Notes on: Ladson-Billings, G and Tate, W (1995).
Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education. Teachers
College Record, 97 (1) 47 – 69 0161 –
4681 – 95/047
Dave Harris
[Very informative. I didn't realise what a
distorting effect the original legal context had
on the formation of CRT. Lawyers can't even
discuss objectivity or neutrality but must hold to
an entirely mythical view that the law represents
the agreed truth when it quite clearly doesn't.
They are riddled with contradictions. It's not at
all like social science. Maybe the early CRT
lawyers also picked up on the naivety of lawyers
on the consquences of their decisions in policy --
once they had passed a law they thought they had
done the job but did not expect counter strategies
like white flight etc? And personal stories are
valued from seeing the effects of testimony [sic]
-- lawyers would not be interested in any threats
to validity of course, but only in their effects?]
There had been great inequities between the
schooling experiences of white middle-class
students and those of poor African-American and
Latino students shown in 1991, and Kozol suggested
that these were 'a logical and predictable result
of a racialised society' where discussions of race
and racism were 'muted and marginalised'(47).
Instead, race could be used as an analytic tool. A
set of propositions about race and property and
their intersections is required — critical race
theory — and we need to introduce new arguments
and perspectives drawn from law and social
sciences to understand educational research. This
will be interdisciplinary. There will be tensions
with education reform aimed at multicultural
education.
There are three central propositions: 'race is a
significant factor in determining inequity in the
USA; US society is based on property rights; the
intersection of race and property creates an
analytic tool through which we can understand
social (and consequently school) inequity' (48. We
need supporting '"metapropositions"'
The first proposition is easily documented [if you
are a positivist] with statistical and demographic
data on educational life chances, high school
dropout rate, suspension rates and incarceration
rates, for example. Some post-modern scholars
question race as a category, however – as an
ideological construct it may miss aspects of
reality, but as an objective condition it denies
problematic aspects such as who decides who fits
into which classification and how we categorise
racial mixtures. The concept of race seems useless
in the world of biology, for example.
'Nonetheless, even when the concept of race fails
to "make sense," we continue to employ it' (49) if
even as a metaphor, depicting events, classes and
expressions of decay and economic division.
So even if 'expensively kept, economically
unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in
election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as
it was during the Enlightenment'. It has some deep
utility and as a metaphorical life embedded in
daily discourse [all this attributed to Toni
Morrison]. [It is active at the level of personal
identity -- especially hurtful for the new
petite-bourgeoisie?]. However, this means it
remains untheorised, unlike say gender or class.
These have not been extended to race, and as a
result whiteness has been naturalised and race
oversimplified even by white Marxists.
Omi and Winant* have done better with a
sociological explanation trying to explain how
race has been conflated with ethnicity, class and
nation because it has never been a particular
priority in American social science, and ethnicity
has been dominant, implying assimilation like
European Americans. Racial formation in contrast
involves the creation, transformation and
destruction of racial categories, a project to
represent and organise human bodies and social
structures, part of the '"evolution of hegemony"'
(50) [sounds like Fanon and sociogenesis, aimed at
black people, clearly connected to the projects of
slavery and colonisation?]. This gives it a new
intellectual salience in the analysis of
educational inequality.
Earlier writers like Woodson and Dubois argued
that race was the central construct for
understanding inequality, by focusing on
African-Americans, as they were then called
Negroes, rescuing them from notions of pathology
and inferiority and seeing how schools structured
inequality and demotivated them by never letting
them measure up to white standards. Dubois
referred to a double consciousness, being both an
American and a Negro, never reconciled, a divided
self, although this had [border] insights
including '"a heightened moral validity"', because
Negroes understood the oppressor as well as their
own psyche.
The second metaproposition says that class and
gender explanations are not powerful enough to
explain all the difference in school experience
and performance. They do intersect race but as
standalones they don't explain all the educational
achievement differences. Even when we hold class
constant, middle-class African-American students
do not achieve the same level as white
counterparts. They are placed at the lowest level
of school trackings. It is not clear which factor
is causal. Race might have an impact on social
class. Gender bias is also important as we know,
for example in the way in which females are
counselled away from advanced maths and science
courses and do not gain an advantage in college
admission. Even so, there are 'extraordinary high
rates of school dropout, suspension, expulsion,
failure' among African-American and Latino males,
often for '"noncontact violations"' (52) 'wearing
banned items of clothing… wearing these items in
an unauthorised manner'. As a result we can insist
that '"blackness matters in more detailed ways"'.
