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caszajkowski-blog · 7 years ago

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Education & The Post-Civil Rights Era

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited educational discrimination, and authorized desegregation suits and the federal government to withdraw funds from schools and other governmental entities receiving federal funds if they did not comply. How has our educational system changed and/or stayed stagnant since the Civil Rights Act has been enacted? Have all 50 states actively complied with the legal changes? Have students benefited or has this legislation simply been idealized?

According to the UCLA Civil Rights Project, in 2014, New York state was declared to have the most segregated education system in America, particularly New York City, while southern states are the most integrated. Although the Brown v. Board of Education decision was well over fifty years ago, Black and Latino students are still attending underfunded schools in low-income areas that are lacking essential resources like quality teachers who are paid a fair salary, college-prep curriculum, and basic supplies.

Not only does this solidify an achievement gap between white and non-white students, it perpetuates what theologian and scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. refers to as the “value gap.” “It continues to justify slavery, segregation, racism, and discrimination. It affords and denies opportunities. It determines who is protected and harmed. It determines who receives the benefit of the doubt or the “deficit of the doubt.” It defines who is qualified, worthy, and deserving” (Anderson 2016). The ways in which dollars get funneled into white communities, private schools, and charter schools, are maintaining the pre-determined path of students based on race.

Glaude speaks of the value gap as the main conflict of humanity, where we as a nation reproduce generations of a social arrangement. This arrangement is a belief that assumes reality, where social practices organize and predict racial treatment. This type of gap reflects fears and definitions of race, where the lack of opportunity reads as failure instead of a societal flaw. Frustration about inequality transforms into counterproductive behavior where we blame, deny, manipulate and normalize the very frustrations which started the conflict.

For countless reasons, based in logic or not, particularly white citizens and politicians fear (yet speak of) equal opportunity as both an American ideal and yet hesitate to engage honestly about what that path would look like. Even though parts of our country do not have the resources to support students through public education, or families as they grow. Despite the disproportionate resources and limitations students of color face, those who navigate their way into higher education do not stop experiencing discrimination. What can we infer about race-relations within institutions that are solely based on acquiring knowledge and heightening our consciousness?

Colleges and universities across the nation are now more frequently exposed and scrutinized for minimizing, disregarding or attempting to cover up explicitly racist incidents, hate-speech, and barbaric social events occurring on their campuses. Parties centered around cultural appropriation, provoking vandalism, racial slurs, and publicly displayed racist symbols remain to be a part of college-culture. News stories exposing universities and interviewing students who have been victimized, excluded and degraded during their college-life are becoming widely recognized but all too common. Statues of white male figures who represent white supremacy and heroic revolutionaries shows the dichotomy of progression and regression.

Ignorance has fueled entertainment for decades. The irony of its existence within educational institutions illuminates the need for alarmingly overdue updates. We must erase the division of public interaction and public policy. Student conduct, administration-intervention, accountability, and zero tolerance policies for racially motivated incidents on campus. The insufficient response to correct this problem supports the notion that modern racism has changed to a subtler form, colorblind racism.

“We can place these incidents within a broader context of race and institutions, suggesting a connection between overt racist expressions and the more covert elements of neoliberal color-blind racism” (Moore, W. L., & Bell, J. M.,2017). Although higher education has widely improved as far as financial aid, inclusivity, campus solidarity, and student diversity, that is not enough.

The website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the controlling legal cases involving racist expression on campuses, are argued by the authors that “explicitly racist incidents operate in tandem with neoliberal educational policies and color-blind racism to mark and reinscribe colleges and universities as white institutional spaces” (Moore, W. L., & Bell, J. M., 2017). News stories are framed in such a way to scrutinize individual states, colleges, and individuals in power, rather than addressing the issue of unequal access of education. Rather than addressing how unequal education is just one element of systematically organized American life.

We are more focused on education as a commodity, an industry, a merit, a personal achievement based on our individual and specific potential, rather than manipulated by history and policy. As a nation, we haven’t fully evaluated education, or the obstacles that have been strategically placed to control the educational system and who is first in line to benefit from it.

More Resources:

When Schools Ain't Enough for Black Boys: Crystal Belle at TEDxTeachersCollege: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7v3FA1gjnI&ab_channel=TEDxTalks

John Oliver: School Segregation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yiYCHMAlM&ab_channel=LastWeekTonight

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caszajkowski-blog · 7 years ago

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Education & The Black Reconstruction Era

History of African American Education

**Influences, State & Federal Government, Laws by the decade**

1867 Reconstruction Act

1900′s: Inclusion of black politicians--> advocating for basic services

Freedmens Bureau--> established primary & secondary schools, attempting to educate both black and white students (funding for black schools was controlled by state government)

1920′s: Few Black Americans received any education until the establishment of public education during the reconstruction period.

Eric Foner Black Reconstruction: An Introduction

The Civil War was a second American Revolution, but not only in the Beardian sense of marking a transition in national power from Southern planters to Northern industrialists, but in the actions of Southern slaves, who transformed a war for the Union into a struggle to overthrow the central institution of Southern life. And when the war ended, blacks organized petitions and conventions to demand civil equality and the right to vote. The suffrage was not simply thrust on former slaves but came, in part, as a result of their own demands. “For the first time in history,” Du Bois writes, “the people of the United States listened not only to the voices of the Negroes’ friends, but to the Negro himself” (230).

