Exposing the Color-Evasive/Tolerance Framing Tactics of Educational Actors Amidst Anti-CRT/LGBTQ + Rhetoric and Policy

Purpose: Divisive politics have quickly led to debates about “divisive” topics in schools and their regulation through state and district-level policy. We apply a lens of color-evasiveness – which we extend to include notions of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) – and critical policy analysis, to nuance how educational actors’ engaged with anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ + rhetoric and policy. Data/Methods: We gathered data from a range of sources including local news articles, school board meeting minutes, and school board meetings to deconstruct and then ultimately reconstruct the localized anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ + context. We then used this data to construct two composite contexts that capture educational actors’ tensions and framing tactics within their localized anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ + contexts. Findings: Our composite contexts reveal how the color-evasive/tolerance frames of abstract liberalism and the minimization of racism/cisheteronormativity were leveraged by educational actors to attack and censor DEI initiatives. This suggests that educational actors frequently centered their rights and economic freedom of choice when responding to anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ + rhetoric and policy. As such, educational actors simultaneously preserved and maintained white and cisherteronormative rights while minimizing and evading racism and SOGI. These framing tactics may be/are likely employed because they provide educational actors the illusion that they are responding in “neutral” and “objective” ways. Implications: Our color-evasive/tolerance framework provided the lens to call out the covert and insidious ways that educational actors framed anti-CRT/LGBTQ + rhetoric and policy. Our framework allowed us to see the deceptive making of racism and cisheteronormativity through abstract liberalism.