Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (5 page)

A
, affirming identity, refers to the fact that students need to see themselves—important dimensions of their identity—reflected in the environment around them, in the curriculum, among the faculty and staff, and in the faces of their classmates, to avoid the feelings of invisibility or marginality that can undermine student success.
B
, building community, refers to the importance of creating a school community in which everyone has a sense of belonging, a community in which there are shared norms and values as well as a sense of common purpose that unites its members.
C
, cultivating leadership, refers to the role of education in preparing citizens for active participation in a democracy, and the assumption that leadership must come from all parts of our community. Leadership in the twenty-first century requires the ability to interact effectively with people from backgrounds different from one’s own—an ability that requires real-life experience.

In effective schools, all three aspects are actively attended to and developed. For instance, consider the example I witnessed at a racially mixed “magnet” school in suburban Atlanta. In 2003 I was invited there to be the speaker at a special assembly celebrating Black History Month. The principal, a White male, took obvious pride in telling me about the diversity of his school population, in which several languages are spoken and there is no clear racial majority. Cultural celebrations were common, and the Black History Month assembly was part of a series of such events held throughout the year.

Certainly for the students of African descent, this assembly was an affirmation of their presence in the school. The theme of the Black History Month assembly was “The Souls of Black Folk,” in recognition of the one hundredth anniversary of the publishing of W.E.B. DuBois’s classic text, a fact that in itself increased the visibility of the intellectual history of the African American community and connected the students to local history, as Professor DuBois published
The Souls of Black Folk
while teaching at Atlanta University at the beginning of the twentieth century. My presence as an author and president of Spelman College, the oldest continuing historically Black college for women, also located in Atlanta, reinforced that visibility.

Although the program was focused on the Black experience (affirming identity), a multiethnic, multiracial planning committee had worked together on the program (building community). Seated on the stage with me and the principal were the student leaders of this planning group—young men and women of all racial backgrounds—and all played a role in the program, whether introducing a speaker, reciting a poem, or giving a musical performance. The assembly began with a parade of flags representing the countries of origin of every student in the school, and with greetings in every language. Throughout the assembly it was obvious that attention had been paid to creating a program that affirmed and highlighted the history of one historically marginalized group and simultaneously reinforced the goal of building one cohesive school community.

The assembly also illustrated the third of my ABC’s—cultivating leadership. Inclusive leadership takes practice. The young students who worked together to create this multicultural celebration of Black History Month were given a valuable opportunity to gain that kind of practice, and they surely learned valuable leadership lessons in the process.

The diversity of this suburban Atlanta school is clearly an asset in this example. However, every school leader needs to find ways to affirm identity, build community, and cultivate leadership within the school—even if it is racially isolated. Where do we begin? My reply must be: affirm identity. Our ability to engage our students in the kind of education they need, and that our society requires, depends on this foundational concept from which all else can flow.

“Identities are the stories we tell ourselves and the world about who we are, and our attempt to act in accordance with these stories.”
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I love this quote, because it captures so vividly the meaning of identity. Yet before we can tell the stories ourselves, they are told to us. Our sense of identity—of self-definition—is very much shaped in childhood by what is reflected back to us by those around us. If you were asked to describe yourself using a set of adjectives, and you replied, “I am tall,” “I am smart,” “I am attractive,” “I am outgoing,” or “I am shy,” whatever those descriptors might be, one might ask, “Why do you think so?” And the answer to that question might easily be, “Because that is what people have said about me. That’s the feedback that I have received.” Identity is shaped by the social context in which we learn about ourselves over time. Group identities—gender, race, social class, to name a few—are part of that developmental process.

When we think about identity as it is shaped in schools, one of the questions we must ask is, How do students see themselves reflected in that environment? What stories are being told about who they are? What messages are being transmitted to them in their daily interactions in classrooms and in the school hallways, and by whom? The answer today is different than it was for my parents’ generation. During the school segregation of the pre-
Brown
era, Black students typically attended schools staffed by people who looked like them—educators who shared their racial and ethnic background and knew firsthand the identity stories that were being told at home and in the neighborhood. Even with inadequate school resources in impoverished communities, the shared efforts of the teachers, administrators, and families created stories of success.
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One consequence of the desegregation process in the South was the dismissal of thousands of Black teachers. When predominantly Black schools were closed and the busing of Black children began in southern school districts, Black teachers and administrators were displaced, replaced by White teachers and administrators. Active discrimination on the part of White school officials kept Black teachers out of racially mixed classrooms, particularly in the South.
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Even very experienced teachers who had earned advanced degrees in education at such prestigious northern institutions as Teachers College at Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, and other leading education programs in the North (which allowed Black students to enroll when southern universities did not) found themselves demoted or unemployed.
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Their displacement represented the rapid loss of role models, models of academic achievement, for young Black students. As doors were closing on Black teachers in the 1960s and 1970s, young African American college students interested in teaching were surely discouraged by what appeared to be declining employment opportunities. Meanwhile, doors were beginning to open in business, law, medicine, and other professions during the affirmative action years of the civil rights era. Not surprisingly, Black enrollment in teacher-education programs declined as enrollments in business administration increased.
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The ranks of Black educators still remain well below the pre-
Brown
levels.

