Abstract
Abstract
This article critically examines how the term diversity rhetorically functions in progressive white parents’ school choice discourse. I draw from interview and focus group data with white, politically progressive, socioeconomically advantaged parents of K12 school-aged children living in the Madison, Wisconsin area. I demonstrate the significance of the racialized contexts in which the polysemous term diversity circulates to suggest how diversity produces contradictory “both/and” meanings. I argue that emphasizing the privileged positioning of white rhetors illustrates how diversity functions both to celebrate multiculturalism and to maintain whiteness as center. My analysis explores how parents position diversity in relation to their school choice decisions as threat, as distant other, as capital, and as commonplace. In doing so, I demonstrate the varying degrees to which diversity functioned to reinforce whiteness's dominance. Through troubling how parents engaged the term in uncritical ways, this paper contributes a nuanced and complex interpretation of how diversity rhetorically functions in polysemous ways within white progressive parents’ school choice discourse to produce paradoxical meanings.