Category Archives: race

Education Inequality: What Are We Doing Wrong?


Posted by ajlovesya

On Tuesday I went to “Men of Color and Education: A Discussion on the Pursuit of Excellence” hosted by Teach for America. Panelists were Common, John Legend, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, Ruben Diaz Jr., Dr. Pedro Noguera, and Eric Snow, moderated by David Banks.

The panelists discussed everything from manhood and racism to personal responsibility and the importance of systemic change. The need to explore education from these different angles is crucial as the situation with Black and Latino men in school is dire: they are more likely than any other group to drop out, be expelled, or classified as having a learning disability. And as educators, Black men make up a mere 2% of all teachers and Latino men less than 5%.

Two and a half hours of high energy and sometimes tense moments is a lot to recap. I’ll highlight a few points that really spoke to me.

“There is a difference between ‘I want to send my child to this school’ and ‘I want to close the achievement gap.’” ~John Legend

Let me start by saying that John Legend was not the star of the evening. While he supports a variety of education initiatives, he got on everyone’s bad side with his generally conservative approach to education. Yet he made an interesting point by bringing up the difference between what we want for ourselves and what we want for those we serve. Unfortunately, I have seen that the two do not often match. Though good intentioned, we may assume “these kids” cant do certain things or wont be interested in certain topics, never truly engaging them or offering praise for the bare minimum. We are there to help and sometimes think that means not pushing or challenging the students or ourselves to demand more of each other.

“Our children succeed not because of school but in spite of it.” ~Dr. Marc Lamont Hill

When he said this it made me reflect of the problematic way we celebrate “inner city kids” who may not succumb to the many problems of their surroundings. We have it backwards when we do this. The shock is not that people like these kids succeed. Instead, the shock is that we expect them not to succeed. Implicit in our celebrations of each child who manages to get out of a depressed neighborhood or home is the acknowledgment that these situations require almost super heroic efforts to overcome and that these stories are the exception rather than the rule. Our narrative speaks to the injustice those children endure while our celebrations allow us to say that perhaps it’s not so bad in the first place.

“There is a conspiracy to keep you here…but are you part of the conspiracy too?”~Dr. Pedro Noguera

When addressing a group of young men in prison he told them that jobs and revenue were dependent on their imprisonment yet demanded that they think of how they were involved in keeping that system running. When we are dealing with something as complex as education and how the failure of schools creates a pipeline to prison for far too many black men, there is no one person to blame. We are all responsible. You need not be a teacher to have a hand in how young people view education and respond to challenges. As parents, friends, and neighbors, we have a responsibility to demand excellence of each other and challenge systemic injustice.  Our attitudes towards education, our definitions of manhood, our expectations of students, teachers, and parents, what we praise and what we denigrate all contribute to the inequality we see.

Since I work in a school that serves a low income minority population, I have had the opportunity to see the many issues the panelist brought up play out a regular basis. In the end, I left the discussion feeling energized and more committed to this topic. It’s rare to have so many people from different parts of the education community together learning and trying to generate solutions.

Here are some other perspectives on the event:

Gotham Schools: Testing, charters get boos at Teach for America education panel

Jose Vilson:  Dear John: Where I Disagree with John Legend

Wall Street Journal:  Common, John Legend Speak at Hippest Town Hall of the Week

Other articles on Inequality in Education:

Sotomayor and the Future of Catholic Schools

Nonprofits and the Education Gap

When it comes to education inequality, what are you doing to solve the problem?


Are Black People More Accepting of Overweight Women?


Posted by ajlovesya

While tweeting the new reality show More To Love—a plus size version of The Bachelor on FOX—the conversation shifted towards the role of race in fat acceptance.  Throughout my time in college and even now I am surprised by the belief that black people are more accepting of overweight women.

Here’s the thing: it’s not about being big; it’s about being curvy in the right places.  It’s about having an impossibly small waist with large breasts, hips, thighs, and ass.  Adolescence was an incessant chase for the perfect hourglass shape with a warped sense of reality:  white girls want to be bone thin, black girls want the hourglass shape, ignoring how neither approach was healthy.