Turning to the argument that US society is based
on property rights, this is best explicated by
legal scholarship and interpretation of rights
again in the context of CRT, developing in the
1970s. CRT legal scholars came to argue that
racism was endemic in American life ingrained
'legally culturally and even psychologically'
(Delgado 52), that civil rights laws were
ineffectual and often undermined, that
'"traditional claims of legal neutrality,
objectivity, colourblindness and meritocracy
[acted as] camouflages for the self interest of
dominant groups in American society"'; [we needed]
'an insistence on subjectivity and the
reformulation of legal doctrine to reflect the
perspectives of those who have experienced and
been victimised by racism first hand; the use of
stories or first person accounts'. [I still don't
understand this turn to subjectivity — I can see
the suspicion of objectivity, but why no suspicion
of subjectivity, especially if black consciousness
and feelings have been so affected — why is their
subjectivity not crippled as well? These people
are lawyers and have never read any critiques of
subjectivity]
There is also a tendency to elide democracy and
capitalism, which ignores the pernicious effects
of capitalism on those who are in its lowest
ranks. Traditional civil rights approaches have
just assumed the rightness of democracy and
ignored the structural inequalities of capitalism,
but US democracy is intertwined with capitalism
and property rights, and always was – the first
settlers also declared Indian land a legal vacuum
[on exactly the same grounds as we declared
Australia a legal vacuum, because the Indians had
not worked the land?] (53). The tension between
property rights and human rights was always there
in the US constitution, exacerbated by slavery.
The central feature of power has always been 'the
ability to define possess and own property' [and
the 'reified symbolic individual', easily
operationalised as the small property owner].
There are some obvious relations to education —
some must pay for public school system, and
affluent communities often resent it if the
clientele is nonwhite and poor: they can buy
better schools. Curriculum is intellectual
property [illustrated by a 'critical race story'
(54) comparing course offerings at different high
schools, one upper-middle-class white and the
other urban largely African-American — one offered
different foreign languages and high status
mathematics and science, the other much more
limited choice and more general applied maths and
science, with quite different elective choices].
The availability of rich intellectual property
affects the opportunity to learn [nearly cultural
capital], despite common educational standards.
Turning to more specific applications, we can see
racism is endemic and deeply ingrained in American
life, in the persistence of African-American poor
performance. Poor children regardless of race
might do worse in school, and African-American
kids are more likely to be poor, but 'the cause of
their poverty in conjunction with the condition of
the schools and schooling is institutional and
structural racism' ['"culturally sanctioned
beliefs which regardless of the intentions
involved, defend the advantages whites have
because of the subordinated positions of racial
minorities"', quoting Wellman, but not really
breaking with the circularity] white people tend
to avoid the possibility of any institutional
change and reorganisation if it affects them.
Civil rights law has been ineffective, as seen in
a particular landmark case – Brown versus the
Board of Education of Topeka. Despite an [apparent
victory] 'students of colour are more segregated
than ever before' — and are overrepresented in 21
of the 22 largest urban school districts. There
has been 'increased white flight' (56), showing
that occasional antidiscrimination victories are
really only stages in 'an ongoing ideological
struggle… [and]... can be ephemeral"' (56)
[quoting Crenshaw]. Another case shows similar
ambiguity. A particular school located in a
predominantly African-American community was
funded with a number of inducements including free
trips to entice white students to attend, but the
trips benefited mostly the white students who had
the necessary expensive equipment [camping and
skiing] and were still not enough to continuously
attract white students. Eventually enrolment fell
and the school was closed and all the students had
to be bussed to the remaining four white schools.
In another case desegregation programs did not
seem to benefit African-American and Latino
students whose suspension, expulsion and dropout
rates 'continue to rise, despite the provision of
'special magnet programs and extended day care':
'whites were able to take advantage'. This 'model
desegregation progam... [became]… one that ensures
that whites are happy and do not leave the
system].
In terms of challenging claims of neutrality,
objectivity and so on, the need to name your own
reality and gain your own voice is a substantial
part of CRT, especially when choosing forms of
scholarship. Parables, chronicles, stories and
counter stories, poetry and fiction are needed 'to
illustrate the false necessity and irony of much
of current civil rights doctrine [?]' (57).
Delgado has three additional reasons for naming
your own reality, even in legal discourse: 'much
of reality is socially constructed [I bet that
goes down well in court]; stories provide members
of out groups a vehicle for psychic
self-preservation; the exchange of stories from
tellers and listeners can help overcome
ethnocentrism and that dysconscious conviction of
viewing the world in one way [?]'.
Apparently this has been useful in showing just
how much political and moral analysis is involved
in legal scholarship, for example in choosing
universalism over particularity, accepting
'transcendent, acontextual, universal legal truths
or procedures', accepting that 'the tort of fraud
has always existed and that it is a component
belonging to the universal system of right and
wrong', rejecting anything historical, contextual
or specific with the labels '"emotional,"
"literary," "personal," or "false." [This is an
extreme case of course with particularly
unreflexive professionals in law — quite unfair to
extend it to social scientists].
