RIP Jim Crow
Fighting Racism through Higher Education Policy, Curriculum, and Cultural Interventions
Summary
This book shouts out ways that we can and must respond to the sickening accumulation of racially inspired and systemically sanctioned deaths. Today, we remember the passing of young, Black Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In responding to this event, we are determined to dismantle the alexithymia (indifference to the suffering of others) that pervades our campuses. It is nothing less than a by-product of racism protected by the illusion of democracy.
RIP Jim Crow contains three sections: (1) Antiracist Theory and Policy; (2) Antiracist Administration, Curriculum, and Pedagogy; and (3) Antiracist Cultural Interventions.
Each of the 31 chapters contributes to the normalization of anti-racist policy within academic institutions, antiracist discourse within academic cultures, and institutional praxis that upholds speaking out against racist activity. The hope is that this book will also reduce racism in the broader world through academic relationships with community partners.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the Editor
- About the Book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface … and a Call to Action
- Section I: Fighting Racism Through Higher Education
- Chapter One: Disturbing the Comfortable: Antiracism as an Institutional Value in Higher Education
- Chapter Two: Who’s Afraid of the Black Male Scholar? A Voice from Within the Walls of Academia
- Chapter Three: Racial Profiling, Trayvon Martin, and Preservice Teachers: From Disengagement to Activism
- Chapter Four: An Indigenous Perspective: Ending “Jim Crow” Through Worldview Studies Across the Curriculum
- Chapter Five: Absence of Color: How Higher Education Preparation Programs Are Sustaining Racism
- Chapter Six: Muslim Perspectives on Racism and Equitable Practice in Canadian Universities
- Chapter Seven: “Basta Ya!” “Enough!” “Pa’lante!” A Lesson on Latinidad Struggle and Activism in the Academy
- Chapter Eight: Spiral Dynamic Theory as an Instrument for Praxis: Memetic Racism and Cultural Transfer
- Chapter Nine: Casualties in the Classroom: How Critical Race Theory Is Weaponized to Safeguard White Supremacy
- Chapter Ten: Reducing Systemic Racism: Movements Toward Change in Higher Education
- Section II: Fighting Racism Through Administrative Procedures, Curriculum, and Pedagogy
- Chapter Eleven: Toward a Kinder and Gentler Ivory Tower
- Chapter Twelve: Bridges of Accessibility: Signature Pedagogies in Graduate Education
- Chapter Thirteen: Leading Negotiation: Exploring the Experiences of Aboriginal Teacher Candidates in a Canadian Faculty of Education
- Chapter Fourteen: Antiracist Curriculum and Pedagogy: Teaching Critical Theory, Participatory Action Research, and Narrative Storytelling to Reduce Oppression
- Chapter Fifteen: There’s a Black Kid in the Classroom and I Don’t Want to Piss Him Off
- Chapter Sixteen: Transforming Whiteness in Teacher Education: The Call for Anti-Racist Pedagogy
- Chapter Seventeen: Hands Up, Don’t Shoot! Indicting Remedial Education
- Chapter Eighteen: Dangerous Black Professor: Challenging the Ghettoization of Race in Higher Education Through Life Texts Pedagogy
- Chapter Nineteen: Dissertation Advising and the Apartheid of Scholarship in Higher Education Leadership
- Chapter Twenty: Culturally Competent Faculty for the Future: Leading Forward in Addressing Racial Bias
- Section III: Fighting Racism Through Cultural Interventions
- Chapter Twenty-One: “I Can’t Breathe!” Learning to Respect and Respond to Subtle and Acute Distress Calls
- Chapter Twenty-Two: Internecine Warfare: White Privilege and American Indians in Colleges and Universities
- Chapter Twenty-Three: Evolutionary, Neuroscientific, and Social Psychological Perspectives on Antiracism and Antisexism
- Chapter Twenty-Four: Reconstruction of Enslaved Policy, Procedures, and Practice in Institutional, Political, Academic, and Social Spaces
- Chapter Twenty-Five: Black Learning Matters: Experiences of Exclusion and Lessons for Inclusion of Students of Color in Higher Education
- Chapter Twenty-Six: The Resurgence of Jim Crow in Education
- Chapter Twenty-Seven: When Riot Is Reason: How Higher Education Can Help Eradicate Institutional Racism
- Chapter Twenty-Eight: Blanking Out “[ ]” (Whiteness): Decolonizing Systems of Domination and Reinhabiting Ancestral Place-Cultures
- Chapter Twenty-Nine: Acceptable Forms of Violence in Academia and Ethnic Studies as Defenses Against Racial Inequity
- Chapter Thirty: Hiding in Plain Sight: Championing the Academy’s Responsibility to Expose Racism
- Chapter Thirty-One: Even the Dirt Is Dangerous: Racism in American Study Abroad Programs
- About the Contributors
- Index
This series, Equity in Higher Education Theory, Policy, and Praxis, has been made possible through the outstanding support of the Peter Lang Publishing Group’s North American managing director, Christopher S. Myers, and his highly professional team in the New York office. Special appreciation goes out to Patricia Mulrane Clayton (sales and marketing director), Bernadette (Bernie) Shade (director of production), Sophie Appel (design and production supervisor), and Stephen Mazur (editorial assistant).
This book, Volume 6, RIP Jim Crow: Fighting Racism Through Higher Education Policy, Curriculum, and Cultural Interventions, has been inspired by so many social justice leaders, many of whose names appear in the references at the end of each chapter.
Volume 1, International Perspectives on Higher Education Admission Policy: A Reader, was published in January 2015. Outstanding congratulations and heartfelt thanks are extended to its authors in light of the following decision: In July 2015 Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., of the United States Supreme Court included this book as background reading material for the 2015–2016 “affirmative action” case 14–981 Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, 758 F.3d 633. It’s good to know that our work is making a difference.
Most importantly, I wish to acknowledge the unwavering patience and support that my spouse, Robert Edward Stead, has so generously provided. His belief in both the value of the series and the importance of each new volume has steadied me through moments of exhaustion and uncertainty … and what joy it has been to celebrate together the arrival of each new book! ← xiii | xiv → ← xiv | xv →
How does one begin to introduce a text that challenges the horrors of racism in higher education? Many are the pauses and tears that these chapters have afforded me as they illuminate the intense cruelties of vestigial slavery. We need to confront every form of fundamentalism and polarization whether their sources be past or present, legislative or religious, or even academic custom. Let us follow in the footsteps of the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malala Yousafazi.
As members of the academy, we are privileged members of diverse heritages and contrasting cultures. Beware that this privilege is the foundation of enduring power, for as we interact with our colleagues and students, we constantly choose whether to fight racism or to let it continue unchecked in our professional communities.
Hidden forms of slavery are rampant within the academy, yet these gravely unjust influences can be overcome through new forms of social awareness and determination. It is impossible to underestimate the difficulty that accompanies the confrontation of such pervasive practices, for slavery and its aftermath are simply manifestations of inequity masquerading as academic freedom and democratic expression. Yet, if we each commit to ridding the academy of the racist scourge, we may succeed in creating a peaceful society in which all of us—our indigenous predecessors, those who were brought to our shores in the agonizing clutches of slavery, and those whose forebears immigrated to escape persecution and poverty—live within a culture of difference and mutual respect. Our work is urgent and foundational for generations to come. ← xv | xvi → ← xvi | 1 →
She is a Dangerous Black Female Professor.
—WHITE STUDENT’S COMMENT ON MAKEPEACE’S COURSE EVALUATION
It’s so weird that you’re interested in this stuff [race and multicultural education]. Don’t people say to you, like, “But you’re White”?
—WHITE STUDENT TO FULMER
INTRODUCTION
Scholars have long described the “ghettoization” of race in higher education to suggest the marginality of scholars of color and issues related to difference and justice (see Cummins, 1997; Grant & Millar, 1992). This pattern is evident in practices—such as course, department, and committee assignments—that tacitly position academics of color as the primary or only ones for whom race and racism are central, possibly leading to White students’ distancing of themselves from these issues (see Sidanius, Levin, & Van Laar, 2008, regarding White undergraduates’ racial isolation). To the student, for example, who described Fulmer’s practice as an antiracist White educator as “weird,” and likely to countless peers and colleagues, discussing race is deemed something that is—or should be—relegated to the sphere of faculty of color. Simultaneously, scholars of color are marginalized and their lived experiences repudiated; they may be seen, as Makepeace was, as being too radical or improbable in their perspectives to be trusted. ← 235 | 236 →
Thus, this chapter explores this phenomenon of the ghettoization of race and marginalization of faculty of color in higher education by drawing on our experiences as three women scholars, one White (Fulmer), one Black (Makepeace), and one biracial, Black/White (Deckman), who co-teach and collaborate on research at a predominantly White institution. We name those practices that mark race as important only for the racially “Other,” and argue that while on the surface they purport to counter racism, they actually more deeply entrench it (Stovall, 2006). Informed by the work of educators who have long espoused the power of personal narrative in dismantling and transforming worldview paradigms (e.g., Britzman, 1986; Copenhaver-Johnson, 2009; Deckman & Montilla, 2015; Fulmer, 2012), we offer life texts pedagogy (Fulmer & Makepeace, 2015; Makepeace & Fulmer, 2015) as a means of challenging the racist mechanisms by which faculty of color are positioned as spokespersons or the ones solely responsible for addressing race and antiracist work.
DEVELOPING LIFE TEXTS PEDAGOGY AT A PREDOMINANTLY WHITE INSTITUTION
Many course instructors strive for their classes to draw on students’ needs, interests, and goals for the purpose of connecting students to the curriculum and enhancing relative learning. While critical and progressive pedagogues have expressed the significance of this practice, and practices like it, for over a century (e.g., Dewey, 1938; Duckworth, 2006; Freire & Macedo, 1987), we braid together strands of such constructivist, relational teaching in unique ways to enhance our antiracist goals through life texts pedagogy. Life texts pedagogy is a transformational constellation of practices that helps students make connections between their lived experiences and race/racism through (1) critically examining their own narratives; (2) engaging family/peers; and (3) co-investigating dilemmas professors share from their practice.
In defining “life texts,” we draw on Gadsden’s (2005) description of this concept. She characterizes life texts as “the accumulation of events and circumstances that affect the daily lives of learners and the ways they think” (p. 376). Though Gadsden related life texts to the intergenerational literacy of her study’s participants, we found the term useful in describing our reliance upon our students’ and our own lived experiences and illustrating the ways in which these experiences were brought into our courses as texts to be interpreted alongside published works. We argue that life texts pedagogy helps combat the ghettoization of race/racism in higher education by requiring White students to deconstruct the concepts of White privilege and color-blindness, which is necessary for antiracist work (Gusa, 2010). This was unmistakably clear in one of our courses, Culture and Community in Education and Teaching, co-taught by Fulmer and Makepeace. ← 236 | 237 →
During a few consecutive sessions of this seminar, conversation moved to the use of the word “articulate” to characterize the coherence and eloquence of a Black person’s speech. Makepeace explained to the small, mostly White group her internal dialogue whenever this word was directed at her: She questions whether it is meant as a compliment or if it instead reveals the person’s preoccupation with encountering a well-spoken Black woman. Hearing about Makepeace’s firsthand experiences greatly impacted most of the students, who gasped and intoned their surprise.
Yet, in a subsequent class one student held to her opinion that “articulate” was not a word to be avoided; she raised the topic again, quizzically. It seemed that Makepeace’s prior narrative had little effect on her. Fulmer, though, urged the student, “Take my word for it. We need to think cautiously before using this word with our friends and colleagues of color.” At last, this seemed to have the intended impact, and the student acquiesced, shrugging her shoulders in acceptance. Importantly here, Makepeace, a Black professor, was disregarded, but Fulmer, a White professor, was taken at her word. Hence, even in a course that explicitly confronted racism, denigration of the Black professor’s lived experience persisted.
In what follows, we outline three components of life texts pedagogy in action. This pedagogy relies on a classroom climate of safety established, for example, through storytelling, respectful disagreements, critical analysis of reading material, and video clips, which help students develop the confidence to share what they think, know, and, importantly, don’t know about race. While previous scholars and practitioners have described the value in each of these practices, we unite them in an overarching pedagogy aimed at combating racism through higher education coursework.
