Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (17 page)

After writing their poems, an activity of about ten minutes, the students shared them in small groups of six or seven students, each group facilitated by an older student-orientation leader. Following the small-group discussion, students were invited to come forward to microphones set up around the meeting room and read their poems to their new classmates. It was exciting and inspiring to see how many students wanted to share their poems, sometimes with their papers shaking in their nervous hands, yet still stepping forward to the microphone. Although the diversity in the room was apparent, the less obvious similarity of experiences started to emerge as students quickly made connections to one another’s lives. When given a chance to evaluate the activity later, the students’ comments revealed what had been learned: “Even White suburbia has culture”; “Although we have a lot of differences, we also have many things in common. This is an amazing group of people!” Embedded in this activity were all three of the ABC’s—affirming the identities of each woman as she read her poem, building community as they found common ground, and cultivating leadership of the student volunteers who honed their facilitation skills in this very diverse context.

Sometimes we allow students to wait too late to partake of what we are offering them. As dean, I often met with seniors who were trying to make sure they had taken all the required courses needed for graduation. I observed to my disappointment that some of the seniors I talked to had waited until the last semester of their senior year to satisfy the “multicultural” requirement. Although the requirement was broadly defined to include a wide variety of courses focused on people of color in the United States or in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East, some students seemed to have delayed as long as they possibly could before exploring this new territory. My concern about this delay was that if you wait until your senior year to broaden your perspective in this way, you lose the opportunity for your new learning to inform your interaction with your fellow students over an extended time. Wouldn’t it be better if students could get exposed to multicultural perspectives in their first year, perhaps as part of a first-year seminar, so that their new learning might help provide context for the interactions they would have with students from the communities about which they were learning?

I tested this idea of early intervention in my own teaching by shifting the enrollment from seniors to sophomores in my Psychology of Racism course, a popular elective course that I taught for many years. Because the course was often oversubscribed, I had given preference to seniors, recognizing that it might be their last opportunity to take it. But when I started giving priority to sophomores instead, the benefit of the course to the campus community increased. The sophomores who emerged from the course with a better understanding of the historical context of racism and the meaning of racial identity in a race-conscious society were able to use that understanding in their interactions with fellow students in ways that positively impacted the campus. These were the students who initiated dialogue groups on campus, brought a multicultural perspective to their student organizations, and began to expand their own horizons by seeking out friendship networks more diverse than those they had before taking the course, and still had two more years to practice those skills before they moved on to the next phase of their lives. Courses that actively encourage cross-group dialogue can be very useful, but they need to happen early in the young person’s college experience for maximum benefit.

A great example of a first-year seminar that affirms identity, builds community, and cultivates leadership is the African Diaspora and the World (ADW) course at Spelman. Established in 1992 as a writing-intensive seminar required for all first-year students, its creation was a faculty-directed effort to reimagine the World Civilization (History) and World Literature (English) core course requirements in ways that would (1) place the African Diaspora at the center of the student’s sociohistorical, literary, and cultural studies; (2) reflect the shifting demographics of the United States and the world; and (3) prepare Spelman women for a new era of diversity and global interaction. Described in the Spelman course catalog as a two-semester course that “seeks to examine the major themes associated with the African Diaspora within a global context and from perspectives that are both interdisciplinary and gender-informed,” ADW is now a signature course at Spelman, considered by many Spelman students to be one of their most powerful and personally defining educational experiences at the college.

A foundational course that speaks to the identity issues that motivated many of them to choose Spelman College, ADW is frequently the one course that alumnae say has most influenced both their career success and dedication to promoting social justice. It connects directly to the Spelman College mission of “empowering the total person,” who not only understands and appreciates the many cultures of the world, but also has a deeper understanding of her own and other cultures of Africa and its Diaspora.

The connection to identity is clear, but it also builds community as a shared intellectual experience, and helps students to understand the diversity within the Spelman community, as our students represent various communities of the African Diaspora. As their understanding of their global awareness expands, their capacity for leadership is enhanced.

As curricular and programmatic innovation is considered, we must also remember that this is not work that can be done well quickly. You can’t bring a complex conversation about race to closure in the two hours of a single afternoon workshop, or even a whole day of resident adviser (RA) orientation. Too often what is accomplished in that period of time is just enough to generate anxiety, and anxiety often leads to avoidance. Put simply, “I don’t want to talk about it” becomes a common response. An article I wrote in 1992 describes the emotional responses that students, both White students and students of color, are likely to have to race-related information, and what we can do to keep them in the dialogue long enough to get to the place where they actually feel the benefit of the conversation.
¹³
Trying to shortcut the process is a bit like treating a child for an ear infection. The doctor will tell you to give the child antibiotics for seven days, but after the second day of medication, the child’s ear feels better and the child’s fussing is no longer about the pain in his ear but about the taste of the medicine. There’s a temptation to stop giving the medicine—after all, the child feels better. But if you don’t give the whole prescription, the ear infection will return and it will come back more virulently. And the next time that antibiotic is not going to work at all. Diversity training, or antiracism training, can be like that. If you just give a little dose, you simply build up resistance. You have to give enough to make some real progress, to get past the initial discomfort, and persist to the point where you can really begin to see the benefits.

