Academics from four major universities have combined on a study designed to brand niceness a strategy for advancing White privilege, in the latest effort by progressive professors to manufacture a new form of racism to condemn.
The paper, titled “Niceness as Whiteness in School Police Officers’ Perceptions of Student Arrest,” interprets interviews with school resource officers (SROs) in ways that enable them to provide “evidence” that niceness advantages White people. The study was produced by Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Research Fellow Abigail Beneke, Professors Benjamin Fisher (U. Wisconsin-Madison), F. Chris Curran (U. Florida), and Samantha Viano (George Mason).
Niceness, they conclude, is an “enduring component of Whiteness” that “allows predominantly White people to elide how their own actions contribute to inequality by maintaining a sense of their own benevolence.”
In their abstract, the researchers claim that niceness is used “as a strategy for upholding a system of Whiteness that systematically privileges White people and excludes those who fall outside of Whiteness.”
Niceness is even antithetical to providing “authentic care” to students, they say:
“Niceness hinders possibilities for the types of political, communal relationships central to authentic care.”
“There is an academic cottage industry in finding new forms of racism in society, George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley explained Tuesday in a social media post introducing his column exposing the study’s bias:
“Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, meritocracy, and even time itself have been tagged. Now, researchers have found another undiscovered continent of white privilege: niceness...”
“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,’” the best-selling author and legal scholar notes in his column.
The officers interviewed in the study “appear to be precisely what you are looking for in an SRO: empathetic and reluctant to make arrests,” Turley notes. “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.”
And, while the researchers claim impartiality, they rewarded the school resource officers who agreed to be interviewed “by twisting their every comment as revealing their deep white privilege,” resulting in the study’s unfair, biased conclusions, Turley writes.
