Category Archives: diversity

diversity, Education, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Progressivism, race, racism

Imposter: Whitewashing “By Any Means Necessary”

Every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. They may not know, as they put it, “what I want,” but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

James Baldwin, On Language, Race and the Black Writer (Los Angeles Times, 1979)

I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are “proving” they are “with us.”

Malcolm X, “What Can a Sincere White Person Do?”

I grew up among oafish racists in my white family and community. This was upstate South Carolina in the 1960s and 1970s.

As a teenager, I stood in the pro shop of the golf course where I worked while one of the grounds crew carefully explained to me that once Cain was banished from the Garden of Eden, he mated with apes and that’s how we have Black people.

This horrific moment aside, one of the most stark lessons I learned living among people with grossly simplistic views of race was that any person’s relationship with race is incredibly complicated.

Each summer as a teenager, I moved from working in the pro shop to working as an attendant and then a lifeguard at the country club’s pool. There, white Southern women arrived daily, many with unnaturally bleached-blond hair piled high, and rubbed themselves down with baby oil to sun bath from midmorning until mid-afternoon.

These women were as blatantly racist as their husbands routinely were on the golf course—a white person’s sanctuary that explicitly banned Black people from joining.

I have a very vivid memory of one woman, a wife of a long-time employee of the golf course. She had the most cartoonish bleached hair, maybe the tallest, but she also was tanned to beyond brown; with the lathering of baby oil, her stomach glistened black.

And my mother often joined these women. She also sunbathed in our yard when not at the pool. Like her father who sat outside barefoot in only cut-off blue jean shorts any sunny day, she was olive complexioned and tanned deeply.

Harold Sowers, my maternal grandfather, was my Tu-Daddy; here, in his later years, he sat outside fully clothed and in the shade.

What compelled these white women who so openly loathed Black and brown people to render themselves dark every summer?

This, I think, is the complexity of anyone’s relationship with race—especially when white and especially when trapped in baseless, simplistic views of race that serve the interests of white people.

In the first six years of my life, before we moved to the golf course, I remember vividly that my mother often suggested she had some Indian heritage; with hindsight, I suspect she spoke with something like a garbled romantic longing because she had exoticized the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina from briefly living in Lumberton, North Carolina growing up.

My mother also adored Cher, whose own jumbled heritage and flourishes of cultural appropriation helped fuel the very worst aspects of my mother’s racism.

Wikipedia offers how complex race and celebrity are (not the used of “claimed”): “Cher was born Cherilyn Sarkisian in El Centro, California, on May 20, 1946.[3] Her father, John Sarkisian, was an Armenian-American truck driver with drug and gambling problems; her mother, Georgia Holt (born Jackie Jean Crouch), was an occasional model and bit-part actress who claimed Irish, English, German, and Cherokee ancestry.”

These white women tanning and my mother’s fantasy of having Lumbee blood somewhere in her veins are my first experiences with white women imposters, who are increasingly being exposed in higher education:

This year alone has seen the unmasking of a handful of white academics who have posed as nonwhite: BethAnn McLaughlin, Jessica Krug, C. V. Vitolo-Haddad and Craig Chapman.

Whereas Chapman and McLaughlin impersonated women of color online only, Krug and Vitolo-Haddad wove their false ethnicities into their personal and professional identities day in and day out. This kind of living a lie is perhaps most infamously exemplified by Rachel Dolezal, former head of the NAACP in Tacoma, Wash., and part-time professor of African American studies at Eastern Washington University. Dolezal identified herself as Black but was revealed to be white in 2015.

White women passing as not white has become a multi-layered offensive whitewashing of “by any means necessary,” since this act of being an imposter seems designed to manipulate a genuine problem in academia, the lack of diversity.

The paradoxical aspect of these layers includes that women are one of the areas of need in many universities dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion and that white women suffer the negative consequences of being women even as that is tempered by their proximity to white men’s privilege (something that we have abundant evidence a majority of white women will cultivate, notably that more white women voted for Trump in 2016 than for a white woman, Hillary Clinton).

White imposters of race who are women are not only doing harm by taking away the very small spaces afforded Black and brown faculty candidates, but by spitting in the face of the very real and very harmful effects of imposter syndrome often experienced by minoritized people.

As a faculty member on our presidential committee for diversity and inclusion, I have spent many years specifically serving on and chairing a committee that participates in the hiring process so that the university implements best practice to increase diversity among our faculty (which is deeply underrepresented by race as well as gender).

Since my university has now faced a recently hired faculty member accused of being a race imposter, I am witnessing in proximity (as I did with my mother) that this deception has many negative consequences, mostly suffered by the people this event has impacted directly (the department, students, etc.) and indirectly (candidates not hired), but also impacting the process of recruiting and hiring diverse faculty.

Academia is a complicated environment, even culture, in which many things must not be spoken while other things are discussed to the point of no return (with no action).

Legal restrictions and tradition have created circumstances whereby universities seeking diverse faculty can discuss diversity needs and set up policies and practices aimed at increasing diversity, but not explicitly address any candidate’s race, culture, gender, etc.

There are also spaces in academia (not all of them) where everything works under a veil of good faith, but the sort of good faith that has existed forever among the privileged, the sort of wink-wink-nod-nod that existed among the all-white members of the golf course of my youth.

Higher education is not the world of Leftist indoctrination imagined by conservatives, but it is populated by progressives with good intentions who are more than counter-balanced by a willful naivete that comes with being the white progressives Martin Luther King Jr. warned about.

As I mentioned above, academia can often be more words than action. I do not doubt that many who speak often and eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion are genuine in their rhetoric and their intellectual commitment; but I also know for a fact that most who offer the rhetoric balk at taking any actual steps on the road to equity.

Don’t want to step on any of the wrong toes.

There are few places where “talk is cheap” (and safe) is more telling and complicated than higher ed.

Academia, then, is ripe for deception by those who are willing to whitewash “by any means necessary” even at the expense of people who have no choice but to live lives tinted every moment with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.

