Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and “the Mirror World”: Let's Go Back to that "Collective Unsettling" and Make the World Anew

Check out this excellent interview of journalist Naomi Klein on her new book, Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. I like how she unpacks what I am sure so many—if not most of us—felt throughout the pandemic that continues into the present. Specifically, this consisted of a "collective unsettling," experienced by the "lockdown class" to not just see, but to be so perceivably impacted by the consequential societal inequities that had been unmasked. I appreciate Klein's analysis herein on how the pandemic resulted in 

"an absolute frontal confrontation with the logic at the heart of capitalism that tells you you’re on your own. You are an island. All of your successes are yours alone, and people who don’t have them, it’s their fault. " 

All of a sudden, a largely racialized workforce of frontline workers, such as those working in meat packing plants and Amazon warehouses, forced all to consider that they breathe the same air as the rest of us, too. Many wondered and grew concerned that they, too, have rights and that these workers' needs, rights, and risks are not only borne unevenly, but affect the whole. 

This was a hard pill to swallow under neoliberal, individualist capitalist thought that nevertheless appreciated in that moment government "largess" of eviction control and flexible working arrangements.

Citing Arundhati Roy's eloquent 2020 Financial Times piece on how the pandemic held promise as a portal to a new and better world, what started out as a fresh kind of hopefulness for societal change for some, myself included, got taken up and distorted by extremists.

After all, with what seemed to be a racial reckoning in 2021, many of us were hopeful that this heralded a new multiethnic, multiracial democracy where greater justice lives.

Klein's research illuminates a core strategy by the likes of Steve Bannon in taking up the rightful anger against big pharma and the elite and artfully flipping these sentiments to manufacture—via social media—xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and the like. She cautions against the online cruelty and de-platforming of her Doppelganger, former feminist, "Naomi Wolf"—with whom Klein is often confused—hence, the title of her book. De-platforming extremists, she cautions, hardly means that they're no longer a threat to democracy when people like her are able to balloon their following, for example, by turning coats and becoming regular spokespersons on the Steve Bannon Show.

I recently listened to this excellent interview of author Naomi Klein Youtube interview on Democracy Now! and encourage you to do the same if you prefer to listen to her talk about her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, and how this led her into the mirror world of the far right.

I understand this "mirror world" of which she writes as largely a bait and switch strategy. First, your against big pharma. Next your against immigrants crossing the border. First it's about "ending all wars;" next, it's about starting a war with China. I look forward to reading this text. In the meantime, let's pause and consider Klein's thesis and analysis of the far-right's manufactured, dangerous, and conspiratorial “mirror world.” It should concern us all that Steve Bannon is forging, in Klein's words, an "international nationalist alliance, authoritarian alliance," with Wolf allowing herself to be a tool for that agenda while enriching herself.

A good, immediate first step for all of us is to listen for the authenticity of the specific policies that any pundit, politician, or marketer like Steve Bannon professes since the mirror world is about sowing confusion and capitalizing on issues that used to be important to the left. Geez, they are wide open in their intentions that it's about taking power. The world is so fearful and boy, can they sell you a dream they'll never deliver on. They haven't yet. They're happy to take your money though.

Let me read your policy proposal and strategy on China, Steve Bannon. How will you accomplish your expressed ends? 

In short, there is a vacuum that right-wing media is exploiting primarily to take power in the service of this unholy, "international nationalist alliance." For the record, China is a market-capitalist country, sometimes described as "socialism with Chinese" characteristics. My husband and I have been to China. They are beautiful people. Very kind and respectful. Incredible history and very ancient. Impressive and magisterial in so many ways. It saddens me that there are not better relations between our countries.

I think we should all go back to that space of a "collective unsettling," that hopeful portal, and make the world anew. THAT's the conversation we should be having and that gets structured out with these intentionally diversionary politics. Weapons of mass distraction, I call them. 

Let's unite and do this by getting involved at the grassroots level. Join or re-commit to a coalition, a civil rights organization, a nonprofit, and any organization doing important work and premised on the humanization of all. It's going to take a lot of work, so the effort itself must rejuvenate. 

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

#JoinTheMovement

References

Klein, N. (2023). Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. MacMillan books.