I grew up hearing my mother proclaim several times that she is FINALLY going to lose weight, my grandmother proudly recounting her days of forgoing food to look svelte in dresses, and my sisters and I agonizing over the width of our hips in relation to their stomachs.  I remember my friends and I mocking white girls for their lack of ass and titties while agonizing over the growth of our own, sometimes wanting to hide for developing too soon other times going through hell to make it seem as if we were growing faster than we really were.

Additionally while there are more overweight black celebrities than white ones I hesitate to see that as an example of fat acceptance.  As Julia over at Fatshionista mentions, those celebrity examples of plus size black celebrities are hand picked for the public.  It doesn’t reflect black people’s acceptance of overweight people; rather it reflects the mainstream media’s hunger for and comfort with large black bodies.  It is, on many levels, an outrageous example of racism and sexism.  Besides, I don’t think Tyler, Martin, and Eddie show their love for larger black women when they don fat suits and act insultingly ignorant.

At the same time, I would be lying if I said that my emotional scars come from the hourglass battlefield.  In all honesty I think that weight is lower on the list of things that black people make fun of each other for.  Skin complexion continues to be our venom of choice.  Weight is not at the center of the most vicious and cruel memories of my childhood; my complexion is and to this day even compliments about my skin color make me uncomfortable.  (So no, calling me chocolate will not get you any points with me).  And don’t even get me started when it comes to hair…

In fact, as I navigated college, internships, work, travel abroad, and relationships various forms of “otherness” mattered differently depending on who was in the conversation.   Class plays as much as role in beauty as race with my middle and upper class black friends weary of indulging in soul food for health reasons while my family back at home is unforgiving of my attempts of keeping my hair natural.

In the end total acceptance on any level is a fantasy but a reality I would love to create.  It requires consciousness—an awareness of all of the attitudes, messages, and behaviors that are detrimental to your self determination—which in and of itself is a terrifying thing.  You find yourself “on” all of the time challenging what was once comforting and normal.  But it’s liberating in the sense that you begin to love yourself, focusing on your potential and life’s possibilities.  It’s exciting to recognize all that you can do and all that you deserve to have. 

How do we shift the conversation from what we arent to a celebration of all that we are?


Reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday


Posted by ajlovesya

martin_luther_king3

…the easiest way to get rid of Martin Luther King Jr. is to worship him. To honor him with a holiday that he never would have wanted. To celebrate his birth and his death without committing ourselves to his vision and his love. It is a lot easier to praise a dead hero than to recognize and follow a living prophet.

Rev. Charles Adams

In many ways, I think turning King into a holiday was the worst thing to do for his legacy. On the one hand, having him as a holiday (and the very name “holiday” evokes leisure, not serious study or appreciation) at least requires that we collectively acknowledge his contributions. However, Americans–black and white–have this tendency to distort images to suit narrow needs essentially destroying a powerful legacy and message.

We are prone to selective amnesia.  We will remember that he was nonviolent yet forget he felt conflicted about teaching peace at home when we were so violent abroad; he fought against racism yet realized that the capitalist system devastated the poor and depressed them further; he professed a great love for black women yet cheated on his wife til the day he died, felt that he could find nothing beautiful in a dark skinned black woman, and stole the idea of the “poor people’s campaign” from an african american women’s organization; he believed in integration yet he also believed that separatism was healthy and necessary for blacks to progress; he recognized that we must use race in order to eradicate racism.

All of these bits of neglect serve social functions–to support the attack on affirmative action; to eclipse the problems and negative consequences of capitalism; to silence the contributions of black women to black liberation; to ridicule and dismiss black youths; to endorse feelings of victimization over resistance and power; to soothe feelings of guilt over oppression; and a host of other dreadful counterproductive actions.

And the fact that he was turned into a holiday by a anti-black anti-working/middle class administration makes me all the more weary the purpose and usage of this day.

My wishes for MLK day?:

1. Retire the “I Have a Dream Speech.” He made over 300 speeches at the height of his career. Surely we love him enough to read some of them.

2. Read about the civil rights movement from a different perspective. Women, for example, were instrumental in the civil rights movement but the patriarchal structure of the church made their voices difficult to hear.  Or how about how people abroad–mainly in Africa–reacted to the civil rights movement?  Countries throughout the continent were liberated during the same time period and the parallels are fascinating.

