Abstract: The promise of a free, high-quality public education is supposed to guarantee every child a shot at the American dream. But our widely segregated schools mean that many children of color do not have access to educational opportunities equal to those of their white peers. In Integrations, historian Zoë Burkholder and philosopher Lawrence Blum investigate what this country’s long history of school segregation means for achieving just and equitable educational opportunities in the United States. Integrations focuses on multiple marginalized groups in American schooling: African Americans, Native Americans, Latinxs, and Asian Americans. The authors show that in order to grapple with integration in a meaningful way, we must think of integration in the plural, both in its multiple histories and in the many possible definitions of and courses of action for integration. Ultimately, the authors show, integration cannot guarantee educational equality and justice, but it is an essential component of civic education that prepares students for life in our multiracial democracy.
Abstract: This chapter focuses on 6 police killings of black men in the United States in 2014–15. Stereotyping as a morally problematic cognition is plausibly thought to have played some part in the motivational set that led to the officers killing these men. Stereotyping is morally problematic for several different kinds of reason, but I argue that these moral wrongs do not fully express the devaluing of black life that seems to have been manifested in these encounters, and that has been protested by the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Seeing someone’s life as not mattering, or not mattering as much as the lives of people in other groups, is not the same as stereotyping the person. I discuss evidence for these lives not being taken to matter by the officers who killed them by looking at the officers’ behavior after the men had been subdued or injured and could not plausibly be regarded as threats. In all these cases there is evidence of a lack of concern to aid persons in danger of dying. I consider and respond to three objections raised by a police commissioner to my argument—that it not reasonable to expect someone who has been involved in a violent encounter to switch to a mindset of concern; that we should be concerned with behavior, not emotional response; that US police often kill white people; and that in some cases the officers were black.
Abstract: The Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 mandated school integration. The decision also to recognize that inequalities outside the schools, of both a class- and race-based nature, prevent equality in education. Today, the most prominent argument for integration is that disadvantaged students benefit from the financial, social, and cultural "capital" of middle class families when the children attend the same schools. This argument fails to recognize that disadvantaged students contribute to advantaged students' educational growth, and sends demeaning messages to the disadvantaged students and messages of unwarranted superiority to the advantaged. Parents, teachers, and schools can adopt a justice perspective that avoids these deleterious aspects of the capital argument, and helps create a community of equals inside the integrated school. Struggles for educational justice must remain closely linked with struggles of both a class- and race-based nature for other forms of justice in the wider society.
Abstract: Different socioeconomic backgrounds and barriers to education have contributed to lower educational achievement among blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, compared to American whites and Asians. The failure of legal integration to close the racial achievement gap is the result of prejudice on the part of teachers, as well as a scarcity of culturally relevant curricula materials for nonwhite children. As a plausible solution to these problems, recent studies show that poor children do better in classes where middle-class children are also present. Middle-class children already have habits and values that support success in the educational system. Integrated schools are not sufficient, because they are often divided in “tracks” that reproduce racial segregation. Racial diversity in the K-12 classroom is fruitful preparation for civic engagement in a pluralistic society made up of citizens from diverse backgrounds.
Abstract: Naomi Zack's 'White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide' is an unusual sort of book, and an admirable one, written in a short space of time in response to very particular events -- primarily unpunished police killings of black men -- and, as Zack says, "with a sense of urgency." Zack provides a great deal of relevant detail about some of the most notorious police killings of 2013 and 2014 -- Trayvon Martin (which she groups in with the others because George Zimmerman was an armed neighborhood watch coordinator), Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. She discusses laws, judicial decisions, and policies bearing on police conduct and criminal justice more generally. She frames her discussion of these cases in the context of philosophizing about justice, race, and white privilege. She has insightful things to say about all these matters. Zack was certainly not surprised that these police killings continued into the next year, and no doubt beyond -- Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, arguably Sandra Bland, and no doubt many others that stayed under the media's radar. Zack could not have known but would certainly be at least mildly heartened by the few cases in which police officers have been charged, indicted, or prosecuted for their roles in the deaths -- the officers who killed Scott, Gray, and McDonald (and Akai Gurley).
