schoolracetalk.org

When it comes to discussing issues of race and education, sometimes comedy speaks more effectively than scholarship.

As a qualitative researcher, I also note how the Daily Show interviewer prompted the Tuscon board member to speak his own logic out loud:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/04/04/the-daily-show-ridicules-ban-on-me...

I just glimpsed the picture of Trayvon Martin that made me saddest, on a neighbor’s magazine page on a plane. It was the picture of him as a child in a white “graduation from elementary school” cap and gown. A child, anticipating a future of contribution.

A few years after this picture was taken, Trayvon was profiled – and then, killed -- by a neighborhood “watchman” as if he were a dangerous criminal – as if he were a neighborhood intruder, simply because of what he was wearing and what he looked like.

As an educator and scholar of race in schools, the parallel in my mind is how security guards, administrators, or even teachers too often approach black boys the same way in American schools – as trouble, and as people requiring eviction.

When I worked at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, I saw cases where security guards sent Latino youth’s names and photos, too, to the local police department because the students were wandering in the halls. Disproportionate discipline of students of color is currently in the news: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/education/black-students-face-more-har...

In OCR work, it was often hard to “prove” that such disproportionate suspensions and expulsions of students of color were “because of race,” because often educators didn’t keep comparative records on white kids who misbehaved and were not suspended. And often, it was true that students disciplined repeatedly and excessively for minor things then did become resistant out of frustration.

But Trayvon wasn’t resisting a thing; he was just walking with Skittles and ice tea. And now, no more graduation outfits.

Today, even unconscious racial bias has a majority of viewers labeling young men of color “suspicious”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phillip-atiba-goff/trayvon-martin-race_b_1.... And the ‘pipeline’ in K-12 education (indeed, K-20 education) is notoriously leaky for such boys. A disproportionate number of young people never make it to the graduation stage, falling through gaps of support in schools. Typically we call these leaks youths’ own fault. But too often, youth grow the feeling that schools don’t want them much.

Robin Kelley has said that “race isn’t about how you look; it’s about how people assign meaning to how you look.” http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-05.htm That in 2012 we still take a sweatshirt and dark skin as “evidence” of a likely troublemaker means that old ways of thinking about “how we look” loom large. These ways of thinking affect how our children are treated – and whether they wear caps and gowns.

I am always seeking "gold nugget" quotes.

Here's one I found in John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed (1897)(http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm).

“To prepare [a student] for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities. . .”

It reminded me of a post-Civil War quote I often read to begin courses or workshops, as it's the most stirring definition I’ve ever heard of what education is supposed to be about.

In 1865, black delegates in Charleston, South Carolina petitioned the legislature for basic rights in the post-Emancipation South. In defiance of increasingly common "Black Codes" restricting black people's pursuit of opportunity, the delegates presented a list of human rights demands. For example, they demanded the right to assemble to discuss politics, to amass wealth, to farm and conduct trade, and so forth. And as Vincent Harding writes in his book There is a River (1981, p. 326), “To this, they added a summary human right not normally found in the public documents of the nation:

'the right to develop our whole being, by all the appliances that belong to a civilized society.' "

I find these quotes unusually inspiring descriptions of the purpose of education.

Hard to believe:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/18/arizona-b...

The erasure of facts and narratives from the written record available to young people isn't education.

The phrase "school to prison pipeline" has surged in recent years, to describe how school discipline policies, law enforcement policies, and a context of mass incarceration intersect to "track" disproportionate numbers of young people -- young people of color, in particular -- into prisons.

But repeating the phrase doesn't accomplish much: we need concrete information about how this cycle works. When I worked at the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, I saw various concrete examples: in one school, Latino students wandering the halls were disproportionately referred to the local police department as likely gang members. That meant that a school discipline experience turned into an actual police record.

This interview by author Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is a useful resource for those exploring the "school to prison pipeline." One quote below:

http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michelle-alexander...

"The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they’re in silos. But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces." -Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

We often insinuate in educational debates that people are educationally and professionally successful due to their own individual hard work alone.

This recent quote from Elizabeth Warren succinctly adds an important logic to such debates: in fact, every successful person has benefited in some way from public money. And so, paying it back "for the next kid" (e.g., funding public education) is part of the deal.

http://front.moveon.org/the-elizabeth-warren-quote-every-american-needs-...

These sorts of everyday arguments (and facts) are very useful to have at hand in conversations about inequality in education. Otherwise, we really just rehash opposing opinions.

Students in my last Everyday Antiracism class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Spring 2011) just created this collective "action plan" for schoolwide antiracist effort. It's a set of suggestions from educators, for educators.

By antiracist effort, we mean everyday acts by educators that counteract:

a. Inequality of opportunity, access, and outcome along lines of race/class/ethnicity/national origin/language;

b. False, harmful, and stereotypical ideas about “types of people.”

See what you think.

My Everyday Antiracism class from Harvard's GSE went over to the Boston Science Museum to see the Race exhibit put on by the American Anthropological Association (to which I belong).

I spent half my time learning details about the history of the U.S. Census and the rest of my time at the section on health and race, because I've always found that discussions of disease stymie discussions about how race categories are biologically bogus (but structurally/historically, very real). What about sickle cell? people say. Tay-Sachs?

A good quote: "There is no genetic basis for race. The vast genetic diversity within each so-called race makes race unsuitable as a marker for genetics. A better substitute for genetics is ancestry or family history."

Stated otherwise: race categories aren't useful as containers for our genetic, biological diversity. They are too blobby, too big, and, too human-made.

"Ancestry" (where in the world your ancestors lived) is a much more precise, and valid, way of talking about your background and genetic propensity for diseases.

A good quote: "should race be used in medical research?" "Certain diseases are more common among people with a particular ancestry than among the general population. But racial categories are just too big and imprecise to indicate anything medically meaningful about a person's ancestry. In order to be truly pertinent, the data gathered in medical studies must track ancestry at the level of specific country or region."

E.g.s from the cards I read, of how race categories are too "big and imprecise" and country/region of origin works better to think about disease:

*Sickle cell is more prevalent in West Africa and Southern Europe, and the Middle East and South Asia, but not Southern Africa or Northern Europe.

*Northern Europeans are more at risk for cystic fibrosis than Southern Europeans, even while both are considered "white" on the US Census.

*Eastern Europeans are more at risk for Tay-Sachs than Western Europeans.

*"Asian" lumping overlooks more precise facts: e.g., Filipinos, Koreans, and Southeast Asians have higher risks of lung cancer than do other "Asians."

But, here's an example of lived structural inequality that plays out along "race" group lines: which groups are more likely to work for a type of employer who offers no health insurance. (e.g., Latinos).

In Philadelphia yesterday, I did a day-long workshop on Everyday Antiracism with members of the Delaware Valley Minority Student Achievement Consortium. We role-played a number of situations that participants wanted to practice -- talking to students about banning the use of the n-word in school; talking to colleagues about the importance of ensuring that a history curriculum shows the full breadth of American experience. A lot of people described wanting to engage their colleagues more successfully on issues of equity.

It was a fabulous group, and I promised to follow up with folks here on "try tomorrows" people tried out in their districts and schools or, on conversations people tried to start with colleagues.

Anyone try anything (or thinking about trying something) and want to report/get feedback here, even if anonymously?