My life has transitioned from the oafish racism of my childhood—good country people—to the elegant racism of higher education—well-educated people with good intentions.

Each faculty member unmasked for being a race imposter sends me back in time to my mother playing Cher records or sun bathing with the regulars at the golf course pool.

I have been reminded in recent days that people with grossly simplistic views of race reveal that any person’s relationship with race is incredibly complicated—and ultimately dangerous.

#BlackLivesMatter, Bayard Rustin, Carter Godwin Woodson, Critical Pedagogy, diversity, Education, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Nina Simone, Paulo Freire, race, racism, Ralph Ellison, White Fragility, Whiteness

Confronting DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” in the Time of #BlackLivesMatter

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For a book on racism written by an academic, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility has experienced a level of popularity over the last two years that is interesting, if not surprising.

With the #BlackLivesMatter movement re-ignited after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, DiAngelo’s book has also experienced another significant boost in readership, primarily by white Americans seemingly having a long-overdue come-to-Jesus moment with their whiteness and complicity in systemic racism.

On social media, however, blog posts and Twitter threads have warned “don’t read White Fragility” and “don’t worship DiAngelo.” These warnings come from Black scholars and advocates for anti-racism activism, creating a powerful and important tension in that fight to eradicate white privilege and racism in the U.S.

There is also an insidious challenge to DiAngelo and White Fragility that comes from and speaks to white denial and white nationalism; this denial is grounded in a dishonest use of “science” calling into question DiAngelo’s statistics, methods, and scholarship.

This rebuttal is ironic proof of the existence and resilience of white denial and racism. It has no credibility and is a distraction.

Black voices, however, challenging the centering of DiAngelo in the conversation about race and racism must be acknowledged by anyone—especially white people—claiming to be anti-racism.

Having been raised in a racist home (with parents who embraced white celebrities such as Elvis Presley whose celebrity erased Black entertainers) and community throughout the 1960s and 1970s, I have documented that my journey to awareness about white privilege, white denial/fragility, and systemic racism has been grounded in Black writers and scholars.

When I first read DiAngelo’s essay, I found nothing new or surprising, except that a book existed and that people seemed to be reading it.

If anyone had wanted to understand white America or white fragility, James Baldwin unpacked all that often, for example in 1962’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind”:

quote 8
quote 9

My reading and scholarship on race, whiteness, and racism began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Carter Godwin Woodson, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Martin Luther King Jr., Nikki Giovanni, Frederick Douglass, Nina Simone, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin, and others.

I cannot emphasize enough the essential role social media has played in my evolving racial awareness through my being able to connect to an invaluable wealth of Black and multi-racial scholars, academics, writers, and creators whose voices drive my own commitments to anti-racism: Natalie Hopkinson, Jose Vilson, Chris Emdin, Trina Shanks, Camika Royal, Theresa Runstedtler, Nikki Jones, Mariame Kaba, Robert Jones Jr., Mychal Denzel Smith, Andre Perry, Ernest Morrell, Seneca Vaught, Michah Ali, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Rhondda R. Thomas, Jay Smooth, Greg Carr, Imani Gandy, Lou Moore, Simone Sebastian, Yvette Carnell, Asadah Kirkland, Venus Evans-Winter, Roxane Gay, John Ira Jennings, Jacqueline Woodson, Cornelius Minor, Stacey Patton, Jessica Moulite, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Brittney Cooper, Lisa Stringfellow, Angela Dye, Sherri Spelic, Bree Newsome Bass, Zoe Samudzi, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Jonathan W. Gray, A.D. Carson, Terrenda White, Clint Smith, David E. Kirkland, Dereca Blackmon, Alondra Nelson, Teju Cole, Colin Kaepernick, Morgan Parker, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Crystal Fleming, Eve L. Ewing, Johnny E. Williams, DeMisty Bellinger, Imani Perry, Josie Duffy Rice, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Etan Thomas, Ijeoma Oluo, Natalie Auzenne, Ja’han Jones, Howard Bryant, The Root, Jemele Hill, Ibram X. Kendi, Nnedi Okorafor, Jason Reynolds, Jamil Smith, Valerie Kinloch, Michael Harriot, Bomani Jones, Rashawn Ray, Walter D. Greason, Hanif Abdurraqib, Sarah Thomas, Joshua Bennett, Marc Lamont Hill, Sarah J. Jackson, Clarkisha Kent, Robert Randolph Jr., Peter Darker, Tanji Reed Marshall, Sil Lai Abrams, Sami Schalk, Bianca Nightengale-Lee, Jessica Owens-Young, Andre M. Carrington, Christena Cleveland, Christopher Cameron, Val Brown, Kim Pearson, Kim Parker, Nicole Sealey, Margaret Kimberley, Malaika Jabali, Lisa Sharon Harper, Benjamin Dixon, Tade Thompson, Maria Taylor, Terri N. Watson, Zaretta Hammond, Shea Martin, and Kim Gallon.

There simply is an enormous wealth of Black voices historical and contemporary that white people should read and listen to, often easily accessible online, in fact.

DiAngelo is finding a place in mainstream and fragile America in a similar way that Ta-nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander have, the latter two Black writers having also received criticism from Black scholars and public intellectuals for appeasing whiteness even as they confront racism.

I have included DiAngelo’s book as a choice reading in my courses as I have introduced students to Coates and Alexander—with caveats and in the context of required reading from critical Black writers, thinkers, and scholars.

White privileged students have admitted openly in class sessions that they finally listened to DiAngelo, even though they have heard and resisted claims of white privilege and systemic racism before.

DiAngelo’s White Fragility and her celebrity from that work fit into what I have called the paradox of centering whiteness to de-center whiteness (a paradox of which I am a part).

DiAngelo represents centering whiteness, acknowledging racism and Black suffering only in proximity to whiteness, and Black voices given space because of white approval; these all work against anti-racism and are in fact racism.

Simultaneously, and paradoxically, DiAngelo represents the importance of and power in white-to-white confronting of and naming racism as well as white denial and fragility.