Abstract: In this article, I argue (1) affirmative action diverts attention from more urgent needs of racial justice in education--better quality K-12 education, and better quality and more accessible public higher education; (2) the increasing wealth of students at affirmative action institutions is a sign of diminished quality of those students compared to those at less selective institutions, who are comparatively disproportionately black and Latino; and (3) aligning the standard rankings of colleges with the quality of student (and quality of instruction at the different kinds of institution) would benefit black and Latino students as a group much more than affirmative action does.
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Abstract: Claude Steele’s stereotype threat idea has the potentiality for advancing racial equality in education. But it also has some drawbacks. It fails to distinguish clearly between sound generalizations and stereotypes as evidence-resistant overgeneralizations, and thus fails to encourage students to develop the intellectual tools to diagnose and reject stereotyping and to understand its harms. In addition, it could discourage the forming of accurate generalizations that are essential in diagnosing disparities between groups (e.g. in educational performance), and thus of structural and systemic injustice. In doing so it masks the asymmetries in vulnerability to stereotyping that are connected with the role of stereotypes in supporting and being generated by such structural injustices. The masking of these asymmetries is connected with Steele’s poorly defended view that vulnerable groups, such as black students, have not internalized stereotypes of their group. Finally, the lack of political and civic perspective in the analysis of stereotype threat is connected with depoliticized suggestions for reducing it.
Abstract: Educational thought and research often operates with whole-race ('black', 'white', and 'Asian') and whole-class ('low-income') categories. For both explaining disparities and assessing them normatively, it is essential to pay attention to subdivisions within those groups. Regarding affirmative action, on average African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and to some extent their offspring, have educational and motivational advantages over, and a distinct normative standing from, African Americans that is masked in the use of 'black' as the operative category in affirmative action. With regard to assessing -- both explanatorily and normatively -- the performance of 'high-commitment' charter schools, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), that make substantial demands on parents of admitted students, compared to traditional public schools serving the same population, it is essential to internally differentiate the relevant race and class categories with respect to the degree of poverty, English-language learner status, and parental capital.
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Abstract: Educational aims for societies comprising multiple ethnic, cultural and racial groups should involve three different values— recognizing difference, national cohesion and equality. Recognition of difference acknowledges and respects ethnocultural identities and in educational contexts also encourages mutual engagement across difference. National cohesion involves teaching a sense of civic attachment to a nation and to one’s fellow citizens of different groups and identities. ‘Multiculturalism’ has traditionally been understood to support the first value but not as much the second, a charge made by ‘interculturalism,’ a newer idea in Europe and francophone Canada. But Tariq Modood, this year’s Kohlberg Memorial Lecturer, has argued that national integration has always been a goal of multiculturalism. However, neither multiculturalism nor interculturalism has placed sufficient emphasis on equality as a social and educational ideal. Equality is a complex idea that involves both equal treatment by teachers of students from different groups, and also relative equal student outcomes among different groups.
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Abstract: This chapter examines the value of solidarity and applies the analysis to the Swedish context as a multi-ethnic society. Solidarity as a value in a multi-ethnic society is closely related to the values of equality and diversity. The chapter considers the meaning of these three values and their relationship to one another. The analysis concludes that solidarity comes in forms of in-group and trans-group solidarity. Each has its own particular value. The value of trans-group solidarity in a multi-cultural society is increased if there is an appreciation of positive diversity for the different groups in the society. In-group solidarity is a good in itself although it has a complex relationship to trans-group solidarity. If all parties are cooperating then in-group solidarity can be an important partner to trans-group solidarity. The two forms of solidarity do not have to be at cross purposes to one another. However, in-groups can manifest tendencies that can harm trans-group solidarity, and instrumentalities outside the group have a responsibility to counter those tendencies.
Abstract: I argue that Samantha Vice understates the moral resources white people have available to them to minimize their falling into distorted ways of perceiving and responding to the world caused by bare white advantage. In doing so, she paints an unjustifiably pessimistic picture of white civic involvement in South Africa, and anywhere where white people are unjustly advantaged, such as the United States. I delineate two similar but distinct antiracist moral identities -- the 'white ally' and the 'person committed to racial justice' -- that can guide civic engagement, as well as provide a counterweight to the distortions of whiteness. I argue that Vice's recommendation of withdrawal from public engagement in humble silence is not the most morally appropriate response to white privilege.
