247d Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Specific U.S. Racial Groups

Specific U.S. Racial Groups

August 1, 2006

Zhou, Min and Susan S. Kim. “Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities,”Harvard Educational Review. 76.1(2006), 1-26.

August 01st 2006 Posted to Asian American

Abstract: “Extraordinary Asian American educational achievement has often been credited to a common cultural influence of Confucianism that emphasizes education, family honor, discipline, and respect for authority. In this article, Min Zhou and Susan Kim argue that immigration selectivity, higher than average levels of premigration and postmigration socioeconomic status, and ethnic social structures interact to create unique patterns of adaptation and social environments conducive to educational achievement. This article seeks to unpack the ethnic effect through a comparative analysis of the ethnic system of supplementary education that has developed in two immigrant communities–Chinese and Korean–in the United States. The study suggests that the cultural attributes of a group interact substantially with structural factors, particularly tangible ethnic social structures on which community forces are sustained and social capital is formed. The authors conclude that ‘culture’ is not static and requires structural support to constantly adapt to new situations.”

Comments(0)

April 20, 2006

Brandt, Deborah. “‘The Power of It’: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives.” Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 105-145.

April 20th 2006 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American

At large, this study traces the changing aspects, practices, and effects of literacy in the 20th century United States through the analysis of more than 80 case histories ranging from 1895 to 1985. The chapter annotated here is concerned with the different challenges and techniques in literacy sponsorship encountered by African Americans due to issues of class and institutionalized racism.

Brandt’s overarching thesis is that “in twentieth-century America, literacy became increasingly reliant on economic sponsorship and grew increasingly vulnerable to the lack of it” (106). Her investigation in this chapter reveals that the history of African American literacy in the twentieth century both supports and complicates this thesis. (Read the article)

20bd

Comments(0)

January 23, 2006

Champagne, Duane. “American Indian Studies is for Everyone.”American Indian Quarterly. 20.1(1996), 77-82.

January 23rd 2006 Posted to Native American

In this article Champagne addresses the concerns of American Indian studies scholars who believe that only Indians are qualified to study Indian life, history and culture. As a counter to these critics’ claims, Champagne writes that, “To say that only Indians can study Indians goes too far toward excluding American Indian culture and history from the rest of human history and culture…Indian nations are human groups, part of the broad history of all humanity, and therefore can be compared with other groups in technology, cultural world views, history and adaptation to global markets and expanding state systems, etc. One does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way” (77). (Read the article)

* Comments(1)

January 10, 2006

Connolly, Mark R. “What’s in a Name? A Historical Look at Native American-Related Nicknames and Symbols at Three U.S. Universities.” The Journal of Higher Education. 71.5 (2000), 515-547.

January 10th 2006 Posted to Native American, The Academy

In this article Connolly examines the arguments surrounding the use of Native American-Related nicknames and mascots at three U.S. Universities: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (the “Fighting Illini”), Miami University in Ohio (the “Redskins”) and Eastern Michigan University (the “Hurons”). After reviewing the history behind these nicknames and examining the controversies surrounding them, Connoly concludes that the attitudes many universities adopt towards Native American nicknames reflects a kind of institutional racism that must be dealt with not just by changing the university’s mascot but by implementing fundamental changes in school policy and attitudes. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

January 4, 2006

West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” Race, Identity and Representation in Education. Ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow. New York: Routledge, 1993.

January 04th 2006 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, African American, The Academy

In this article West announces the emergence of a new kind of cultural politics, marking “a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists” (11). West argues that previous forms of criticism can no longer account for the ethnic, gender and sexual diversity of late twentieth-century society. The new cultural politics that West promotes seeks to “trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in the light of the concrete, specific, and particular; to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing” (11). The new cultural critic, West argues, must work to form alliances with disempowered or disenfranchised groups to enable social action and must learn to critique their immediate work contexts (the academy, museum or gallery) from within (11-12). (Read the article)

* Comments(1)

