The Social Funding of Race: The Role of Schooling

Our nation is suffused in questions of race and racism. Despite much scholarly and public discussion we struggle to undo long-held assumptions about race and how it functions. This article looks at race from the perspective of a public commodity that the society “funds” in order to make it seem real and intractable. Throughout the article there are multiple examples of the everyday, commonsense things people in this society do to fund the concept and give it meaning from our children's earliest days. The challenge in a society that so “fully funds” race is it seems near impossible to “defund” the concept in teacher education to allow new teachers to approach the classroom as a space where race is not determinant and highly predictive of student achievement.