If we really want to have these conversations, and have them in ways that help us, it has to be an ongoing dialogue. It is one reason that I recommend the framework of a course as one strategy—a semester includes adequate time to provide context for important social issues, an opportunity to explore the individual and societal implications of the issue, and even help students strategize about what they can do to effect change.

It may seem that implied in these comments is the assumption that we—faculty, staff, administrators—know how to facilitate these conversations ourselves. The reality is that a lot of us don’t. But we can learn. And we can support one another in the process. When I first began teaching about racism in 1980 I was a novice instructor, and I know I made mistakes. But even in my inexperienced state, my students told me that I was changing their lives by giving them permission to talk about race—powerful feedback for a then twenty-six-year old instructor! That conversation is still needed, perhaps more now than ever.

Although some progress has been made, the road to racial equality is not complete, and it appears that some have abandoned the task. But as a child of
Brown
, I know that change is possible, even if it is sometimes slow and not easily made permanent. My father could not attend the graduate school of his choice. His daughter did, as did his grandson.
More
change is still needed. As the door of school desegregation closes, perhaps a new door of dialogue-driven action can open, enabling us to build bridges across divided communities and meet the educational needs of all of our students. We owe it to ourselves and the generations that follow us to try.
Can we talk about race?

Can we reclaim the grand idea—if flawed in initial conception and implementation—of schools as the great equalizer? Will we take the time to understand the role that race has and continues to play in determining who has access to what kind of education?

The Problem We All Live With
. This is the title of a documentary film that a group of students from Boston’s Brighton High School produced in 2004. Graphically and in a dramatic fashion, the students do a comparative analysis of the differences between the education they receive in their city school and the education available to their overwhelmingly White counterparts in a suburban high school. In the film, we are given a tour of a decaying Boston high school, with paint peeling off the walls, leaking roofs, small, dark, and unattractive classrooms. We also see the light, airy, spacious classrooms and facilities of the suburban high school. While the differences in facilities, visually observed, are arresting, what is more affecting are the voices of students, the White students from the suburban school and the Black and Latino students from the city school, as they describe and theorize about the reasons for the discrepancies in curricula, resources, teacher expectations, and support available in the two environments. After you have watched the presentation, it is hard to get out of your mind the plaintive voice of a Black male from the city school as he talks about wanting to enroll in an honors algebra class and twice being closed out because of limited space. His comment is positioned alongside that of a suburban White student who, in her privileged environment, rattles off quickly—as if to suggest that so much is available that she might miss something if she goes slowly—the range and diversity of course offerings, in addition to numerous honors and AP classes in virtually all content areas.

A
Boston Globe
article from November 26, 2006 (Tracy Jan, “School Makeovers, Fueled by Middle Class”) focused on White middle-class parents, some of whom were registering for their neighborhood schools as a group and raising money for their respective schools once their children had enrolled. One group of parents had raised $90,000 to expand the activities, offerings, and budget of their local school. The article’s focus was on the benefits of bringing White middle-class parents back into the Boston public schools, while briefly alluding to the issues that might arise from this fund-raising activity; that is, the White parents having too much control and power at the schools. Neither the article nor the subsequent letters to the editor focused on the questions this scenario raises about the public’s commitment to equal educational opportunity, about our contemporary vision of public education, and how race figures into this vision.

In 2005, in
Hancock et al. v. Commissioner of Education
, a case emblematic of school financing and equalization lawsuits across the country, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts rejected the claim, brought on behalf of students from nineteen school districts, that the state was not meeting its constitutional responsibility to provide equitable funding for an adequate education for children from the low-wealth school districts. In a 5–2 ruling against the plaintiff class, the justices noted, “A system mired in failure has given way to one that, although far from perfect, shows a steady trajectory of progress.” “Progress” was the watchword, not “equal educational opportunity.” Essentially, the court allowed the government to back away from its responsibility to provide equal educational opportunity for all students. (See Cindy Roy, Michael P. Norton, and Amy Lambiasa, “SJC Applauds Education Improvements, Rejects Hancock Case Plaintiffs,”
State House News
, February 15, 2005.)

Charter school advocates—business leaders, policymakers, and educators—extol the virtues of charter schools as an option for the children and youth of urban America. And yet, throughout the country, some of the buildings in which these schools are housed would be considered unacceptable learning environments for children in middle- and high-income school districts. Some charter schools are devoid of gyms, science labs, auditoriums, libraries—all the facilities that African Americans in their historic struggle for equal educational opportunity demanded and often financed themselves when state and local funding was not forthcoming. Has personal choice replaced both the collective demand and the public will for equal educational opportunity for all? A group of Black middle school students in Atlanta provided an apt commentary on the conditions of the charter schools that they and their friends were attending, calling them “bootleg schools.”