Category Archives: Education

Education, Equity, race, racism, sexism

Diversity Hiring and the White Lie of “Most Qualified Candidate”

As the news has spread about my university being the latest case of white faculty claiming false diverse identities, I have seen on social media one of the negative consequences I anticipated from this situation—people criticizing diversity hiring.

I expected this sort of backlash because every time the issue of needing to hire a more diverse faculty has been raised among faculty, one of the first responses is, “We should always hire the most qualified candidate.”

The person voicing that position is always a white man.

And each time a new hire turns out to be a white man (again) even though the final 2 or 3 candidates include diverse people, the response is, “We hired the best candidate.”

The problem with this claim and even commitment is that white men constitute only about a third of the population, but are the majority in many fields—and almost always the majority in positions of power.

If mostly white men are making hiring decisions, there is a significant likelihood that these white men see “best candidate” in people who look like them.

With wealth and power disproportionately and historically pooled among white people, hiring has long been skewed toward white bias, cronyism, and nepotism.

If we are gong to be honest, in all fields, positions are flush with mediocre white men who have been hired for many reasons other than being the “most qualified candidate.”

And even though there is abundant evidence that white men have huge advantages in almost all fields—even ones that are predominantly Black, such as professional sports—there is a history of imposters there also.

Take the case of George O’Leary from 2001, in the world of high-level football coaching which is disproportionately made up of white men who are recycled through jobs at a mind-numbing rate:

Five days after naming George O’Leary its new head football coach, the University of Notre Dame announced today that O’Leary had resigned suddenly after admitting to falsifying parts of his academic and athletic background.

For two decades, O’Leary, 55, formerly the coach at Georgia Tech, exaggerated his accomplishments as a football player at the University of New Hampshire and falsely claimed to have earned a master’s degree in education from New York University. Those misstatements followed him on biographical documents from one coaching position to another until finally reaching Notre Dame, one of the most coveted and scrutinized jobs in college football.

Does anyone recall the rush to end the hiring of male football coaches due to high-profile cases of fraud?

Anyone calling to curb or end diversity hiring due to the rash of imposters in academia in recent years is simply grasping at a convenient and misleading reason to hide their real efforts to cling to white privilege.

“Most qualified” and “best fit” are white lies aimed at preserving the status quo.

Here are some harsh truths that must be stated:

White male exceptionalism is a lie, and white male mediocrity is extremely common across all fields.

Diversity hiring remains necessary, and hiring candidates primarily for their diversity is not only acceptable, it is in fact preferable to counter-balance countless decades of white people being hired purely for being white and connected.

Daily, mediocre white men are hired while diverse candidates are expected to be exceptional and compete among themselves for ever decreasing positions in fields such as higher education.

The fear that a candidate may not be the “most qualified” in higher education—where almost all candidates have achieved a doctorate—is particularly ridiculous.

Certainly among academic doctorates and even medical degrees, there is a range of quality, but that range is already at an advanced level. For people with academic doctorates, there is also substantial evidence that even so-called weaker candidates have significant capacities to grow, learn, and improve.

Systemic racism and sexism still make diversity hiring very challenging, and as recent cases have revealed, higher education is likely very susceptible to the sort of fraud uncovered among white women posing as diverse candidates and scholars.

But hasn’t all hiring been prone to fraud and poor hires throughout history?

Curbing or ending diversity hiring would be yet another case of demanding perfection among diverse candidates and the hiring process while having never demanded perfection in the good ol’ boy system.

Recent cases of academic imposters are not signs that diversity hiring is a problem, but a few high-profile cases of fraud cannot be allowed to pause the already very slow progress being made to create faculty in higher education who look and live more like all of the U.S.

Diversity hiring remains a necessity, and “most qualified” is a white lie designed to derail those goals.

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.

Education, Grades, Teaching, Writing

The Perfect Trap

Many years ago when I was teaching high school English in rural upstate South Carolina, I taught all three of the district’s superintendent’s children—two daughters and a son.

The older daughter in many ways represented both a uniquely smart and hard-working student and the paradox of the perfect student.

These were the early days of me learning how to teach writing well; these were the early days when I taught with a sort of earnest zeal that can never make up for the horrific blunders I imposed on several years of students.

Setting aside everything I did wrong—reminding us all that learning to write and learning how to teach writing are journeys—I was from the earliest days as a teacher firmly committed to students experiencing writer’s workshop and writing often, authentically, and with multiple drafts for each essay.

Most of my students then and even now have had very little experience with drafting, navigating substantive and challenging feedback, and teaching/learning experiences that sit outside the norm of grading and evaluation.

This older daughter was the top student in her class; she went on to excel in college and eventually eared a doctorate.

But she wasn’t the perfect student because she was fortunate to be so smart and having been raised in a very privileged home.

From the beginning, she simply revised her essays and resubmitted them time and again. While other students tried to avoid the revision process or simply submitted a weak effort at the one required revision in order to pass my class, she was all-in on our partnership to help her learn to write well.

In stark contrast to that experience many years ago, I routinely—and once again this semester—have to carefully navigate that many if not most of my students are paralyzed by their own misguided perfectionism; paradoxically, the perfect student is not bound by perfection, but by risk and trust in learning as a journey.

A new partner for me in my quest to move students learning to write away from perfectionism and grade-grabbing is John Warner’s The Writer’s Practice.

My first-year writing students just finished Warner’s book, and we recently brainstormed the big take aways they gained from the book. I was deeply encouraged that many students were quick to focus on a theme of Warner’s:

This book is here to give shape to your practice, and encourage you to work purposefully toward increased proficiency.

While you will quite quickly amass experience, it’s important to recognize that there is no terminal expertise in writing. You will get a little better every time you do it, but you will never reach a finish line after which you will cease to improve.

This is one of the best things about writing with purpose and writing through different experiences.

May as well keep going by next figuring out who you are as a writer….

The first thing to know about writing is, in the words of Jeff O’Neal, a longtime writing teacher and now digital media entrepreneur, “You are going to spend your whole life learning how to write, and then you are going to die.” (pp. 9, 16)

I abandoned putting grades on essays decades ago in order to shift students away from thinking in terms of evaluation and avoiding mistakes in order to be perfect; however, the lack of grades has proven to inhibit student performance as well.

While I still do not grade essays, I invite students at any time to conference with me about what grade their work would be assigned. Several students have had this conversation with me this fall, sharing a common theme: They feel that my feedback suggests they are writing poorly and that they are doomed to low grades.

First, I assured each of them that their current hypothetical grade status is quite good, but more importantly, I stressed that if they continue to revise with purpose and care they certainly were capable of achieving an A in the course. In fact, I tell them, I often anticipate that from students who fully engage in the process.

They all left our conference relieved, but I have to stress to students over and over what Warner emphasizes above: “[Y]ou will never reach a finish line after which you will cease to improve.”

At the core of the perfect trap are some fundamental problems with traditional teaching that are firming linked to grades and evaluation.

The punishment/reward paradigm discourages risk and encourages pale compliance; writing well comes from risk and requires that writers navigate boundaries, both conforming to and breaking them.

There is nothing perfect about the perfect student, and there never will be.

As teachers of writing, we are tasked with fostering in our students a sense of purpose, care, and trust that the educational system has denied them.

While my two FYW seminars discussed Warner, several mentioned the O’Neal quote, which seems a bit harsh, but writing and learning to write, as journeys with no finish lines, are bound only by time.

We must write and rewrite until there is no more time for that piece, and then we move on.

Perfect is a trap that ends that journey, or even worse, never allows the first step.

Education, Grit, growth mindset, Incentives, politics, race, racism

You’re on Your Own (But You Don’t Have to Be)

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During the recent U.S. Senate debate in South Carolina, Jaime Harrison and Lindsey Graham seemed determined to one-up each other about their overcoming hardships in their lives.

Harrison, as a Black South Carolinian, sounded quite similar, in fact, to Republican senator Tim Scott—both sending strong messages about rugged individualism that can easily be viewed by those denying racism as proof anyone can make it in the U.S. with enough grit and the right mindset.

The U.S. has long loved rags-to-riches stories, ignoring both that these stories are compelling because they are incredibly rare and that these stories are often lies.

Rugged individualism is not just an idealistic mythology, but a deforming lie that helps mask that most success in the U.S. comes from privileges and connections linked to family wealth, race, and gender; wealth begets wealth just as privilege begets privilege.

Bootstrapping myths have existed nearly as long as the U.S., and seem grounded in a belief that without these stories to incentivize people, the country would crumble due to inherent human laziness.

Certainly the real and mythologized stories of the U.S. are mostly about exceptional individuals (almost all white men) and the power of competition to drive the demands of capitalism and consumerism.

Bootstrapping and rugged individualism myths fail for several reason, however. One is that rags-to-riches stories are by their nature outlier events; it is both illogical and harmful to treat outlier phenomena as “normal,” as the foundational expectation for everyone.

But the greatest harm in these myths are grounded in the lies. Research, in fact, shows that cooperation, collaboration, and community are far more productive than competition.

Just a bit of critical examination into anyone claiming to be a “self-made” success exposes that many factors played a role in that success, notably connections, collaboration and community hidden beneath the individual, and even luck (despite the problems with Malcolm Gladwell’s work, Outliers serves well to reveal those patterns).

What business can prosper without the publicly funded roads and highways systems?

For many in the U.S., Harrison and Scott as successful Black men prove that there is not a systemic problem in the country, but a failure of individuals who can be “fixed” through a more demanding education system and a more punitive police state and legal system.

Again, these beliefs are contradicted by evidence, such as that Mullainathan and Shafir detail in Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Individuals tend to behave in ways that reflect their environments.

Mullainathan and Shafir offer two contexts—slack and scarcity, which we can loosely frame as wealth and poverty but understand it is more complex than that.

When people live in slack, they tend to behave in ways that seem rational and productive, in part because of lower stress and wider margins for error. While this is paradoxical, having more than enough money tends to allow people to be better with money (such as saving or spending more carefully, including having greater access to wealth through loans that tend to be lower interest for those who are wealthier).

Living paycheck to paycheck or living without adequate finances creates a level of stress that tends to result in greater financial hardship—falling behind on payments or accumulating insurmountable debt.

Despite the mythologies and beliefs of many in the U.S., these differences can be traced to the circumstances of people’s lives and not to flaws in individuals.

In fact, living in slack allows for individual flaws since making mistakes or bad decisions have much lower stakes.

Having a car break down when you are a salaried employee with a strong savings account and a high credit score has a much different consequence than when you are a single parent working two part-time jobs with hourly wages and no savings account as well as a low credit score.

