Category Archives: race

This Is U.S.: “To be a Negro in this country…”

July 8, 2016 plthomasedd 4 Comments

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.

James Baldwin from “The Negro in American Culture,” Cross Currents, XI (1961), p. 205

Two nights ago, a friend shared with me a disturbing but all-too-common story about his two young adult daughters with their mother.

The three women were approached by a man while filling up the car with gas before all going to the station restroom. The man followed them into the station, and they all felt concerned for their safety.

This is a snapshot of what it means to be female in the U.S. in 2016.

Last night, I sat in my living room with my pregnant daughter, my biracial granddaughter, my wife, and my black son-in-law. My daughter was showing my wife videos from the recent gruesome shootings of two black males by police.

My son-in-law told us he saw two people pulled over by police on his drive home, shaking his head and adding, “I don’t want to be pulled over.”

This is a snapshot of what it means to be black in the U.S. in 2016.

White males are about 30-35% of adults in the U.S., yet white males control nearly all the wealth and all the power in this country.

And despite the disturbing power of the videos documenting the institutional executions of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, this is the image of the U.S.

Brock Turner’s image captures the world created by the white male power structure of the U.S., the inequity designed and maintained by those white males in the service of white males.

Equity and justice—or rightly inequity and injustice—these exist as those in power choose. The powerless—children, women, people of color—did not bring this world about and do not maintain it.

Turner represents that the U.S. is two worlds: one criminal justice system for white males and another criminal justice system for everyone else.

This image of Turner—All-American athlete and all-around good guy—stands in stark contrast to the immediate efforts by the media and whitesplainers to justify the shootings of Sterling and Castile, the immediate framing of these men as inherently criminals who deserved street executions.

The American Dream is a whitesplainer’s myth; as George Carlin quipped: “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

“This is why those pious calls to ‘respect the law,'” argued James Baldwin in “A Report from Occupied Territory,” “always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.”

And then, in Baldwin’s “No Name in the Street,” he points a finger at the entrenched American problem with race:

The truth is that the country does not know what to do with its black population now that the blacks are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred, like cattle; and they especially do not know what to do with young black men, who pose as devastating a threat to the economy as they do to the morals of young white cheerleaders. It is not at all accidental that the jails and the army and the needle claim so many, but there are still too many prancing around for the public comfort. Americans, of course, will deny, with horror, that they are dreaming of anything like “the final solution”—those Americans, that is, who are likely to be asked: what goes on in the vast, private hinterland of the American heart can only be guessed at, by observing the way the country goes these days. (pp. 432-433)

Before the U.S. is “the way the country goes these days.”

Let us not ignore that “the way” is exactly what white males who control the wealth and power want. If it were not, then things would be otherwise.

This is U.S.

Revisiting “Juno” in a Time of Instagram: The Luxury of Being Desperate

June 27, 2016 plthomasedd 3 Comments

You didn’t see me I was falling apart
I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park
You didn’t see me I was falling apart
I was a television version of a person with a broken heart

“Pink Rabbits,” The National

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –

“This World is not Conclusion,” Emily Dickinson

Near the end of the film Juno, Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page), pregnant teen, gives birth, and the teen father, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), appears at the hospital room door, having run straight from his high school track meet and adorned in the infinitely silly red running shirt and gold shorts with matching gold sweat bands around his head and wrists.

Juno’s father, Mac MacGruff (J.K. Simmons), leaves his daughter’s side, pauses to squeeze Paulie’s shoulders, and then leaves. There is a wonderful tension in that moment since after Juno confesses her pregnancy to her father and step-mother, Mac tells his second wife, Bren MacGruff (Allison Janney), that he’s “gonna punch that Bleeker kid in the wiener next time [he] see[s] him.”

Instead Mac leaves the young Bleeker unharmed, and Paulie circles Juno’s bed, ceremoniously takes off his sweat bands, climbs into her hospital bed, and then spoons her as she cries.

I sat on the couch rewatching the film last night, crying for the 7th or 8th time during the film.

I love Juno in the same sort of very conflicted way I love teens and high school.

And while I want to revisit some of the reasons I love the film, I also must confront the main and most powerful character in the film that receives no credits at all: white privilege.

Juno is technically wonderful, smart, funny, and well crafted as a film, reminding me in many ways of the Coen brothers’ same artistry—and similar whitewashing.

I love the use of drawings to guide film transitions, the music is wonderful, and the acting/actors along with the diamond of a script are equally beautiful.

“Smart” is a fair word to describe the film in the same way the characters are hyper-smart—linguistic virtuosos all of them, that is at least hyperbole (and not unusual in film and literature; think J.D. Salinger and To Kill a Mockingbird, as just a couple literary examples) if not cloying ultimately (I suspect as many people love as hate the film for the clever word play; think Aaron Sorkin or Little Miss Sunshine).

The slang that characterizes teens—as acts of resistance—is exaggerated and, I think, perfect as a medium for carrying a film that is mostly real in its unrealistic portrayals.

The film also depends on the actors as well as their crisp acting to keep the viewers distracted by the humor and the bittersweetness of the story and those characters (there is a sadness, a desperation in every single character) so that we avoid the elephant in the room, or rightly the white elephant not credited in the film.

Juno is a PG-13 whitewashing of teen pregnancy in the same way Breaking Bad is a dark TV whitewashing of drug dealing.

