Race and Ethnicity in an Integrated School

Blogpost: Race and Ethnicity in an Integrated School
By Spencer Pforsich

Another perspective on how important (and difficult) it is to find constructive and supportive ways to talk about race & ethnicity in our schools:

It was February 2008 at High Tech High. As my first period students arrived and settled in, I distributed copies of an email the entire faculty received the evening before from celebrateblackhistry@gmail.com. The email, signed only “Concerned Student,” expressed outrage because the author felt not enough attention had been paid school-wide to Black History Month, currently in its last week. It read, “I’m not saying that every teacher in this whole school needs to drop whatever they already have planned and change the curriculum to do ONLY Black History, but people need to do something.” 

... 

“Let’s pause here for a moment,” I said. “Look around the room at who has done most of the talking. Also look around at whose voices you haven’t heard.” As students slowly took this in, a few surprised sounds and awkward giggles emerged. They began to notice, as I had, that almost every student who had spoken throughout the conversation had been white; about half the class had remained silent. The two black students had said nothing. 

One point from the email that the students hadn’t addressed was a sentence that read, “I’m choosing to be anonymous because I don’t feel I can talk to a teacher or my advisor about this.” In our small school, many of us felt that the best part about it was the close-knit sense of community that we could create. The thought that there were possibly students here who didn’t feel comfortable approaching their teachers about issues that mattered to them was deeply alarming to me—and I began to question why my classroom had such conspicuously silent voices.

Race vs. Class: The False Dichotomy

Article: "Race vs. Class: The False Dichotomy"

By SHERRILYN A. IFILL

I don't have a conclusive position on affirmative action, but the two things from this editorial that spoke to me are that:

1) Race and Class are often pitted against each other as if we can or should only examine one issue at a time.  

2) On the contrary, because of how interrelated the issues are, I do believe that we need to be working on multiple fronts at a time... and that to do so doesn't necessarily have to mean that we're diluting our efforts or that we're not acknowledging the relative importance of the issues.

What we might learn from the decades-long (and painfully incomplete) experience of desegregation is the need to deploy multiple efforts to address a chronic problem. In the context of higher education, that menu of efforts should include considering income (if not wealth), as well as an aggressive campaign to raise the quality of K-12 public education.

I know that these points - particularly the second one - seem fairly obvious, but it's one that I've had to grapple with a lot myself this year, since I tend to want to work on issues in a linear, hierarchical fashion.  And unfortunately, real life and circumstances doesn't work like that.