Yes, we should all feel skeptical about celebrity status and capitalizing from racism, just as we should resist monetizing and career-boosting that surrounds poverty studies as well as poverty workshops and simulations.

White people must not worship DiAngelo or her book, and no one should be recommending that white people read only White Fragility or read it instead of Black voices.

My students who have been introduced to DiAngelo know that dozens of Black writers, thinkers, and scholars made the case against whiteness and racism over decades starting at least a century ago (in terms of the works I offer as required reading).

I take the warnings of “don’t read DiAngelo” from Black scholars very seriously, and find compelling without qualifications the alternative offered—read Black voices, listen to Black voices, and believe Black voices on their own merit.

I also think there remains a place for DiAngelo’s work—even as it has one foot solidly in centering whiteness—as long as it is an element of de-centering whiteness and eradicating white privilege and racism.

My critical commitments make me concerned this caveat is a mistake, yet another concession to that white fragility which DiAngelo is naming.

Is a contextualized place for DiAngelo necessary as white people continue to wrestle with racism? I think that is likely true.

“Don’t rely on only white voices about whiteness and racism” is the goal, the ideal.

Since we find ourselves in the midst of the paradox of centering whiteness to de-center whiteness, at the very least white people committed to anti-racism must reject calls for reading only DiAngelo or reading DiAngelo instead of Black voices.

White celebrity and white authority can no longer be allowed to rise on the backs and instead of Black labor and experiences, as that whiteness occupies spaces that erase or bar Black voices.

There simply is no place left for approaching the work of anti-racism while tip-toeing around the delicacy of white people.

Ultimately that is the sort of white fragility we must recognize, name, and check.

Recommended

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument, Caroline Randall Williams

#BlackLivesMatter, diversity, race, racism

Dabo Swinney and the White-Man No-Apology Apology

After a series of critical challenges to the highest paid college football coach in the U.S., Dabo Swinney, concerning weak responses to the uttering of racial slurs by a Clemson coach (and Swinney) and Swinney sporting a “Football Matters” shirt in the wake of George Floyd’s death underneath the knee of a police office, a calloused death sentence executed in 8:46, Swinney wants everyone to believe he is offended equally by the N-word and GD:

You see, Swinney’s racial awareness is as hollow as his Christianity, worn on his sleeve 24/7.

In a statement lasting about 5-plus minutes longer than Floyd’s last breaths, Swinney launches into the white-man no-apology apology.

Swinney isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to practice the art of no-apology apologies, but he hits all the key elements.

We weren’t there, and we don’t understand.

There were no racial slurs directed at players, but simply uttered near players.

All the white men in charge took care of the situations, and since we weren’t there, we simply don’t know, and can’t understand.

The assistant coach in question is a fine man, Swinney assures us, as all white men are when they have power and are inexplicably held accountable.

We have watched this play out fairly recently, in gross relief from any kind of decency at Penn State, another fine university where Football Matters, but not the humanity of those consumed in the process.

Swinney, like some of his fellow elite-coaches such as Nick Saban and Mike Krzyzewski, has made his millions and built his authority mostly on the backs of unpaid Black labor. And while, yes, a small percentage of these amateur athletes reap huge salaries as pros and a fair share of them receive mostly reduced college degrees, the elite-coach fraternity is where the real power and money are.

This college football monstrosity of abuse and hypocrisy is dwarfed only by the Holy Grail waiting at the end of some players’ rainbow—the NFL.

An important lesson that seems less obvious during the current wave of civil unrest and calls for racial equity—for an end to racism and white privilege—is that if you are surprised at the corruption and hypocrisy in policing in the U.S., wait until you take a similar critical look at coaching—from the pee-wee leagues all the way through professional leagues.

Like Swinney, coaches are the least likely people to accept accountability, and they rarely embody the principals they demand of the players who have no power in their charge.

Take one of the stumbles in Swinney’s no-apology apology concerning whether or not he banned players from participating in racial protests at Clemson several years ago when See the Stripes and other groups called for the renaming of Tillman Hall.

Once again, Swinney explains that we weren’t there, and that he didn’t ban players from attending the rallies. Swinney did warn in his most Christian fatherly role that athletes at Clemson have lofty statuses and that they should be careful about what they associate themselves with and consider how their presence at the rallies could be interpreted.

[Note: Swinney determines who plays and when on the team, and someone with Swinney’s power need not directly ban player behavior in order to effectively ban player behavior.]

Of course, this is the same Swinney who just recently wore a Football Matters shirt directly in the moments of civil unrest focusing on #BlackLivesMatter, a movement not well supported in the state of South Carolina, where Clemson resides.

Swinney’s supporters are often the Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter folk.

Clemson University, we must note, is a public university whose founding and funding originated from one of the most notorious racists in the state’s history, Ben Tillman, and has until recently also included the honors college being named for another virulent SC racist, John C. Calhoun.

Not insignificant, Clemson University is funded in a state including a population that is nearly 30% Black, but out of the top 100 universities in the U.S., the university ranks 98th in diversity with under 7% of undergraduates identified as Black.

Swinney wants us to believe that for him Black lives matter, but as he so eloquently warned his players, his high profile actions suggest that Black doesn’t matter as much as white or, especially, green.

Since Swinney’s no-apology apology, “hotbed of reality” Don Lemon was taken to task by Dave Chappelle in his 8:46:

Chappelle is not the first to challenge Lemon’s role as a prominent Black voice in the media, but Lemon’s measured, calm response to criticism serves as a powerful contrast to the white-man no-apology apology from Swinney.

Lemon doesn’t tell us we weren’t there, that we don’t understand. Lemon accepts Chappelle’s criticism but also takes responsibility for his own words without denying them or gaslighting his audience.

Lemon makes a strong point about two high-profile Black men agreeing and disagreeing in a very public forum. And unless I am being naive, I have been watching Lemon evolve during the Trump years in a way that stands in stark contrast to the stubborn sameness we watch in Swinney or the “rigid refusal” that seems to have finally begun to crumble in Roger Goodell and Jim Harbaugh.

Swinney’s white-man no-apology apology sits in a long tradition in the South where honor and tradition allow men with power to cling to the rotting corpses of the region’s past without acknowledging that it is far past time to do the right thing, not the thing we have always done.

Like the perpetual gaslighter in the White House, Swinney cannot walk the talk, cannot embody the ethics or behavior he demands of his players; and he will not because he doesn’t have to.

One of the few completely honest things Swinney has done recently is the shirt, Football Matters.

I wouldn’t expect anything more because Swinney has no reason to be the man he demands his players to be.

diversity, Education, race, sexism

How Diverse Is Your Syllabus?

During an impromptu pre-department meeting chat with literacy colleagues, we began to think about examining our syllabi for diversity of required and recommended texts. We noted that often people examine reading lists for K-12 students in terms of diversity, such as children’s literature, adolescent literature, and the secondary canon.

Below are the texts listed on my course syllabi for all courses I currently teach on a regular basis. I have put white male authors in red text for a quick glance at diversity.

Assigned and Recommended Texts in Taught Courses

[In many courses, students choose among these texts, and in some courses, students have choice outside this list. These are texts offered on course syllabi as limited choice but required in courses.]

White male author

Why We Teach Now, Sonia Nieto

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, Robin DiAngelo

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too, Chris Emdin

The Poverty and Education Reader edited by Paul C. Gorski and Julie Landsman

Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children, Sarah Carr

Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School, Kathleen Nolan

Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance, P.L. Thomas

Me-Search and Re-Search: A Guide for Writing Scholarly Personal Narrative Manuscripts, Robert Nash and  DeMethra LaSha Bradley

Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered, Gerald Bracey

Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay

Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 12th Edition, Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup

The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, John Warner

James Baldwin: The Last Interview: And other Conversations

Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin

Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

No Name in the Street, James Baldwin

I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin and Raoul Peck

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education, Mychal Denzel Smith

A House of My Own, Sandra Cisneros

Known and Strange Things: Essays, Teju Cole

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson

The End of Imagination, Arundhati Roy

Sex Object, Jessica Valenti

We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Men Explain Things To Me, Rebecca Solnit

Best Practice: Bringing Standards to Life in America’s Classrooms, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde

Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write, Cunningham and Allington

Girls, Social Class and Literacy: What Teachers Can Do to Make a Difference, Stephanie Jones

Writing and Teaching to Change the World: Connecting with Our Most Vulnerable Students, Stephanie Jones

When Kids Can’t Read—What Teachers Can Do, Kylene Beers

Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, Michael Smith and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm

Finding Joy in Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds: Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Practices in U.S. Classrooms, Sonia Nieto

Teaching English by design, Peter Smagorinsky

Writing Instruction That Works: Proven Methods for Middle and High School Classrooms, Arthur N. Applebee and Judith A. Langer

Critical Foundations in Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres, Antero Garcia

Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-truth America, Chris Goering and P.L. Thomas, eds.

Comic Connections: Reflecting on Women in Popular Culture, Susan Eckard, ed.

Course Syllabi

EDU 111: Perspectives on American Education

EDU 115 (MAYX): The Reel World: The Depiction of Schools on Film

EDU 250/ EDRD 750: Scholarly Reading and Writing in Education

FYW 1259: Reconsidering James Baldwin in the Era of #BLACKLIVESMATTER

EDU 452: Teaching English in Grades 7-12

EDU 451: Literature for Young Adults; EDRD 748: Adolescent Literature Survey

EDU 350: Curriculum and Methods of Teaching in Grades 7-12

diversity, Education, race, racism, sexism

Breaking the Gender Codes of Dress Codes

A popular meme in the wake of even more mass shootings makes a powerful, if somewhat hyperbolic, point:

Image result for girls clothing in schools more regulated than guns
DAVID MACK/BUZZFEED NEWS via TeenVogue

With most formal schooling restarting now, the dramatic consequences of gun violence is more likely to overshadow the more subtle negative and disproportionate impact of dress codes, especially on girls and young women as well as black and brown students.

When I raise the topic of dress code early in my foundations of education course, where students are required to tutor in a nearby school once a week, the young women invariably respond in ways that confirms what research has shown about the gender inequity of dress codes and how they are applied.

An early-career high school teacher and I were discussing her school and the new year starting with a different principal; she noted that principal is taking a different approach to the school’s dress code, specifically focusing on applying the existing code uniformly and more strictly.

She is concerned about the strictness, knowing that dress codes and their implementation tend to target girls more harshly than boys and perpetuate slut-shaming culture as well as placing the burden of “proper attire” on those girls instead of addressing toxic masculinity and sexism among the boy students. However, the consistency, she thinks, will be welcomed and much better for the students and the teachers.

Her next comment was important for me since she plans to ask the principal to re-examine the dress code next year, stressing that administrators and teachers need to explore the purposes of that dress code as well as the details (including the gender inequity likely in the current code).

This discussion spurred in me a more nuanced way to think of dress codes in the context of both the #MeToo movement and the rise of pronoun preferences and greater gender sensitivity in, especially, formal schooling.

I have always been skeptical of and resistant to dress codes in schools or in the workplace. I find the broad message about clothing to be superficial. But I also have rejected school dress codes because of their sexism and racism, and how they perpetuate blaming girls/women for boys/men being sexist and abusive.

Now, I want to consider if dress codes can be created and designed to work for equity by, as the teacher above suggests, first having administrators, teachers, and students clearly defining the purposes of the dress code, keeping in mind elements of equity and not simply the traditional focus of dress codes on discipline and compliance.

Next, writing a dress code that is gender neutral is an essential step that is also a valuable exercise for administrators, faculty, and students.

While searching to see if gender neutral dress codes exist, I found this from Roanoke County Schools in Virginia and this from Gender Inclusive Schools.

A final element in transforming from traditional dress codes that perpetuate inequity to equitable dress codes must include maintaining data and evidence on how the code is implemented as well as who is impacted by the implementation.

