So this week I'm reading Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-First Century by Monique W. Morris, and clearly it's taken me more than a week to read. I could blame this on having to grade all of the things for the end of the semester, or on my three children's unwillingness to just leave mom alone to read, but it really has more to do with how hard it is to stay focused while reading line after line of statistics. Don't get me wrong, I think the layout of the book goes a long way towards overcoming the this problem through the page design, organization, and use of introductory prose in each chapter, but the sheer volume of information is overwhelming.

All together, though, that information paints a picture of unequal opportunity and consequences in this country, albeit with some strides in the right direction. None of what it presented was really new to me because of my previous reading and experience, but it is an excellent resource to have so many facts collected in one place for easy access.

What I found myself reflecting on in relation to my teaching as I read, however, was how these numbers don't actually tell the story that needs to be told. Just a few weeks ago, one of my composition students was presenting on his project looking at the quality of prison food in Ohio. His research hadn't been terribly in-depth, and my other students were content to leave the discussion at, "Man, that looks like the gross food they served us in high school!" but I wanted to push them a bit further. I was asking questions about the purpose of prison (punishment, rehabilitation, seclusion) and how their position on that purpose might change their thinking about what quality of food ought to be served. Then I asked them about the fact that people of color are disproportionately represented in the prison population for things like drug offenses despite the reported rate of drug abuse being roughly equal across all demographic groups.

The majority of the class erupted into comments about decriminalizing drugs, fighting racism, or at least improving the quality of the food, but one girl kept insisting, "Or maybe they could just not do drugs! If you don't break the law, nothing bad can happen to you!" She was clearly frustrated, turning red in her anger, and I could relate to her feelings. I remember taking such an adamant stance myself in my younger days.

Which brings me back to my issue with numbers. As I'm continually telling my students regarding quotations, these numbers can't speak for themselves. If left to ourselves, we will attach whatever narrative to them that suits our worldview, whether we take the blatantly racist view that more African Americans are incarcerated because they are more inclined to criminal behavior, or the more subtle position of my student that whatever discrimination might exist could be overcome by good behavior on the part of an individual. Both views miss the point, in my opinion, of all of the numbers working together, demonstrating that a lack of access to education, job opportunities, financial services, affordable housing, health care, and a safe environment stacks the deck against African Americans in this country, making that good behavior my student sees as natural incredibly difficult to achieve.

My job as a white educator is to make sure I'm telling the stories that flesh out what these numbers mean in the lives of actual people. For more help with that, I'm moving on to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for next week.

(Mis)Understanding Integration

As I mentioned in my last post, I've taken on the project of reading all of the books on Crystal Paul's "10 Books I Wish My White Teacher Had Read." For this week I read Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession. 

I'm not trying to write a traditional book review here (though I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who would like a highly readable and fair-minded discussion of some of the major themes of education and education reform in the US over the past two hundred years), so I'm going to focus on what stood out to me the most in relation to Paul's article rather than the book as a whole.

I've spent the last few years studying the meeting minutes and other internal documents of the New York Women's Trade Union League from the first couple decades of the twentieth century. I was, therefore, very interested in Goldstein's discussion of the role of teacher's unions in the history of education in the US. As usual, I discovered that the answer was complicated. While I'm inclined to be fairly sympathetic to the need for collective bargaining and other protections for workers who are vulnerable due to their youth, gender, and social class, the ugly underbelly of racism and xenophobia so common in labor unions of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries is evident in Goldstein's history. This was disappointing for me to see, though not surprising.

What was surprising for me was discovering my own blindspot regarding the integration of schools following Brown v. Board of Education. Going into this book, my thoughts on the subject went something like this:
Segregation and discrimination were inherently bad, but one byproduct of the "separate but equal" system was that many of the most capable and brilliant minds in the African American community became teachers due to a lack of other opportunities. As a result, despite terrible facilities and a lack of supplies, African American children often received superior instruction. Through the Civil Rights Movement, however, opportunities opened for those teachers to choose other, more lucrative professions, leaving African American children with fewer stellar role models in the classroom.

In reading Goldstein's history, however, I realized that I only had part of that story right. Integration did lead to Black children losing wonderful teachers, but not because those teachers were off living the American dream. Far from it. When schools were combined, most of the African American teachers were fired and replaced by White teachers who were often less qualified. In addition, these White teachers brought with them into the classroom prejudices against Black children's abilities to learn and achieve at higher levels. These often became self-fulfilling prophecies as children saw that they were not valued or expected to succeed, and did not see anyone who looked like them modeling who they could become.

After reading this history, I find myself shaking my head and saying, "Of course. Of course they didn't want to integrate teachers fairly. People who would scream and curse at children for just wanting a decent education are not going to submit to a person of color having authority over their children. How could I have not considered this aspect before?!" The answer, of course, is privilege. I haven't had to wonder why there isn't anyone who looks like me at the front of my classroom because generally, my teachers did look just like me. I'm sitting here wracking my brain, trying to think if I ever had an African American teacher before I got to college, and I can't think of one. And even in college, the two professors who come to mind weren't African American but recent immigrants from Africa. But I didn't notice.

This is why Paul needs teachers like me to read these books. Because even when we mean well, we sometimes just don't notice what's going on around us.

Up next:

Reading the "10 Books I Wish My White Teacher Had Read"

The class that I began writing this blog for is now over, but I have enjoyed writing semi-informally about pedagogy and my classroom practice, so I thought I would keep it up for awhile, even though I will no longer have a captive audience.

Over the past few years, I've thought a lot about systemic racism and my role in dismantling it as a white, woman teacher. Two main messages have come to my attention in this process: first, it is essential to listen to and believe the experiences of people of color in order to understand what actually needs to change, but second, I need to do the heavy lifting of educating myself on what the current and historical situation is in this country rather than relying of people of color to spoon-feed that knowledge to me.

My first post-course series for this blog is an attempt to do both by listening to the suggestions of one person, Crystal Paul, for what 10 books she wished her white teachers had read to prepare them to meet the needs of students of color, and then to do the hard work of actually procuring, reading, and processing through the information in each of them. Paul's article appeared on Bustle just over a year ago, but the titles are no less relevant today and it's better to do the work late than never. Seriously, the fact that I have not yet read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me feels like a mark on my character at this point and the sooner I can rectify this omission, the better.

I'm proceeding through the list in the order I am able to borrow the books from my local library rather than in the order she listed them, but my goal is to read one book each week and write at least one post reflecting on that week's book.

This week I'll be writing about the tenth book on Paul's list: