Cooper, they linger in the fallacy that they could never be involved in a racist incident. Either they accept that they have inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to them, and they are now responsible for paying the taxes on that inheritance, or the status quo continues. I hope they will become radicalized by this moment and begin to fight fiercely for racial justice; but more than that, I hope they start at home, in their own minds and hearts.
As I tell my students: a white person rushing to do racial justice work without first understanding the impacts, uses, and deceptions of their own whiteness is like an untrained person rushing into the ER to help the nurses and doctors—therein probably lies more harm than good.
The answers are all around you if you are willing to look and listen. Contact us at letters time. By Savala Nolan. You can follow her on Instagram and on her blog.
TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
Related Stories. It's Time to Rethink the Language of Accessibility. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? When Germans slaughtered tens of thousands of Africans in Namibia between and , that was predicated on their sense of racial superiority.
When they brought that genocide home and perpetrated it on Jews a couple of decades later, that was based on a sense of racial superiority. She looked at her interlocutor with a look of not contempt but pity.
Morrison is here turning the racist question thrown at her against itself. The question is asked from the presumed epicentre of a position of power so assured of itself that is unconscious of itself. Morrison unveils that centre, makes it conscious of itself, and exposes it for the sham that it is. But it is in her novel A Marcy that Morrison went back to a point in American history when there was no American history, namely a time of fluidity in the continental social life before the racial codification of power surfaces in a manner that would be sustained for the rest of American history.
In the book, the gathering destinies of Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader, his wife Rebekka, slave girl Florens, Native American farm worker Lina, and a free African blacksmith whom Florens loves, details a whole different America before the rise of racism as the defining moment of American history.
As Painter puts it in a recent follow-up essay:. Next to the African was the Tahitian. No one is. The overcoming of the disease of racism is to begin with the undoing of the social construction of races that is the premise of racism.
Independent analyses by Ronald Ferguson and David Grissmer suggest that this change in class size was followed by a marked decline in the black-white test score gap. Since the teachers who fail such tests are concentrated in black schools, such exams would probably prove especially beneficial to black students, although this benefit may be partially offset by the fact that the teachers who fail such tests are also disproportionately black.
But Ferguson also finds some evidence that low teacher expectations have a more negative effect on black children than on their white classmates.
Research also suggests that black-white differences in parenting practices contribute to the test score gap. Improving parenting skills may therefore be as important as improving schools. The puzzle is how to proceed.
Like teachers, parents are usually suspicious of unsolicited advice about how to deal with their children. But once parents become convinced that a particular practice really helps their children, many adopt it. As a practical political matter, whites cannot tell black parents to change their parenting practices without provoking charges of ethnocentrism, racism, and much else.
But blacks are hardly the only parents who need help. We should be promoting better parenting practices for all parents in every way we can, including television, which reaches both blacks and whites. Finally, conservatives who want to improve academic achievement should stop emphasizing the relationship between heredity and achievement and play up the importance of another conservative virtue—namely, hard work. Americans seem to be unusually likely to attribute academic failure to low ability rather than inadequate effort.
When Harold Stevenson and James Stigler asked American, Japanese, and Taiwanese parents and teachers why some children did better than others in school, the Americans were more likely to emphasize ability whereas the Japanese and Taiwanese were more likely to emphasize effort.
This difference does not seem to reflect a difference in fundamental beliefs about causation. Children all over the world recognize that both ability and effort affect achievement, and the same is probably true for their parents as well.
But attributing failure to inadequate effort implies that if you work harder, you will learn more. Attributing it to ability serves as an excuse for doing nothing. Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, for example, have shown that black Stanford undergraduates, unlike their white classmates, do measurably worse on tests when they are asked to record their race before taking the test or told that the test measures intellectual ability.
Psychologists, sociologists, and educational researchers have devoted far less attention to the black-white test score gap over the past quarter-century than they should have.
We can do better. Related Books. Shep Melnick. No Child Left Behind? Christopher Jencks. Meredith Phillips.
Brown Center Chalkboard How does student-teacher matching affect suspensions for students of color?
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