Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 515

Popaganda: An Experimental Physicist on "The Physics of Melanin"

'Dr. Chanda Prescodd Weinstein usually researches dark matter. But in this interview, she talks about a far more down-to-earth topic: the social construction of race and the way science has been used to justify racist exploitation of certain peoples.' -- Popaganda | Bitch Media

African Artists Missing in Action at the Venice Biennale

'The Venice Biennale, the Olympics of the art world, is underway in Italy. Artists from around the world are invited to show their work here. But the African continent is heavily underrepresented. Al Jazeera’s Charlie Angela reports from Venice.'

School Choice? Some Kids Don’t Really Have One

School Choice? Some Kids Don’t Really Have Oneby Jamila Thomas | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile) | The OpEd Project
When it comes to school choice, I am not convinced all children have one. Parents living on the margins don’t have much of a choice, either. As I walk the halls of schools, and talk with teachers, students and parents, it becomes obvious for certain students, “choice” is a popular phrase signaling quality and high-impact results — but doesn’t at all mean what it says.
If anything, poor and racially marginalized black and brown students make a choice to come to school in the first place. Based on funding formulas and limited resources and services many students showing up bedecked in white shirts and khakis, expect to gain a fair and equitable education they won’t actually get. While “choice” is being pushed from the federal level down to the closest city block, what’s being offered is more of a stripped-down facsimile of public education that does not serve all students. And if the Trump administration budget is any indication, the expansion of so-called “choice” can’t help students because of more than $9 billion (13.5 percent) in Education Dept. cuts that accompany this move.
This is happening while investors leverage money-making opportunities to make “education” a product by siphoning public dollars into charters and vouchers that don’t deliver the results they promise. In fact, many of the children who are angry or ill prepared are the mercy of their parents’ plight or bad decisions. Their demeanor is not reflective of their desire to be a good student but of a more complex situation. Yet, for many this noble idea of choice seems like the answer. Meanwhile, most schools still aren’t prepared to cope with the totality of a child’s experience.
Budgets impact everything from school resources to hiring the best teachers. When children from racially and economically marginalized communities are siphoned from neighborhood schools into charter schools run on slim budgets, they are forced to battle for more than the right to learn. The real choice being made may well be safety, as parents from marginalized communities smartly prioritize sending children to safe environments but ones that don’t happen to deliver solid learning results. A recently released study of D.C.-based school charter school vouchers suggests as much, as the study shows school choice has actually worsened learning results rather than improved them.
It is compelling now to utter the words “educational equity” while not adequately addressing “teacher parity” or “equitable resource allocation” or “student/teacher behavioral management” or the impact of so-called school choice. Stating these systematic ideologies in the same sentence is equivalent to five freight trains traveling 100 miles per hour and stopping at the point of impact. Wait! Stop! There are so many questions that need to be answered.
At the core of a child’s growth and development, regardless of ethnic background, is an excitement about trying new things, seeing new things and learning creatively. There is a valid argument that students who fail are not failing because they are not capable but because they are disengaged. Why is this? Teachers need support to act boldly and creatively, teaching against “the test” in order to pass the test. 
In Texas, where the choice movement has taken off, African-American students are performing significantly behind their peers, according to Texas Academic Performance Report. Data shows glaring achievement gaps for third-graders, the age group serving as the barometer for ongoing academic growth and development. Students performing well by the third grade are more likely to have academic success. By fourth grade, students are no longer reading to learn but reading to excel because of the compounding effect of educational concepts. In the 2014-2015 school year, only 52 percent of Texas black students scored favorably on the reading portion of the state- sponsored standardized test compared with white children, 86 percent of whom scored significantly higher. Hispanic, Asian and Native American students also scored significantly higher at 65 percent, 74 percent and 77 percent respectively on the same reading assessment.
What we know for sure is teachers’ creativity is shackled to black-and-white testing preparatory sources, and a child’s natural ability to embrace new concepts is threatened and beaten down by a constant barrage of “That’s not on the test.” There is a direct correlation between absenteeism and academic performance. The more a child is engaged in school the more likely they are to come to school and participate in a more concerted way than a child who is withdrawn and disconnected from the academic process.
Exposure connects students to excitement about learning, and this is especially true for underserved pupils, many of them African American. For many black children, schools are not a choice but rather a sentence, time wasted gearing up for test that doesn’t even reflect their reality.
The idea around school choice is noble and necessary. Let’s just be clear when these schools are “chosen” and filled to capacity by students who have the support systems, we not forget there are students who never had a choice in the first place.
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Jamila Thomas, a Dallas Public Voices Fellow, is an African American Student Success Initiative coordinator in the Dallas Independent School District.

Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Rock Bythewood Talk 'Shots Fired,' Television and Race

'Writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) and her husband, writer/director Reggie Rock Bythewood (Get on the Bus) have created ground-breaking films that explore the universal themes of love, loss, ambition and longing through the lens of the contemporary African-American experience.  Their latest joint project is the limited series Shots Fired on Fox, which examines the dangerous aftermath of two racially charged shootings in a small Southern town, providing an explosive autopsy of our criminal justice system.  Susan Fales-Hill hosted the young auteurs in The Greene Space at WNYC where they talked about the making of the series, their decades-long artistic collaboration and the role of film and television in addressing the racial chasm in America today.' -- The Greene Space at WNYC

 
 

Reflecting On Politics Through Poetry

'Poets Amit Majmudar, Carol Muske-Dukes , and  Andrea Cohen discuss their new poetry collection Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now . The book is a response to the 2016 election and our current political landscape. Majmudar, Ohio’s poet laureate and the son of immigrants, edited the collection. He also wrote the introduction.' -- The Leonard Lopate Show

 

Richard Rothstein, author of 'A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America' in Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates

'In this rigorous examination of U.S. housing policy, Richard Rothstein exposes a century of unconstitutional federal, state, and local laws designed to segregate American cities. He combines legal research with heartbreaking human stories to demonstrate the history and impact of this government push for segregation, including its influence on tragedies like those in Ferguson and Baltimore. The Color of Law is the first book to debunk the myth that racial segregation after Jim Crow arose from private prejudice, and it provides an entirely new perspective on our segregated neighborhoods—and new strategies to address the injustices that divide them. Rothstein is in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant winner, and the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2015.' -- Politics and Prose 

MoCA Presents Robin Coste Lewis

'Robin Coste Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus, winner of the 2016 National Book Award. This collection of poems is a meditation on the cultural depiction of women in the African diaspora. Coste Lewis considers the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self, juxtaposing actual events with research into the representation of Black female figures through-out art history. Coste Lewis’s reading takes place within the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Mastry.' -- MOCA   

Dance Africa's Abdel R. Salaam Talk Carrying Forward Baba Chuck Davis' Legacy

'Dance Africa is the nation's largest festival of African dance. Celebrating its 40th year, Dance Africa's Artistic Director, Abdel R. Salaam, visits BK Live studio to talk with us about what we can expect this Memorial Day weekend, and carrying forward the vision of the festival's founder and guiding spirit, Baba Chuck Davis.' -- BRIC TV 

Profiles in Africana Studies: Cornell University's Carole Boyce Davies

A profile of Carole Boyce Davies, Professor of English and Africana Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press). Her most recent monograph is Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (Illinois, 2013) and a children’s book, Walking (EducaVision, 2016). -- Africana Studies Cornell University 

Vanessa Bell Calloway at 60: Epic dance Performance with Daughters Ashley and Ally Calloway

Join Vanessa Bell Calloway's sexy at sixty ageless campaign.