By contrast CRT says political and moral analysis
is situational — '"truths only exist for
this person in this predicament at this time in
history"' [going right to the other extreme of
relativism. This is apparently attributed to
Delgado. ]
The point about interpretive structures imposing
order leads to the second reason — psychic
preservation of marginalised groups where
storytelling is 'a kind of medicine to heal the
wounds of pain caused by racial oppression',
coming to realise how you were oppressed and
subjugated and permitting you to stop inflicting
mental violence on yourself. Finally, it's a way
of affecting the oppressor back – dominant groups
also have their stories, stock explanations which
rationalise their oppression and this is what
Delgado means by 'dysconscious racism'. Finding
your voice means reawakening what has been
silenced, and one graduate Education student is
quoted expressing annoyance that you need to have
to quote various academic authorities
[Vygotsky] before you can gain validity to
speak about your own kids [common to white
students as well of course, but probably behind
later accusations of white fragility here]. There
is a claim that we need 'authentic [hmm -- people
of colour just ARE this?] voices of people
of colour' and without that ' it is doubtful that
we can say or know anything useful about education
in their communities' (58) [well this is the full
slippage here, perhaps based on the contrast
between legal discourse and everyday knowledge,
but without academic knowledge which is also ruled
out entirely? But they have quoted academic
studies earlier of dropout or underachievement
themselves]
The intersection of race and property is central,
and in the US, clearly slavery links subordination
of blacks to a legal regime that converted them
into legal property. This led to an even more
pernicious notion — 'the construction of whiteness
as the ultimate property' -- only the 'cultural
practices of whites'could be the basis for
property. Harris is cited to suggest that these
property functions include rights of disposition,
rights to use and enjoyment, reputation and status
property and the right to exclude.
The rights of disposition is the equivalent of the
normal notion of transferable property rights,
mediated through entitlement, licence or
professional degrees held by particular parties.
In education it means something conferred on
student performances, when students are rewarded
'only for conformity to perceived "white norms" or
sanctioned for cultural practices (e.g., dress,
speech patterns, unauthorised conceptions of
knowledge)' (59). Rights to use and enjoyment
arise when whiteness allows for particular
privileges, since 'whiteness is both performative
and pleasurable' allowing for the extensive use of
school property, for example, including space. The
big issue, though is the curriculum, and the often
extracurricular resources available in white
schools [a class matter really?] . Reputation and
status property again is often demonstrated in
legal cases: 'to call a white person "black" is to
defame him or her' and likewise to identify a
school or program similarly. Status differences
affect the nature of bilingual education, and
terms like 'urban'. The absolute right to exclude
is seen in views that one drop of black blood
makes you black [there is a reference to some
legal decision here – is it US state law
somewhere? — Oddly, it seems to be German
citizenship law as well?]. There are also separate
schools, white flight, schools of choice, policies
of exclusion, so that 'black students often come
to the University in the role of intruders' (60)
It's clear that scholars have failed to theorise
race and that traditional civil rights legislation
is inadequate compared to critical race legal
theory. There is a similar tension between
critical race theory and the multicultural
paradigm. We can see this as a reform movement
trying to change schools to produce equality for
students from diverse backgrounds. The policy has
expanded to include gender, ability and sexual
orientation recently. The origins probably lie in
the American melting pot notion, where
assimilation was to follow through the reduction
of prejudice. However assimilation was replaced in
the 1960s by 'the reclamation of an "authentic
black personality" [that word again --indigenous?
subcultural?] that did not rely on the acceptance
by all standards of white America' (61) and this
led in turn to black studies and later ethnic
studies.
Multicultural education in schools is often
reduced to trivial examples such as eating
different foods, singing songs, dancing and
something other than different conceptions of
knowledge or quests for social justice. At
university level it has often been a matter of
curriculum inclusion. However there is a deeper
notion of a philosophy of many cultures existing
together with respect and tolerance, bringing
students and faculty from different cultures into
the environment. Today the term is used
interchangeably with diversity referring to
differences of all kinds. However, there are often
'growing tensions' between the various groups,
with competing interests or perspectives [not at
all like CRT?] . The liberal tradition allows a
proliferation of difference, but there is no
simple unity of difference — not all differences
are analogous and equivalent.
CRT theorists doubt moderate and incremental legal
reform and human rights, and points of the ways in
which civil rights law regularly gets to benefit
whites. 'The current multicultural paradigms
functions in a manner similar' (62), where reforms
are routinely subverted, where liberal ideology
offers no radical change. We should not disparage
the early efforts and sacrifices of course, but it
is difficult to support the oppressed 'while
simultaneously permitting the hegemonic rule of
the oppressor' so we should reject 'the paradigms
that attempts to be everything to anyone and
consequently becomes nothing for anyone'. We
should align instead with Garvey, who thought that
the emancipation of black people should be put
first
Notes openly accept that race is involving polar
opposites of '"conceptual whiteness" and
"conceptual blackness"' (63) and they argue that
discussions of race in the USA puts everyone in
one category or the other
|
|