Unintentionally, the film is a powerful message about how privilege allows the luxury of being desperate.

Mark Loring (Jason Bateman), the husband of the very pretty couple who cannot have children so seek to adopt Juno’s baby, is (ironically) a case of arrested development—a man-boy who is handsome, charming, and ultimately stunningly selfish.

Mark, I think, is a minor character but the ideal example of where Juno is a problematic film, one that unselfconsciously ignores the white privilege.

Everyone is buoyed, protected by white privilege in the film so that these very real conflicts—teen sex, teen pregnancy, divorce—are rendered PG-13, harmless, the fodder for mirth.

Even the sensitive teen sex scene—both Juno and Bleeker looking pre-pubescent, childlike—fits perfectly into the Instagram culture or today: Instagram, where scantily clad women traffic in product placement but there is no room for the very dangerous female nipple.

If we admit Juno is a technically fine film, that it depicts some wonderful and touching aspects of human frailty, especially during our teen years, we must also accept that all of this is wrapped in the safe blanket of privilege.

Juno the character as a black pregnant teen is a much bleaker story.

Consider the documentary Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, which includes “Maya, a 16-year-old black student who had her first baby at 13 and another before she was old enough to drive.”

Even though this documentary shows that Maya is often very much still a child herself, the real-world consequences for those not sheltered by white privilege are a much different tale than Juno.

But Juno is just a movie—I feel some people say. And yes, there is something to art, or pop art, as a vehicle for escape.

I am not trashing Juno; as I noted above, I do genuinely love the movie.

But along with the moments of adept artistry, the abrupt humor, and the sincere homage to the bittersweet realization about love and human affection that confronts everyone moving from childhood to adulthood, Juno fails to admit how white privilege has shielded these mostly compelling characters from the consequences that black, brown, and poor people cannot afford to set aside for a few laughs.

AlterNet, CCSS, Charter schools, Disaster capitalism, Education, education reform, Equity, Lou LaBrant, NCLB, NCTE, NPR, privilege, race, racism, reading, School choice, social justice, Standards, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation, VAM

Weekend Quick Takes June 25-26

June 25, 2016 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Read Julian Vasquez Heilig’s What other universities should learn from UT, and note especially this:

Not discussed in the current ruling, but I believe relevant, is that Fisher did not fall below a bright line by which whites were rejected and minorities admitted. As reported in The Nation, UT-Austin offered admission “to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were Black or Latino. Forty-two were white.” Additionally, “168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s who were also denied entry into the university that year.”

It is unfortunate that Fisher believed wrongly, in spite of factual evidence and data to the contrary, that she was discriminated against because she was white. In fact, by pursuing a case where the data was very clear on this point, she continued the insecurity and insidiousness of racial prejudice that has unfortunately permeated our society for centuries.

Also see his co-authored Actuating equity?: Historical and contemporary analyses of African American access to selective higher education from Sweatt to the Top 10% Law

There may be many cracks in Maintaining the Charter Mirage: Progressive Racism, including Paul Hewitt’s A modest proposal for charter schools; consider this:

Now that I have established myself as an opponent of charter schools I have a proposal for the Walton family and charter school proponents everywhere. I propose that you go against my friend’s admonition that we need public schools for charters to succeed. If charter schools are so good, let’s make every school in the current school district a charter school. Let’s dissolve the traditional school board and have them become trustees of school facilities. Let’s take all the existing school facilities and have charter school groups nationwide bid through proposals to take over and run that school. State law may need to be altered a little for this grand experiment. For example, no student living in the current school boundaries could transfer to a school in another neighboring school district. This would ensure that the charters serve all students in the community including the special education, English language learners, and at-risk children to ensure that no child could be “pushed out.”

Just imagine, every school would be a charter school and parents could have their choice of schools for their child. The traditional lottery system would be used at each school, and if the parent wasn’t lucky enough to get their first choice they could go to their second or third. Because the population of the entire school district would be involved there could be no discrimination and all students, even the at-risk, would be served. The traditional creaming of top students that is the major criticism of charters would be eliminated. This would be a completely free-market school choice system.

The double irony to this confrontation as (mostly) satire is that transforming all public schools into charter schools has already occurred—in New Orleans; see Endgame: Disaster Capitalism, New Orleans, and the Charter Scam.

And while edureformers continue to mislead political leaders and the public about such turnover/turnarounds, New Orleans is but one example of how these market-based reforms have proven to be utter failures.

In 1949, former NCTE president and English teacher/educator Lou LaBrant argued: “Our language programs have been set up as costume parties and not anything more basic than that” (p. 16).

In 2016, former NCTE president and esteemed educator and activist Joanne Yatvin confronts the same disturbing dynamic in her Too Little and Too Late.

Regretfully, Yatvin’s powerful refuting of the National Reading Panel, at the base of No Child Left Behind, was mostly ignored by political leaders and the public. Yet, she is once again ringing a bell that must be heard:

To the Editor:

As a retired educator, still deeply involved with the teaching of reading and writing, I was dismayed to read that the Portland Public schools are still tied to one-size-fit all commercial materials for teaching reading and considering combining pieces from several of them to make a new program. By this time experienced teachers should have learned that each child learns to read in his own time frame and in his own way, and that real literature and non-fiction are far better tools than anything concocted by commercial publishers.

