Kindle Notes & Highlights
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June 27 - June 29, 2022
the forces of discrimination—processes—had been given new expression, new voice, new energy, and new power.
and scale of changes that enveloped and gave shape to those years. Our purpose is to underscore the persistence of the discriminatory actions—processes— and the normalization of the use of race (and class)—conditions—to justify the existing and growing disparity between the quality of life and opportunity for middle-class and more affluent Whites and that for people of color and people of color who live in poverty.
Richardson, E. (2007). “She was workin like foreal”: Critical literacy and discourse practices of African American females in the age of hip hop. Discourse & Society, 18(6), 789–809.
schools perform a crucial sorting function for society at large (Boykin, 2000). Some students will excel, some will do moderately well, and some will fail.
It should be linked more to knowledge production than to knowledge consumption.
we do not educate (with different outcomes and aims) a critical mass of our citizens to very high levels of attainment, not only will presently marginalized (Black and Brown) communities suffer, but our society at large will simply fall short of providing the talents and skills that we will greatly need in the years and decades ahead.
the education afforded to them should be enlightening, empowering, and sensitive to the educational roadblocks that may be or have been (either implicitly or explicitly) placed in their way.
Transactional approaches focus on optimizing learning exchanges that occur inside classrooms (and other learning settings, for that matter; more on this later) on a daily basis between teachers and students and among students themselves.
asset-based instructional strategies acknowledge, utilize, and build upon the assets that students bring with them into learning or performance settings; if no such assets are readily apparent, the pursuit is to create assets for students as needed (Boykin & Noguera, 2011).
These include incorporating students’ interests and preferences; capitalizing on their passions and commitments; and forging links, as appropriate, to their personal, family, and cultural values, as well as to their attitudes, beliefs, and opinions.
The teacher also holds students to high standards and is unyielding in pushing them to reach behavioral and academic expectations.
They tie this pattern to differences in the levels of mistrust that Black and White students typically have for their teachers.
The White/Black difference was statistically significant under the neutral feedback condition.
Under the neutral feedback condition, the essay scores for the White students were higher than those of their Black counterparts. However, the relative rise in the performance scores of the Black students under the wise feedback condition was substantially greater than that of their White counterparts, to the extent that there was no difference in the essay ratings for Black and White students when these students received wise feedback.
Tenenbaum and Ruck (2007) conducted a meta-analysis about teacher expectations. They found that, in the main, teachers hold higher expectations for White than for Black and Latino students. This involves their directing more positive comments toward White students, and engaging these students more in exchanges focusing on the processes of learning.
the more teachers exhibited implicit (and not explicit) prejudice toward immigrant children, the greater were the achievement gap differences in their classrooms; this difference was mediated by teacher expectations. In other words, implicit racial bias was linked to lower teacher expectations. In turn, lower expectations linked directly to lower achievement scores for the Turkish and Moroccan students relative to their Dutch counterparts, thereby contributing to the presence of the achievement gap.
Communalism is seen as a theme that may be culturally salient in the proximal experiences of many (though certainly not all) people of African descent.
The findings revealed that under the interpersonal competition condition, the White students significantly outperformed their Black counterparts. In fact, on average, the White students performed their best under this condition. But under the communalism condition, the Black students, on average, significantly outperformed their White counterparts. The best performance for Black students was under the communal condition.
What is particularly striking about the pattern of results in this investigation is that the “achievement gap” was not simply closed. It was actually reversed.
in comparison with their White counterparts, Black students displayed more task involvement, more positive affect, and more adaptively effective intragroup communication while studying together under the communal condition.
These include reenvisioning the purposes and functions of schooling, and thus of the substance of teaching and learning activities, to be more consistent with a human capacity-building agenda.
American social science has, since its inception, revolved around two inseparable projects: a science project (more in-depth understanding of institutions, organizations, human decision-making, and so on) and a national political project (protecting the nation, building the economy, strengthening democracy, etc.).
Carter, R. T., & Goodwin, A. L. (1994). Racial identity and education. Review of Research in Education, 20, 291–336.
Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68.
Rumberger, R. W., & Palardy, G. J. (2005). Does segregation still matter? The impact of student composition on academic achievement in high school. Teachers College Record, 107, 1999–2045.
Tate, W. F. (1997). Critical race theory and education: History, theory, and implications. Review of Research in Education, 22, 195–247.
Suburban America can be a place of extreme poverty and harsh segregation in ways that belie the presence of single-family homes and manicured lawns that many people associate with these spaces.
Defining the American school crisis as ‘urban’ has limited the scope of inquiry into school failure and ignored the connection between schooling and geography” (p. 3). Suburban spaces are far from utopias, and as historian john a. powell writes, “We cannot simply assume that the suburbs will be the location of opportunity or that the central city will be the location of decline” (2003, p. 217).
Where White death evokes images of broken systems and inadequate safety nets on all levels of society, Black death represents personal failure and moral choice.
Deamonte Driver and Trayvon Martin (among many) are the subjects of reciprocal narratives of lives lost in post–Civil Rights Era America, two sides of the same coin of injustice.
