2158 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » African American

African American

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)

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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 2289

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)

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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)

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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 22c3

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)

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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)

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September 19, 2005

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

September 19th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Pleasures of Teaching Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, The Academy 23b5

In this indispensable and highly influential book, bell hooks (the writing persona of Gloria Watson) writes essays in the varying forms of feminist personal narratives and/or dialogues, based on her experience as a black woman (both student and teacher) in an educational system dominated by a white male ethos. The essays all strive to break down that structure of domination. “Multilayered, then, these essays are meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness to education as the act of freedom.” (11)

Hooks’ work is informed by both feminist pedagogies and the Marxist critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (see his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, abstracted on this site). In the introduction hooks discusses where these pedagogies took her and also the point at which she believes they failed. They lent her the tools to eschew the submission to authority and rote memorization occurring in what Freire calls the “banking system of education” and to practice in their place critical thinking and a democratic classroom engagement with the object of knowledge. But hooks suggests that even these critical systems fail to acknowledge the radical value of the pleasure of learning, particularly in higher education. (Read the article)

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September 12, 2005

Lipman, Pauline. Race, Class and Power in School Restructuring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.

September 12th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, Public School Initiatives

In her book, Lipman examines the effect of school restructuring on two urban junior high schools which she calls Gates and Franklin, located in a mid-sized Southern city. Efforts to restructure these schools (which included giving teachers more authority, creating smaller “teams” of students within classes and forming organizations that promoted dialogue about race) were all thwarted by teachers’ own unacknowledged racial prejudice and by the power wielded by Riverton’s white upper-middle-class parents, school board members and administrators. Lipman concludes that efforts to restructure schools fail to address the needs of minority and low-income students because they tend to reproduce larger social inequalities. (Read the article)

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September 8, 2005

Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

September 08th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, African American, Public School Initiatives, Court & Policy Issues

In this widely-discussed book, Kozol examines the inequalities of the public school system by interviewing teachers, students, coaches and administrators in six of the nation’s poorest urban areas. Kozol compares the day-to-day experience of students in well-funded, predominately white suburban schools to the experience of students living in predominately black and Latino urban areas. Kozol notes that many problems facing urban schools (poor facilities, high dropout rates, large class sizes and underpaid teachers, to name a few) are largely the result of funding inequalities. He suggests that desegregation through school bussing programs combined with a nationwide effort to equalize funding could help narrow the gap between suburban and urban schools. (Read the article)

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September 6, 2005

Delpit, Lisa. “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children.” Harvard Educational Review. 58.3 (1988), 280-298.

September 06th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, Public School Initiatives

In this article Delpit examines the (often unacknowledged) codes and structures that create a “culture of power” in classrooms. She suggests that, while middle-class whites might not be aware of this “culture of power”, minority students are acutely aware of their exclusion from certain codes and discourses. Delpit compares black teaching strategies—which are often more direct and task-oriented—to more process-oriented white teaching strategies in order to show that “progressive” pedagogy often fails to reach minority students because it participates in rather than dismantles the “culture of power”. Ultimately, Delpit argues that teachers should make minority students aware of the culture of power so that they can succeed, while at the same time respecting their individual cultural backgrounds. (Read the article)

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September 3, 2005

LaCapra, Dominick, Ed. The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

September 03rd 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American

The Bounds of Race provides a subtle analysis of the variable role of racial ideologies and traces the interplay between hegemonic constraints and the strategies of resistance to them. The contributing authors take on questions of language, genre, and politics with reference to African American, Anglo-American, African, South African, Francophone North African, British and Afro-Hispanic texts. Individual chapters discuss writings from an array of genres including homily, autobiography, the novel, children’s literature, and political and scientific discourse. Taken together, the essays persuasively argue that the existing canon must be expanded, that the protocols of interpretation must be transformed to make a prominent place for such issues as race, and that the problem of interpretation cannot be posed in the absence of theoretically informed modes of historical investigation.

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