Teaching After Brown vs Board of Education

 Think about how institutional racism is anchored in our society and feeds internalized racism in the way Wise analyzes it, and what the impact might be on Black and Brown students' approach to schools - Delpit's Culture of Power - and school achievement. Think about segregation/desegregation/re-segregation in the way Kozol/Kirp analyze it. Think about what you are observing in your tutoring site. Think about what "actual diversity" means, and how everyone (race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, body ability, religion, etc) might benefit from a completely desegregated and truly diverse school environment. 


It is painfully obvious that there is still institutionalized racism in this country, simply because of the shocking of statistics. I remember being taught in school the victories of civil rights when Plessy v Ferguson was overturned by Brown v BOE and the great progress we as a country had made since the 60s. However, when I look at the statistics presented by Kirp and Kozol, we have started to slip and go backwards.  When I see information like "The achievement gap between black and white children...started to widen once more in the early 1990s when the federal courts began the process of resegregation by dismantling the mandates of the Brown decision." (Kozol 10).
Some might say that statistics don't tell the whole story, which is why many have done studies with people, surveying and simply asking questions. When Kozol went to talk with some of the black students in a high school in LA, the first thing the student mentioned was the bathrooms. There were "fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law requires" (Kozol 8). This is just shocking and brings me to Maslow's hierarchy, the fact that if the students are not physically satisfied, they will never have any desire or motivation to learn nor better themselves. Something that most people take for granted, others have to worry about, preventing them from even absorbing   anything in school. The student goes on to explain how she wanted to take AP classes, to better herself through college so she doesn't have to be a seamstress like her mother. However, she is quickly put down by a fellow black student, explaining "You're ghetto-so you sew!".
The institutionalized discrimination and prejudice starts very young, as demonstrated by the doll experiments conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark in the 60s. The young children picked out the white dolls as "nice", "pretty", and "good" and the black dolls as "bad". The black students were also very hesitant to pick out the one that was most like them, especially after saying the darker skinned dolls were "bad". When this experiment was performed in the 80s and 90s, the same results were obtained, indicating a huge lack of progress. Another experiment performed was by Jane Elliot, in an all white classroom, where for a day she discriminated by eye color, making a certain eye color wear collars and constantly berated them, associating their eye color with substandard behavior and the other eye color with superiority. She found that the students who were wearing the collars performed worse on the same assessment than the students without. The next day she reversed the experiment, and found the same result.
When I look at the classroom where I am volunteering, it is not as diverse as it is labeled, there are no white students to be found, at least I didnt see any. This is not "actual diversity", just like Kozol mentions. If students were truly unsegregated, everyone would benefit, since children are not empty glasses to be filled up but people with their own culture to share. I also believe that the achievement gaps would start to narrow and people would become more culturally aware, the first step needed to ending institutionalized racism.