Strauss, E. E. (2014). Death of a suburban dream: Race and schools in Compton, California. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
But in a Black/non-Black reality, non-Black multiracials and non-Black minorities may not side with the most disenfranchised group since there is much to gain by adopting dominant group identity” (Yancey, 2006, p. 55).
Bonilla-Silva and Embrick (2006) assert that the United States is following patterns of racial stratification evidenced previously in Latin America through the adoption of a loose triracial system. In this system, Whites are at the top. An intermediary group of honorary Whites is in the middle, and a non-White group, known as the collective Black, is at the bottom. According to Bonilla-Silva and Embrick, the three-tier system serves to buffer racial conflict, while still maintaining White supremacy. Under the triracial system, White-looking multiracials would fall in the White category. Most
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with regard to the appearance of Black-White biracials, Brunsma and Rockquemore (2001) note that, in the case of racially ambiguous physical appearance, Whites construct biracials as Black. In contrast, members of the Black community are more likely to identify the individual as biracial. “It appears that the Black community can, and does, distinguish among the variation in skin tones among Biracials, whereas, possibly the White community sees only two ‘colors’—Black and White” (p. 242). Khanna (2010) found similar results in her study of Black-White biracials. Thus, the connection between
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“minor alterations to the paradigm are insignificant as long as the pure and hierarchical status of Whiteness remains unchallenged and unchanged”
relative economic, political, and social advantages dispensed to whites under systematic white supremacy in the United States were reinforced through patterns of oppression of Blacks and Native Americans. Materially, these advantages became institutionalized privileges, and ideologically, they became part of the settled expectations of whites. (1993, p. 1777)
Institutions with the capacity to do this, Harris argued, are “bound up by those essential features that afford them great power (p. 1761),” which include the exclusive rights to exclude and determine rules in ways that reproduce White privilege.
Harris’s framework suggests that elite colleges and universities operate within a system that is historically rooted in reproducing White privilege, and that one way they reinforce this system is by retaining the right to exclude.
connects those practices to each institution’s interest in guarding the privileges accompanying Whiteness.
a new admissions regime was set in place at Harvard, one that, according to Karabel, would emphasize “character”—“a quality thought to be in short supply among Jews but present in abundance among high-status Protestants” (p. 2)—which was believed to be “in accordance with the probable value of a college education … to the university, and the community” (p. 108). Similar admissions practices that considered nonacademic factors coded in Whiteness were also adopted at Princeton and Yale, and they still guide the current approach for admitting students at all three institutions.
Not only was the standard for merit broadened to consider individual talent and accomplishments beyond scholastic achievements, including athletic talent in such sports as rowing, field hockey, sailing, golf, squash, fencing, and others that systematically favor the privileged, but connections to powerful external constituencies, including alumni, were also considered meritorious.
diversifying their student bodies enabled elite universities not only to remain legitimate, but also to benefit from enrolling “rising social groups” such as Asian Americans who could add to their prominence, especially in emerging fields of science and technology (p. 545).
“a realistic possibility only for those young men and women whose families endow them with the type of cultural capital implicitly required for admission,” which “is heavily concentrated among the scions of the privileged” (2005, p. 549). Thus, he claimed that beneath this dramatic and highly visible change in the physiognomy of the student body was a surprising degree of stability in one crucial regard—the privileged class origins of students at the Big Three. That the exclusionary practices of elite colleges and universities continue to favor the privileged, subsequently allowing them to
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nation’s laws historically have cemented advantages for Whites, and that those privileges were reproduced through institutional power and exclusionary practices that limited access to key institutions for other groups.
That such institutions actively and consistently rejected any attempts to remove their rights to exclude is, as Harris argued, a key principle that largely defines the identity of institutions that dispense the privileges accompanying Whiteness (1993, p. 1761).
While they might slightly alter their admissions practices to remain socially relevant, they have a vested interest in maintaining the social order and their position in it. If privilege is cemented in law to reproduce the position of Whites at the top of the social order and continues to be coded in Whiteness, as Harris argued, then those elite universities have exclusive rights to determine who is or is not White enough to enjoy the privileges accompanying Whiteness.
That the racial representation of the student body, and to a much lesser extent, the faculty, of those institutions has changed, suggests to Harris only that not “all whites will win, but simply that they will not lose” (1993, p. 1759). “Of course, there’s still diversity,’’ one Ivy alumnus was quoted as saying in a New York Times article (Yazigi, 1999) concerning eating clubs at Princeton—“about 20 percent. They are there to make the other 80 percent show they are democratic and feel more superior.’’
Yang argued that “it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation.”
the story of discrimination does not end at the moment of access. Inclusion in does not mean the absence of discrimination from”
there is little reason to believe that those Asian Americans who over-attribute hard work and “individual merit” to gaining admission to an elite college or university will necessarily “lift as they climb.” Unless, perhaps, they have seriously considered the underlying sources that both shape and derail the pursuit of the American Dream.