Equity and community not only can be but also must be a part of the codes that govern public institutions; formal education that claims to be in the service of freedom and democracy cannot achieve those goals when the codes and rules work against that freedom and shared ideology.

Breaking the gender codes of dress codes is more than rejecting them if we can agree to create new ones that recognize the humanity, dignity, and autonomy of all students, teachers, and administrators.

Sample Dress Codes

Evanston Township High School’s student dress code

Eastside High School dress code

Boys can wear skirts under Taiwan school’s gender-neutral uniform plan

See Also
Update: Houston-area school district suspends gender-based provisions of its dress code after being sued over its long-hair policy

‘It’s About Power’: D.C. Students Seek To Remove Bias In School Dress Codes | WAMU

Students Want to Know Why Girls’ Clothing Seems to Be More Regulated Than Guns

NEW: Comic Connections: Reflecting on Women in Popular Culture

In the U.S., Where the Female Nipple Is More Dangerous Than a Gun

diversity, race, racism, sexism

The Matrix and the Failure of Diversity

Several years ago, I wrote a confessional and tongue-in-cheek poem about having watched The Matrix a full 13 years after its release.

My childhood and adolescence had been fully steeped in science fiction—including my mother’s love of mid-twentieth century B-movies that often blurred science fiction and horror as well as Star Trek. However, just as I resisted Star Wars, I somehow never gave into the cultural phenomenon of The Matrix trilogy until 2012 when the films ran on my cable service, and I became hooked.

That initial viewing, as I explore in the poem, left me focused on how The Matrix trilogy often has at its core the Hollywood compulsion toward relatively formulaic love stories, but the films also pay homage to nerdom—or what may (dangerously) be interpreted as an endorsement of misogynistic male fantasies often embraced by incels and social media trolls.

As a child and teen, I moved from science fiction B-movies to science fiction novels and then comic book collecting. I have left none of this behind, but I also have had to confront how science fiction and superhero comic book narratives are often deeply problematic in terms of gender, race, and sexuality.

The Matrix trilogy, however, may seem at first glance to be in many ways a revolt against these flaws. The Wachowski Brothers, now trans women identified as The Wachowskis, gained their fame for the film franchise. With the racially diverse cast and high-profile women characters, these films may appear to be bold efforts at diversity.

However, as I have been rewatching the films recently, the trilogy remains despite some of the surface features a white savior narrative—sitting among other movies such as The Martian and Gravity.

Despite its iconic place among science fiction films, The Matrix trilogy remains a white savior narrative with Neo as the constant center.

(See image here: Sygma via Getty Images)

One way to unpack a film’s gender diversity is the Bechdel test, and these guidelines help viewers recognize that many of the high-profile women characters remain merely in orbit around men—notably Neo and Morpheus. Expanding similar tests to race exposes that while the films are visually diverse (consider the slow-motion orgiastic scene in The Matrix Reloaded), the characterizations and narratives remain primarily normative because The Chosen One is Neo as white savior.

The Matrix trilogy proves to be the Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas of diversity initiatives because the films address only empirical diversity (not substantive diversity) while reducing that diversity to the service of racial and gender norms centered on whiteness and men.

Three Types of Diversity—and Why Many Diversity Initiatives Fail

In the U.S. where whiteness and being a man are centered, the first type of diversity is similar to how The Martian and Gravity as films work as if race and gender do not exist in any expressed way. In other words, the centering of whiteness and being a man are not acknowledged and rendered normal, and thus correct or best. Often the mask used in this type is to call a narrative or character “universal.”

A second type of diversity exists in organizational efforts designated as diversity initiatives, such as those commonly found on university campuses. This second type most often resembles The Matrix because the manifestations of these diversity initiatives tend to be limited to rhetorical outcomes (mission and diversity statements, etc.) and superficial goals (hiring or admitting people who can be labeled “diverse,” etc.).

This second type can be dangerous since it does not disrupt the status quo of centering whiteness or being male but seems to be diverse; this second type can also spur open hostility to diversity as well. Those who unconsciously or consciously oppose diversity as a goal tend to confront the superficial possibilities of diversity initiatives by asserting “We can’t just hire/admit diversity for diversity’s sake”—a claim that can seem credible if not fully unpacked (ignoring, for example, the long history of people being hired because they are white or men).

As I noted above, this superficial diversity allows lifting identifiable diverse people, Ben Carson or Clarence Thomas, to positions as a nod to diversity even as those so-called diverse people work against the interests of marginalized people. Carson claims racism no longer exists, and Thomas works to dismantle the affirmative action that he benefitted from in his career.

Yet, the Republican Party can point to these men as proof of diversity in the party.

A third type, the elusive type, of diversity in which both empirical diversity exists—we can see Black and brown people, and women in roles and positions disproportionately dominated by white men—and their status actively de-centers whiteness and being a man.

During the current 2019 women’s World Cup, we may be witnessing something close to this third type in the person of Megan Rapinoe who is centering being a world-class woman athlete (deconstructing the “plays like a man” narrative and among women teammates demanding equal pay for their performance) and gay:

“To me, it’s literally all the same, insofar as I want people to respect who I am, what I am — being gay, being a woman, being a professional athlete, whatever,” Ms. Rapinoe said in the article. “That is the exact same thing as what Colin did.”

For films, or any art, and organizations claiming to seek diversity as a goal, then, there is much more involved than simple empirical diversity.

The Matrix trilogy remains an iconic work of cinematic science fiction, and much about the narrative breaths life into traditional frames, such as the white savior, in ways that we can enjoy and even praise.

But the success of The Matrix also depends on a lazy public, one awash in the first type of diversity and occasionally tolerant of the second type. There also is a great deal of flash and visual spectacle that makes The Matrix appealing—and ultimately dangerous like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas.

