Not White, but American Values

 

I have not blogged since June, but I found a response paper that I had to write for a class and realized that it would make a good blog post. We had to respond to something we found that would piss people off. I responded to the first time I was perusing the website of the National Museum for African American History and Culture and found an infographic about characteristics of whiteness. When I first saw it, I knew that it would ruffle feathers. In class, we were learning how to write coherent responses quickly. We were given 15 minutes to respond to a prompt.

 

The infographic came up on Twitter this week and I was reminded of this response.

 

In my Diversity and Inclusion class, I compare U.S. cultural components to some of the other cultures that my students may see in the classroom. I use some of the resources from Peace Corps training. My presentation aligns characteristics about time, family structure, communication, status, and future orientation to American characteristics. So, I had to chuckle when I saw an infographic about these characteristics connected to being white on the website of the National Museum for African American History and Culture. Years ago, I had remarked that the school curriculum paints a picture that the characteristics of what is American is not black, so common American values are associated with being white. The infographic flooded my brain with those thoughts.

 

While completing an observation, I witnessed an exchange where a fourth grader had completed a U.S. symbols activity by saying that he was proud to be white and listed the reasons why. The worksheets were supposed to be part of a bulletin board presentation so needless to say there was “concern” about what he wrote. My solution was to ask him to explain. Simple enough. He said I am proud to be white because white people are…. You know the list. Well, his teacher continued to question him and he eventually changed it to “I am proud to be American”. Characteristics of American culture have always been associated with the white race. Let’s not pretend that this was not implied in the stripping away of African culture and the subjugation of Africans into property to be bought and sold. Slaves were not Americans. They were not people as they were property.

 

When students learn about concepts such as individualism, power, competition, and justice in context of American history; they don’t see Black people and don’t equate those characteristics with Blacks. Black is associated with overcoming and with perseverance, but those aren’t necessarily American traits. The school curriculum does not put any emphasis on freed Blacks. They are described in contrast to slaves. For students to really understand the concept of freedom among Blacks, they need examples and non-examples. Prior to legal emancipation, an understanding of living free during the period of slavery is not a common theme in the school curriculum.

 

How do we change this? Well, infographics like this are shocking. They wake people up and get them to question. If the title said “Characteristics of Americans”, we would have taken it for granted like I do every semester when I contrast American culture with the other cultures that may be new to our American classrooms. The word “Whiteness” was jarring. That word was constructed in contrast to Blackness, but its deconstruction requires us to question. It requires us to think about how stained that white had to become with the black to truly become American.

The Impact of the Past on the Present

 

I just listened to Dr. John McWhorter’s 2019 remarks at Bard College on YouTube and if I could respond to him, this is what I would say.

 

Before Dr. Ibram Kendi said that all unequal outcomes are due to unequal opportunity due to racism and his particular brand of anti-racism became the rage, we were actually having relevant discussions about unequal outcomes that were due to racism. I call the new diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting that he ushered in “Shock DEI”. It's not his “all” or your none. And while you don’t use the word “none”, your language sets up the dichotomy. Since you used an urban public school to illustrate your point, I thought I would respond as you brush aside some key issues and don’t bring to light others.

 

First, you brush aside history to make your point. And while I agree with most of your solutions; you can’t brush aside history. The unequal outcomes due to racism’s unequal opportunity don’t appear overnight. The racism of white flight and redlining made a huge impact on the economic conditions of communities and while it occurred 50 plus years ago the impression was lasting. When economist Thomas Sowell discusses the damaging effects of desegregation, he focuses on the contradictions of the government trying to force racial balance in schools. He doesn’t discuss the impact of racist decisions such as firing close to 40,000 black teachers that robbed communities of what Chris Stewart calls “cultural capital”. This is the racism that is foundational to building the administrative frame of the schools many Black people now run. It is disingenuous to talk to undergraduates about the War on Drugs and gloss over the racist structural history that has a present-day impact.

 

Now to the education schools. Well, I will take this hit because I have been managing student teaching at a small liberal arts school for close to 20 years now. When you talked about Black people running districts, you neglected to talk about who is in the classroom doing the teaching. In my close to 20 years training teachers, I have only trained two Black teachers. State certification policy has a racist history that impacts us today. But let’s not talk about the race of the teachers. Instead, I want to discuss the present-day racism in the practice of teacher placement. Those urban schools with the large minority populations of people who are poor don’t employ the strongest teachers and, in many districts, the pay scale doesn’t reward more able teachers or teachers who are placed in more challenging schools. Alternative preparation programs are promising, but we need resident teachers who are afforded two years of paid apprenticeship before becoming a teacher of record. Teacher quality must be addressed before outcomes can improve.

