces of information in the article. 

First, they need a methodology section.  We have no idea how the research was conducted/the historical data was accumulated, and so have difficulty determining the validity of the project.

Secondly, the author needs to locate themselves in the research, including their positionality, motivation, and relationship to the study.

Without both additions, the study feels unfinished and more like a report than an article based on empirical research. 

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful feedback. Please find responses to each comment in the attached document. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I thought this manuscript on the history of color-evasive attitudes in Salt Lake City schools was fascinating!

To me, the use of Salt Lake City made a ton of sense as an extreme case of where the forces of whiteness and niceness would be at their strongest—this also made me wonder about the implications for other contexts that might not be as extreme. The discussion currently focuses mostly on the implications for white educational leaders (and uses the example of Arthur Wiscombe to discuss). If there is space, I would love to know more of the author’s thoughts on the types of actions white educational leaders can take to “continuously [act] to address racism in themselves, their communities, and their schools,” but how those actions might look different in different types of school and district contexts.

The theoretical framework of Critical Whiteness Studies is very appropriate for this topic, and those theoretical elements are woven through the manuscript.

The majority of the manuscript describes the case of Arthur Wiscombe, superintendent of SLC in the 1970s, drawing on newspaper records, and an interview conducted with Wiscombe in the 1970s from the archives. (As far as I could tell, and I might be missing it, the data from interviews in this study was from the interview with Wiscombe and another interview with Bernice Benns from the 1980s – these were located in the archives rather than oral history interviews conducted by the author (????) If that is the case, I would make that a little more clear in the abstract and objectives section on p. 4 (that this study draws on archival data, and it’s the archival data that includes interviews.))

There was a reference to a detail on p. 5 that I thought would be helpful to have more directly in the manuscript? Around line 252, the author refers to Wiscombe talking about withholding taxpayer dollars—the top of that page refers to loss of funding from white flight, but was there some kind of relationship with desegregation and a refusal to accept federal funds (or withholding of federal funds) if schools were not desegregated? My basic question is just, “What is this part about withholding taxpayer dollars referring to?”

The details about Wiscombe’s interactions with the Black community of SLC and the media coverage of the Maher incident were fascinating.

I liked the full circle structure of the manuscript to begin and end with Izzy Tichenor, and I also liked the transition between the implications for white educational leaders and a final example of white-evasive discourse in the district’s response to Izzy’s suicide.

Author Response

Thank you for your helpful feedback. Please find responses to each comment in the attached document. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf