‘Being black is like being a soldier in Iraq’: metaphorical expressions of blackness in an urban community

Metaphor and metaphorical expressions are phenomenon of interest in teacher education research, critical race literature, and research on black communicative practices. Only marginal concerted attention has been paid to students’ metaphorical expressions, and what these expressions might tell us about students’ racial identities and lived experiences. This study explores the metaphorical language that nine black youth used to describe what it means to be black in their social and political context. Data collected through the metaphor elicitation prompt, ‘Being black is like …,’ is presented to probe participants’ understandings of race, racial identity, and urban society. Conclusions indicate that abstract or indirect conversations about race may provide teachers and other hearers of students’ metaphors a greater understanding of and empathy toward students’ needs, experiences, and identities.     

White on White: Researcher Reflexivity and the Logics of Privilege in White Schools Undertaking Reform

I use this paper to reexamine my role as a White researcher on a multi-racial research team. I reanalyze data I collected during an evaluation project to reveal how I avoided seeing race in the schools I visited and how I dodged discussions of race with members of those school communities. By analyzing my own discursive practice, I introduce a series of logics enacted through a variety of strategies that I used to manage race talk. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) an analysis of the strategies I used to sustain White privilege and (2) an examination of the logics of those strategies in order to understand the power they have in reproducing inequity. Only by understanding the self-perpetuating nature of White privilege will we be able to begin to dismantle it. Jenny Gordon is an assistant professor in the Division of Education, School of Education and Human Development at Binghamton University. She teaches foundations courses for elementary education and courses on qualitative research methods. Her scholarly work includes articles on methodological issues pertaining to qualitative research methods and narratives on the impact of race on research and teaching.     

美国民族高等教育快速发展原因探议

推动美国民族高等教育发展的动力有四种：一是黑人民权运动,这是争取教育平等权利的民众动力;二是教会对民族高等教育的支持,这是民族高等教育的原始动力;三是各种基金会,这是民族高等教育的经济动力之一;四是联邦和州政府的立法和财政拨款,这是美国民族高等教育发展的行政动力。     

美国“黑人内阁”的形成及其影响

在罗斯福时代,美国黑人的政治力量显著增高,参与联邦政府决策的黑人数量不断增多,并发挥着重要的作用。1936年夏季,“联邦黑人事务委员会”或曰“黑人内阁”出现。“黑人内阁”的一系列活动提高了广大黑人群众的政治参与意识与能力,它本身也成为黑人政治成就的象征。     

When the levees break: the cost of vicarious trauma,microaggressions and emotional labor for Black administrators and faculty engaging in race work at traditionally White institutions

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to offer insight to administrators and human resource professionals at Traditionally White Institutions (TWIs) about developing action plans that provide meaningful support to Black administrators and faculty who are coping with racial trauma. Operationalizing tenets of Critical Race Methodology (CRM), the counter-narratives presented here are drawn from 15 years of unpublished professional and personal communication created by an individual Black faculty and administrator. The lectures, conference presentations, commencement addresses and other ephemera trace the development of battlements and emotional battle scars over the early years of one scholar-activist’s career at TWIs. The calamitous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is considered in this context both as metaphor and collective psychic wound. As such, it illuminates other instances of vicarious trauma, foreshadows the Movement for Black Lives, and provides a devastating illustration of administrative unpreparedness. Revealing the ramifications of racial trauma can serve to help others who suffer to feel less alone and can provide stakeholders in higher education with valuable knowledge for the sake not only of recruitment and retention, but institutional transformation.     