 

Yes, explicitly teaching children to decode, not sending people to jail for non-violent offenses, and providing free access to long-term birth control are all solutions that I can get behind. Two income households are always better than one income, but don’t make it sound like all Black men are in jail. There are plenty raising their kids and we need to raise them up and recognize them instead of reinforcing a stereotype. I would like to add job opportunities, gentrification without displacement, and entrepreneurial support as solutions also. We need to thin out urban poverty which is predominately minority. Having raised my children in a rural area surrounded by rural poverty that is low density gave them the opportunity to attend economically diverse schools naturally. Dense poverty creates high density poor schools and we have learned that artificial solutions to force types of integration create friction.

 

One last thing Dr. McWhorter. I can’t get behind walking away quietly when someone openly expresses racism. That is how I was brought up and it’s too much like Jim Crow etiquette. I also don’t advocate acting hurt. Call them out. No, not cancel them; but shed light upon them with your head held high. I will end here because I don’t want to veer from this talk. Hopefully, we can ultimately make headway in getting people the help they need.  

 

 

The Cliché of "Black History Is American History"

 

I am glad that people are talking about Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma and that they are surprised about the origin of Memorial Day. I follow chats about canonical texts and am glad that Black authors are cited in lists that meet the requirement for inclusion in canonical instruction, though many of my freshman students don’t remember the work of Black authors in high school. It goes to show that as much as people like to profess that Black history is American history, they don’t put it into practice where it counts. When I examine textbooks and look at standards, the Black experience is additive. I would rather not have a Black History Month because I honestly believe that Black history is American history, but when the resources and standards treat it as additive, having a month of focused celebration is better than nothing at all.

 

What people don’t understand is that the “African American” experience is not like the Italian American, Irish American, or German American experience. The Italians, Irish, and Germans brought their heritage with them and preserved what they could in the manner they saw fit as they became "American". The African in African American was forcibly stripped away. Yes, some of the concrete, behavioral, or symbolic components of African culture before enslavement survived, but that was not for lack of trying to snuff it out in order to subjugate.

 

The African American experience that we know today is uniquely American, but it is possible for students to graduate from a U.S. high school career and college ready and have no understanding of African American history. It is not required. In high school, my daughters were on a competitive college track where AP or honors classes were preferred. It was interesting to me that they read less diverse instructional texts than friends on more career-oriented tracks. All students can get away with a section in a textbook about slavery and its economic focus. Abraham Lincoln is the center of emancipation and the Civil Rights movement is more about dreams and coming together. African Americans spent a century building and living in a “separate but equal” society with an amazing AMERICAN story that goes untold. It is as if we were less than or invisible in the curriculum if we weren’t actively struggling to be integrated into white society, but we also struggled and achieved in a parallel society that is also American despite Jim Crow etiquette and second-class treatment. A parallel society that highlights the so-called American ideals of hard work and perseverance. It included schools, businesses, banks, and professional organizations that operated with dignity and pride while unfortunately respecting the psychologically damaging social rules of American race.  

 

I am team Frederick Douglass so I will never say that the American idea was rotten to its core. He used it to argue the abolition of slavery. But I will say that Americans spent centuries building a country that didn’t live up to the ideals embodied in that idea, this experiment. I love learning about Africa and the ancestry that was stripped away, but I recognize that my story is uniquely American unlike other immigrants. And no American student should be considered educated without knowing its unique nature.

Critical Manifestations of Race Aren't New

 

While I know that the controversy over Critical Race Theory (CRT) will blow over sooner rather than later, it is leaving some destruction in its path because teachers will err on the side of comfort when it comes to teaching Black history. The thing is, some of the tenets of Critical Race Theory have been accepted for as long as I can remember. And no one had a problem with how it manifested in Black communities. It didn’t really dawn on me until an Asian colleague said, “the reason that my parents were so hard on us to study had less to do with the greatness of America and more to do with racism. If we focused on out performing academically, we could always have class cover. We wanted economic power and didn’t care about social or political power. You don’t see us caring about Asian American history in the school curriculum.” When she said that, I thought about how the main tenet of CRT guided my upbringing without any complaint from the white community and now the very thought of it has people clutching pearls all over the country.