Despite our knee-jerk urge as a country to blame individuals for their situations and applaud success as the result of individual effort, the evidence is clear that systemic forces are far more powerful than individual qualities for most people.

The ultimate irony here is that while the American Dream tends to be a message of rugged individualism, bootstrapping, and having the grit and proper mindset to succeed, the more robust and humane version of that Dream requires a culture shift in our collective mindset.

Instead of celebrating individuals who overcome inequity, poverty, racism, and sexism, what if as a people we committed to making sure no one has those challenges to begin with? What if we genuinely committed to the possibility of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness we claimed all people to be endowed with at birth?

Why must any child earn a full and dignified life in the richest and most powerful country in the history of humanity?

While it feels cliche to mention, Martin Luther King Jr. serves well here to demonstrate the great failures of the American culture bound to individualism to the exclusion of community—what John Dewey identified as either/or thinking that misleads people into thinking the needs of the individual are in conflict with the needs of the community.

King, well after his assassination, has been added to the pantheon of celebrated individuals, reduced to a passive radical and quoted or invoked mostly in ways that confirm the very system King was, in fact, rejecting.

The American Myth requires a King who is a unique individual who overcame, and his messages are only useful when they can be woven into the existing fabric of individual responsibility, respectability politics, and (maybe worst of all) a colorblind society.

That is the “content of character” King, often more prop than the person and radical King became near the end of his life.

However, King called for setting aside “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms [that] have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor” because “the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.”

Ultimately, then, King concluded: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income” because:

We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Many decades before the research offered by Mullainathan and Shafir, King recognized that shifting to systemic solutions instead of “fixing” or punishing individuals would allow the sort of individualism that need not be rugged in order to be fully human—and a contributing individual to the larger economy and democracy.

Consider the shift in perception of individuals by a systemic change—decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana creating entrepreneurs where we once saw criminals.

The American Dream is a damning dream, a hoax, a lie—as long as it remains a story of bootstrapping and a celebration of manufactured individuals overcoming.

The Harrison and Graham debate was more than one-upsmanship about who had the hardest path to the stage.

One is a pause, a possibility for turning toward the sort of community at the center of King’s final message; the other is clinging to the very worst of the country that has resulted in each of us being on our own—unless we were lucky enough to be born into the sort of wealth and privilege that allows us to fail and try again.

In 2020, during an international pandemic while living in the richest and most powerful country in the world, you are on your own.

But you don’t have to be.

Critical Pedagogy, Democracy, Education, indoctrination, James Baldwin, politics

Patriotic Education and the Politics of Lies

Not long after my daughter started losing baby teeth and going to bed excited about visits from the Tooth Fairy, she confronted me in our upstairs bonus room while I sat working at my computer.

“You and Mom are the Tooth Fairy,” she asserted, with no hint of asking.

When I admitted such, she replied, “Why did y’all lie to me?”

I can still recall that moment vividly—just as I can one of my moments of having to face the disconnect between mythology and reality concerning my father.

During my first year of marriage, we lived in the converted garage of my parents’ house, and one night we were awaked by my sister yelling and pulling the screen door off the hinges to our room. My mother had found my father collapsed and covered in blood in their bathroom.

I rushed to help him. In the next few hours, our roles shifted and would continue to transform until he died a couple years ago, very frail and worn down by both the myth and reality of his invincibility and job as provider.

As a parent and grandparent, coach, and career-long educator, I have had to wrestle with the role of myths in how adults interact with children and teenagers. Explaining to my daughter that stories such as the Tooth Fairy (like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny) aren’t lies, but metaphors fell on deaf ears, closed off by a loss of innocence, an awareness of a harsh world that was being hidden from her because she was a child.

My father, of course, was never superhuman, invincible, or even uniquely capable of being the ideal manufactured in a son’s mind.

That tension between harsh, uncomfortable reality and the intoxicating allure of myth and the Ideal has now confronted the U.S. in vivid and disturbing ways; the Trump administration has launched an assault on harsh, uncomfortable reality and called for a return to the soma of the Ideal concerning America.

Ironically, a call for patriotic education is embracing the very indoctrination that many conservatives claim to be refuting.

I was a high school English teacher throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s. The first quarter of my American literature course was devoted to nonfiction, and one of the first texts we examined was the Christopher Columbus chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

For my very provincial students in rural upstate South Carolina, this was the beginning of a disorienting nine weeks that included works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

Many of these students responded as my daughter did, feeling as if they had been lied to, deceived, disrespected for being young.

An interesting part of conservatives demonizing much of formal education as liberal propaganda is that they completely misread how young people respond to adults and ignore that institutionalized education has always been overwhelmingly conservative itself.

I watched as my daughter was fed a deeply distorted and incomplete version of Hellen Keller during her third grade; the Hellen Keller students meet is a myth of rugged individualism that erases Keller’s leftwing political activism.

For most K-12 students in the U.S., the education they receive in social studies and history is primarily idealized, incomplete, and patriotic education.

For fifty or sixty years, some have been chipping away at that distortion of history—the “I cannot tell a lie” George Washington of my education in the 1960s was mostly gone by my teaching career in the 1980s-1990s—and there has been a slow process of including the stories and voices traditionally omitted, women and Black Americans, for example.

