The willful blindspots of whiteness, teacher gossip, and ethical nerds.
What a time to be alive. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about whiteness, wtf to do with charter schools’ questionable financial motives, and Paul Simon (of all things)
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This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about whiteness, or the condition of being labeled as racially white (race is a social construction, not biological determination). In order to guide my thinking on this, I’ve been reading what Black authors have to say about whiteness. James Baldwin’s thinly veiled contempt for white privilege feels on brand for me at the moment, and the thing that gets me is just how much of what James Baldwin wrote in the 1960s still can be used to describe race relations in the U.S. today.
Which is to say, not nearly enough has changed.
What I’m reading:
I recommend Glaude’s Begin Again, even if you haven’t read anything by James Baldwin because it narrates his writing career through the lens of the civil rights movement, MLK’s assignation, and the deeply embedded cynicism every person invested in fighting for equity has struggled against in one way or another. The book is lyrically written and as such is pleasant to follow along, which is a rare feat amongst academic writers.
Eddie S. Glaude, a Princeton professor of African American Studies, writes in his recent book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (book review in the link) about this uncomfortable reality. Glaude says:
“[James Baldwin] was not only motivated to transform the stuff of experience into the beauty of art; as a poet he also bears witness to what he sees and what we have forgotten, calling our attention to the enduring legacies of slavery in our lives; to the impact of systemic discrimination... to the willful blindness of so many white Americans to the violence that sustains us all.”
This “willful blindness” is what interests me the most about the condition of being white, because that is precisely how we have arrived at this moment. It is how we all continue to operate in systems designed to discriminate, exploit, and perpetuate the status quo, what Glaude and Baldwin refer to as “the lie” of who we are as Americans and what our historical legacy really says about us. This willful blindness also suggests that the victims of this oppression are somehow responsible for it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the narratives we tell ourselves about students of color, especially Black students, and how they are branded as wild, out of control, not interested in learning, and not smart enough to learn even when they try. I can testify, or perhaps bear witness, to the reality that this is so far from the truth of who Black and brown students are that it would be comical if it weren’t for the reality that even teachers believe this lie about students of color, and act accordingly.
The defensiveness white people feel when we are called out on our own b.s. is as fascinating to me as it is horrifying. Perhaps because I am in research-mode, or perhaps due to endless exposure to this, I’ve stopped feeling defensive whenever I read about the foolishness white people do in the name of “race.” Frankly, whenever I do feel defensive, I take that as a sign not to shy away, but to dig down deeper-- to question myself as to why I feel that way, and what that means about the reality of embedded and internalized racism in all of us.
I don’t know why, but many white people, as individuals, have not allowed themselves the space of this critical introspection. Hence, the willful blindspot of whiteness. We cannot see what we insist we do not see. And this impacts all of us in pernicious ways that are largely invisible to those with the power to wield white privilege. But most of all, this attitude becomes magnified in the classroom.
In the classroom, learning takes place in silences and subtle gestures as much as it does during a lively discussion. And students internalize it, whether they want to or not, as an ugly truth about themselves and their communities. Ibhram X Kendi points to this in the first chapter of How to Be Anti-Racist. It’s significant that Kendi begins his story of his own process of becoming anti-racist by combatting his internalized racism from how Black people were (and were not) depicted in his schooling.
As Paul Simon says, “when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can hardly breathe at all.”
That statement is doubly true for Black and brown students in our public education system. The metaphorical weight of this lyric is further exaggerated in the reality that for Black boys and men, this statement is literally true as well.
For those in need of witty cynicism to get through: James Baldwin’s essay “White Man’s Guilt”
I’ve also been reading ed activist Diane Ravitch’s blog. To be honest, she posts multiple times a day, and my inbox quickly becomes dominated by new post alerts in a way that I honestly feel is excessive (fully aware of the hypocrisy of that statement), but I do find myself agreeing with her. The education journalist Peter Greene has taken over her blog and is building a more accessible archive of her posts, so I’m hoping that takes place sooner rather than later.
(Ravitch is the former U.S. assistant secretary of education under George W Bush who realized, what she helped usher in for public education and has since dedicated herself to righting those wrongs. Her book Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools from 2014 is a good example of her work. She’s 82 and has far more energy than I do. She makes all us writers look bad she’s so damn prolific.)
Hot teacher gossip:
The op-ed I recommended last week, by Eve Ewing about charter schools got read for filth* in a post by Jan Resseger and highlighted by Diane Ravitch. The two accuse Ewing of being an apologist to charter schools in a way that runs counter to Ewing’s excoriation of the impacts of charter openings on public school in urban communities in her book Ghosts in the School Yard.
All three women, Jan Resseger, Diane Ravitch, and Eve Ewing are powerhouses in the education field, so of course I made some popcorn to eat as I read the tea. Ravitch, quoting Resseger, says Ewing ignored the “economic catastrophe” that charter schools impose on public schools.” Ohhhhh no she didn’t is what I told myself as I read this.
However, the way I read Ewing’s op-ed was through the lens of pragmatic realism: charter schools are here to stay. I wish that they weren’t, but they have become so deeply intertwined with school boards, education policy and legislation, and are tax havens for Bill Gates and hedge funds alike. I recently interviewed an education lawyer who spent five years trying to get one charter school chain to close due to perilously low test scores and a more than questionable relationship to disappearing government money, who sounded as resigned to the reality of charter schools as James Baldwin became of white supremacy.
The inevitability of charter schools is not in question and both sides have a point. One is idealistic in its refusal to “negotiate with terrorists” kind of way, and the other is resignedly pragmatic: if charter schools aren’t going anywhere, that means we have to start working with them. I guess. Let me know what you think, if you have any skin in this particular game!
This Week in Post-PhD the Blog: Ethical Nerds = Radical Activists
What does it mean to unite praxis with practice when you are a radical academic? Shuttleworth fellow Chris Hartgerink's plan to Liberate Science through organic networks of exchange situates a bottoms-up approach to research. In line with Open Access proponents, Hartgerink seeks to go even further. Over the summer, I was fortunate to help lead Chris and his team at Liberate Science in developing a manifesto to help delineate its radical goals to advance equity, accuracy, and rigor to scientific publishing. Obviously I am a fan of alternate publishing methods :P
Read on Post-PhD the Blog
What I’m reading FOR FUN:
And, to balance out all this heaviness, I’m reading a novel by Charles Yu titled How to Safely Live in a Science Fictional Universe. It’s a wonderful meditation on time, temporality, and memory told through the viewpoint of a time machine repairman who chooses to live between and beyond time. Yu plays with the notion of time and history as stable and firmly in the past, and with how our identity is shaped by own engagement with, and conception of, time.
Here’s to another time, hopefully in our future, where education equity is not something debated in elite circles and is instead enacted and turned into reality.
Until next week,
Allison
*Read for filth is a term that belongs to the tradition of Black drag and the 1990 cult film “Paris is Burning” and popularized by Ru Paul’s Drag Race (my library is always open, hunties!). Recently, a high school friend who’s now super successful, Brandon Goodman spoke about white people appropriating black culture in a provocative way that made me pause, take stock of how I used things like “Yes, Queen, Yes” and the term “Read for filth.” I highly recommend his podcast “Black Folkx.” As a writer, I love the idea of applying this term outside of its original context in order to provide a light-hearted but accurate description of methodological smack downs. As a White Person Who is Very Sorry for the Shit Her People Have Done, I agonize over the issue of cultural appropriation. I love debating these things, so if you want to do a deep dive, lmk! Can I, a white lesbian dedicated to racial equity in education, use the term “read for filth” while of course referencing its origins?
NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram