How to be anti-racist in a nut shell
Thursday, May 01, 2008
An out line to help navigating Courageous Conversations About Race, by Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Linton
Extras
What is a courageous conversation?
A strategy for de-institutionalizing racism and improving student achievement by utilizing the agreements, conditions and compass to engage, sustain and deepen interracial dialogue about race in order to examine schooling and improve student achievement.
Traditional conversation: Our school is becoming more diverse each year. It is not their culture to disagree with the teacher. The teaching population is not reflective of our student population.
Courageous conversation: We are noticing an annual increase in our student of color population. Brown families, more than black and white families, are likely to view the teacher as a knowledgeable authority figure. All our teachers are white, while 90 percent of our students are black and brown.
How does it work?
By engaging those who won't talk, sustaining the conversation when it gets uncomfortable or diverting and deepening the conversation to the point where authentic understanding and meaningful actions occur.
Questions to answer:
Why do racial gaps exist? What is the origin of the racial gaps? What factors have allowed these gaps to persist for so many years?
Agreements for conversations:
Stay engaged, speak your truth, experience discomfort and expect and accept non-closure.
Conditions for having courageous conversations:
1. Establish a racial contest that is personal, local and immediate.
2. Isolate race while acknowledging the broader scope of diversity and the variety of factors and conditions that contribute to a racialized problem.
3. Develop understanding of race as a social/political construction of knowledge and engage multiple racial perspectives to surface critical understanding.
4. Monitor the parameters of the conversation by being explicit and intentional about the number of participants, prompts for discussion and time allotted for listening, speaking and reflecting. Use the Courageous Conversation Compass to determine who each participant is displaying emotion — mind, body and soul to access a given racial topic.
5. Establish agreement around a contemporary working definition of race; one that is clearly differentiated from ethnicity and nationality.
6. Examine the presence and role of whiteness and its impact on the conversation and the problem being addressed.
Definitions:
Courageous Conversation Compass: Primary ways people deal with racial information: emotional in the heart, intellectual in the mind, moral in the soul and social in the hands and feet.
Belief: The most devastating factor contributing to the lowered achievement of students of color is institutionalized racism, which the authors recognize as the unexamined and unchallenged system of racial biases and residual white advantage that persists in institutions of learning.
Race: The socially constructed meaning attached to a variety of physical attributes including, but not limited to skin and eye color, hair texture and bone structure.
Racism: Beliefs and an enactment of beliefs that one set of characteristics is superior to another set. The conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional enactment of racial power, grounded in racial prejudice by an individual or group against another individual or group perceived to have lower racial status.
Racist: Anyone who subscribes to these beliefs and perpetuates them intentionally or unconsciously.
Institutionalized racism: When organizations, such as schools or school districts, remain unconscious of the issues related to race or more actively perpetuate and enforce a dominant racial perspective or belief. For example, that racism is not a problem worth attention or redress. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
Anti-racism: To actively fight racism and its effects wherever they may exist. A conscious and deliberate effort to challenge the impact and perpetuation of institutional White racial power, presence and privilege.
Anti-racist schools: They teach the history of how oppressed people have been treated in this country and support students of color and their families to challenge and heal from internalized racism. They move beyond the celebration of diversity and create communities in which it is possible for students to talk about how they experience unfairness and discrimination and to heal.
Educational equity: Raising the achievement of all students while narrowing the gaps between the highest and lowest performing students and limiting the racial predictability and disproportionately of which student groups occupy the highest and lowest achievement gaps.
Equity: An operational principle that enables eduators to provide whatever level of support is needed to whichever student requires it.
Racial Consciousness: "I don't know what I don't know." We use what we think we know and share with others our opinions and beliefs. We may have a limited understanding of not only of the lives of people of a different race, but even of how our personal racial identities impact our own lives.
Culture: How we live on a daily basis in terms of our ancestry, language, religion, food, dress, musical tastes, traditions, values, political and social affiliations, recreation, etc.
Corner: Designates citizenship, either by birth or naturalization as specified on a government-issued passport.
Color: Those rich in melanin content found in skin, hair and eyes. In this book, people are characterized as black, brown, red, yellow and white to take ethnicity out of the equation.
White: Those who have the least amount of melanin.
Quotables from Singleton's book:
"When a teacher ventures into their classrooms, most teach their own personal culture first and the subject matter or standards second."
"When it comes to racial matters in our society, we have learned to not say what's on our minds — to not speak our truth. This leads to deeper confusion, mistrust and misunderstanding."