The Trump administration first attacked critical race theory and then Zinn directly, so a few days ago, I asked my foundations in education students to consider why we in the U.S. have formal schooling. We had briefly examined Thomas Jefferson’s commitments and framing of why a free people and a democracy needed universal public schooling, but my students were keenly aware that K-16 schooling in practice is primarily focused on preparing young people to enter the workforce.

In another twist of irony, saying public schooling is for fostering citizens and to fertilize the soil of democracy is itself an idealized myth that is refuted by how the country actually works.

And here is an important point: I became and continue to be a teacher because I believe in the promise of equity, liberty, and democracy that the U.S. and public education aspire to; and therefore, as James Baldwin implored, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually” (Notes of a Native Son).

I am not sure I primarily aspire to patriotism or loving my country, however, since I think those are steps away from the ideals I do embrace. A country should not be loved until it deserves that love.

I am sure that the many young people I have taught did not immediately believe anything I taught them; I am certain that my students did not respect me or the implication of my authority simply because I had the title of “teacher” and stood before them with that power every day.

Respect, like love, and the gift of knowledge and facts cannot be demanded—must not be demanded—but certainly can be attained when humans are free to recognize and embrace them.

And now the final irony: Conservatives reinvigorated by Trump have long resented critical educators, who continue to be marginalized and discredited as the purveyors of indoctrination, yet critical educators, scholars, and activists (see those who practice critical race theory as well as Howard Zinn) “[want] to know who’s indoctrinating whom” (Joe Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy Primer).

I often see my daughter standing there beside me in a moment when I had to confront that what seemed like a harmless myth had denied her basic human dignity; she deserved reality, the truth, simply by being a human being trying to navigate a reality that often seems determined to erase us.

The daily tally of lies trafficked by Trump and his enablers has reached a logical conclusion, a demand that the entire country double-down on the delusions of myths, white-washed history, and plain and simple lies.

Conservatives have long buckled under the weight of genuinely not trusting children and young people, of believing so deeply in Original Sin and flawed humanity that they cannot see the paradox of yielding to authoritarianism that must eradicate their liberty, their humanity.

Calling for patriotic education is the next step in the politics of lies.

If we truly believe in individual freedom, we are now faced with the choice of who we will be as people, whether or not we deserve that freedom.

You don’t have to teach people to love their country if that country deserves to be loved.

Education, Educational Research, literacy, reading, science, Science of Reading

The Ends Do Not Justify the Means in the Lives and Education of Children

17 September 2020 turned out to be a day of disinformation about education in the U.S. The White House launched another assault on education (not a surprise), and the International Literacy Association offered (for a fee) “Making Sense of the Science of Reading.”

The latter is disappointing from a powerful and influential professional organization because the “sense” made appears to be quite different than the intent.

Ultimately, as this event revealed, the “science of reading” (SoR) advocacy fails for several key reasons:

  1. The movement is driven by parent advocacy (specifically around dyslexia) and media advocacy. That grounding lacks historical context and expertise in reading, literacy, and special needs.
  2. SoR promotes a simple view of reading and seeks to mandate systematic intensive phonics for all students (regardless of student need).
  3. SoR embraces a simplistic and distorted view of “science” as “settled.”
  4. SoR links reading to policies and practices that lack scientific support and cross ethical lines of allowing the ends to justify the means (for example, nonsense literacy and grade retention linked to high-stakes testing).

Here, I want to focus on how SoR crosses ethical lines in order to justify and misrepresent the very “science” those advocates embrace.

Writing about corporal punishment, Rutherford quotes from Gertrude Williams: “[s]ince the dawn of humanity, children have been treated with incredible cruelty and have little recourse to the law which regarded them as things, not persons” (p. 356).

In my scholarship and public work, corporal punishment and grade retention share something, ironically, with SoR advocacy; I contend that the scientific research base (both decade’s long) on corporal punishment and grade retention , while not “settled,” is overwhelmingly compelling against the use of either with children and students.

And thus, I am deeply alarmed at ILA justifying the use of grade retention as a component of the SoR movement. A speaker at the ILA event and a follow-up email from ILA highlighted a disturbing report from the conservative Manhattan Institute: Do Retention Policies Affect Student Success?

In 1974, talking on education at UC Berkley, James Baldwin confronted the same sort of inequity toward children highlighted by Rutherford on corporal punishment: “And education is a billion-dollar industry and the least important part of that industry is the child.”

With that in mind, the report on grade retention from Perrault and Winters must be interrogated for its lack of peer review (How does one reach for the unscientific to support the scientific?) and its distorted view of teaching and learning along with its antagonism toward children (and teachers).

Perrault and Winters make several key mistakes in how they focus this report and what they fail to identify and consider important.

Decades of high-quality research on grade retention as well as more recent examinations of high-stakes retention similar to what Perrault and Winters address have found the following: grade retention’s impact on raising test scores is mixed, but even when test scores increase, those gains dissipate over time (those gains, then, are a mirage); grade retention is strongly correlated with negative consequences for students, including being separated from their peers and increasing the likelihood of dropping out of school; and grade retention tends to disproportionately impact students of color, high-poverty students, English language learners, and special needs students (contributing, then, to perpetuating inequity).

Perrault and Winters choose to ignore the overwhelming negative consequences, preferring to argue for the ends justifying the means, and instead focus again on a simplistic look at whether or not the “threat” of grade retention increases test scores for students not retained (a circular argument for decreasing grade retention).

Those choices lead to a very disturbing and flawed argument that grade retention, according to Perrault and Winters, improved student learning and teaching (a reductive claim based solely on test scores as an adequate proxy for learning and teaching); their concluding rhetoric is very telling:

Our results, however, suggest that earlier studies, which focus entirely on retained students, substantially understate the benefits of test-based promotion policies on student achievement. The test-score improvements that we find within the third grade for students in Arizona and Florida apply to a much larger group of students than those who were eventually retained by the policies. Indeed, our results show that the threat of retention [emphasis added] improves student academic achievement, thus reducing the need for retention.

SoR advocacy and ILA have made a fatal flaw in citing this report in order to argue that the ends justify the means.

Grade retention is overwhelmingly harmful to students, it does not improve learning and teaching, and it disproportionately harms the most vulnerable students in our schools.

Instead of the report from Perrault and Winters, we should paid heed to Huddleston’s Achievement at Whose Expense? A Literature Review of Test-Based Grade Retention Policies in U.S. Schools:

Short-term gains produced by test-based retention policies fade over time with students again falling behind but with a larger likelihood of dropping out of school. These unintended consequences are most prevalent among ethnic minority and impoverished students. The author concludes by providing alternatives for ending social promotion that do not include grade retention as well as suggestions for further researching the role such policies play in perpetuating class inequities. [from abstract]

The SoR movement has lost its way, depending on reports and anecdotes in order to promote a simplistic view of reading and teaching reading.

As Baldwin noted in the 1970s, education is an industry, and we must be suspicious why so many are compelled to make claims that seem more likely to serve the interests of those who produce and sell reading (phonics) programs and reading tests than the very children we claim to serve.

#BlackLivesMatter, Education, race, racism

Uncritical Erase Theory Seminars: Presented by Trump University and Khan Academy [Satire]

It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date “training” government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda….

The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed. The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.

Memorandum, Russell Vought, Director

Col Jessup: You want answers?!

LTJG Kaffee: I want the truth!

Col Jessup: You can’t handle the truth!

“A Few Good Men” (1992)

Partially funded by a Freedom Grant, and in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education, the following seminars are now available in an effort to correct years of damage done by diversity and anti-racism training that included Critical Race Theory.

The seminars are available live through Trump University via Zoom (https://trumpu.zoom.us/djt/06141946666) each Tuesday at 4 PM EST or available through recorded on-demand via the Khan Academy.

Register for individual seminars ($189 and include access to the recorded seminar for an additional $29) or for the entire series ($1799 and include access to recorded seminars for an additional $69).

Concurrently, book clubs are also available and will be conducted via Zoom throughout the month designated. Register for book clubs for $139 (participants must purchase their own book copies).

Seminars

Slavery: A Necessary Evil

Presenter: Tom Cotton, Senator (Arkansas)

Canceling “Cancel Culture” and Reverse Racism

Presenter: Herman Cain (via Twitter)

It’s Just a Joke: Reclaiming Comedy in Trump’s America

Presenters: Louis CK and Bill Cosby

America: Land of Racial Harmony (Except for Our Stories of Overcoming)

Presenters: Nikki Haley and Tim Scott with a special recorded message from Ben Carson

The Law Is Colorblind: Beyond Affirmative Action

Presenter: Clarence Thomas

Policing: Overcoming the Dangers of Black Boys and Black Men’s Backs

Presenter: Roland Fryer

Put American Workers First

Presenter: Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump

Returning Women’s Reproductive Roles through Household Voting

Presenter: Abby Johnson

All Lives Matter: Standing Our Ground

Presenter: George Zimmerman

Why Can’t I Use the N-Word?: Language Fairness in Trump’s America

Presenter: Sgt. Chad Walker

Book Club

October 2020

John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me

Facilitators: Jessica A. Krug and Rachel Dolezal

BONUS: Movie Marathon (Free)

November 2, 2020 / 8 AM EST thru November 3, 2020 / 8 AM

The Help (2011)

Hosted by Netflix

#BlackLivesMatter, Education, Equity, inequity, race, racism

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Racism by the Numbers

Several years ago, women faculty at my university raised concerns about gender inequity across hiring, retention, and pay. The data suggested those concerns were valid so the university brought in an outside team to examine if gender inequity, in fact, existed at the university.

The university faculty was composed of fewer than 40% women (well below the percentage of women in society) and women faculty had been leaving the university at a higher rate than men faculty for several years. Although the university culture discouraged the sharing of salaries, women faculty were able to establish that women did in fact make less than men—in part, because there was also inequity of rank by gender.

These gender imbalances are common across higher education in the U.S. as well.

The external review gathered more data, mostly interviewing across campus different stakeholders in the university. That report confirmed gender inequity and offered reform strategies to address the imbalances.

Almost immediately upon its release, white male faculty questioned the review on the grounds that it did not meet the high standards of scientific inquiry (quantitative experimental/quasi-experimental research).

This scenario is playing out nationally in a similar way, but focusing on racial inequity (racism) in policing, specifically in the use of deadly force by police officers.

First, it is important to start a consideration of statistic and quantitative data by clarifying language. At the crux of a statistical analysis of gender inequity or racism (incredibly complex phenomena), we must distinguish between equality and equity.