Learning to read is not all that difficult when children are given interesting and well-written books for group activities and allowed to choose books that appeal to them to read on their own. It also helps when adults read aloud interesting books with illustrations on a regular basis. That is how children learn vocabulary and begin to understand the world outside their own homes and neighborhoods. Reading poetry helps too, because of the repeated word sounds and lines.

Over all, we should remember that reading and writing have been around for many centuries, and that the people who wanted and needed to use those skills found them easy to learn– often without a teacher, and certainly without any breakdown into separate skills, workbook exercises, or tests.

Sincerely yours,
Joanne Yatvin

The entire accountability reform movement driven by ever-new standards and ever-new high-stakes tests benefits mostly the education market—not students, not teachers.

In fact, as my current graduate literacy course has revealed to me, teachers both recognize the negative impact of required reading programs and materials and feel powerless to set those materials aside in order to implement what their children actually need.

I entered the field of education fueled by the belief that traditional schooling needed to be reformed. I am a public school advocate, but I also recognize that traditional public schools have served white middle-class and affluent children well (even though, as I can attest, that population often excels in spite of traditional schooling) while mostly failing vulnerable populations of students, specifically black, brown, and poor children.

My fellow pro-public school friends have been proudly sharing Jack Schneider’s America’s Not-So-Broken Education System.

While both Schneider and those sharing his piece are, I am certain, driven by good intentions, I must caution that such defenses of public schools suffer from whitewashing—a not-so-subtle middle-class lens that fails to adequately emphasize the racist and classist policies entrenched in public schools.

Public education as a social reform mechanism has not happened; public schools more often than not reflect and perpetuate the very worst aspects of our society.

If I may, I believe those of us who are adamant about supporting public education are committed to the potential, the promise that public education could be or should be something better, at the very least a model of equity if not a lever for equity.

Related to the above concern, access to experienced and certified teachers is a key aspect of both how our public schools have failed and how we are currently committed to the very worst aspects of education reform (for example, Teach For America and value-added methods for teacher evaluation).

Derek Black has compiled a powerful and important examination of Taking Teacher Quality Seriously.

See the abstract:

Although access to quality teachers is one of the most important aspects of a quality education, explicit concern with teacher quality has been conspicuously absent from past litigation over the right to education. Instead, past litigation has focused almost exclusively on funding. Though that litigation has narrowed gross funding gaps between schools in many states, it has not changed what matters most: access to quality teachers.

This Article proposes a break from the traditional approach to litigating the constitutional right to education. Rather than constitutionalizing adequate or equal funding, courts should constitutionalize quality teaching. The recent success of the constitutional challenge to tenure offers the first step in this direction. But the focus on teacher tenure alone is misplaced. Eliminating tenure, without addressing more important fundamental challenges for the teaching profession, may just make matters worse. Thus, this Article argues for a broader intervention strategy. When evaluating claims that students have been deprived of their constitutional right to education, courts should first ensure that states equally distribute existing quality teachers, regardless of the supply. Courts should then address state policies that affect the supply of teachers, which include far more than just salaries. When those remedies still prove insufficient to ensure access to quality teachers, courts must ensure that the removal of ineffective teachers is possible.

And a perfect companion for your weekend reading comes from 1969: “Bullshit and the Art of Crap -Detection” by Neil Postman.

Here’s just a taste:

Thus, my main purpose this afternoon is to introduce the subject of bullshit to the NCTE. It is a subject, one might say, that needs no introduction to the NCTE, but I want to do it in a way that would allow bullshit to take its place alongside our literary heritage, grammatical theory, the topic sentence, and correct usage as part of the content of English instruction. For this reason, I will have to use 15 minutes or so of your time to discuss the taxonomy of bullshit. It is important for you to pay close attention to this, since I am going to give a quiz at the conclusion.

Education, education reform, Poverty, race, racism, sexism

The Butthurt Right, Or, An Outbreak of the White-Man Vapors

June 21, 2016 plthomasedd 1 Comment

…so feared by a patriarchal world…

Audre Lorde

But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.
Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”

Let’s start with a fact that few are willing to acknowledge:

Despite endless debates between and about the Right and the Left in the U.S., there is no substantial Left in the U.S.—a country that is solidly right of center and distinctly so when compared to Canada or European countries with a vibrant Left.

The U.S. Left is Obama and the Clintons—neoliberals who nudge at the left edge of capitalism and a country in perpetual war.

The U.S. Left is a sort of polite progressivism of rhetoric that sees almost no fruition in action of any kind.

The U.S. Left is a compromising incrementalism that sustains the disease; it is Tyrion.

The U.S. Left meekly raises it hand and whispers: “Might we consider how we could be a tad bit less sexist, racist, and homophobic—and if that isn’t too much trouble, a little less violent?”—before shrinking away for fear of the response.

And those whispers—or God forbid a direct shout—are met with what we have now in the U.S., a newly butthurt Right, an outbreak (dare I say “epidemic”) of white-man vapors.

Nicholas Kristof—nice-guy, cardboard “progressive”—thinks the nasty Left in the U.S. has excluded the Right from academia (and we all know how powerful academia is in the U.S., right? nudge nudge), and the education reform movement (a bi-partisan assault on public education that is entirely a rightwing enterprise) is all atwitter because of the contentious Left/Right divide (Gosh, they are fuming, if those nasty BLM folk don’t settle down, all the Righties will flee the reform movement!).