3. Commit to giving back. Throughout the country people are encouraged to volunteer on Dr. King’s birthday.   Instead of making it a one time thing, why not be an ongoing giver in terms of time and money.  Buttress your giving by learning about the cause or community you plan to serve through research and dialogue.  Once you make giving and learning a part of your life, you begin the process breaking down barriers.

When it comes to leadership and learning lessons the best thing to look at is how a leader evolves over their lifetime and what shaped their growth.


Should You Racialize the Internet to Build Social Change and Community?


Posted by ajlovesya

Mozilla has launched Blackbird, a web browser created for African-Americans. The browser filters searches, networks, and websites to bring African-American related content and acts as a network for African-Americans to connect and highlight African-American charities.

My gut reaction is that this browser is created to make money for advertisers. African-Americans are projected to have over $1 trillion in purchasing power by 2012 so anyone who can get this groups attention will certainly see profits. Additionally for the 85% of African-American web users who prefer African-American related content this browser does all of the filtering and searching that they may not have the time or savvy to do.

At the same time, if we recognize that the internet has revolutionized how we learn and interact with the world around us there is something unsettling about limiting content to solely focus on an ethnic group. And who gets the privilege of selecting what exactly is African-American content? What if I am interested in something that doesn’t have a high African-American following or focus, will that info not be shown?

The only aspect of this browser that stands out to me is its Give Back function (coming soon) which will provide greater visibility for African-American community based organizations. But couldn’t that have been a website instead of a browser? And wouldn’t it help to have the visibility of African-American charities grow among all groups of people?

The goal of building community and social change seem lost by having a separate browser since change is not possible in isolation.   As a college student I noticed that many of the programs or groups that were targeted at African-Americans werent very different in content from information shared with the rest of the campus, but they instantly seemed to attract more African-American students.  These browser, like those programs, seems more about comfort than innovative content.  What are your thoughts?

_________________________________________________________________

This post was written for the Literacy ‘N Poverty Project , a New York based non-profit that support the advancement of adults through advocacy, research, and service.  Read their blog here.


Revisiting the Discussion about Black Americans


Posted by ajlovesya

From the time Obama secured the democratic party nomination up until winning the election, much attention has been paid to the political and social lives of black Americans.  In general I think it’s great that attention is being paid to black Americans that isn’t motivated by a crisis.

Unfortunately, these conversations are boring. We begin with a focus on the black underclass vs. black bourgeoise (not all black people are in the ghetto—DUH!), some kind of crisis (AIDS, incarceration,
out-of-wedlock births…), outrage at hip-hop and the generational divide it creates, and an interracial couple thrown in just to show how times are a changing.

Maybe it is because I spend my life living black America I find these topics to be dull and not really reflecting the lives of black Americans. While I understand the importance of having groups share their own experiences, if you want to learn about black Americans, black Americans aren’t the only people you should be asking.  We don’t create our lives in a vacuum—we interact, move, and think among various places and with various people.   So why not explore issues facing black Americans in the context of other people’s lives and other issues? Below are my burning questions:

When did it become OK for Hispanics to say “nigga?”

I don’t care to talk about the propriety of the word and if anyone should say it. Add that debate to the “beaten to death black American issues.” But the one non-black group that seems to get away with saying it are Hispanics.  Why?

Why are so many of the black kids on campus black Caribbean or black African?

A noticeable number of the black kids in my year at Haverford were either from another country or their parents were. This trend warrants a reexamination especially when affirmative action is brought up.

Why couldn’t Mona Lisa Smile take place at Spelman?

That movie—about a rebellious teacher who challenges the norms at a conservative Wellsely—is one of my favorites. Yet each of those characters could have easily been at Spelman and the issues they
addressed are not so removed from black women. Why can’t more black movies celebrate friendships, different points of view, and social challenges without being poorly written and acted or “urban” (for lack of a better word)?

And why do these issues matter?

Because they examine the impact the relationships black Americans have with other groups of people and explore the images of black Americans outside of hip hop and crisis. If we really want to discuss black America we have to open the conversation.