For example, equality as a goal would dictate that universities hire the exact same number of men and women, maintain the same number of men and women at each rank, and pay men and women the exact same at those steps. Equality (in a much darker view of the world) would mean that police officers shoot and kill the same number of white citizens as black citizens (note that such a quantitative approach fails the ethical issue of whether or not police offices should kill any citizens).

Equality, however, is the wrong standard since it fails to acknowledge proportionality; this is especially important when trying to measure racism in the U.S.

Race demographics in the U.S. are significantly imbalanced since there are about 5-6 times more white people than Black people. Here is the importance of starting an investigation of racism in policing with equity.

The data on policing and race, then, become extremely complicated since police do kill more white people than Black people, but that measurement is also inequitable since the imbalance falls well below the race imbalance in society; as Bronner explains: “That’s how you get studies that show 96 out of 100,000 Black men and boys will be killed by police over the course of their lifetimes, compared to 39 out of 100,000 white men and boys — a risk that is 2.5 times higher.”

Two statistical facts (police kill more white people than Black people and police killing are racially inequitable) are simultaneously true, seem to discredit racism in policing for some people, and prove racial inequity. This last point is incredibly important and at the root of the problem with measuring racism in policing.

Once there is credible evidence of inequity (data on gender inequity at my university or policing in the U.S.), the challenge of conducting research on that inequity is identifying why the inequity exists and then establishing if that inequity is justifiable or if that inequity can and should be eradicated.

Another paradox of conducting so-called high quality research on inequity is that experimental and quasi-experimental research (designed to isolate and capture causal relationships between factors) often finds no causal significance in the data, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the condition doesn’t exist.

This brings me to the work of Roland Fryer, who I first encountered through his research on education (charter schools and teacher quality). Measuring teaching and learning has similar problems to measuring inequity since teaching and learning are highly complex and pose real challenges for isolating relationships among factors.

Fryer’s research on education garnered a great deal of uncritical media and political attention since that research reinforced uninformed and overly simplistic views of teaching and learning among the media, the public, and political leaders.

Bruce Baker, for example, noted about Fryer’s work in education: “But, each of these studies suffers from poorly documented and often ill-conceived comparisons of costs and/or marginal expenditures.”

Here is a pattern that is essential to understand: Experimental/quasi-experimental research fails to show a causal relationship in an examination of inequity, the media rush to cover the research by misrepresenting the conclusion (“didn’t find” doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist), and public/political biases are triggered and reinfocred.

Fryer, who seems to revel in having surprising outcomes to his research, has recently shifted to studying policing and racism, but the pattern has remained intact.

Recently, Fryer promoted a surprising study that seemed to fail to show racism in police killings of citizens, and the media jumped on board despite the research not yet being peer reviewed.

A paradox of research on inequity is that as long as a culture is inequitable all evidence that seems to disprove inequity benefits from that inequity and even the most intentionally “unbiased” research is likely tainted by that inequity.

Once other scholars, most of whom have more expertise in race and policing than Fryer, began to interrogate Fryer’s research, the “surprise” in his conclusion fell apart—in similar ways as his research on charter schools and teacher quality.

Two aspects of scholarly challenges to Fryer’s research on policing and racism are important to highlight.

First, once Fryer was challenged, he responded in a way that clearly discredits the media interpretation of his findings; Fryer wrote a rebuttal to his critics and concluded:

The time has come for a national reckoning on race and policing in America. But, the issues are thorny and the conclusions one can draw about racial bias are fraught with difficulty. The most granular data suggest that there is no bias in police shootings (Fryer (forthcoming)), but these data are far from a representative sample of police departments and do not contain any experimental variation [emphasis added]. We cannot rest. We need more and better data. With the advances in natural language processing and the increased willingness of police departments to share sensitive data, we can make progress.

Once again, probably due to the use of a non-representative sample, Fryer did not find causal proof of racism in fatal policing, but that is a statistical fact that cannot and should not be used to claim that racism does not exist in policing or in fatal police interactions with citizens.

In a response to Fryer’s response, in fact, Ross, Winterhalder, and McElreath conclude in a review of Fryer and other research that seem to fall outside the standard view that racism does impact policing:

We establish that: (1) the analyses of Ross (2015) and Fryer (2016) are in general agreement concerning the existence and magnitude of population-level anti-black, racial disparities in police shootings; (2) because of racial disparities in rates of encounters and non-lethal use-of-force, the encounter-conditional results of Fryer (2016) regarding the relative frequency of the use of lethal force by police are susceptible to Simpson’s paradox. They should probably not be interpreted as providing support for the idea that police show no anti-black bias or even an unexpected anti-white bias in the use of lethal force conditional on encounter [emphasis added]; and, (3) even if police do not show racial bias in the use of lethal force conditional on encounter, racial disparities in encounters themselves will still produce racial disparities in the population-level rates of the use of lethal force, a matter of deep concern to the communities affected.

A more fair response to Fryer (and others) is that his work—despite its weaknesses—raises challenges about the complexity of systemic racism when trying to determine how racism does or does not impact policing.

Systemic racism pervades virtually every aspect of U.S. society, therefore, teasing out and isolating racism may be nearly impossible to do (see Fryer’s emphasis on “granular data” which allows a scientist to focus on a grain of sand while ignoring the beach and the nearby ocean).

Ultimately, a more disturbing paradox may be that interrogating racism by the numbers will never allow us to consider the importance of human witnessing.

The lived experiences of women and of Black people can be silenced when numbers are allowed to trump the complexities of inequity.

