Rafferty SED 561

Antiblackness and the Model Minority Myth Michael J. Dumas examines the theory of anitblackness in education in his article, “Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse." Dumas argues that although slavery has ended in terms of the law, the relations of power between Black and white still exist and can be seen through acts of “police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls” (14). Dumas maintains that even though we’ve become a society that celebrates diversity and has created laws to maintain a multicultural society, the Black population is still positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy- still seen as slaves in the social imagination. As a society, we focus on the individual successes of people of color and “therefore, the failure of large swaths of the Black population is purported to be a result of cultural deficits withi...

“Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because it’s not a problem to you personally.” David Gaider The first article this week is entitled “My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege”. Robin DiAngelo shares her experience on growing up poor and white and explains how she uses these experiences to study racism. “I had my experience of marginalization to draw from in understanding racism, which helped tremendously, but as I became more conversant in the workings of racism, I came to understand that the oppression I experienced growing up poor didn’t protect me from learning my place in the racial hierarchy” (53). This quote summarizes DiAngelo’s argument that even white people who are being oppressed in other ways, such as class, gender sexual orientation, etc., still benefit from privileges afforded to white individuals. She suggests that whites benefit from “internalized dominance” and identifies several patterns to support this idea.   D...

The first reading this week is a chapter from a book entitled “The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession”, written by Dana Goldstein. The excerpt highlights many reasons why “too many schools failed to effectively educate black and low-income children” (121) during the Civil Rights Movement, and implies that the issues are still present today. Many examples are given of prejudicial views held by whites during the time of desegregation, such as the belief that black teachers were less qualified than white teachers or that white teachers assumed they had to lower their standards for black students. Black teachers were forced out of positions in favor of white teachers, which left white teachers who had little to no training on working with a “student population simultaneously fighting racism, poverty, and political disempowerment.” (121). The second half of the chapter discusses programs (particularly the Teacher Corps) that were put into place to encourage you...

Envisioning the Future of the American Educational System The three authors of this week's articles present similar ideas of how we should be educating the youth of America, especially in communities composed of minority backgrounds. Each author discusses underlying themes of community and purposeful learning. In the article "Education: The Great Obsession", Grace Lee Boggs gives the history of traditional education and describes how the values and goals of education have shifted over the years, making the point of how discriminatory these values are against the black community today. She makes the argument that the American educational system needs to be reorganized to allow students to become integrated into their communities in order to engage in purposeful learning. She says, "A human being, young or old, is not a warehouse of information or skills, and an educational system that treats children like warehouses is not only depriving them of education but also...