Abstract: Although all seasons of The Wire deal with society’s institutions, and how their perverse logic generates social oppression, the widely-admired fourth season—focused on schools—complexifies this framework. The powerful story of four poor, urban, black middle schoolers is also a critique of various contemporary corporate school “reform” efforts—the overfocus on standardized testing, the devaluing of the day-to-day professional efforts of ordinary caring teachers, the neglect of poverty and family dysfunction’s impact on students’ ability to succeed in school, the blind eye to the defunding of schools. I also favorably compare The Wire’s portrayal of the imperfect white teacher, Prez, with the unreal and borderline racist “white savior” trope found in Hollywood films such as Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers.
Abstract: The 2005 film Crash deals powerfully with personal racism. Its wide array of story lines raise issues of personal stereotyping, prejudice, racial humiliation, wielding of racial power, and racial and ethnic misconnection. It is also sensitive to the complexity of racist motivations. Crash generally avoids false symmetries about race typical of popular thinking and Hollywood film; it recognizes that white people hold racial power and that this matters morally. Yet by including so many different forms and modes of personal racism, involving so many different racial and ethnic groups, Crash can create the false impression that they are all of equivalent moral seriousness.
Abstract: Among race scholars, there is a general consensus that (1) groups thought to be races in the 19th /20th century do not possess the characteristics attributed to them in classic racial ideology, (2) such groups are nevertheless intergenerational collectivities with distinctive social and historical experiences, and (3) those experiences were and are deeply shaped by the false beliefs of classic racial ideology. The groups of whom this consensus is true are felicitously called “racialized groups,” terminology preferable to “social construction,” “classic racial groups,” “ethnic groups,” and “ancestral/descent groups,” though each of these has something to be said for it. The socio-historical consensus is not, however, adequately reflected in recent work on race, for example, by Appiah (who confuses race and racialization), Mallon (who does not capture the “group-ness” of racialized groups), and Glasgow (who does not capture the way the false ideology of race has shaped the experience of racialized groups).
Abstract: This article explicates the views on both race and ethnicity of these three prominent Latinx philosophers, compares them (somewhat), and offers some criticisms. Corlett jettisons race as a categorization of groups, but accepts a form of racialization somewhat at odds with this jettisoning. Gracia adopts as a general principle that an account of both ethnicity and race should help us see aspects of reality that would otherwise be obscured; but this is at odds with his regarding the Latin American view of race as more rational than the U.S. version with its “one-drop rule.” The latter has structured the reality of race in the U.S. for African Americans. Alcoff is much more concerned with the phenomenology of race and ethnicity than the other two, and she clearly adds “pan-ethnicity” to the mix of concepts required to understand Latino/a Americans. I argue that she fails to see the agentic and political aspect of black identity in the U.S., and in a sense shares with Gracia a misplaced sense that the mixedness of Latin American racial identity is somehow to be preferred to the more binary U.S. form.
This article examines the problematic character and effects of prejudice on education and evaluates the prospects for overcoming them. It investigates the diversity of prejudices and the totalistic and selective forms of prejudice and explains theories on the causes of prejudice. It describes educational responses to prejudices via the contact hypothesis and curricular approaches and describes the ideal character of prejudice reduction as an educational goal.
Abstract: White privilege analysis has been influential in philosophy of education. I offer some mild criticisms of this largely salutary direction -- its inadequate exploration of its own normative foundations, and failure to distinguish between 'spared injustice', 'unjust enrichment' and 'non-injustice-related' privileges; its inadequate exploration of the actual structures of racial disparity in different domains (health, education, wealth); its tendency to deny or downplay differences in the historical and current experiences of the major racial groups; its failure to recognize important ethnic differences within racial groups; and its overly narrow implied political project that omits many ways that white people can contribute meaningfully to the cause of racial justice.