“Granular data” and rigorous experimental research are neither fool-proof nor inconsequential. Scientific inquiry isn’t the problem.

The problem is there is inequity entrenched in the type of “science” that is allowed to count, and that is a cycle that itself maintains the inequity that is often nearly impossible to measure.

Fryer’s research along with the media, public, and political engagement with that research does prove one very troubling thing—a confirmation of Audre Lorde‘s warning: “[T]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

For Further Reading

Why Statistics Don’t Capture The Full Extent Of The Systemic Bias In Policing

Education, literacy, literature, Writing

What Should Students Do with Text?: From Interpretation to Interrogation

Over the first week or so of my first-year writing seminars, I carefully explain to students that the course is not an English class, but a composition class.

Most students have experienced writing assignments primarily in English classes and often anchored to literary analysis (interpreting fiction and poetry grounded in New Criticism or “close reading” assumptions about analysis).

In our composition class, we explore many texts, but are mostly examining non-fiction and the essay form. A guiding structure I used with high school students (including those preparing to take Advanced Placement exams in literature) and continue to use in first-year writing is to ask the following questions when engaging with text:

  • What is the author saying or arguing?
  • How is the author making that case?
  • Why does it matter to the reader?

The transition I am addressing for composition courses is away from literary analysis, interpreting text, and toward reading like a writer, interrogating text (something my students encounter in John Warner’s The Writer’s Practice).

However that same transition should also occur in literary analysis since traditional interpretation tends to focus on a static and misguided view of meaning—such as the “close reading” argument that meaning exists only in the four corners of that text.

Texts in a composition course that focuses on students as essay writers tend to serve as models for the writer’s craft as well as how to create and maintain the writer’s authority (specially in scholarly writing). I often tell students to mine those models of the essay for the “how” in the the three questions above—rhetorical strategies, literary techniques, organizational structure, etc.

Too often, I have noticed that traditional interpretation of fiction and poetry does not serve students well who are likely to navigate college in ways that never ask them to interpret fiction and poetry but that do require them to construct original essays that investigate and interrogate complex ideas, disciplinary knowledge across many disciplines, and non-fiction texts.

As just one example of the high school/college disconnect I have highlighted often, students tend to leave high school believing they should have MLA citation memorized only to discover a vast array of citation styles and the expectation that they know how to use the style guide assigned (and not memorize formatting).

One way to bridge the disconnect between high school English and first-year writing as well as writing expectations in college is implementing interrogation instead of interpretation at all level.

Reading like a writer in a composition course (see here and here) matches well experiences interrogating literature (fiction and poetry) since the larger concept is not identifying a fixed meaning, but considering and contesting many aspects of the text—such as writer intent, writer craft, and the role of the reader in creating meaning.

For example, consider Lavina Jadhwani’s approach to Shakespeare: Dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in Shakespeare.

In an interview, Jadhwani explains:

I spent a long time thinking Shakespeare’s plays were inaccessible to me: Either I didn’t have the “right” training or I wasn’t in the “right” circle. I wasn’t getting invited to direct them. I spent a long time feeling like I wasn’t worthy, and I think a lot of people feel that way.

This experience, I think, comes from how Shakespeare is taught, the focus on so-called objective interpretation of text that ignores the role of the reader as well as the many historical contexts of any text.

More specifically, Jadhwani explains how to approach Shakespeare through an anti-blackness lens (interrogating):

The document I created started with the word that starts with an “n” and means miserly. I don’t use that word, and I don’t see a reason for it. If you are a Black artist who has a different relationship to that word and feel like you want to reclaim it or use it in a certain way, I say, “Go for it.” As a non-Black artist, I only know the harm that word does, and “miserly” is just as good. It’s clearer. It scans. There’s no reason not to use it.

If there’s an instance where the word “slave” does harm and the word “knave” doesn’t, I think you can change it. I don’t know if that word did harm to Shakespeare’s audiences, but it can to ours. In an instance like that, I believe that making a substitution is actually closer to honoring Shakespeare’s original intention.

Further, this approach moves away from seeing any text as the ends, the goal, of instruction, and moves the text to a means to a much richer range of goals.

For example, Jadhwani’s anti-blackness guide invites students to consider and reconsider “cancel culture,” the historical context of Shakespeare’s language and Elizabethan culture, and their contemporary association with language, race, and racism.

To interrogate Shakespeare is to ask far more of teachers and students than the traditional interpretation process that restricts students to the text and evaluates the student against a singular and authoritarian meaning.

Even as high school English remains primarily courses in literature (with an emphasis on fiction and poetry), students need a much better foundation for writing in college or in the workplace. I am not rejecting the value of fiction and poetry or writing literacy analysis.

Literature and composition goals are different, and both valid. But we should find ways that those goals are symbiotic and not in conflict.

To achieve that, students should be invited to interrogate and not simply interpret text with their own reading and writing goals in mind.

#BlackLivesMatter, deficit thinking, Education, James Baldwin, NCTE, privilege, race, racism

To “Be” or Not To “Be”: Moving Beyond Correctness and Stigmatized Language

1 Comment

ESPN radio has recently shaken up their on-air personalities across the daily schedule, notably replacing the morning slot held for many years by Mike & Mike (and a recent fractured version after Mike Greenberg left) with a clear signal toward diversity— as reported by Andrew Marchand:

And now, look who is moving into the predominantly white sports-radio neighborhood beginning Monday. It’s Keyshawn, Jay Williams & Zubin Mehenti….