PRACTICE 1: STUDENTS CRITICALLY EXAMINE THEIR OWN NARRATIVES
Britzman’s (1986) argument that those from the dominant group must explore their own autobiographies in order to bring about social change through liberatory teaching practices informs Deckman’s life texts pedagogy practice. Inevitably, at some point early in the semester in Deckman’s Social and Cultural Foundations of Education class, after students have begun to interrogate the differences between equity and equality and note the impact of race on educational funding, at least one student will raise the question that is on the minds of many: “But, isn’t [race-based] affirmative action racist?” Some students refer to this constellation of equity-oriented policies as “reverse racism,” perceiving it as discriminatory to the White majority. One White male student described affirmative action as “putting minorities on a pedestal.” His classmates largely did not object to this view. Some nodded in agreement, while others sat in silence. ← 237 | 238 →
The “unfairness” of equity-oriented employment and college admissions policies is a common narrative in our society. Anticipating this, Deckman invites students to discover the silences of unearned advantages in their own stories. She begins by having the class take five minutes to reflect on the prompt, “How did you end up at Ithaca College?” (Deckman modified this prompt from one introduced to her by Mica Pollock.) The class is invited to write whatever comes to mind and is not required to share publicly. Then, Deckman has them read Gebhardt’s (1996) essay, “The Real Birth of Affirmative Action.” The author explains how he benefited from affirmative action through a racial covenant that stipulated that only “Caucasians” were allowed to purchase homes in a particular desirable area. He goes on to describe how this home he bought as a World War II veteran with government financing appreciated exponentially, ultimately allowing him to create intergenerational wealth:
A house that had cost $8,000 in 1952 sold for $180,000 in 1986. As the third generation of the postwar Gebhardt family prepares to enter college, my grandchildren know that if help is needed for ever-growing educational costs, there is a reserve fund in place: one more benefit of affirmative action. (n.p.)
Gebhardt’s story provides a lens through which students in Deckman’s class can examine their own stories.
Often in social justice teaching we ask White students to bear witness to phenomena that they have spent 18 to 22 years of their lives not questioning. They need structured opportunities for beginning to see the world in new ways. Gebhardt’s story does this in two ways. First, it makes a system students are quick to condemn—affirmative action—relevant to their own White lives. Second, it works to disarm defensive reactions among White students because the author is himself White and explains,
My ancestors never held slaves. My family never actively discriminated against African-Americans. I personally never did anything meant to hold black people down. But, like most other white families, mine passively profited from the economic, social, and political preferences and opportunities that were granted to us but withheld from people of color for decades and centuries. (n.p.)
After reading and discussing this article, Deckman asks a volunteer to share her/his story of ending up at Ithaca College.
This exercise works without fail, each semester, regardless of who volunteers. Typically, White students share that a teacher suggested they apply based on some particular programmatic offering. Their parents usually bring them to visit the campus, and in some cases, grandparents help cover the sizeable tuition expense. Deckman takes notes on the board as students share their stories and then asks the class, based on the discussion of the Gebhardt article, what questions they want to ask to reveal potential hidden privilege or accumulated advantage. ← 238 | 239 →
In one instance, a White male student, “Joe,” described failing out of the first college where he matriculated because of “too much partying.” His father forced him to enroll in the nearby community college and then transfer to Ithaca College once he had gotten back on track with his academics. Joe was asked if he felt he had a “safety net” and could thus afford to make mistakes and not do well in college, since he admitted to focusing on drinking and socializing instead of academics.
At first, Joe responded to the whole class that he did not feel as though he had a safety net. He explained that while his father had a professional job with a prestigious higher education institution, “My family is not wealthy.” But after connecting this exercise with Ladson-Billings’s (2006) “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” which introduces the idea of an “education debt” that has been building over centuries beginning with the systematic denial of education to enslaved Africans in America, Joe had the epiphany that he was never really worried about the negative repercussions of his actions. After class one day following this exercise, Joe approached Deckman and explained that he knew he could live relatively comfortably at home while attending community college. Furthermore, his father, having obtained a college degree himself, understood how to navigate the transfer system and was the one who insisted that Joe get his four-year degree.
The Ladson-Billings article, coupled with Gebhardt’s and juxtaposed with students’ own personal narratives, allow students to see systemic processes at play that would otherwise seem irrelevant to their own experiences. This is a key component of using life texts pedagogy to dismantle racism. To be moved to action, students must be convinced there is a problem that needs to be acted on that matters to them and that they are a part of (Bell, 1980). Using narratives helps move issues of race and racism from the realm of the “Other” to something that has directly impacted White students.
Details
- Pages
- XII, 462
- Publication Year
- 2016
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433130687
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781453915806
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781454189565
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781454189572
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433130694
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-1-4539-1580-6
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2015 (March)
- Keywords
- Alexithymia Antiracist theory Antirasist Administration Curriculum Pedagogy Indifference to the suffering of others
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2016. XII, 462 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