All of this butthurt on the Right is very much reflected in both the rise of Trump in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the silliness of Kristof and edureform butthurt.

The white-man vapors are triggered by Michelle Alexander’s relatively moderate confrontation of the New Jim Crow, the polite left-of-center Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the Norman Rockwell Obama family just as they are accelerated by BLM, Cornel West, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

And the butthurt messages come from faux-progressives (Kristof) as much as they come from the rabid Right—political leaders, religious leaders, and law enforcement publicly stating that gays slaughtered in Orlando deserved the massacre or calling on gun owners to shoot black protesters at Trump rallies and the Republican convention.

The polite and articulate butthurt punditry on the Right, like Michael Petrilli trying to shame BLM for having the audacity to name racism “racism,” is very little different from the bully racism of Trump; in fact, they are an inseparable part of the U.S.’s conservative nature reflected in the necrophilic South.

In fact, the U.S. once chided the South for its backwardness, its illogical Bible thumping and gun toting, but we stand today in a U.S. where the essence of the entire country is just like that South.

The white-man vapors are upon us, but we must not fall prey to the same-old faux-liberal solution to yelping Rightwingers; we must not shrink against the fears of the most powerful people in the country who see their ill-gained fortunes and power slipping away.

No, the butthurt Right is a sign that women, black and brown people, the LGBT+ community, and people of all faiths and nationalities are demanding to be heard, are standing on the right side of history, which is ironically on the Left.

Higher education does not need a diversity of thought that includes traditional bigotry, misogyny, and a blind faith in disaster capitalism.

And let’s hope the neoliberals (self-identified as both Right and Left) throw up their hands and exit stage right the education reform movement—which has rained terror on the vulnerable populations of students who need our public schools the most.

James Baldwin wrote in The Nation (July 11, 1966), “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer.”

He was naming racism “racism,” both in the acts of specific police officers and as a systemic reality of the U.S. codified in the judicial system.

Baldwin was not being impolite. He was not ostracizing the Right or shaming white male patriarchy.

Baldwin was speaking necessary truth to power—and it resonates to this day because the butthurt Right slips into the vapors every time they are held accountable for the wreck of the ship they built and captained.

The barely audible Left in the U.S. has pushed the door slightly open to the House White Male Privilege built.

The owners are clutching their pearls as they lean against that door chastising the intruders to please simmer down.

We must not step back. We must push the door open, throw out the Masters, and start anew.

deficit thinking, Education, education reform, Poverty, privilege, race, racism

Arrogance: Service, Not Saviors

June 17, 2016 plthomasedd 6 Comments

Beyond the obvious—that they are all joined by the field of education—what links the National Reading Panel (NRP) and No Child Left Behind, the edureform documentary propaganda Waiting for “Superman,” Teach For America, and edusavior Steve Perry?

Arrogance.

While I count myself among English language arts (ELA) teachers who are skeptical of the Great Books mindset—that we have essential books all children must read—I am moved today to endorse how many of those works remind we puny humans about the folly of pride. Not the “I am proud of you daughter/son” pride, but the arrogance pride.

The “‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'” kind of pride.

What on earth possessed politicians to form the NRP to find out what we know about teaching children to read? Did anyone point out that we have had a vibrant field of literacy in the U.S. for a good century? Isn’t it sort of obvious that we have dozens upon dozens of people across the U.S. who know exactly how to teach children to read (and have known for decades)?

But it isn’t just the teaching of reading.

Naive experts, often journalists, every week roll out yet another book in which she or he researches a field in which real experts in that field have been doing authentic work for decades—the history of teaching!, how to teach poor children!, the glory of 10,000 hours of practice!

Paternalistic, self-important, blowhard politicians daily puff up in front of the public to be that “Superman” at the center of the great lie documentary noted above that ironically serves as a perfect representation of everything that is wrong with education reform.

But one need not go back to that complete failure of film making. Try within the last week.

Educators and activists Andre Perry and Jose Vilson (see also) have assumed the mantle of speaking truth to the cult of personality that is Steve Perry.

I consider myself a student of Andre Perry and Vilson, as I work to navigate my own white male privilege in a way that serves others—specifically those marginalized by race and class.

I am a product of white privilege and colonialism, and therefore, must not serve those corrosive forces.

Here, I urge you to read Andre Perry and Vilson, but also to act upon their messages.

And I want to offer a tentative framing informed by their charges.

First, I am compelled by the new 30 for 30 series on O.J. Simpson to suggest that Simpson himself is a cautionary tale about the dangers of white privilege and the costs of whitewashing blacks in order for them to be allowed into mainstream society.

Next, I find troubling parallels in the work of Steve Perry with powerful blacks (Bill Cosby, Clarence Thomas, and Simpson) who negotiate the whitewashing in their favor at the expense of all other people of color.

The demonizing of dreadlocks, the finger-pointing at sagging pants, the judgmental finger-wagging at black English—yes, these are the tools of white privilege, but they also serve the cult of personality unmasked in Steve Perry, for example, by Andre Perry and Vilson.

Finally, although specific people have to be addressed when confronting the cult of personality, the problem is that those people are serving larger forces that are driving education reform, a movement that uses “civil rights” as a mask to implement policies that are perpetuating colonialism and whitewashing.

“No excuses” charter schools committed to “grit” are about “fixing” black, brown, and poor children.

