A high school class on race and racism

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2004 by Lawrence Blum

Later in the semester, we discuss contemporary racial issues--general issues in society, and issues as they arose in the school. Also, I break the students up into racially diverse "project groups, and each group researches a topic and makes a presentation at the end of the course. The topics in 2002 were comparative slave systems, academic segregation by race at the high school (i.e., the achievement gap in the context of AP classes), social segregation by race at the high school, racial profiling at the school and in the Cambridge community, and mixed race identity.

We spent two classes on the achievement gap itself, in addition to the group presentation. For the class discussion we had read an article about a high school in Denver with a similar racial make-up to CRLS, at which (the article claimed) the guidance counselors had steered minority students away from AP classes independent of the particular student's potential. (15) In our class discussion, my students had a range of perspectives on this issue. Waheed said that at CRLS students are not discouraged from taking advanced courses. Parris said the racial tracking was the same at CRLS, only they are not open about it. (In a comparable discussion in a previous year's class, the students were much more critical of the guidance counselors for steering minority students away from the AP classes.) Jeanie, a Black student, said that students get used to lower expectations being held of them, so they are not comfortable with the high demands of the AP classes. In a later class, Jeanie went into more detail about her personal experience of this. She said she had essentially been forced, by one of her history teachers and her guidance counselor, to take an AP History class; they would not sign off on her schedule unless she agreed to sign up for that course. She said she had never taken a class that was so hard, and she just wasn't accustomed to working that hard for a course. (16) Jeanie said she was not sure that she is glad she did take the class, since she thinks she would have gotten a higher grade in a non-AP class. Angela dissented from this view and said that the AP classes were manageable, that you had to push yourself a bit harder than in the other classes, but that it could be done.

Some version of Jeanie's remarks was echoed by two other Black students in my follow-up interviews. Parris, a Haitian-American, said: "there are not enough Black kids who work hard. I'm not saying I'm smart, but I work hard. There are not enough Black kids who work hard. For some reason, we don't work hard enough. That's why my mother thinks African-Americans are lazy." Efriem, an African immigrant Black student, said: "I would say it goes back to elementary school. The Black kids are not pushed to do that well; they don't get pushed by their parents in the same way as a lot of white kids are. By the time you get to high school you haven't had that kind of encouragement and so it is hard to do when you are a junior, to all of a sudden challenge yourself like that."