Race-based exclusion has been a defining characteristic of the U.S. K–12 public school system since its inception. Although scholars, practitioners, and policy makers have long studied and sought to address the many manifestations of race-based exclusion, the underlying problem persists. Despite decades of intervention and reform, our schools continue to produce disparate experiences and outcomes for students of color. Rather than applying a problem-solving approach to this critical social justice issue, this study starts with questions—critical inquiry into the social ideology of whiteness that generates and sustains the practices of race-based exclusion in the normalized structures, systems, and interactions we have come to understand as “school.” Embedding the method of video Interactional Analysis within a Critical Discourse Analysis, this study provides a nuanced understanding of the ways in which seemingly race-neutral daily interactions in an elementary classroom at almost all times generate exclusion as whiteness—even, and especially, when nobody is physically removed from the room. It also provides a hopeful glimpse at the types of interactions that could transform this entrenched ideology, offering and illustrating an alternate pattern of practice called democratic inclusion.