22bd Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Specific U.S. Racial Groups

Specific U.S. Racial Groups

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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September 2, 2005

Anyon, Jean. “Race, Social Class, and Educational Reform in an Inner-City School.” Teachers College Record 97.1 (1995) 69-95.

September 02nd 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, African American, Public School Initiatives

In this article Anyon explores the ways that school reform can fail by observing a reform implemented in a predominately black and Latino grade school in Newark, New Jersey. Anyon argues that “three factors—sociocultural differences among participants in reform, an abusive school environment, and educator expectations of failed reform—occurring in a minority ghetto where the school population is racially and economically isolated constitute some of the powerful and devastating ways that concomitants of race and social class can intervene to determine what happens in inner-city schools, and in attempts to improve them” (70). (Read the article)

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August 25, 2005

Donato, Rubén. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Era. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In this book Donato explains that while many scholars have focused on the African American struggle for equal education during the Civil Rights movement, few have focused on the Mexican American community during this period. Donato summarizes this “silent” history, using as his primary example Brownfield School District in northern California. Donato writes that in Brownfield, “The concern for respecting and preserving the cultural identity of Mexican Americans found itself at odds with the traditional values of the Brownfield school system and the larger white community…Despite the claim that Mexican children were being processed by a neutral school system, public schools across the Southwest were rife with ethnic, linguistic and class biases. If one of the prime values of the Brownfield schools was uniformity, then there was an inherent conflict between the organization of schools and the desires of the Mexican American community” (10). (Read the article)

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Rumberger, Russell W. and Gloria M. Rodríguez, “Chicano dropouts: an update of research and policy issues,” Chicano School Failure and Success. Ed. Richard R.Valencia. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002, 114-146.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In Ch.4 of Valencia’s anthology, Rumberger and Rodríguez address the issue of Chicanos’ high dropout rate, citing the fact that “in 1999 the dropout rate for White, non-Latinos was 7.3 percent, compared to 12.6 percent for Black, non-Latinos and 28.6 percent for Latinos (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, 2001, Table 106)” (Rumberger and Rodríguez 114). Rumberger and Rodríguez examine the individual and institutional factors that contribute to this high dropout rate, identify the economic and social consequences of large numbers of Latino dropouts, and offer several programmatic and policy-based solutions to the dropout problem. (Read the article)

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August 23, 2005

Kolko, Beth E., Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2000.

August 23rd 2005 Posted to Race and the Internet, African American, Asian American

Widely acknowledged as a vanguard text on cyberspace race studies, Race in Cyberspace, in collection of twelve essays, directly challenges Internet utopists’ proclamations of an online racial paradise.

The editors begin with an anecdote illustrating how poorly online discourse on race is received, even in critical and mature academic circles. A post on a listserv about a theory positing race as a social, not biological, construct initiated a “flame war,” as the original poster was attacked and labeled a troublemaker for having the audacity to even mention race. The editors were troubled by the fact that the original poster was not attacked for any perceived theoretical flaws, but simply for the act of introducing racial discourse. Online, there seems to be a culture of ignoring race matters. (Read the article)

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August 18, 2005

Lee, Rachel C., and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, eds. Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. New York: Routledge, 2003.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and the Internet, Asian American

A book of collected essays, Asian America.Net seeks to address the question of how cybertechnologies complicate the tenuous space occupied by Asian Americans on issues of identity, transnationalism, and gender/sexual politics. If it is a truism, write Lee and Wong, that there was no such concept as “Asian American” prior to ethnic consciousness movement of the 1960s – the entire label being a construct – then the additional layer of technological virtuality only intensifies contestation of what it means to be Asian American. (Read the article)

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August 17, 2005

Valencia, Richard R., Martha Menchaca and Rubén Donato, “Segregation, desegregation, and integration of Chicano students: old and new realities”, Chicano School Failure and Success. Ed. Richard R. Valencia. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002, 70-113.

2079 August 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In the third chapter of Valencia’s book, Valencia, Menchaca and Donato explore the issue of the segregation of Chicanos in public schools. They begin by providing an overview of the history of Chicano segregation, beginning with the post-1848 decades following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In addition, they paint a picture of Chicano school segregation today and offer several practical solutions. (Read the article)

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Valencia, Richard R. Chicano School Failure and Success. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002.

August 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American

This book is a compilation of the most recent research being done on the historical, political and social factors contributing to what Valencia describes as “the persistently, pervasively, and disproportionately, low academic achievement” of Chicano students (4). In his introductory chapter Valencia provides an historical background of Mexican Americans as a conquered people who have always been subject to language suppression and cultural exclusion (7). He then outlines the main factors contributing to Chicano school failure today, which include: (Read the article)

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