Zero tolerance policies and grade retention policies disproportionately turn black, brown, and poor children into criminals and drop-outs.

High-stakes testing and accountability produce and perpetuate so-called achievement gaps among race and social class—as well as gate-keep in order to keep “other people’s children” in their place.

Teach For America fuels the historical inequity of access to experienced and certified teachers: White Students Get Experienced Teachers, While Black Students Get Police In School.

Whether the face of education reform is Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Geoffrey Canada, or Steve Perry (or the long list of celebrities who decide education is their hobby), and while we must necessarily confront each person as we confront what they represent, the ultimate challenge in rejecting edureform while also calling for building public education as a vehicle for equity and liberation is to call colonialism “colonialism,” to just say no to policies and practices designed to erase who children are so that they can be assimilated into society.

There are profound and significant differences in Andre Perry’s work, Vilson’s daily classroom teaching, and Steve Perry’s bloviating (think Donald Trump).

Andre Perry, Vilson, and Chris Emdin, for example, celebrate black students, their humanity as inseparable from their blackness—while Steve Perry celebrates Steve Perry as one who erases the black from children in the service of white privilege.

We are way past time to stop believing in and listening to these false idols, self-proclaimed “Super(wo)men.”

Ozymandias, please recall, was a fool in king’s clothing whose words mocked him:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Let’s not form any more panels, let’s not crown any more edusaviors, let’s not print and/or buy any more bestselling books by educelebrities (who have never been teachers), let’s not worship at the altar of hollow Ted Talks.

Just as we didn’t need the NRP to “know how to teach children to read,” we have ample knowledge right now how to eradicate racism and classism in our society and our schools.

Edureformers, edusaviors, and educelebrities are in the service of keeping us from that vital work.

As Andre Perry asserts:

Let’s be clear: Belt wearing isn’t the reason white children are educated in wealthier schools. Haircuts and etiquette classes don’t lead to the technological innovations of Silicon Valley. Lower incarceration rates aren’t because whites use drugs less often. The wage gap isn’t caused by white men’s hard work ethic.

But social and educational inequity is the consequence of white privilege.

So I ask now that you listen to carefully and then act upon Chris Emdin‘s confrontation of edureform as colonialism and what choices lie before teachers:

What I am suggesting is that it is possible for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to take on approaches to teaching that hurt youth of color….

I argue that there must be a concerted effort…to challenge the “white folks’ pedagogy” that is being practiced by teachers of all ethnic and racial backgrounds….

The time will always come when teachers must ask themselves if they will follow the mold or blaze a new trail. There are serious risks that come with this decision. It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student [bold emphasis added]. (pp. viii-ix, 206)

Especially in our schools, and especially among our most vulnerable students, we need service, not saviors.

Critical Pedagogy, Education, George Carlin, privilege, race, racism

Bigotry, George Carlin, and My Critical Journey

June 13, 2016 plthomasedd 3 Comments

As I have noted many times, George Carlin and Richard Pryor were instrumental in saving me from my redneck past.

As a frail, anxious, and highly insecure teen, I sat in my room alone listening to their comedy albums over and over—memorizing, yes, but listening very carefully because I wanted to understand what these men were saying.

These were revolutionary ideas to a redneck in South Carolina in the 1970s.

With the death of Muhammad Ali, I have been drawn back to my Classic Gold collection of Carlin’s first three albums, anchored for me by his “Muhammad Ali – America the Beautiful” on Class Clown:

But as I have been listening, my recognition that Carlin and Pryor are foundational to my critical journey—especially as an educator—has been shaken by coming back to Carlin as I sit in my mid fifties.

Two routines—”White Harlem” and “Black Consciousness” on Occupation: Foole—have pushed me even further into the tension that exists in pop culture, a tension I have examined regarding Marvel Comics Captain America:

And as I have been contemplating these routines, mostly about race and the politics of race, the Orlando massacre has forced me to highlight what is possibly the most important joke from Carlin for me in terms of everything it represents about why I was drawn to his work, why it still speaks to me, and why I am deeply concerned about both of those.

Carlin was born a couple years before my father and we are separated significantly by regional and religious backgrounds; however, we still share some commonalities that distinguish us from younger generations.

During Carlin’s riff on his old neighborhood—Morningside Heights bounded by Columbia University and Harlem, and labeled as “White Harlem”—he offers his sharp observation about language, noting that in his time, the words “fag” and “queer” meant different things: A fag, Carlin explains, is someone who wouldn’t go down town with you to beat up queers.

The audience roars on the albums—and I am forced to contemplate the ugliness beneath the laughter.

Carlin as social critic and master wordsmith always laid the world before us—and in his routines, characters, and rants, I believed him to be critical of that world he portrayed.

But just as Captain America’s popularity reveals the very worst of mainstream U.S. bigotry (regardless of the creators’ and many writers’ and artists’ since intentions), I see beneath Carlin’s routine that the audience response is about laughing at marginalized people due to sex or sexual identification.

Carlin’s race riffs seem to be as problematic. White Harlem? Really?

Carlin also explains that if you put five really white guys with black dudes for a while, the white guys will start to talk, act, and walk as the black guys do.

I think Carlin genuinely valued his growing up close to and in black culture, but I am not sure he understood appropriation—and I am certain his audience did not.