“Staying Black”: the demonstration of racial identity and womanhood among a group of young high-achieving Black women

Signithia Fordham’s theory of “racelessness” purports that while interacting with teachers, administrators, and peers in the school setting, academically successful Blacks must suppress the racial identities of their home worlds to secure and maintain the label of high achiever. My objectives were to examine how young Black women navigate between racially homogenous public schools in their neighborhoods to a racially integrated setting, and to highlight their involvement in work groups and social clubs as a way of expressing their racial identity and burgeoning womanhood. This study used interviews and questionnaire data gathered from a cohort of high-achieving young Black women in a highly selective honors high school to dispute Fordham’s theory, and to examine the various strategies that these women use to become and remain academically successful. This study revealed that through social club participation these female students are not raceless, and consciously identify as Black, and develop and demonstrate versions of Black womanhood that allow them to negotiate diversity. Implications for promoting racial integration, the development of Black identity, and the academic success of Black female students are provided.     

“American Chimera: The Ever-Present Domination of Whiteness,Patriarchy, and Capitalism…A Parable”

In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a fire-breathing monster with three heads: one of a lion, one of a horned goat, and one of a powerful dragon. Of similar construction is the presence of three structures in US society, whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism, which are overwhelmingly represented, valued, and espoused when examining areas of progress, i.e., family income, poverty rates, high school and college graduation rates, and home ownership. This modern American three-headed beast controls, manipulates, and permeates all aspects of US society irrespective of class, culture, or gender. Using critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, this critically interpretive parable draws from the ways in which whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism function in social, cultural, economic, and educational spheres. The parable tells the story of Sue Libertad and analyzes how this metaphorical Chimera, despite its ubiquity, silently permeates all aspects of her life. Not until a tragic outbreak occurs, does the hegemony of this chimera erodes and Sue.     

‘It is certainly strange…’: attacks on ethnic studies and whiteness as property

In 2010, Arizona passed legislation that attacked ethnic studies in k-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade). Specifically, Mexican American/Raza Studies (MARS) was targeted by the state Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI), and, in effect, would be eliminated by the Prohibited Courses; Discipline; Schools Law (Prohibited Courses Law). This study utilizes document and content analysis to examine both a letter written by the SPI calling for the elimination of MARS, and the text of the Prohibited Courses Law. Framing the work within critical race theory, these two documents work together to normalize and make property of whiteness in Arizona’s public schools, and re-create a hegemonic status quo. In addition, this study analyzes how MARS acts as a site of counter-hegemonic activity by scrutinizing customary discourses as presented in schools and curricula.     

Race and ‘Disability Passing’ in a Chicago Public School Art Classroom

Race, history and visibility have a great deal to do with how disability operated socially and educationally in the Chicago public high school art classroom where I taught for ten years. I am severely near‐sighted, and I am also white, educated and often, but not consistently, able to pass for non‐disabled. A large number of my students were identified as having learning, emotional and behavioural disabilities, diagnoses which were certainly conditioned by the institution, but diagnoses which perhaps also underrepresented the amount of socially and historically occasioned impairment or debility that existed in the low‐income majority‐Black community served by my school. In this article I reflect on the overlapping social performances that occurred in terms of ‘disability passing’, a state that can characterise both hidden and exaggerated or invented impairments. My reflections examine my own individual experience in contrast to the long‐term experience of the African diaspora in and beyond the USA, in order to think about other ways to parse the complex factors determining how disability plays out in educational environments.     

Racial Identity Theory and Peace Education: Tools for the Teacher In All of Us

As people develop a meaningful understanding of racism, they also experience shifts in their appraisals of self and others as members of an unfairly stratified society. Consistent with the premises of Helms' (1995) racial identity theory, these shifts can be explained as transformational processes that have relevance to matters of morality and peace advancement. Individuals who operate at advanced levels of racial identity development overcome the confinements inherent in a racism Zeitgeist and in so doing, learn to accept themselves and others more authentically. This theory can prove crucial to peace promotion in children because it espouses to nurture the integration of self within the broader spectrum of humanity. Educators who transform their selves can also transform their educational practices by disrupting cycles of socialization that adversely influence children's identity formation. They can also contribute to the creation of new structures of socialization. In this paper, I describe this theory and how it applies to peace education.