A Rational Girl in Irrational Times
Colorblind is not enough
Kathleen Parker continues to be annoying, insisting she doesn’t see race (of course she does – but only within her own narrowly-defined terms). Increasingly we are seeing that racial colorblindness does not lead to racial equality – particularly when it comes to teaching children about race.
Learn more about teaching children to be anti-racist at Love Isn’t Enough.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Debbie on July 6, 2010 at 9:57 pm, and is filed under Anti-racism. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 1 month ago
Yesterday in (upper level college) math class, we talked about the study that showed that the only real difference between the performance of the black/hispanic minority students and the Chinese was that the Chinese students had a peer/social network with which to discuss their coursework and the black/hispanic students were trying to do it all alone. It wasn’t poverty. It wasn’t preparation. It wasn’t smarts. It wasn’t hard work. It was having friends with whom you work, friends to encourage you when you are down.
I have 2 black students in the class, and a few hispanic students, and I always feel embarrassed talking about race in front of them; like I shouldn’t mention it. I think the results of the study are important, crucially important, for students to know. I talk about it anyway, swallowing my embarrassment as best I can, trying to confront the topic directly. I still worry that I made some of my minority students feel singled out in a bad way.
about 1 month ago
That’s an interesting study! It makes a lot of sense. But I guess the thing to be careful about is to not imply that students who haven’t been using a group should have known better all along or something.
When I was in law school, it seemed to me that a lot of the other students watched the Black students really carefully, and everything they did was suspect. When one got a scholarship, other students began to criticize the make and model of his car for being “too expensive” – never mind they had no idea where he got that car. When the Black students studied as a group, other students complained that they now had some kind of “unfair advantage” – when of course all of the other students studied in groups, too.
So if some of your students aren’t using groups, particularly minority students, they may have reasons which aren’t readily apparent.