When a Sport Illustrated article repeated praises a female Olympic swimmer by framing her as “like a man” (at the subtle and seemingly harmless-but-not end of the scale) and when fifty people are slaughtered for being in a gay nightclub just a year after nine people were slaughtered in a church for being black, I have to ask are these routines by Carlin funny? Were they ever funny?

And, for me this is important, how complicit is Carlin in perpetuating the horrors of homophobia, sexism, misogyny, and racism?

It seems a very privileged thing to sit in a theater and laugh at a man, self-proclaimed foole, telling jokes and using dirty words:

I memorized Carlin and Pryor—and I took their routines to school everyday as a shield against getting beat up, probably not against the threat of physical abuse but getting beat up socially and psychologically because I was skinny and insecure—I simply was not man enough, I feared.

In the late 1970s, I was entirely unaware that I was already shielded from those threats in most ways, being white, male, and heterosexual.

I was entirely unaware of how cruel and wrong this world was and is, even though Carlin and Pryor had opened the door for me to discover all that in the coming years of college.

My critical journey has been a tremendously privileged one—one in which I have been afforded the role of witness, informed by James Baldwin and many others who have been passengers.

Just as Kurt Vonnegut taught me the sacred value of kindness, Carlin and Pryor proved to me that words matter—but our critical journey must step beyond words even as we correct them.

In a year, we have placed at our feet the Charleston Massacre and the Orlando Massacre. I find little joy in listening to Carlin because I must ask: What are we going to fucking do?

race, racism

On Bravado: “He Was Willing to Speak His Mind”

June 10, 2016 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Why did you listen to that man, that man’s a balloon

“Friend of Mine,” The National

Some day soon, we will be able to look back at 2016 through the more nuanced lens of history, and part of that re-creation must include the recurring praise “He was willing to speak his mind.”

A coincidence of history, in fact, has brought us this refrain for two men: Donald Trump and the recently deceased Muhammad Ali.

Right-wing apologist and commentator Cal Thomas has equated Trump and Ali, mostly as an attempt to mask Trump’s racism and all-around bigotry as part of his political appeal:

If there is one explanation for Donald Trump’s success it is this: Unlike most Republicans, he fights back. He may not have the late Muhammad Ali’s finesse, but he sees himself as more than capable of dealing a “knockout” punch to Hillary Clinton in November. That ought to be the goal of any GOP presidential nominee.

Even among Ali’s most ardent supporters—former combatants in boxing, major sports figures, friends, and relatives—Ali’s brashness, bravado is highlighted as a central reason for his greatness (praise that sounds a great deal like why supporters of Trump explain his appeal as a presidential candidate):

“Ali was one of the first athletes to speak his mind, and that opened the door for the many who do so today. … He freed us all in that way.” The man who sang those praises for Ali was Derek Jeter, the retired Yankee shortstop who never uttered a controversial, or even particularly interesting, statement his entire career. And why would he? His sponsors — Nike, Gatorade, Ford, Movado, Gillette, Visa — would not look kindly on, or write checks to, a rabble-rouser.

In a country where free speech is mostly protected, “speaking one’s mind” doesn’t really rise to the level of why we should praise anyone.

To be blunt, any fool can speak her/his mind—and Trump is showing us how this can generate great wealth and popularity.

Although this is an urgent distinction now, I hope with the passing of time, we can come to see that bravado is not a simple thing.

Trump’s bravado is all show; he is a balloon—air puffing up a thin veneer. As a business man—his signature bloviating about Success!—he came from wealth and privilege (not self-made, our greatest myth in the U.S.), has run multiple businesses into bankruptcy (a cowardly way to function for such a bully), and would have earned far more money investing instead of his business ventures.

Trump is all false bravado. His bluster is irony.

Trump is a shell game best represented by his Trump University. In short, he is the personification of everything that is wrong with capitalism.

Muhammad Ali is the bravado of substance. When he told us he was pretty, he was pretty. When he told us he was The Greatest, he was The Greatest.

Ali was more genuine, more successful, and more dignified in one thirty-minute interview than Trump has been in his entire cartoon life:

But even at that, Muhammad Ali is not a major figure in human history because of his bravado—not because he was willing to speak his mind.

Again, any fool can do that.

Muhammad Ali is The Greatest because of what he said, and the moral stand that he took at great personal sacrifice.

Muhammad Ali was on the right side of racism and militarism (Vietnam specifically) when few others were, and he was willing to take that action even as a significantly marginalized human in a country begrudgingly confronting its de jure racism.

Muhammad Ali lived his ethics before himself, and we must not allow his public persona, a purposeful mask of his making, to distract us from his substance.

Trump is all Self, to the detriment of others, any others. He is a buffoon, as his ridiculous hair, facial gestures, and clown suits literally reveal to us.

Bravado is neither inherently good or bad. But we must resist to praise anyone for “speaking her/his mind.”

Trump’s hollow bravado is an embarrassment to humanity, and it is upon us now to embrace with ample apologies the genuine bravado of Muhammad Ali who never rose to perfection but lived on the right side of history regardless of the costs to his own Self.

AlterNet, Charter schools, Education, education reform, Equity, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, privilege, race, racism, SAT, Segregation, Testing

9 June 2016 Reader: School Choice, GPA v. SAT/ACT

June 9, 2016 plthomasedd Leave a comment

I. School Choice, Charter Choice

Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City, Nikole Hannah-Jones

When the New York City Public Schools catalog arrived in the mail one day that spring, with information about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new universal prekindergarten program, I told Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school. Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means “liberated” and “free” in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child deserved access to “good” public schools felt like implying that children in “bad” schools deserved the schools they got, too. I understood that so much of school segregation is structural — a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.