December 22, 2005

Paul, Dierdre Glenn. Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation: Womanist Thought and Perspective. Questions about the Purpose(s) of Colleges and Universities, Vol. 2. Ed. Norm Denzin, Josef Progler, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Shirley R. Steinberg. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

December 22nd 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, African American

“Through the processes of reflexivity and life history, Paul writes, “I attempt to cohere the concentric spheres of race, gender, and class as they play themselves out in my daily living and multiple roles” (xi). A collection of essays not necessarily meant to be read linearly, Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation documents the author’s own social location as a Black woman in “a racially schizophrenic society, a single mother, a former public school teacher, a teacher educator, and an emerging intellectual” (xi). Just as Paul must live each day through multiple and contradictory roles, so too must the reader of this book encounter linguistic, formal, and narrative multiplicity: an “amalgam of genres and writing styles,” the book is written to promote “disequilibrium” (xii). (Read the article)

* Comments(1)

December 1, 2005

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 17 (1987). 65-81.

December 01st 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, African American

The symbolic order structuring American society—America’s “grammar”—is still dictated by the legacy of slavery, Hortense Spillers writes in this psychoanalytically inflected deconstruction of race and gender in the United States. Beginning with stereotypes of African American women, Spillers analyzes the way African American men are denied access to the patriarchal “name of the Father,” the way African American women are then stigmatized as unlawful leaders of African American society, and the way such a disruption of the patriarchal structure leads not to liberation, but to the disempowerment of all African Americans. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

Moraga, Cherrie. “From a Long Line of Vendidas.” Loving in the War Years. Boston: South End P, 1983. 90-144.

December 01st 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Latina/o American

Cherrie Moraga begins “From a Long Line of Vendidas” with the dedication “para Gloria Anzaldua, in gratitude.” Like Anzaldua’s work, this essay is also a heavily autobiographical account of the way in which gender intersects with race and sexuality. Alternating between journal entries, poetry, and expository writing and combining English with Spanish, Moraga explains how her childhood experiences taught her that as a racial minority and a woman, she was and is doubly marginalized: her brother’s sex, she writes, “was white. Mine, brown” (94). While her brother’s gendered location within the patriarchal system allows him to identify with the white oppressor, Moraga’s gender “fully necessitated my claiming the race of my mother” (94). This identification as a Chicana, however, is complicated. Blending personal narrative with an account of the “historical/mythical” Malintzin Tenepal figure—La Vendida, the native Mexican woman who slept with the Spanish conqueror Cortez and thereby sold out her race—allows Moraga to analyze the cultural prejudice against women and the ways in which women are still coded as “traitors” within Mexican/Chicano culture. (Read the article)

20da Comments(0)

November 21, 2005

Swisher, Karen Gayton. “Why Indian People Should Be the Ones to Write about Indian Education,” American Indian Quarterly. 20.1 (1996), 83-90.

November 21st 2005 Posted to Native American

In this article Swisher argues that, while many attempts have been made to research the unique needs of Indian students in schools, “much research is still presented from an outsider’s perspective” (83). Swisher claims that non-Indian researchers cannot accurately represent life on the reservations, the struggle for recognition and the importance of preserving the language and culture of indigenous tribes. “If non-Indian educators have been involved in Indian education because they believe in Indian people and want them to be empowered,” she writes, “they must now demonstrate that belief by stepping aside” (85). (Read the article)

Comments(0)

November 17, 2005

Williams, Patricia J. “On Being the Object of Property (a gift of intelligent rage).” The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 216-236.

November 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, African American, Court & Policy Issues

Utilizing a combination of feminist personal narrative and legal discourse, Williams analyzes how contract law and the legal institution exercise a “deadening power” by creating in the individual “a passive relationship to the document: it is the contract that governs, that ‘does’ everything, that absorbs all responsibility and deflects all other recourse.” (224) She explores in particular how this quality of contract negatively affects those who have been institutionally (and thus legally) formulated as inferior: people of color and women. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

— Next Page »

0