Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 27 - June 29, 2022
The “end times” is the end of the ways of doing and knowing that are reflective of a public commons. Despite the myriad of contradictions that exist for communities of color in urban centers, public infrastructures and spaces of shared understandings (e.g., schools, community centers, health care services, public parks) are now neoliberal free-market entities.
many traditionally underserved and historically marginalized communities of color, curricular content is directly aligned with standardized tests, further inhibiting the capacity of young people to think and create
our educational research on race must revisit the idea of liberatory praxis through a process that understands the collective struggle of disenfranchised, disinvested, and destabilized communities as central to our analysis and interruption of the current trend.
Ds of corporate school reform: disinvestment, disenfranchisement, and destabilization
resulting in defunding of public schools, closure of mental health centers, and shuttering of drug treatment centers and state-sponsored childcare agencies without the capacity to pay utility bills.
the process as one of state-sanctioned violence rooted in a rationale of disposability of certain residents of the city (read low-income Black and Latino/a families).
grapple with research on race in education, there is a moment when you have to develop an articulation of the intersections of your work with other disciplines, along with an analysis of the current situation. Once you have made the conscious decision to engage in research on race and education, you have forfeited any claim to neutrality.
If a goal of intersectional praxis is to have our practice on the ground inform theory and our theoretical practice inform the work we engage in with communities, then there also must be an instance where we question and deeply interrogate the utility of our work (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013, p. 785).
However, the combination of the 24-hour news cycle, along with the filming and instant posting (through social media) of many of these deaths have brought national attention to what many have known for centuries: Under a judicial, political, economic, and educational system steeped in White supremacy, Black and Brown bodies are deemed criminal before they are considered human.
Who and what do we care about? How is our research reflective of our concerns? • In what ways does our research support collective efforts on the ground to challenge and seek to dismantle racism/White supremacy? • How does our work contribute to the short- and long-term strategies of organizations and communities that have taken intentional stances against their isolation, marginalization, and disenfranchisement? • What agreements are made with organizations and communities that intentionally prioritize their needs above the “requirements” of the university?
Modify these questions to guide our work
our scholarship should begin with acknowledging the devastating effect that universities have inflicted on communities of color, while making the conscious decision to engage in an active interruption of the deficit narrative that permeates popular understandings of the communities we are working in solidarity with. This type of research suspends traditional notions of “expertise” while challenging us to build new and responsible strategies to address the current conditions.
Theoretically, the intersections of race and education can incorporate (but are not limited to) CRT (specifically, analysis of deficit assumptions placed on Black and Brown bodies in K–20 schools), anti-Blackness (e.g., justification of Black gratuitous discipline in K–20 schools, deaths from law enforcement), and Black queer feminist analysis (ignoring increases in suspensions and expulsions of Black girls in K–12 schools, lack of recognition of deaths of Black and transgender women by law enforcement).
Posit each area to SEL
Michael Dumas, in his riveting essay on school and Black suffering,
Read thus
school foundationally as a site of suffering, an intersectional frame allows us the leeway to engage in practices that are not bound to a discipline, but instead are centered in addressing the concerns of the people we are in solidarity with.
education moving forward, concerned parties should understand how this type of positioning is reminiscent of the colonial state, where racial/ethnic groups are pitted against each other, creating further distractions in the larger project of justice in education.
Indicative to this line of research is the responsibility of constructing new realities with affected communities.
(action and reflection in the world in order to change it), the following tenets provide some guidance in thinking about aspects of engaged scholarship: • Conceptual: Examining the racialization of a controversy and the interconnecting influences of heterosexism, patriarchy, and class while locating that examination in a critique of the political economy. (Yamamoto, 1999, p. 130)
Performative: Answering the question as to what practical steps are responsive to the specific claim and who should act on that claim. (p. 131) • Material: Inquiring into changes, both those that are sociostructural and those involving the remaking of the democratic structure of public institutions, in the material conditions of racial oppression. Examples would include access to fair housing, health care, quality education, and employment. (p. 132) • Reflexive: Commitment to the continual rebuilding of theory in light of the practical experiences of racial groups engaged in particular
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Use these to evaluate our work
the performative and material require a more intense, authentic, critical, and long-term engagement with communities and/or organizations.
As the performative asks us to work with others who should respond to a particular issue to create practical steps to address that issue, the realities of university/community relations often come into play.
it is critical for the scholar/activist to intentionally engage in the political exercise of claiming space while admitting to mistakes made along the way.