How will it be different?

“First of all, we are three minorities,” Keyshawn said. “That is No. 1. There haven’t been three minorities that I know of on a morning national sports show.”

One of the traditional areas where radio and television in the U.S. has had a strict lack of diversity is the use of language; talking heads—even late-night talk show hosts—practice something of a radio voice (lacking distinct regional pronunciations) and so-called “standard English.”

While listening to the new and more diverse morning radio show on ESPN, I heard Keyshawn Johnson say about a river they were discussing that people “be jet-skiing” in it. The trio’s reactions made it clear this waterway was not safe for recreation.

Since it is early in my first-year writing seminars, I am still helping students re-orient their attitudes and assumptions about reading, writing, and language. A foundational re-orientation for my courses is moving away from seeing language use as “correct” or “incorrect” (as well as rejecting terms such as “standard English” and “non-standard dialect”) and cautioning students not to stigmatize language use as some distinct flag for intelligence or moral/ethical character.

Johnson’s use of “be” to capture a continuous “presentism” of an action along with the omission of “to be” verbs (“Keyshawn home all day”) are often markers for what some call “Black English” (I was taught about Black English through the work of Dillard in the 1970s, but “Ebonics” and “AAVE” have also been used to designate this language usage pattern).

Few people are likely to recognize that ESPN’s new line up is more than racial or cultural diversity; Johnson embodies the importance of language use diversity as well—and he also embodies my cautions to students about “correctness” and stigmatizing language.

While there are people who may have flinched and drawn unfair and racist conclusions about Johnson’s verb usage, I suspect that there will be no professional consequences for Johnson’s language usage.

As I noted to my class, everyone listening knew the meaning of Johnson’s usage, and thus, the primary value of language—clear and precise communication—was completely achieved.

Writing from France in 1979, James Baldwin explained: “The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language.”

A few paragraphs later, Baldwin elaborated, focusing on French:

What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one’s temporal identity. So that, for example, thought it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical Provençal, which resists being described as a “dialect.” And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language.

It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one’s antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden.

In her work to move teachers of English away from “correctness” and the “error hunt,” Connie Weaver has highlighted Baldwin’s point about language usage being about power and that some forms of language usage have social, economic, and political consequences (often grounded in inequity such as racism, classism, etc.).

Often the use of “status marking” in language usage is accompanied by an uncritical acceptance of “standard English” and the inherent context that some language usage (“She is home”) is more complete and “better” than other language usage (“She home”) (see Pullum).

And language usage as status marking (some threat of observable consequences) is used to justify teaching students about code switching instead of stigmatizing any form of language usage.

The code switching argument has stood for many years as a progressive way to teach language that avoids “correctness” and appears to avoid stigma (which it doesn’t).

Again, Baldwin’s key point—”People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate”—is simply side-stepped when we teach disenfranchised and marginalized young people to code switch because that approach allows us to avoid discussing the larger issues of power and inequity that govern the status marking.

Johnson’s use of “be” comes in a time of high social unrest over race, but also intersects with another harsh reality about language and teaching language: Language use is always in a state of flux, and the loose conventions that structure different groups of language usage are tenuous at best.

“People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate,” Baldwin acknowledges. Language change, then, is also about power, not necessarily who has power but the dormant or repressed power of marginalized humans (children and teens manufacturing slang to build a linguistic wall between them and adults or racial minorities reshaping and reappropriating language as defiance and to claim power denied).

Although language can be racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc., language also can shift toward equity. For example, many publications have now embraced “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Although some people are pulling out their hair in protest, that usage of “they” is centuries old in the English language because it fills a need left vacant in so-called “standard English.”

This door opened to “they” as singular and gender-neutral is in part about diversity, of course, and we can imagine that some racialized usages of language will walk through a similar door.

Language change is often very slow; it seems to happen organically, and then those with power eventually and some times reluctantly acknowledge a thing that has existed for decades or even centuries.

If this were a case for communication and standardization in the name of that communication, we may find the reluctance more compelling.

But Baldwin’s 1979 confrontation of Black English remains true in 2020 when the world and our language usages are all tinted by racism.

Because all teaching is political, and the very best teaching is activism, re-orienting students’ understanding of language does not have to be slow or organic, as demonstrated by The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC):

We DEMAND that:

  1. teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm, which reflects White Mainstream English!
  2. teachers stop teaching Black students to code-switch! Instead, we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!
  3. political discussions and praxis center Black Language as teacher-researcher activism for classrooms and communities!
  4. teachers develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!
  5. Black dispositions are centered in the research and teaching of Black Language!

In K-16 formal education, language usage still falls on a continuum from correctness/standard English at one end and encouraging code switching at the other; the radical dismantling of language usage as status marking is rare, but some evidence exists that culturally we are ready for it.

This demand by CCCC is not simply about equity and authentic diversity, however, because the 5 demands are more linguistically sound than traditional approaches to framing language usage as “correct” or “wrong.”

Once again, Baldwin remains painfully true as he ends his essay:

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in American never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets–it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.

Those of us who teach language usage have a moral obligation to refuse the norm of “correctness” and to dismantle the stigmatizing of language usage. Otherwise we are abdicating our own agency in the service of inequity and at the expense of our students.