This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, and Ethnic Studies at the state and national levels. It addresses politics in Texas. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Great read. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi successfully argues on just how nonsensical the battle over Critical Race Theory is where he argues that republicans are essentially arguing against themselves, fighting a "monstrous evil" of their own creation. The irony is how many Republicans decry "cancel culture," yet the censorship for which they are advocating is the epitome of cancel culture.
The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.
Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recentlydefined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.
There arediffering points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now.
In this widely-viewed Ted Talk, John Biewen makes a presentation on the origins of racism, that is, the origin of race as a concept. He reached out to renowned scholar Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and got the answer on how this all began and that you can read for yourselves in his seminal text, Stamped From the Beginning.
In his masterful and authoritative account that Biewen subsequently recounts, Kendi finds that Gomes Eanes de Zurarawas hired to write a book by the Portuguese King in the 1450s where he lumped all the people of African into a distinct group. A few years earlier, slave traders with close connections to the Portuguese Crown pioneered the Atlantic slave trade. The book thusly served to justify this trade by pointing to the inferiority of African peoples.
Allow me to expound a bit on this lie that invented racism. Yes, it was invented, created. There is no country or national origin named "white" from which people emanate.
Racialization, a historical and contemporary process, created "others" to justify subordinate status, war, conquest and colonization and to set up structures like capitalism and ideologies like the supremacy of fair- or white-skinned peoples and individualism that disproportionately benefits whites. Western European immigrants that migrate to these shores readily become "American" within a generation or two in their sense of selves, as well as how they are seen by others.
Racialization was designed to rationalize horrific actions and policy decisions that wreaked havoc on Black and Brown people and established an enduring sense of privilege among many white people.
Specifically, Biewen maintains that racism is a tool to divide us and to prop up systems of advantage where some people are more highly ranked than others in systematic, stubborn ways.
Biewen's main personal discovery is that racism isn't a problem for people of color, but rather for white people. It's a "white people's problem," he emphatically states, and not the other way around.
As to how this makes him feel, Biewen says that it's not so much about feelings of guilt, but rather about personal responsibility. He's specifically moved to pull down "the power that we [white people] did not earn."
Great for the high school and college classroom.
-Angela Valenzuela
References
Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Hachette UK.
Gildea, K. (2017, July 29).Impressive and challenging look at the history of racist ideas in US:Epic in scope, this book examines the many different and complex sources of racism, Irish Times. Retrieved: https://tinyurl.com/2p8sh89c
To understand and eradicate racist thinking, start at the beginning. That's what journalist and documentarian John Biewen did, leading to a trove of surprising and thought-provoking information on the "origins" of race. He shares his findings, supplying answers to fundamental questions about racism -- and lays out an exemplary path for practicing effective allyship.
This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxCharlottesville, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.
Award-winning author, Dr. Ibram Kendi calls out in this piece below the underlying racism and elitism undergirding the very idea of an "achievement gap," and the use of standardized tests as the key instrument for determining this. A couple of good quotes from within:
(1) Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies. However, some of the greatest defenders of standardized testing are civil rights leaders, who rely on the testing data in their well-meaning lobbying efforts for greater accountability and resources.
(2) The testing movement does not value multiculturalism. The testing movement does not value the antiracist equality of difference. The testing movement values the racist hierarchy of difference, and its bastard 100-year-old child: the academic achievement gap.
Dr. Kendi appropriately also calls out Civil Rights organizations for supporting the testing regime that we're in. They say "We can't reform what we can't measure," which is true. But "achievement" is a cultural idea that is not value free. Nor is the means by which we measure it value free. Teachers and administrators who are the closest to the students are best able to make determinations of growth and success than the scientistic, "remote-control," top-down approach that we currently have.
Plus, we'll never test our way to equity as Kendi suggests below. Rather, the opposite is true.
Many, myself included, have written on such things for years. The high-stakes testing movement is what inspired this blog to begin with, dating back to 2004. Our task then is to make a shift in policy if we are to end high-stakes, testing and move toward more robust and holistic forms of assessment.
“Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies”
Source: citizenstewart.org
This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the academic achievement gap–built and continuously renovated by the 100-year-old standardized testing movement. It is a centennial that hardly anyone knows about.
These days, many people are criticizing the testing movement. Colleges are slowly diminishing the importance of standardized testing in admissions decisions. We are seeing unprecedented numbers of wealthy white parentsopting their school children out of these tests.
But few testing critics are bursting its biggest bubble: the existence of the achievement gap itself. To believe in the existence of any sort of racial hierarchy is actually to believe in a racist idea. The achievement gap between the races–with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinos at the bottom–is a racial hierarchy. And this popular racial hierarchy has been constructed by our religious faith in standardized testing.
Americans have been led to believe that intelligence is like body weight, and the different intellectual levels of different people can be measured on a single, standardized weight scale. Our faith in standardized tests causes us to believe that the racial gap in test scores means something is wrong with the Black test takers–and not the tests. And the belief that “inferior” Black minds are capable of doing as well as the “superior” White minds does not take away from the racist belief in the existence of the racial hierarchy itself. Let me explain.
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)
In 1869, Charles Darwin’s cousin, English statistician Francis Galton, hypothesized in Hereditary Genius that “[t]he average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.” Galton pioneered the western eugenics movement, but failed to develop a testing mechanism that verified his racist hypothesis. Where Galton failed, France’s Alfred Binet and Thodore Simon thought they succeeded in 1905 when they developed an IQ test that Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman revised for Americans in 1916.
Lewis Terman (1877-1956)
An avowed eugenicist, Terman introduced and defended the viability of the nation’s first popular standardized intelligence test in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. These “experimental” tests will show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” Terman maintained. He imagined a permanent academic achievement gap, a permanent racial hierarchy.
Terman’s IQ test was first administered on a major scale to 1.7 million U.S. soldiers during World War I. Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham presented the test results as evidence of genetic racial hierarchy in A Study of American Intelligence, published three years before he created the SAT test in 1926.
Famed physicist William Shockley and educational psychologist Arthur Jensen carried these eugenic ideas into the 1960s. But by then, these genetic explanations—not the tests and the achievement gap itself—had largely been discredited. In other words, the construction of a permanent racial hierarchy had been replaced by the construction of a temporary racial hierarchy.
Well-meaning environmentalists had shifted the discourse to disclosing and closing the “achievement gap,” a shift that powered the testing movement through The Bell Curve controversy in 1994. “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences” in test scores, wrote Harvard experimental psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray.
The Bell Curve sparked such an intense academic war in 1995 that the American Psychological Association (APA) convened a Task Force on Intelligence. The APA report rejected all the existing explanations for “the differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites,” from “biases in test construction” to genes, class, and culture. “At this time, no one knows what is responsible for the differential,” they concluded.
No one will ever know what doesn’t exist. And yet, the racist idea of an “achievement gap” lived on into the new millennium. The testing movement rejoiced over the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act.
Progress has been slow in closing the statistical gap. In 1964, a Department of Education report found that the average Black 12th grader scored in the 13 percentile, meaning 87 percent of White 12th graders scored higher on their tests than the average Black 12th grader. The Nation’s Report Card fifty years later found that the average Black 12th grader scored in the 19th percentile. And in 2015, Blacks still had the lowest mean SAT scores of any racial group.
At 100-years-young this year, standardized tests have come to literally embody the American doors of opportunity, admitting and barring people from the highest ranked schools, colleges, graduate schools, professions, and jobs. Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies. However, some of the greatest defenders of standardized testing are civil rights leaders, who rely on the testing data in their well-meaning lobbying efforts for greater accountability and resources.
But what if, all along, our well-meaning efforts at closing the achievement gap has been opening the door to racist ideas? What if different environments actually cause different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a poor, low testing Black child in a poor Black school is different—and not inferior—to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if the way we measure intelligence shows not only our racism but our elitism?
Gathering knowledge of abstract items, from words to equations, that have no relation to our everyday lives has long been the amusement of the leisured elite. Relegating the non-elite to the basement of intellect because they do not know as many abstractions has been the conceit of the elite.
What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individuals knew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life?
What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’s mind is to self-critique and new ideas?
What if our educational system focused on opening minds instead of filling minds and testing how full they are? What if we realized the best way to standardize a highly effective educational system is not by standardizing our tests but by standardizing our schools to encourage intellectual openness and difference?
But intellectual difference, and multiple literacies, languages, and vocabularies, are only valued in a multi-cultural society that truly values diversity and difference. The testing movement does not value multiculturalism. The testing movement does not value the antiracist equality of difference. The testing movement values the racist hierarchy of difference, and its bastard 100-year-old child: the academic achievement gap.
