Why is Racism so Hard to Talk About When it Comes to Education?

Why are We Uncomfortable Talking about Literacy and Race?

Anyone who thinks racism is dead either is incredibly naive or sleeps under a rock somewhere far, far away from civilization. Race is an issue that permeates every level of society especially in education. I think the reason race is uncomfortable to talk about is mainstream society's desperate attempt to cover it up and make everyone believe that everything is equal and try to pretend that there is no racial strife of any kind. A great deal of this conditioning happens in the classroom but is it really working?

Society's stratification and interaction problems come out in its education system. In, Race and Ethnicity in Multi-Ethnic Schools by James Ryan, he states that, "Both multicultural and antiracist approaches have made significant contributions to education Their analyses of advantage and disadvantage and their suggestions for practice have among other effects drawn attention to the injustices faced by groups of racial/ethnic students and motivated practitioners to adopt more inclusive teaching practices and increased the life opportunities of some students. But despite these positive achievements most multicultural and antiracist approaches are not (as yet) equipped to analyze the process of representation in schools. White representation remains an important part of their respective approaches. It does not figure directly into the ways in which representation works outside curricular images through for example the so-called "Hidden" curriculum and all interactions that take place in schools. Rattansi also maintains that multicultural and antiracist representations which are uniform and positive and sometimes essentialist often gloss over the division an differences within groups. Finally most multiculturalists and antiracists do not account for how the images presented in the classroom come to mean things to students. They do not take into consideration the ways in which students make sense of curricular materials or the interactions they have with fellow students and teachers." (Ryan, 21)

While multiculturalism wants to educate all students on different cultures the antiracist approach only teaches what students should do regarding the race issue. Either way neither of these approaches address the racial tensions in and outside of the classroom. As the quote says, education is not addressing the actual interactions.
The question begs, "How did we get here?" Some history will help answer it. In 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregated the American school system. While this was a landmark decision, President Eisenhower had to send the United States Army to force southern schools to segregate at the point of a gun. Many in the south were outraged but it was accomplished. That was when we began to have these inter-racial interactions.

There was one significant problem with integration of public schools. Neither the black or the white students were prepared with the necessary cultural and attitude differences that would make this integration successful. Interviewing my mother who grew up in Texas and how she remembered integration in her small town. "Everything changed. It was unheard of to have black students in the school. They were barely acknowledged in society and now they were in school every day. Everything changed." Many of the students in my mother's school did not know how to act because they had never had to learn with black students before. With only the societal template of cursory acknowledgment to work off of that is how these "new" students were treated. In Texas, black people were never invited over to a white person's house and they were only acknowledged in public with a simple greeting. No elaborate conversations were carried on unless there was specific business to be done. And that is exactly what happened in the newly integrated schools. Struggle between the two races was immediate; the black students also had only their societal template to work off of and so they subordinated themselves beneath the white students and did not speak unless spoken to and generally stayed out of the white students way. Teachers, being adults and using their societal template, treated the black students differently as well and in some cases ignored them entirely. It was very hard for black students to get ahead with these societal templates getting magnified in the classroom. People who are not relaxed and feeling good don't learn well.

Seeing this stratification and the inequities it caused; well-meaning, but misguided educators created the above theories and systems to try to equal things out for all of the students. But as stated above, neither of these methods has adequately solved the problem. So how is this best solved? As minority drop-out rates rise, especially with black students, what is the education system and the public supposed to do? We have to study society to find out.

Works Cited

Ryan, James, Race and Ethnicity in Multi-Ethnic Schools , 1999