Even for those of us who have affinity for The Matrix trilogy, and the resurgence of admiration for Keanu Reeves, we must be able to confront the failures in this series in terms of diversity and then admit we can, and must, do better.

diversity, sexism

The Best Candidate: On Resisting Diversity and Equity

The 2019 version of March Madness has provided two powerful and different images of the passionate coach.

First came the brief controversy over Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, captured in this frame:

Photograph: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Next, despite the typically less well covered women’s game, Muffet McGraw, who coached Notre Dame to the National Championship game, falling a point short, offered an impassioned plea for coaching equity:

When I posted McGraw’s video on social media, the connection between these two moments was highlighted by one of the responses on Facebook: “Just hire the best candidate.”

That plea for something like meritocracy in the face of McGraw’s argument for equity has been repeated often during my time in higher education as I have worked on committees seeking ways to increase diversity and equity among our faculty.

“Just hire the best candidate” is a refrain, in fact, among white men in all sorts of professions. The implication is that what is past, is past, and if we value equity, then we must practice a sort of color- or gender-blind policy now in order, well, to just hire the best candidate.

“The best candidate” response, however, is a dodge because it is overly simplistic and it exposes the lack of self-awareness among white men.

White male privilege is not a thing of the past, as exemplified by Izzo and a large percentage of coaches who are allowed nearly any fault—as long as they win. Izzo is no outlier; the abusive coach, the coach who loses his temper while also admonishing his players to perform with control is the marker for the mediocre white man who glides along on his privilege while also believing he has earned everything he has attained, while believing that he is “the best candidate.”

Etan Thomas explains about the inequity of the coach/player dynamic, captured in stark relief by the tenure of Bobby Knight:

Luke [Recker] and Jason [Collier] had each played two seasons at Indiana University under the legendary but volatile coach Bobby Knight before transferring out to different schools. They spent for two straight hours telling stories about Knight. I was completely shocked by what I heard. The level of torment they both endured: the public and private humiliations, the degrading outbursts, the verbal abuse, the physical abuse, the cursing, the yelling, the screaming, the insults, the attempt to completely break them down and – most of all – the outpour of support their former coach received from all of the adults who worshipped at his throne. Basketball is a religion in Indiana and Knight, who coached the Hoosiers to three national championships, was the pope.

The comparison at the end shouldn’t be ignored since the long and ugly history of abuse of power in the Catholic church and its terrifying consequences for children remain a scar that almost no one seems motivated to heal.

So when McGraw asserts that she will no longer hire men as assistant coaches, that 99%-100% of women’s sports should have women coaches, she is confronting by saying aloud the unspoken reality of white male privilege: Men coaches of men’s sports do not consider women for assistant coaching positions, but never have to utter those words because there is a veneer of coaching hires being about “the best candidate” with the assumption that can only be men.

In all fields where there is gender or race inequity, the solution of “just hire the best candidate” is inadequate because it doesn’t seek ways to investigate that “best.”

Years of experience and success in a field or the education/credentialing needed to enter a field are often aspects of “best,” and those have been gained through, in part or whole, the privilege of white men at the expense of women and people of color.

Coaching, for example, is a real-world example of the “good ol’ boys club,” those coaching trees widely hailed and acknowledged in fact.

How can anyone find fault (and keep a straight face) with McGraw’s argument for women creating their own version of the “good ol’ girls club”?

Ultimately, calls for hiring “the best candidate” is a diversion and a lie perpetuated by those who have for most of history benefitted from unfair advantages while being allowed to pretend that they have succeeded on merit.

Coaching is one of the most glaring examples of how white male privilege elevates the mediocre white man—the hard-nosed point guard who becomes a Division I head coach and then is allowed on a daily basis to yell at and berate young and mostly black men who themselves have no recourse for that abuse.

Those same coaches all go on and on about building character in their players, about the whole athletics scheme being mostly about preparing young people for life after sports.

Part of McGraw’s message confronted the need for role models:

“How are these young women looking up and seeing someone that looks like them, preparing them for the future? We don’t have enough female role models. We don’t have enough visible women leaders. We don’t have enough women in power.”

If we really value merit, and character, I want to ask that for anyone regardless of gender or race, who should we emulate, Izzo or McGraw? Whose message and passion resonate in ways that should guide young people, or any one of us?

The best candidate? McGraw because she offers the voice of real merit and a genuine understanding of inequity.

#BlackLivesMatter, Capitalism, diversity, Equity, inequity, race, racism, social justice

The NFL and the Politics of Lies

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –

“This World is not Conclusion” (373), Emily Dickinson

I taught throughout the 1980s and 1990s in my small rural hometown in Upstate South Carolina. That town literally had a railroad track separating the black and white sides of town.

The very small school district includes only four schools—primary, elementary, middle (junior, when I attended), and high—that encircled the largest church in town, Woodruff First Baptist, its steeple looming prominently over the schools and the town.

white church near trees at daytime
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Many of my students attended that church, and for a time, virginity pledges became a thing. Sunday morning services included girls and young women coming forward to pledge their virginity until marriage.

These young women received praise and recognition throughout the town and at school. At one point when this trend was at a peak, a group of young women came to me upset that, as they explained, most of their peers taking the virginity pledge were far from virgins, before the pledge or after.

These young women taking the pledge were playing a powerful game of making public displays that gave them social capital but required in no way that they practice what they proclaimed.

The young women who had not pledged, were mostly not sexually active, and felt a great deal of resentment also informed me that one of the young women who had recently been praised in front of the student body, and was also a very popular student and cheerleader, was among a secret group of young women who helped each other pay for and acquire abortions.

I have dozens and dozens of these stories, since I grew up in the deep South and am well acquainted with the power and hypocrisy of the Christian veneer.

While I have mostly stopped watching all organized sports, college or professional, I was wrangled last night into viewing the 2019 Super Bowl. What resonated with me above the lackluster game itself and the disappointment of another success story for the New England Patriots (with a coach and quarterback who personify all that is wrong with the NFL and the U.S.) was the clear drumbeat throughout the event by the NFL that the organization is deeply committed to social justice.