 

Racism is a normal feature of society and embedded in systems. Centuries of slavery and Jim Crow did not sanitize racism from systems. It will take many generations to rectify the impact of America’s shame. People in the black community have accepted this and acted accordingly. While my church was Black and my social groups Black, my mom knew that the neighborhood public schools were not preparing most of the black kids well. I really didn’t understand, but she said that those schools “only prepared you for the working class”. She wanted me in a school where college and professional opportunities were guaranteed and not predicated on the right track for limited access opportunities. She wanted a school where the curriculum and enrichment access prepared me for the appropriate assessments. She chose for me to integrate small private schools. She made sure I presented myself well and never discussed race. I would get popped in the mouth for Black vernacular. Education was of utmost importance, but she never came to the school or engaged as a parent. I was taught to read and write standard English without controversy. I endured a canonical based program because she knew that it was the accepted path to college with “universal” themes and no Black protagonists whose lives were lived without struggle. Whiteness was centered without complaint or question and modeled for Blacks to follow. But I accommodated because Algebra was guaranteed in 8^th grade and calculus is what seniors took.

 

So why complain now? When racism manifested itself in a way that maintained a comfortable social and political order, it was fine. Scholarly opponents of Critical Race Theory know that it has been around for over 50 years. The only problem that opponents have with it today is that it is being used by anti-racism proponents to question social and political structures outside of the “ivory tower.” While CRT is NOT a theory taught in schools, diversity “experts” are aligning it with school professional development in anti-racism and equity. I oppose some of the "ideas" like getting rid of all standardized testing as opposed to raising rigor and teaching so ALL students have access to grade-level proficiency. Other aspects I welcome include analyzing the impact of school desegregation and community redlining or de-centering the white experience as the American experience in the school curriculum. I also welcome an honest examination of the origin and structure of "racialization" in American in order to understand the concept of race as a social construct designed to subjugate a group of people based on the color of their skin and then eradicate the construct over time.

 

We need to be honest about race. When my African ancestors were brought to America to work as slaves, they were not black in America. They were enslaved Africans with a proud culture. They were "racialized" in order to subjugate and bear the mark of inferiority so that they thought and operated like slaves. When we used the political process to give Blacks access to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” like everyone else, we never bothered to “de-racialize”.  Decision maker, we could use the school curriculum to "de-racialize" while raising up a group who has roots in Africa, but uniquely helped to shape the culture we all share as Americans.

 

What Systemic Racism Can Look Like

 

I love attending seminars and talks (even virtual ones) to hear administrators share what they do that works. I see frequent articles about gifted programs, talent development programs, and accelerated programs that are disappearing because of "equity". Equity seems to be a scapegoat for laziness. When I started working at a small liberal arts college almost 20 years ago, I worked with students who came from both public and private schools. I quickly noticed the public school students liked to talk about their honors programs and AP courses as well as getting to take Calculus in high school. They talked about their accelerated course work and talent development programs. I also had students from small schools that did not have tracks. One student professed to going to her school after not getting into the gifted public school. She boasted 4s and 5s on her 3 AP tests even though she never took an “AP” course. The students weren’t labeled at those private schools, each year teachers had high rigorous expectations for ALL students. Algebra was simply the math that all 8th graders had to take and the curriculum K-8 prepared all students to take it.

 

I attended a seminar where an elementary principal shared study gains for African American and Hispanic students over the past 5 years. The achievement gap at her Title 1 school was non-existent when students who met criteria in a racial “sub group” category and the special education category were removed from the analysis. So, what did she do?

 

When she took her leadership position 6 years prior, she took over a school that had a gifted kindergarten program. Parents touted the program. The make-up of the class was predominately Asian and White students each year. It was a program taught by a phenomenal kindergarten teacher who did not have a gifted education certification. When faced with an enrollment that required her to hire a new kindergarten teacher and replace a retiring kindergarten teacher, the principal moved the gifted education kindergarten teacher to one of the “regular” kindergarten sections, hired another phenomenal kindergarten teacher who boasted a 90 percent reading success rate and hired a new gifted kindergarten teacher with a gifted certification. This allowed her to have three kindergarten classes of 13-15 students each and keep the “gifted” program. She then found out the teachers that the “high fliers” got each year (1^st-3^rd) and made sure that the neediest students got that teacher instead. She ruffled parent feathers, but she made sure to tell them that programs for the “gifted” students were intact.