One family, or even a few families, cannot transform a segregated school, but if none of us were willing to go into them, nothing would change. Putting our child into a segregated school would not integrate it racially, but we are middle-class and would, at least, help to integrate it economically. As a reporter, I’d witnessed how the presence of even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a school would be neglected. I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the “good” public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is nothing harder than navigating our nation’s racial legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn’t believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. “Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?” he asked. “Are we putting her at a disadvantage?”

Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era

Just as mass incarceration from the war on drugs continues institutional racism once found in slavery and Jim Crow, education reform, especially the “no excuses” charter school movement, resurrects a separate but equal education system that is separate, but certainly isn’t equal. The masked racism of mass incarceration and education reform share many parallels, including the following:

Both depend on “racially sanitized rhetoric,” according to Alexander, that thinly masks racism. “Getting tough on crime” justifies disproportional arrests, convictions and sentencing for African Americans; “no excuses” and “zero tolerance” justify highly authoritarian and punitive schools disproportionally serving high-poverty children of color.

Both depend on claims of objective mechanisms – laws for the war on drugs and test scores for education reform – to deflect charges of racism. Alexander recognizes “this system is better designed to create [emphasis in original] crime and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals, rather than to eliminate crime or reduce the number of criminals,” (p. 236) just as test-based education reform creates and does not address the achievement gap.

Both depend on racialized fears among poor and working-class whites, which Alexander identifies in the Reagan drug war agenda: “In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the ‘excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse’ and thus built on the success of the earlier conservatives who developed a strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race” (p. 48). The charter school movement masks segregation within a progressive-friendly public school choice.

Both depend on either current claims of post-racial America or the goal of a post-racial society: “This system of control depends far more on racial indifference [emphasis in original] . . . than racial hostility,” Alexander notes. (p. 203)

Both depend on a bipartisan and popular commitment to seemingly obvious goals of crime eradication and world-class schools.

Both depend on the appearance of African American support. Alexander explains about the effectiveness of the war on drugs: “Conservatives could point to black support for highly punitive approaches to dealing with the problems of the urban poor as ‘proof’ that race had nothing to do with their ‘law and order’ agenda” (p. 42).

This last point – that African Americans seem to support both the war on crime and “no excuses” charter schools – presents the most problematic aspect of charges that mass incarceration and education reform are ultimately racist, significant contributions to the New Jim Crow.

For example, Carr reports that African American parents not only choose “no excuses” charter schools in New Orleans, but also actively cheer and encourage the authoritarian policies voiced by the schools’ administrators. But Alexander states, “Given the dilemma facing poor black communities, it is inaccurate to say that black people ‘support’ mass incarceration or ‘get-tough’ policies” because “if the only choice that is offered blacks is rampant crime or more prisons, the predictable (and understandable) answer will be ‘more prisons.’ ” (p. 210)

New Orleans serves as a stark example of how this dynamic works in education reform: Given the choice between segregated, underfunded and deteriorating public schools and “no excuses” charters – and not the choice of the school environments and offerings found in many elite private schools – the predictable answer is “no excuses” charters.

II. GPA v. SAT/ACT

Study: Colleges Put Students Into Remedial Classes Who Don’t Need Them

The Alaska study, conducted by a regional research laboratory funded by the U.S. Department of Education, found that SATs, ACTs and the placement tests used by the University of Alaska were all poor predictors of how a student might do in a college-level math or English class. Many students who did well on these exams bombed their college classes, and vice versa. Instead, the researchers found that if college administrators had simply looked at the students’ high school GPAs, they would have done a much better job at figuring out who needs to relearn high school material and who doesn’t.

“We definitely should be including GPAs when assessing college readiness,” said Michelle Hodara, the lead author of the study and a senior researcher at Education Northwest. “We found the same thing that community college researchers and practitioners are finding, that high school GPA is a really powerful measure of college readiness, even for students who want to earn a four-year degree.”

Developmental education and college readiness at the University of Alaska

This study examines the postsecondary readiness of first-time students who enrolled in the University of Alaska system over a four-year period. The study calculates the proportion of students considered academically underprepared for college and how placement rates for developmental education (that is, non–credit-bearing courses) vary for different groups of students. The study also determines the proportion of students placed in developmental education who eventually enrolled in and passed college English and math. Finally, the analysis looks at whether high school grades, rather than exam performance, are a better predictor of success in college-level courses.

Results show that developmental education rates were higher in math than English for students pursuing any degree type and increased as the gap between high school exit and college entry grew. Among students pursuing a bachelor’s degree, developmental placement rates were highest for Black students from urban areas of the state (in math) and Alaska Native students from rural areas (in English) compared to all other student groups. Almost half (47 percent) of students placed in developmental courses eventually passed college English and almost a quarter (23 percent) passed college math. For students who enrolled directly in college, high school grade point average was a stronger predictor of college-level English and math performance than were SAT, ACT, and ACCUPLACER scores. Secondary and postsecondary stakeholders can use the findings to help identify students in need of support to be college-ready and to consider further conversation and additional research regarding whether and how to use high school grade point average as part of the placement process.

