Weeks 10 and 11: Role of Race in Education

We began these two weeks by discussing the role race plays in our placements and in the larger scope of the field of education. In a free write, I discussed my cooperating teacher's relationship with the one African-American student in her classroom and how it seemed to be skewed and odd. She tends to discipline her more harshly and pick on her more often, even saying both her first and last name while reprimanding her, whereas she wouldn't do that for another student. After discussing race in a fishbowl with our class, I became hyperaware of the fact that racism is still a very prevalent issue within our country. The discussion made me realize that slavery and the civil rights movement were fairly recent occurrences in our country, and though progress has been made, we still have a ways to go to establish equality and non-bias.

In the midst of the Ferguson riots due to decisions based on Michael Brown's death in Missouri, a CNN article discusses implicit biases that everyone has, despite their claims that they are not racist. We discussed the idea that as teachers, all types of children will come into our classrooms, and the idea of "not seeing color" just isn't fair or correct. It's important to keep in mind that biases that we don't even know we have can still influence our behaviors and we treat others unfairly due to stereotypes we may have heard or misperceptions we have in our heads. The CNN article describes a study in which people are shown a picture of two white men fighting, one with a knife and another unarmed, and typically people can correctly identify who is holding the knife. However, when the picture shows a white man and a black man fighting, with the white man holding the knife, people tend to misidentify the armed fighter as the black man. These implicit biases can at times be more harmful than outright racism, as they are harder to correct and mediate, UCLA researcher Daniel Ames describes.

We also discussed whether or not black people can be racist as one of our Socratic Seminar talking points. Initially, I did not bat an eyelash when I said "yes" in answer to that question. I think of racism as a hatred or prejudice against another race for no justifiable reason, and in that case, I believe that racism can be found among any race towards others. Unfortunately, biases and prejudices are just a part of being human. However, as I continued to listen to what my classmates had said, I realized there could be other definitions of racism that would make the answer to the question "Can black people be racist?", no. I read an article under Ferris State University's Jim Crow Museum describing the definitions of racism and by those definitions whether or not black people can be racist. The writer of that article and Professor Dyson in this video, describe that under the definition "systematic oppression and exclusion of other races", the United States is not set up to oppress the majority of whites. There is no possible way that whites are excluded from different social systems in the United States simply because they are white, which I had never thought of. 

In our fishbowl and Socratic Seminar, we talked about poverty, however, since we are mostly in urban districts, we did not really discuss rural poverty. Interested, I looked up the tendency for more urban populations to be at lower socioeconomic levels than rural populations, and the results were surprising. 

 


 Looking at this chart, the rural and urban rates of poverty are about equal in most places in the United States. However, when looking at the South, the rural poverty rates skyrocket compared to the urban rates. This came as a surprise to me because most people, especially teachers, do not realize how few resources rural areas, districts, and schools have. Generally, teachers and people in general tend to think of cities when they think of people of low socioeconomic status, not realizing that rural areas have as much as, if not more, people living at a low socioeconomic status. This also plays into the race conversation, as people generally think of those with fewer resources as people of minorities, when that is not always true. Many rural areas have a higher amount of people of white race, meaning our biases about race in relation to socioeconomic status tend to be incorrect when we don't think of those in rural areas and of the majority race.