Indeed, of the more than 3 million teachers in the United States, only 15.6 percent are teachers of color, 7.5 percent African American, specifically. Most students of color today are being taught by a teaching force that is predominantly White and female, particularly at the elementary school level. Nowhere is the current cultural mismatch between students and teachers more visible than in urban school districts, where White women make up 65 to 76 percent (depending on grade level) of the teaching population and students of color represent 76 percent of the urban student population.
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Can White teachers—male or female—affirm the identities of the students of color in their classrooms? An ahistorical and idealistic response to this question might be, yes, of course. But in his essay “White Women’s Work: On the Front Lines in Urban Education,” Stephen Hancock reminds us that, “instead of providing students, schools and communities with better learning environments,
Brown
created (and continues to create) environments where African American and other minority students and White women teachers share dysfunctional relationships built on fear, ignorance, mistrust and resentment.”
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His description might seem harsh to some, but we cannot wish away the history of hostility that greeted Black students at school in the era of school desegregation, hostility that represented an assault on one’s personhood rather than an affirmation of it. This generation of students and teachers may seem far away from that past, but its legacy lingers in the form of misinformation and stereotypes to which we are continuously exposed. If, for example, your knowledge of African American or Latino communities was based only on watching the real-life courtroom dramas so common on television today—where the frequency of people of color as plaintiffs and defendants is high—or perhaps based on a steady diet of popular music videos, what images would you hold in your mind? We carry a lifetime of these and other images with us as we interact across racial lines. How do those images shape the stories we tell students about who they are and who they will be?

Can any teacher transcend our shared history to affirm rather than assault student identities? Yes, but not without considerable effort and intention. Teachers of all backgrounds must be willing to engage in significant self-reflection about their own racial and cultural identities (a point I will return to later) to understand the assaulting stories they tell without conscious awareness. They also need to be willing to learn deeply about the lives of their students in their full cultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical contexts in order to affirm their identities authentically—with identity stories of hope and empowerment.

In her book
The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children
, Gloria Ladson-Billings documents her classroom observations of both Black and White teachers who told such stories—teachers who worked effectively with their urban African American students, communicating high expectations and inspiring their students’ best efforts. While the teachers differed in style, what they shared in common was a clear and demonstrable respect for the students and their families, and knowledge of the community from which the child came. In return they held the trust of the children and their parents.
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Such community knowledge takes time for an outsider to acquire, and trusting relationships in a school community take time to build. One critical challenge that urban school districts face is that the teacher turnover rate in racially isolated schools with concentrated poverty is high, limiting the opportunity to gain the local knowledge needed to truly understand and then affirm the identities important to the students.
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We must also consider that it is not just the teachers that changed in the post-
Brown
era. The curriculum in 1954, particularly in segregated Black schools, often included some cultural dimension specific to the African American experience. Ask somebody who went to school in 1954 to recite the lines of a poem by Langston Hughes or to sing a verse of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the James Weldon Johnson song once referred to as the “Negro National Anthem,” and it is very likely that you will get a positive response. Today, if you ask a young person of African American ancestry to do these tasks, it is more likely that he or she cannot. But what
are
the words of that song?

There is a story about identity in those words—a story about struggle, resistance, and hope that may seem to some outdated, but that still resonates for many. What songs are our students of color singing together today?

And what difference does it make? If we think about our school environments as an illustrated book in which students look to see themselves, we have to ask, what story is being told, and who is included in the illustrations? As the environment becomes increasingly segregated, what pictures are they seeing? For young people of color in largely segregated schools, are they seeing themselves in the story, and how? They may be seeing themselves among their classmates, but they may not be seeing themselves in the curriculum in meaningful and substantive ways. In all likelihood, they are not seeing themselves among the teachers and they are not seeing themselves in the administration.

What does that mean for their own view about their possibilities, their future? Is there a relationship between invisibility in the curriculum and the underachievement of Black and Latino students? Certainly we know that motivation to learn is related to one’s sense of connection to both the content and the teacher. We know that “how learners feel about the setting they are in, the respect they receive from the people around them, and their ability to trust their own thinking and experience powerfully influence their concentration, their imagination, their effort, and their willingness to continue.”
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