 

Well, we all know what happened. Her “gifted” students scored proficient or better though she did admit the number of advanced students did lose some ground, but her percentage of basic students which was at 40% (all Black, Hispanic, and special education students) fell to below 10% in 5 years. I am all for keeping your gifted programs, accelerated programs, AP classes, honors classes etc. But if to do this, you are denying your neediest students access to the more skilled teachers year after year, you are creating disparate impact and it’s wrong to tell those parents that it’s a culture problem. It’s a systemic racism problem.

 

Responding to Diversity

 

I am not a "blogger". I write too much for work and school and will blog after retirement, but I want to take a break from systemic racism to discuss a framework for analytical thought that is also foundational to my belief that racism has not magically disappeared. Let’s see if I can edit 10 pages down to a blog post.

 

Norman Kunc is a disability advocate. In 1994 he wrote an article with Emma Van der Klift titled Hell-Bent on Helping: Benevolence, Friendship, and the Politics of Help. In the article he provides a framework for how people respond to diversity. While his focus was disabilities advocacy, that framework has informed how I think about responses to all types of diversity including racial differences. Quite frankly, it is easier to talk to predominately white teachers about using the framework to discuss racial diversity after we have used it to discuss how people respond to diversity when the difference is disability related.

 

We can respond to diversity by marginalizing, by reforming, by tolerating, or by treating it as normal and valuing. When it comes to race, we have not reached a societal point where all racial diversity is truly valued. It is still managed, controlled, and tolerated. When you truly value racial diversity, it has equal worth in the community and it would not community without it. When I consider what race means in this country historically, why would it have equal worth? Race is commonly accepted as a social construction. It was designed to separate—black was a mark of inferiority. While there is historical evidence of race language in other countries, in the United States; Africans were racialized to enslave them and render them less than. I understand when teachers say that they are colorblind. They first associate Blackness with something negative. Historical propaganda, contemporary policy, and present-day media work to perpetuate the laziness and inferiority stereotype that is a foundation of Blackness in this country’s psyche. It is up to individual Black people to prove their exception to this foundational rule. In a 1973 Freedomways article on selecting Black literature for children, Jacqueline Lee Young said that education has “a significant effect on the shaping of the black self-image.” Unfortunately, the educational system has made it impossible to reconstruct the Black self-image of the American descendants of slaves as an amazing ethnicity born out of the horrors of slavery so that Blackness is associated with greatness, but it gets high marks for pathologizing it. 

 

So, we know we don’t value racial diversity, but where do we fall? It depends and you can decide. According to Kunc and Van der Klift there’s marginalization. When we marginalize, we segregate or show aggression. We are motivated to marginalize people that we don’t want to be part of the community. We accept that they are there, but we don’t want them in our community (or too many of them at least). There’s reform. When we reform, we work to make them assimilate or we rehabilitate them. The motivation is to accept them if we must, but we will work with you and mold you into something more like us. Then there’s tolerance. When we tolerate diversity, we are quite benevolent. That’s a good thing, huh? But the motivation is not community or equal worth. We are motivated to tolerate because we want to look good and think we are doing the right thing. Or, we tolerate because we feel sorry and want to protect. How do we respond to racial diversity?

 

I will argue that when it comes to Black people in this country, we marginalize, reform, and tolerate; but we have not reached a value response as a society and I am fine with that for now. Attempts to integrate schools have little to do valuing diversity and more to do with reform and tolerance. As if making Black children feel less than because they aren’t learning alongside white children is mutually beneficial. Quite frankly it sets up a white/black relationship that is helper/helpee which affirms worth and superiority on the part of the white side of the equation and implies burden, inferiority, and obligation on the black side with a crossed out equal sign in the middle. This is another Kunc and Van der Klift framework that is aligned to disability advocacy.

 

As a member of the first generation in my family born with full civil rights, I am not expecting a valuing response in my lifetime, my children’s lifetime or my grandchildren’s lifetime and I refuse to be demeaned and labeled a victim simply because I recognize that there are many Americans who would not see their community deficient if it had no racial diversity. The racism, sexism, ableism, classism, etc. that permeated our systems from building a nation to slavery and on through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement did not just magically disappear. Look, I get it. White kids are feeling uncomfortable with the outlandish ways the "woke" advocates run anti-racism affinity groups and oppressor activities. But stop gaslighting. Racism still runs through America’s veins full-stop. Let’s converse about what truly valuing diversity looks like and set pathways that include high academic expectations, a positive self-image, and supports for all children.