I found Margaret Hagerman’s discussion of “packaged actions,” to have distinct relatability to my life. Hagerman’s conceptualization of “packaged actions” describes a situation when parents make a seemingly single choice for their child, however, this single choice triggers many other decisions to be made simultaneously. An example of this phenomenon is when a parent chooses a neighborhood to raise their child in. This choice simultaneously chooses the child’s extracurricular options, peer group, and amount of meaningful interactions with individuals of other social classes and racial groups.
My parents raised me in a somewhat diverse neighborhood in a liberal U.S. capital. This neighborhood is 55% White, 26% Black, 12% Hispanic, 3% Mixed race, 1% Asian and 1% Indigenous. The closest middle and high school to my house was a arts-magnet school. In terms of extracurriculars, my parents enrolled me in piano lessons beginning at a young age. I ended up auditioning for, and attending the arts- magnet school, due to an almost predictable outcome of these bundled choices that my parents had earlier made.
At the arts- magnet school, there was a “conception” of racial and ethnic diversity, as well as class diversity.
I mean a “conception,” in that students truly thought that our school was diverse in regards to these two dimensions, when in reality, the number of White students and the number of middle class students greatly superseded the number of individuals from different racial and class backgrounds. After fact- checking district data on the racial composition of the student body during the years that I attended this school, I found that 80% of the students were White. This racial breakdown of the student body certainly did not echo the aforementioned statistics of our neighborhood.
This school was able to promote “diversity” by citing the large number of LGBTQ+ students and the number of creative individuals at our school, as opposed to any other measures of diversity. While it is fabulous that the school has such a large number of LGBTQ+ students, other dimensions of diversity were excluded from this discussion. This example fits neatly into a framework of White hegemony, which is defined as “the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group.”
The perception of diversity was able to be conveyed through the exertion of the dominant group in the U.S. and at our school, White people, in order to promote the ideology that diversity existed at our school by reshaping the idea of diversity to include one dimension of diversity, LGBTQ+ identity, while excluding other dimensions of diversity- such as race and class. Additionally, this perception was created by White people at our school equating achievement and excellence in regards to a wide array of art forms with diversity.
To sum this up, parents should be aware of the domino effect that a single decision in their child’s life can have. This is constantly stressed throughout Hagerman’s text as countless examples are referenced of families who chose where to live, and at the same time decided their child’s entire academic trajectory and extracurricular engagement.
Additionally, parents need to think critically about the conversations around diversity that are going on in their microcosm. My parents experienced my school as a diverse space, as there were people of color that attended our school. I did as well.
Without context about the level of diversity in this neighborhood, the comparative lack of this diversity reflected in the student body of our school wasn’t understood. I think many White students like myself that attended this school were not even aware that our neighborhood was diverse because our school was not. Without interactions with POC in our neighborhood, I hadn’t even realized that this neighborhood space was so diverse. Thus, I did not experience the school as a comparatively un-diverse space. White parents need to understand the level of diversity in their neighborhood, and whether this diversity is reflected in the school environment of their child. Additionally, White Parents need to be aware of the many dialogues that circulate that attempt to identify “diversity” and fail at doing so, such as the example mentioned above.