Former College Board Exec: New SAT Hastily Thrown Together; Students: March SAT Recycled in June

Manuel Alfaro is the former executive director of assessment design and development at the College Board.

Beginning on May 15, 2016, Alfaro has published a series of posts on Linkedin in an apparent effort to reveal the haphazard construction of the new SAT, released and first administered in March 2016 and again, in June. (He is also posting info on Twitter: @SATinsider.)

Below are excerpts from Alfaro’s Linkedin posts, all of which provide an enlightening read concerning the sham Coleman has thrown together and labeled the “new SAT.”

Adrienne Rich, Childhood, corporal punishment, inequity, Poverty, privilege, race, racism, sexism

Doubling Down (Again) on the White Man’s World

June 7, 2016 plthomasedd Leave a comment

A decade ago, I was confronted with an incredibly uncomfortable situation when my first-year English class overwhelmingly believed the Duke lacrosse team was innocent and the woman accusing them of sexual assault was fraudulent.

There was a significant mixture of irony in the tension resulting from my trusting that the class—atypically majority male at a university consisting of mostly privileged and white students—was biased by their collective and individual privilege as that conflicted with the eventual revealing that the Duke lacrosse team was in most ways innocent (although I would argue that is a simplistic conclusion supported by technicalities of law): the irony, of course, being that I—white, male, and privileged—was proven wrong about my claims of the U.S. being, in the language of today, a country in which white male lives matter most.

Just this May, another class included, again atypically, about a third black students, some of whom were eager to argue for corporal punishment and then several of the black male students felt compelled to speak up for males wrongly accused of sexual assault.

At that, I asserted that in the U.S. today it remains easier to be a male wrongly accused of sexual assault than to be a woman actually raped or sexually assaulted.

But I could not have anticipated both the Baylor University scandal and then the Brock Turner rape judgment and sentence, which has been followed by a disturbing pair of commentaries by Turner’s father and a female childhood friend.

The light sentence of Turner, by a judge who like Turner attended Stanford University, was justified because of the consequences this rape would have on Turner’s life. Turner’s victim has rebuked this decision in her own statement.

Both the Turner sentence and the Baylor scandal returned me to my examination of The Martian, an unintended allegory of the hyperbolic concern in the U.S. for the white male at the expense of women and people of color.

Having been raised in the sexist and racist South, I have spent my adult life—going on four decades—working against my privilege and learned bigotries.

I am aware of and fearful of whitesplaining and mansplaining, the white gaze and the male gaze in every interaction I have in both the real and virtual worlds. I shudder to think, on social media especially, how often I creep toward the line crossed by vicious male trolls, how often women and people of color see in my words the very things I abhor.

As a writer, I am hyper-aware that my one-more-white-man’s voice is crowding out space for women and people of color; we simply do not need more white male perspectives.

As a scholar and academic, now full professor and tenured with a significant body of published works, I am equally hyper-aware I continue to do the same in academia.

Much of my work has been devoted to calling out racism, but I have also addressed misogyny and mansplaining often. In both cases, I have tried to confront the inevitable “yes, but” from men and whites.

But I look at the one picture of Turner, and I see me—white male. I think about the judge in the case, and I am among the disproportionate number of white males in power in the U.S.

What woman would trust me, especially from a distance? Why would black and brown people believe my solidarity?

And while I am writing about me, this is not about me; this is about the daily doubling down in the U.S., proving that white male lives matter most—and the corrosive consequences for everyone.

That fact—the light sentence for Turner, the failure to hold police officers accountable for taking black lives—sustains a hostile world for everyone; we are pitted daily against each other because the greatest threat to power is solidarity.

I will continue to name misogyny, racism, and child abuse—even as that work pushes my voice farther the margins.

As a privileged white male, I am insulated enough that I can offer these observations that remain mostly about my own minor inconveniences that are devastating realities for vulnerable populations and people oppressed because of race, gender, sexuality, or age. As a privileged white male, I seek to use my privilege to eradicate privilege.

But most of all, my greatest act of solidarity remains my role as a student—I listen, I read, I heed.

And even then, I fall short.

I have failed enough women, children, and people of color to last a dozen life times—and “I’m sorry” seems trivial against that.

White male privilege has created a vicious world that needs to be dismantled, and in its place, we must imagine something better, a world brought forth from the mouths and minds of those rendered less human and thus more aware of the beauty and grandeur of being human.

•

As Adrienne Rich offers, “the sea is another story/ the sea is not a question of power.”

Most people know “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but the Turner verdict and sentencing remind us of what Lord Acton offered next: “Great men are almost always bad men.”

Daily, this is proven true as we watch white males double down again and again on white male lives mattering most.

Education, education reform, Grit, Poverty, race, racism

Defund the “Grit” Industry: Alternatives to Tough and Duckworth

June 6, 2016 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Once edujournalist Paul Tough and “grit”-genius Angela Duckworth realized their significant contributions to the “grit” industry were gradually being unmasked, they discovered ways to cash in on backpedalling (slightly) to keep the train rolling.

Regretfully, many very good people have praised Tough and Duckworth for their much-too-late and way-too-little—somehow ignoring the incredible damage that has been done to vulnerable populations of students—and even recommend Tough and Duckworth’s “new” books.

Please, I beg of you, do not forgive and forget, and especially do not fund further the “grit” industry.

Let me offer instead a few alternatives:

Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

9781250056115