Fugitive spaces exist when people come to the realization that the intention of the university was never to act as a force for justice and liberation. At the same time, the contradiction of our position as researchers provides an avenue for fugitive space, in that it creates the opportunity for us to utilize the resources of the academy to support justice-centered efforts on the ground.
She disappears into the underground, the downlow low-down maroon community of the university; into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong. (Harney
Camangian, P. (2011). Subverting the master(’s) syllabus. Monthly Review, 63(3), 3–12.
Dumas, M. (2014). Losing an arm: Schooling as a site of Black suffering. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 1–29.
Gershon, W., & Wolozek, B. J. (2016). Getting schooled: A curriculum of lying, choking, and dying. Special edition of American Educational Research Association, Division B (Curriculum Studies) newsletter, Washington, DC.
Lipman, P. (2003). Chicago school policy: Regulating black and latino youth in the global city. Race Ethnicity and Education, 6(4), 331–355.
Majors, Y. (2015). Shoptalk: Lessons in teaching from an African-American hair salon. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Taylor, K. (2016). From #blacklivesmatter to Black liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket.
Tormey, S. (2005). From utopian worlds to utopian spaces: Reflections on the contemporary radical imaginary and the social forum process. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 5(2), 394–408.
United Nations. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. New York, NY: Author. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
As one of our mentors told us, “Present your most radical self during your job talk, so ‘they’ (read: White folks) aren’t surprised when you ‘show up’ (read: keep it real).” We did just that.
previously perceived as an attractive asset to the institution during the hiring phase, is challenged once we dig into our critical toolbox to call out and promote the dismantling of inequities, particularly racial inequities, within the very structures and settings in which we are employed.
Sel?
the actual practice of embedding race, social justice, and critical pedagogy within one’s practice is seen as unfit, non-inclusive, and overly discussed (based on a perceived thorough level of understanding), among faculty and students.
Dr Lance
Unless one enters the stream of scholarship that works to problematize and deconstruct race, racism, and its effects within society, the “R-word” is avoided like the plague.
In fact, the majority of the “discussion swerving” happens at the educator level, only to trickle down and make students adopt discomfort with the illusive “R-word” because there is little to no academic space open to discussing race and racism.
The level of comfort he had for informing me that “‘round these parts” we do not talk about race, as a senior in the academic program I taught for, was a clear indication that this was the first time he had been challenged to think about his privilege and that nowhere within the program were critical perspectives on race and racism being taught.
And also his entitlement
I was expected to assimilate to the department’s white-washed message.
In particular, I called attention to how we were complicit in the reproduction of White supremacy within our systems and structures. I spoke out against the constant desire to “fix” the students and lack of appetite to fix ourselves as a college through dismantling the very structures that were never designed to fully support our intending majors.
discusses, where our difference is simply added onto a space to make it look “diverse” and not act, sound, or function in a way that uproots Whiteness.
(Ahmed, 2012, p. 34). There is a difference between being utilized as an expert to assist in educating and being used as a mascot for a department and/or university.
Sel?
So long as the “kumbaya effect” 4 is in play and previous unequal institutional practices are not challenged, the presence of a diverse person is welcomed. Ahmed (2012) explains: People of color are welcomed on condition they return that hospitality by integrating into a common organizational culture, or by “being” diverse, and allowing institutions to celebrate their diversity. (p. 43)
The interest convergence concept also warns that when Whiteness is under attack or is no longer the greatest beneficiary, the unspoken “terms of agreement” or “memorandum of understanding” will be revisited or terminated without question or consideration.
“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak” (Lorde, 1978).
particular, we can break through oppressive systems by way of expanding the boundaries of our official professional roles and responsibilities. In other words, we may have to step outside our job descriptions to protect and serve our students.
We can prepare and share, with the larger campus community, lectures, modules, and syllabi focused on combating racial injustices and inequalities and oppression within higher education.
Leave
How do students do thus?
Similarly, race may be considered a project. Its work is to create and maintain a hierarchy and to force us to produce gradations of humanity. Interestingly, race—unlike class or gender—is a relatively modern project.
(a) the idea of race was invented; (b) human biological variation is real, obvious, wonderful, and necessary; (c) the idea of race does not explain human variation; (d) race is both stable and protean, and; (e) we own the future of race.
The project of race is to maintain hierarchy and the mythology of White supremacy, and despite sound science that debunks the concept, we live in a social world that continues to try to make it real.