Over the past few years, the NFL has ostracized Colin Kaepernick for political protests and perpetuated the vapid notion that some of the athletes have sullied the game with their politics.

This same NFL began the most recent Super Bowl, as usual, with nothing except politics, the National Anthem and a military flyover. But most disgusting of all was the use of Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly since the game was played in Atlanta, GA, to associate billionaire owners and the league with social justice.

I have never seen anyone look more out of place than the images of Commissioner Roger Goodell touring Atlanta and marking great places and moments in civil rights.

The NFL is a master of the politics of lies, playing up its own brand while simultaneously beating down any millionaire worker who has the audacity to be anything other than a player-drone for the billionaires who own them.

I understand how many NFL players feel compelled to remain stooges for the corporation that pays many of them well, even as the evidence is mounting that almost all of them are being physically and mentally maimed, that virtually all of them are just cogs, expendable. None the less, I cringed when Marshawn Lynch showed up in one of the most popular feel-good spots portraying the NFL as all that is good and happy:

There is a world unlike this one in which I imagine Marshawn Lynch as the hero and not bent by the great burdening weight of the NFL.

But that is not this world.

Concurrent with the Super Bowl has been a brewing controversy about the governor of Virginia, which Chris Emdin confronts broadly:

Today, as everyone indicts the governor for his racism and everyone professes to stew in anger at how he has let down his constituents, I am most disturbed by the ways that we allow folks to construct progressive public personas that are allowed to mask a problematic past even as the country endorses the past and the masking. WE have allowed people to use buzzwords like equity and social justice to mask their racism. WE have allowed sitting next to the right people or hanging the right painting to erase things they have done that cause pain. WE have failed to allow folks to face their history and the part they play in what they profess to fight against. It is easy to advocate for something without acknowledging that you are part of what caused it. It is easy for the governor to denounce the hatred in Charlottesville without acknowledging that he is a branch of the tree that the hate there grew from.

Emdin unmasks the progressive veneer that works like the Christian veneer—for some. Mostly for the privileged who use that veneer to maintain a death-grip on their unearned power.

In this age of Trump politics, we must recognize that billionaire NFL owners are no more committed to social justice than Trump is to Christianity.

Billionaires have been afforded their billions because of inequity, and the only real threat to their egregious wealth is equity, the cleansing sunshine of social justice.

The NFL exists on lies, it needs lies. The NFL is a microcosm of U.S. capitalism that exists on poverty, that needs poverty.

Kaepernick was sacrificed exactly because he was the Truth, unadulterated because the banishment was swift and seemingly invisible, silent. Allowed to return to the NFL, like Lynch, Kapernick likely and excusably would have merged into the fold in some uncomfortable way—like Jim Brown’s face if the commercial above is paused just right.

The NFL’s lie is just another Great America Myth, another cultural lie. The Super Bowl was its crowning act of this year’s season of lies.

The perfect team, the Patriots, now sit on that throne of duplicity like an arrogant middle finger to all that is decent and humane.

Like the church steeple ringed by my home town’s only schools.

diversity, Education, education reform, Educational Research, race, racism

Dark Histories Cast Shadows over Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education

Sitting 30 miles apart, two upstate South Carolina universities seem to have mostly proximity in common. Furman University is a small, selective, and private liberal arts college while nearby public, land-grant Clemson University is the second largest research university in the state, touting a high-profile football program.

Yet, these universities represent higher education’s struggles with dark histories and a stubborn gap between faculty and student demographics compared to the communities and states they serve.

Private colleges with restrictive admission guidelines and higher costs have long struggled with diversity, but “[a] growing number of public universities are becoming less affordable and accessible for low-income students and people of color,” reports Ashley A. Smith for Inside Higher Ed.

In one ranking from 2016, Clemson (HHI 0.707) sat 98 among the top 100 universities, even less diverse than Furman (HHI 0.662), ranking 85 among the top 100 liberal arts colleges*. Both schools serve, notably, South Carolina with a black population of 26% (national rate 12%).

While many universities have begun reckoning with their histories as well as committing to diversity initiatives, diversity goals for faculty and student populations mirroring the general public remain elusive.

Reckoning with, Not Erasing, the Past

One permanent shadow appears to be Tillman Hall on the campus of Clemson University, the source of a contentious 2015 debate among students, faculty, administration, and the community.

Tillman Hall is named for former SC governor and senator Benjamin Tillman, who also founded Winthrop University (Rock Hill, SC). Will Moredock explains, “Modern historians generally regard Tillman as a fire-breathing racist, opportunist, and demagogue who played on the worst of human nature to promote himself to the highest levels of state government.”

The lack of action by administration concerning Tillman Hall spurred a student organization formed about a year earlier, See the Stripes, to continue urging Clemson toward greater diversity and inclusion:

The central idea of See The Stripes is an acknowledgement that The Tiger has stripes, which are an integral part of its existence and survival. While The Tiger could be seen as “Solid Orange” a solid orange tiger could not survive without its stripes. Similarly, Clemson University’s history has its dark parts that should be acknowledged—particularly the histories of laborers who contributed significantly to its development: slaves, sharecroppers and convict laborers.

The Tillman Hall stalemate represents one powerful hurdle for diversity goals at a university when the past remains an unaddressed stain on the present.

Furman’s reckoning has come in the form of a Task Force on Slavery and Justice, prompted by a new provost, and a diversity and inclusion committee charged by the university president.

The Task Force report, Seeking Abraham, confronts slavery and  racism in the founding of the university, but also details a roadmap of actions for moving forward as an essential part of creating a university community that is more inclusive.

Good Intentions, Rhetoric Not Enough

None the less, Furman student Juhee Bhatt blogged that good intentions of diversity initiatives are not enough:

Inclusiveness is much more than portraying students of color in news articles or acknowledging Furman’s role in slavery. Inclusiveness is an unfolding process of action that affirms the humanity of each minority on campus, it is not only displaying a headshot…or working to strengthen diversity statistics. Inclusivity is not a one-step process, rather it demands individuality and intentionality.