The conversation does not start with education or race or class. It starts with the historic policies and practices designed to enable success and poverty, advantage and disadvantage. In 1948, Shelley v. Kraemer (Missouri) courts could not enforce racially restrictive covenants on real estate that prevented “people of Negro or Mongolian race” from buying or living in certain neighborhoods. We see the affects from segregation from this era even today, now referred to as red-lining. It is the problem of residential segregation which also contributed to which families attended which schools.

Before the Civil Rights Act, a prime example of institutional racism was segregation of public education. The disregard for equal access and quality education was seen through the disproportionate allocation of resources, the insufficient funding to ensure black schools could stay open, and little to no regulation or security in low-income communities of color. Students were funneled into districts strictly based on their race, correlating almost directly to the segregated neighborhoods they were growing up in.

The Fair Housing Act became law in 1968, to prevent landlords and lenders from turning away tenants and homebuyers because of their color. Senator Edward Brooke, the first black man elected to the U.S. Senate, pushed to use the act to integrate cities, reversing the effects of housing discrimination. Children of low-income families who are integrated into “high-opportunity” areas achieve higher levels of education because the schools and families are affluent and capable of investing in the resources needed.

Thurgood Marshall is one of the most famous pioneers who strived for the educational opportunities promised to all citizens. As a scholar, lawyer, writer, and activist, he won 29 out of 32 Supreme Court cases. Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955) consisted of five cases fighting to desegregate public schools. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund handled these cases, which were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For the most part, it was argued that “separate school systems for blacks and whites were inherently unequal, and thus violate the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, relying on sociological tests, such as the one performed by social scientist Kenneth Clark, he also argued that segregated school systems tended to make black children feel inferior to white children, thus such a system should not be legally permissible” (Hemingway, 2011).

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caszajkowski-blog · 7 years ago

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Education & The Slavery Era

Social injustice is manifested by using institutions as powerful yet cunning tools to maintain a social hierarchy. Education is a prime example of an institution Countless social scientists, scholars, public officials, political commentators, and investigative journalists are consciously aware and consistently exploring racism as a part of the American legacy. Acknowledging our nation’s relationship to racism, its evolution, and consequential harm to its citizens is our responsibility.

Education and race are inextricably linked to socioeconomic status. To develop strategies to address social, economic, racial or educational inequality, that strategy must be intersectional and involve all components. In America, there is no such thing as a war on poverty, war on drugs, war on crime, you cannot win a battle with one element of American life without seeing the other attachments to one’s identity.

Randall Kennedy defines racial structure as a “network of social relations at social, political, economic, and ideological levels that shape life-chances” …in which the dominant group is advantaged, and the subordinate group is disadvantaged (Kennedy 1997). We are very familiar with inequality, but mostly unaware of the resulting academic achievement gap. Comparing the slavery era, the reconstruction/Jim Crow era, and present day, it is unfortunate how slowly progress happens.

It is horrifyingly accurate how we use the phrase “black and white” when describing social issues and ethical dilemmas… and not just color contrast. During the slavery era, black and white was equivalent with yes and no, entitled and forbidden, respected and shunned, celebrated and shamed, human and property. Education was used as tactic or weapon to hold over non-white individuals, which could simply mean being literate or not. Knowledge is power. That continues to be a mainstream statement and an American ideal. Education is used to categorize people and “races”, measuring their education on a spectrum of value.

10 Reason Why Healing Justice

https://blacklivesmatter.com/healing-justice/

Trauma, violence, and oppression live on and through our bodies limiting our experience, our connection and choice.

Freedom for Black people must include healing that address the individual and collective, the current and the generational pain

Our healing brings us into new kinds of relationships with one another

Healing justice and transformative justice remind us that conflict can be generative and a way to care for each other and learn more about our needs and boundaries

Healing allows us to move away from scarcity and fear and into connection and choice

The trauma Black people feel is compounded, often constant and complex. Building a world that creates space and time for Black people to heal and limits the trauma they experience requires a deep reworking and re imagining of relationships and institutions

Healing, culture and spirit have always sustained us and informed our struggles for liberation

Healing justice allows us a place to practice the care with each other that we each deserve

Healing justice makes care political in a world that harms and dehumanizes Black bodies

Healing justice makes it possible to transform and heal a legacy of trauma for future generations of Black people

Boundless US History: Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.: 1820–1840

Treatment of Slaves in the United States

Education & Access to Information in the Slavery Era:

*Varied from state to state

*Slaveholders remained fearful that slaves would rebel or try to escape

*Most slaveholders attempted to reduce the risk of rebellion by restricting access to information about other slaves/possible rebellions/ degrading the slaves by stifling mental faculties

*Depriving slaves of exposure eliminated dreams/aspirations from awareness

*It was feared that knowledge, reading and writing would cause slaves to become rebellious

*In the mid-nineteenth century, slaving states passed laws making education of slaves illegal

*Virginia 1841: Punishment for breaking law = whiplashes to the slave and $100 to the teacher

*North Carolina 1841: Punishment consisted of 39 lashes to slave and fine of $250 to teacher

*Education was not illegal in Kentucky, but it was virtually nonexistent

*Missouri: Some slaveholders educated their slaves/permitted slaves to educate themselves

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