Identity

The chapters for this week's reading were extremely important and insightful. Particularly striking was Janie Victoria Ward's discussion about race. The most blunt and perhaps telling was Ward's perspective about the way African-Americans view education. She argues, "For some black students, doing well in school is equated with 'selling out' or becoming non-black; thus for them, 'the burden of acting white' was too high a price to pay for academic success," (259). I was aware of this as a problem in the black community (the press made this an issue in the lead up to the 2008 Democratic Primary because many African-Americans were allegedly not satisfied with Barack Obama's blackness), but never saw it crystallized quite like this. This is sad. It is as if some elements of the African-American community choose to shun white culture by not conforming to this, but all they are doing is sabotaging themselves and the futures of their children.

HOWEVER, this is not to say that this is their fault. Actually, it is quite the contrary. Perhaps if our political leaders were not set on glorifying the American ideal, and instead chose to accept some of our faults, we would be able to better reach less ambitious students. For example, in my 8th and 11th grade history courses we spent countless days focusing on the battles of the Civil War. But the only time devoted to slavery--the actual cause of the Civil War--was 2 days. We watched the movie Glory and did not have a discussion about either the movie or the issue. That is absolutely PREPOSTEROUS. It was not until college that I focused significant time reading or discussing slavery.

One other example is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This often gets dropped because of time constraints, but I think this issue is far too important to simply cut out. In neither 8th, nor 11th grade did we even discuss this issue in class (beyond Martin Luther King Jr., and most of that was spent talking about his assassination). Instead we devoted significant class time to the Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the counterculture. Again this is ABSURD! These are important issues that must be reconciled in Middle and High School history classes.

The same could be said of passing up the women's movement. My 11th grade history teacher was great and really connected with me. But even when I was in his class, I could tell that he was not reaching the girls in the class. His tone was vulgar and focused on the "white male" issues. The women's suffrage movement in the 1910s-1920s and its liberation movement counterpart in the 1960s-1970s were simply footnotes in his curriculum. Do I blame him? Partly. This was 10 years ago, so I don't know if it was part of standards, but he still should have covered this much more in depth than he had.

The real point of me raising these specific examples (beyond my desire to rail on my middle and high school teachers) is that if teachers gave students a reason to pay attention, they may. A white middle school teacher teaching a predominantly African-American class about America's glorified, idealistic past is a bit of a stretch for most of those kids. If it is a poor, urban school, those kids probably do not look at America's finest hours and ideals as all that fine or ideal. In fact, they see the raw hand that they have been dealt and may want to shove it up America's backside. We need to find a way to reach kids that are different from us.