Across the U.S., college and universities employ faculty that are disproportionately white and male (especially at the higher ranks) and serve students channeled through narrowing admission processes and limited by increasing costs.

Further, diversity initiatives are often dulled by external forces, such as undermatching, and suffer from student and faculty skepticism about programs that seem to be more rhetoric than action, as Bhatt expresses.

Another challenge for diversity and inclusion programs is implementation, too often targeting diverse populations instead of acknowledging that diversity and inclusion awareness must be for all stakeholders—especially majority populations.

“Inclusivity Is Not a One-step Process”

A 2016 U.S. Department of Education report outlines the complex ways that colleges and universities can better attain diversity goals. These steps include more than diversity and inclusion programs, but include the following:

  • Creating mission statements to provide a context and foundation for action and policy.
  • Recognizing diversity must pervade the entire campus—faculty, administration, staff, and students—in ways reflecting the rhetoric of those mission statements.
  • Prioritizing diversity through admissions and hiring practices.
  • Providing diverse populations with on-campus support.
  • Establishing and maintaining inclusive climates as a precursor to increasing quantifiable diversity throughout the institution.
  • Resisting silver bullets, and dedicating funds and policy to a “multi-pronged commitment to diversity,” as the USDOE report concludes.

The U.S. must have colleges and universities where faculty, staff, and students represent the entire spectrum of diversity within the communities they serve, but commitments to diversity and inclusion must be more than banners, rhetoric, and public relations if those goals are to be met.

* The ranking index used (HHI): “A student body that is entirely White would have an HHI of 1. A student body that is equally made up of people from five different racial groups would have an HHI of 0.2.”

Barbara Kingsolver, diversity, poetry

Barbara Kingsolver’s “Justicia” and “Refuge”

“I wasn’t prepared for the knowledge of what one nation will do to another,” Barbara Kingsolver explains near the end of the Introduction to her poetry collection, Another America/Otra America, continuing:

But knowledge arrived regardless. I saw that every American proverb has two sides, can be told in two languages; that injustice does not disappear when you look away, but seeps in at the back of the neck to poison your soul. The unspeakable things can be survived, and sometimes there is joy on the other side. (pp. xvii-xix)

And so Kingsolver presents a collection of poems, each translated into Spanish by Rebeca Cartes, written over many years and finally published in 1998.

“My way of finding a place in the world is to write one,” Kingsolver concludes. “But when I want to howl and cry and laugh all at once, I’ll raise up a poem against the darkness. This is my testament to two Americas, and the places I’ve found, or made, or dreamed in between” (p. xix).

This idea of two Americas grounded in culture and language, poems now two decades old and well before the rise of Trump’s America, offers a way to navigate what seems to be contradictory claims: Trump’s politics represent enduring ideologies and patterns that in fact reveal who America is while also confronting the nation and the world with a unique bravado and crassness that deserves an equally resolute response.

“Justicia” and “Refuge” speak to historical problems with the American character and current tensions inflamed by Trump’s rhetoric and policies.

“The feral incantations of our dreams” begins “Justicia,” a title evoking “justice” but also (possibly) the flower of that name. Nature is always prominent in Kingsolver, and this poem is grounded in the lone wolf (given a human pronoun):

His orange pain becomes a desert sunset.
His hunger perceives the scent of blood
on the wind,

the sleep of sheltered animals,
everything
but borders.

Kingsolver investigates civilization (“borders”) and the wild, the wilderness (“feral”), a paradoxical tension in which it is the wild that is framed as violent and dangerous but that is often sacrificed.

Next, Kingsolver turns to the politics of race and geography:

The television says McAllen, Texas,
is closer to Managua than to Washington, D.C.,
and housewives in McAllen

check their own
possibly Bolshevik eyes in the mirror
and lock the windows.

The poem ends with a crescendo of “peaceful,” “liberty,” and “justice” building to “the wolf deserves a meal.”

Reading “Justicia” in 2018, in the wake of Trump’s incessant demonizing of Mexicans and invoking images of immigrants as “animals,” I am compelled to suggest Kingsolver is offering a powerful exploration of racism and nationalism folded into the image of the lone wolf reappropriated as a sympathetic symbol of the dignity all living creatures deserve.

Quoted in full in Feroza Jussawalla’s “Cultural Rights Theory: A View from the U.S.-Mexican Border,” “Refuge” fits equally as well into the state of mangled U.S. politics under Trump.

Kingsolver dedicates the poem “[f]or Juana, raped by immigration officers and deported”—replayed with an awful intensity during the current debate about separating children from parents seeking political asylum and reports of children being sexually assaulted by immigration officials.

“Give me your hand,/He will tell you”—the opening inviting tone triggers for me Adrienne Rich’s equally disturbing interrogation of how the criminal justice system subjects victims of rape to a second assault in her “Rape”: “There is a cop who is both prowler and father.”

“[B]arbed wire,” “desert,” and “hunger” create next an oppressive tone, building to “I will/take your hand./Take it” and then:

First
He will spread it
Fingers from palm
To look inside,
See it offers nothing.
Then
With a sharp blade
Sever it.

Again paralleling Rich’s poem, the language is both violent and sexual, dehumanizing and invasive.

The final stanza is disturbing in its simplicity detailing the officer keeping the severed hand as a token of “the great/desirability/of my country.”

In these two poems, civilization—specifically America—is the rapacious aggressor, the taker that objectifies the weak, as Others, foreign, less than. This is the America that is contrasted with the America claimed.

Kingsolver’s poetic recreation of two Americas, another America, resonates in awful ways that should turn our stomachs, that may prompt us to turn our eyes.

“Another America” confronts us as not the America we claim to be; “another America” challenges us to become the ideal we have yet to achieve—a people devoted to human dignity, to enduring values such as each child is everyone’s child, such as there are no strangers, such as anything we have we will halve and share.

In her poems, essays, and fiction, Kingsolver implores us to be our better selves. I wonder if that is a dream also, an ideal, something we simply are not capable of being.