Klein, N. (2023, Sept. 13).  To Know Yourself, Consider Your Doppelgänger, New YorkTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/naomi-klein-wolf-doppelganger.html

Lewis, H. (2023, Sept. 12). From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist: What Naomi Wolf's Odyssey can teach us about seeing patters where they don't exist, The Atlantic. Retrieved: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/10/naomi-wolf-klein-doppelganger-book/675120/

Naomi Klein on Conspiracy Culture and

 “the Mirror World”

Sep 15, 2023 | 2:00 AM

View on the original site.

Naomi Klein, author, professor, journalist, and contributing editor at The Intercept, has ventured into the far-right “mirror world,” exploring the movements and figures promoting conspiracy theories, misinformation, and its hold on large segments of society. This week on Deconstructed, we bring you a live conversation between Ryan Grim and Klein at the George Washington University Amphitheater, organized by Politics and Prose. Klein and Grim discuss Klein’s newest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” They discuss the labyrinthine world of conspiracy theories and how the right has effectively sowed confusion and capitalized on issues abandoned by the left.

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

On Wednesday of this week, I interviewed Naomi Klein about her new book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” which begins with Naomi following her doppelganger, other Naomi — that’s the feminist-turned-Steve-Bannon-ally, Naomi Wolf — down a series of rabbit holes.

Describing her journey to these shadowlands, she also looks into the mirror, and asks all of us to look in the mirror as well, and ask what role we’ve played in ceding turf to the right, or abandoning principles — like skepticism of corporate greed and big pharma, opposition to censorship and mass surveillance, and so on — that have long been the domain of the left. By abandoning that territory, did we play a part in clearing the ground for the mirror world? And how can we reclaim our confidence and our voices in such disorienting times?

We spoke at George Washington University at an event hosted by Politics and Prose. That independent bookstore, by the way, will also be hosting a reading for my own forthcoming book, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” I’ll be in conversation there with my Breaking Points colleague Krystal Ball on November 27th.

Now, here’s Naomi Klein with a brief reading from her new book, followed by our conversation.

[Deconstructed intro theme, continued.]

Presenter: Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a warm and enthusiastic welcome to Naomi Klein and Ryan Grim.

Naomi Klein (Reading from “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World”): In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book. I did not have time, no one asked me to, and several people cautioned against it. Not now, not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet, and certainly not about this.

“Other Naomi,” that is how I refer to her now; this person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade. My big-haired doppelganger. A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me, or thank me, or express their pity for me. The very fact that I referred to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation.

For a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations. I report in the aftermath of oil spills and Category 5 hurricanes. I write books of big ideas about serious subjects.

And yet, in the months and years during which this text came into being, a time when cemeteries ran out of space and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space, everything else that I might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption. In June 2021, as this project began to truly spiral out of my control, a strange new weather event, dubbed a “heat dome,” descended on the southern coast of British Columbia, the part of Canada where I now live with my family.

The thick air felt like a snarling, invasive entity with malevolent intent. More than 600 people died, most of them elderly. An estimated 10 billion marine creatures were cooked alive on our shores. An entire town went up in flames. It’s rare for this out-of-the-way sparsely populated spot to make international headlines, but the heat dome made us briefly famous.

An editor asked if I, as someone engaged in the climate fight for 15 years, would file a report about what it was like to live through this unprecedented climate event.

“I’m working on something else,” I told him, the stench of death filling my nostrils.

“Can I ask what?”

“You cannot.”

There were plenty of other important things I neglected during this time of feverish subterfuge. That summer, I allowed my nine-year-old to spend so many hours watching a gory nature series called Animal Fight Club that he began to ram me at my desk like a great white shark. I engaged in all of this neglect so that I could, what? Check her serially suspended Twitter account? Study her appearances on Steve Bannon’s live streams for insights into their electric chemistry? Read or listen to yet another of her warnings that basic health measures were actually a covert plot orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum, to sow mass death on such a scale, it could only be the work of the devil himself?

My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back. A master’s degree worth of hours. I told myself it was research. That, if I was going to understand her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against objective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows, with names like “Q Anon Anonymous” and “Conspirituality,” that unpack and deconstruct the co-mingling worlds of conspiracy theories. wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with COVID 19 denial, anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism.

This, on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson, on whose shows Other Naomi had become a regular guest. “I feel closer to the hosts of Conspirituality than to you,” I whimpered one night into my best friend’s voicemail.

I told myself I had no choice. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time, or of the compressed writing time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises — and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers of people to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated tyranny — is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that we humans might at some point decide to do together.

Thank you.

[Audience clapping.]

"The people claiming to be ‘freethinkers’ in the pandemic might actually be sheep," By Dominic J. Packer & Jay J. Van Bavel

Here is a piece to chew on. In captures a paradoxical feature of North American identity, namely, that "individualistic norms can create a 'herd of independent minds.'” What mediates this tension between the individual and the herd is the following: Inasmuch as so-called individualism leads to a nation of specialized roles, we become more—not less—dependent on one another. 

The pandemic should have served as a reminder of just how dependent we are on each other, translating into actions that support the well-being  of the whole. Countries that have gone down this path have fared better in terms of COVID infection rates and deaths. Those that have not, like the U.S., have paid a high price for the illusion of independence that is itself a manifestation of conformity. It's helpful to see how research supports this.

-Angela Valenzuela

Op-Ed: The people claiming to be ‘freethinkers’ in the pandemic might actually be sheep

A demonstrator at a protest against vaccine and mask mandates near the state Capitol in Santa Fe, N.M., on Aug. 20. Social researchers find that American individualism is just another norm determined by the group.

(Cedar Attanasio / Associated Press)

BY DOMINIC J. PACKER & JAY J. VAN BAVEL | Nov. 15, 2021 | Los angeles times

Now two years into the pandemic, we continue to hear constant fights about the fundamental antagonism between being an independent individual and being a good group member. You must be either a “freethinker” or a “sheep”!

But research suggests this is not the case and that the two often go hand in hand. Indeed, individualism may be the ultimate form of American conformity.

Individualism is a core part of American identity, with individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. This contrasts sharply with the collectivism expressed in other parts of the world, where the needs of the group are often prioritized over individual rights.

Yet even in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” noted an apparent paradox in the American way of life: an unprecedented individualism was combined with mass involvement in “voluntary associations.” Far more than citizens in his native France, Americans were joiners, belonging to “associations of a thousand … kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.”

As we found in our research, the groups we identify with, including our nation, shape our understanding of what it is to be a person. The ways in which we strive to be an independent self are influenced by the norms of the groups we care about. Over time, these values fundamentally become part of who we are. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has said, “In constructing an identity, one draws, among other things, on the kind of person available in one’s society.”

American identity has strong norms of independence, emphasizing personal autonomy, responsibility and individual rights. Does this mean that American individualism is just another norm determined by the group?

Research suggests that indeed it is. In one study, for example, social psychologist Jolanda Jetten and her colleagues measured how much American and Indonesian citizens identified with their respective countries. Respondents were asked, for example, how glad they were to be an American or Indonesian and how connected they felt to their fellow citizens. The researchers then assessed these citizens’ levels of individualism by asking them how much they agreed with statements like, “One should be independent of others as much as possible” or “When faced with a difficult personal decision, it is better to decide yourself rather than follow the advice of friends or relatives.”

American citizens were more individualistic than Indonesians, which aligns with a large body of research on cultural differences. Crucially, Americans who were strongly identified with their country reported higher levels of individualism than Americans who identified less. It was the opposite in Indonesia, where citizens who identified strongly with the nation were less individualistic than those who were weakly identified.

In other words, it was identification with their nation — intersecting 

with the nation’s social norms — that determined individualism.

This study is entirely consistent with what social scientists and commentators have long noted about a paradox in American identity. In the memorable phrasing of art critic Harold Rosenberg, individualistic norms can create a “herd of independent minds” — people who strive for independence are often doing it to fit in.

It also turns out that autonomy and interdependence are highly intertwined. A study of 42 nations (as well as comparisons across the 50 U.S. states) found that in places where people are more individualistic, they also become more dependent on others.

This counterintuitive pattern might appear surprising. But it occurs because the more individualized and specialized our roles, the more dependent we become on other people to function effectively.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a stark reminder of just how interdependent we all are. Our individual vulnerability to COVID-19 is highly dependent on the actions of the people around us and, with the rise of variants, responses around the world. As we noted in an April 2020 study, fighting a pandemic requires large-scale cooperation — which means having people get vaccinated, wear masks and take other precautions to protect their communities.

A major problem with public health communication during this pandemic has been the failure to dispel the false choice between personal freedom and collective well-being. New Zealand, for instance, found that the populace acting collectively to mitigate the virus early on has actually allowed far more freedom overall during the pandemic.

Evidence suggests that countries with norms that place greater value on independence, like the U.S., (what the social psychologist Michele Gelfand calls “loose cultures”) have had a harder time coordinating their citizenry and slowing the spread of the virus, ultimately suffering higher rates of infection and mortality. Yet the autonomy people believe they are proving by refusing to conform to health protective behaviors is largely an illusion, itself a type of conformity.

Independence and interdependence are not antagonistic, and we need to exercise both at the same time. It is our collective strength that allows for our individuality to flourish. There’s no clearer example of this fact than what we’re living through now.

Dominic J. Packer is a professor of psychology at Lehigh University and Jay Van Bavel is an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. They are authors of “The Power of Us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony.”

Study: White people react to evidence of white privilege by claiming greater personal hardships

This Stanford Graduate School of Business study finds that whites claim hardship and deny the existence of inequalities in response to evidence on white privilege.

Since one of my areas of expertise is race and ethnic relations, I can similarly attest to the difficulty of teaching white privilege in the context of contravening ideologies of individualism, individual merit, and white supremacy—as if the right and opportunity to be an individual were equally distributed and as if merit were unmediated by the status of one's racial/ethnic, class, or gender group. Never mind strong and consistent patterning of "merit" (e.g., test scores, educational attainment, income, etc.) indicators along these axes to the contrary.  

Regarding the myth of white superiority, this is not only a U.S. problem, but a global one.  It exists as an ideology—however implicit or explicit—within our majority and minority communities alike.  Even in our own families.  In many families, children that are more fair-skinned than others get more attention or are deemed more attractive than their darker-skinned siblings.  Heck, babies are barely born and parents or relatives are quick to comment on children's skin color.  "Salió muy güerito," they say. "She (or he) came out fair-skinned," they say.  Unfortunately, in some form or fashion, no one on the planet is entirely immune from the ideology of white supremacy.

Central to the very concept of white privilege is to not even have to acknowledge it to begin with.  Were this not the case, we wouldn't be having the offensive conversation in our state right now regarding a "World Geography," McGraw-Hill textbook that eliminates the term "slavery," by referring to slaves as “workers” and then placing them in the section “Patterns of Immigration." You can read about this here.   

McGraw-Hill has backtracked and has corrected the online version.  Yet even this decision fails to get at the depth of white privilege in the curriculum.  For a great, thorough read on the state's politics over its history curriculum written by Texas history professors, read:  Politics and the History Curriculum: The Struggle over Standards in Texas and the Nation (2012) by K. Erekson (Editor) (Note: It's pricey but you can get your local library or university to make sure it is one of their holdings for check out.)

Were this example on slaves an exception, then the claim about white privilege in children's textbooks would indeed be hyperbole. Instead, this is the rule.  That is, our textbooks not only are truly erroneous in instances like these, but they are entirely biased in favor of white histories, stories, accomplishments, and epistemologies (or ways of knowing).

While "micro-aggressions" (discrimination and prejudice) are important to the study of white privilege and minority-majority relations, what should not get lost are the institutional mechanisms for the reproduction of status in society.  Curriculum, in particular, is powerful.  We here in Texas would not be having these contentious battles over curriculum were this not the case.  

Moreover, since curriculum equates to the reproduction of consciousness, systematic exclusion of subaltern histories reinstantiates privilege and ways of knowing and viewing the world in our society and helps account for why so little seems to change.  Fortunately, our children have alternative media for getting a more complete story and many are savvy in this regard. None of this mitigates, however, the power of our state-approved curriculum either to validate (frequently white) teachers' stories or exploit their ignorance.  In my own work, I call this "subtractive schooling."  The alternative is "additive schooling" as a specific antidote.  This is an anti-racist, culturally and linguistically relevant curriculum and pedagogy about which much has been written (e.g., Bartlett and Garcia (2011), Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times).

Educate yourselves.  Read history.  Get involved in textbook and curriculum battles.  Promote equity, inclusion, and honesty.  And not only disavow that the concept of "white privilege" is even a debate, but also acknowledge that our never-ending struggles for inclusion in Texas' textbook selection process is wholly about the ideological agenda of maintaining current arrangements of power that align stubbornly to racial/ethnic, class, and gender divides in our society.

Peace and justice for 2016.
Angela Valenzuela
c/s

Study: White people react to evidence of white privilege by claiming greater personal hardship

David Edwards
28 Sep 2015 at 17:10 ET                   

Frustrated man (Shuttershock)

Researchers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business have found that white people

respond to evidence that they are privileged by their race by insisting
that they face greater hardships in life.

In a study published in the November issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
L. Taylor Phillips and Brian S. Lowery point out that progress on
racial equality is limited by the fact that many whites deny the
existence of inequities.

“Despite this reality, policy makers and power brokers continue to
debate whether racial privilege even exists and whether to address such
inequity,” the researchers noted. “One reason for this inaction might be
an unwillingness among Whites to acknowledge racial privilege —
acknowledgment that may be difficult given that Whites are motivated to
believe that meritocratic systems and personal virtues determine life
outcomes.”

“However, claiming personal life hardships may help Whites manage the threatening possibility that they benefit from privilege.”

The researchers argued that understanding the reaction to evidence of
racial inequality was important because whites who did not feel that
they personally benefited from their ethnicity would be less willing to
support policies that were designed to reduce racial inequality.

Subjects in the study were separated into two groups. The group that
was shown evidence of white privilege “claimed more hardships than those
not exposed to evidence of privilege,” the study found.

A second experiment suggested “that people claim more life hardships
in response to evidence of in-group privilege because such information
is threatening to their sense of self.” Researchers observed that whites
who read self-affirming statements before completing the survey claimed
less hardships, and they found that self-affirmations could actually
reverse the denial of white privilege.

“Furthermore, Whites’ claims of life hardships mediated their denials
of personal privilege, supporting our hypothesis that hardship claims
help people deny they personally benefit from privilege — that White
privilege extends to themselves,” Phillips and Lowery wrote.
“Importantly, these denials of personal privilege were in turn
associated with diminished support for affirmative action policies —
policies that could help alleviate racial inequity.”

Researchers recommended that efforts to reduce racial inequalities also 
include the education of advantaged populations.

“Our work suggests that privilege reduction efforts might need to
focus not only on convincing or educating advantaged group members about
privilege, but also on reducing the feelings of self-threat this
information induces,” Phillips and Lowery explained. “The existence of
hardships does not reduce racial privilege, since racial privilege
entails comparison to someone of a different race with equivalent
hardships. People may erroneously think privilege entails complete ease
in life and that the presence of any hardships denotes an absence of
privilege.”

In conclusion, the study postulated that whites may claim hardship
“to maintain not only a positive sense of self, but also the material
benefits associated with racial privilege.”

“Whites’ claims of hardship might also serve to legitimize the racial
advantages they enjoy, and thereby justify a system that benefits their
group.”

I don't even know if I  should even post a piece like this that is so incredibly deficit oriented except for the fact that individualistic, "success-oriented" arguments about low-income students' school failure are so appealing to so many--particularly that segment of the public that refuses to acknowledge the "savage inequalities" (to use Jonathan Kozol's term) that characterize inequities in our schools, neighborhoods, and society.

This piece pretends to be explanatory, yet it fails to acknowledge society's unwillingness to equitably and adequately fund our schools.  Racism is powerfully systemic, as well, where race is not only historic and profound, but is also an organizing principle of society.  Segregation, bias, prejudice, discrimination stubbornly find expression in policies and practices to the point that it is the air that we breathe.  One can hardly turn on the morning or evening news and not address racial inequalities in America.  

And why is speaking another language even a "language barrier?"  Why is English monolingualism even a goal given that bilingualism and multilingualism have always been the gem of the upper class in our own country?  For an increasingly multilingual world, this goal is not only passé, it is also a target that represents the interests of those that want to perpetuate a parochial mentality that reinscribes their statuses or positions within our highly unequal and massively diverse status quo. It's problematic that this person would view English monolingualism as a marker of success, particularly for our children who are wonderfully poised for biliteracy, biculturalism, and multilingualism.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan's comments to CNN are pathetic.  Give me a break.  We don't have African American teacher role models in schools because we are losing them to gangs? The way that this is written, that is exactly what Carter suggests.  Even if  this were anywhere close to true, for our schools, policies, and policymakers to have no onus in the matter is off base, at best, and blaming the victims, at worst.  Ever heard of the school-to-prison pipeline...?

The author ends her piece with statements about children's resilience.  If our children could get "success-coached" into  success, this would have happened a long time ago.  Indeed, our children are resilient...which includes their capacity to weather good, power-evasive and power-neutral, liberals like her.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

Why Aren't Low-Income Students Succeeding in School?

by Carol J. Carter

Posted: 03/19/2013 5:18 pm EDT Updated: 05/19/2013 5:12 am EDT

Many low income first-generation college students who are reading and doing math at a seventh or eighth grade level are admitted into college. Every year, as many as 1.7 million first-year students entering both two- and four-year colleges will take a remedial course to learn the skills they need to enroll in a college-level course. African American, Hispanic, and low-income students represent the largest populations of entering college freshmen who require remedial courses. In fact, 64.7 percent of low-income students who are enrolled in a 2-year college and 31.9 percent enrolled in a 4-year college will require remediation. Academic challenges are often deep-seeded and begin in primary and secondary school, which when left unaddressed, often leads to remediation at the postsecondary level. There are several factors that contribute to low-income students entering college with poor math and reading skills. Here are some of them:

1. Lack of exposure. In early childhood, many low-income students aren't exposed to books. Contrast that with the amount of books in middle-income students' homes.

• In low-income neighborhoods there is one book per every 300 children.
• In middle-income neighborhoods there are 13 books per one child.

Children from low-income families hear as many as 30 million fewer words by the age of 4 than their higher-income peers. In homes where education is not a priority, high standards need to be set for students from birth where language skills, language exposure, reading expectations, a love of learning, and a connection can be made between academic success and future success. Geoffrey Canada, who runs Harlem Children's Zone, emphasizes teaching these skills to pregnant moms so that their unborn children can benefit from increased access to learning. An exposure to books, after school programs, summer learning experiences, volunteering, and positive role models are crucial for all students, and can be provided after school in libraries, community facilities, and many of the housing projects where residents live.
2. Language barriers. English Language Learners (ELL) are defined as having English as a second language and predominately speaking a language other than English at home. While there are many affluent and advantaged ELLs in our schools, two-thirds of ELL students come from low-income families and nearly half of ELLs in grades pre-K to 5 have parents who did not graduate from high school. About 8 percent of students enrolled in U.S. schools are ELL. Research shows that ELL students are much less likely to score at or above proficient levels in both math and reading/language arts. The same report found, in Florida, a difference of 34 percentage points in math proficiency between ELLs and white students.
3. Lack of stability. Many low-income households can be tumultuous environments and create challenges for students to get to school, have an area at home that is conducive to learning, and engage in safe activities after school. The following statistics from the Urban Institute illustrate only some of the struggles a low-income family might face:

• Single-parent families are almost twice as likely to have low incomes compared to all families with children, and almost three times as likely to have low incomes compared to married-couple families with children.
• Health problems are more prevalent among low-income families, and these families are more likely to be uninsured.

In a separate study, research showed schools with high rates of student mobility -- those who change schools for reasons other than grade promotion -- generally have a large population of children migrant workers, homeless children, and or low-income families. Mobile students who don't have the opportunity to form enduring connections are likely to experience lower achievement levels and are at high-risk for dropping out.

4. Lack of role models. In low-income households where adults are less likely to hold high school diplomas or degrees of higher education, students lack positive academic role models. Even in the classroom, less than two percent of America's teachers are black men, according to the Department of Education. In response to the number of positive male role models, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said to CNN:

I think what we haven't talked about enough is that we're competing with the gangs, we're competing with the drug dealers on the corner, and when students fall through the cracks, when young people don't have that positive mentor, in a school setting, in the church or community, there's always a guy on the street corner that can say come my way.

5. First Generation. Of entering college freshmen, 30 percent are first-generation college students, meaning no one in their family has earned a degree, and 24 percent are first-generation and low income. Within six years, 89 percent of low-income first generation students leave without a degree. First-generation low income students are four times as likely to drop out of college in their first year (USA Today). This may be due in part to the fact that first-generation students often straddle two cultures -- the family culture and the college culture -- each with its own set of expectations, rules, and demands. Without support, it can be difficult for students to navigate the challenges of college and face sometimes conflicting demands.
Perhaps not surprising, some of the students who are from our roughest neighborhoods have the toughest skin and are often best equipped to deal with hardship, setbacks, and disappointment. Many deal better with these life realities than their suburban counterparts. The resilience that they possess is something that can inspire all of us. Sadly, they often don't know early enough how valuable their own difficulties are in the real experience that catapults people from poverty to self-sufficiency to prosperity. Next week, I will explore how low-income graduates can beat the odds, succeed, and thrive.