Critical Reflection #6 — Quotes

“What I am up against is much larger than the politics of my campus. My battle is with teacher education writ large and the stubborn insistence on suturing the field to psychology to the exclusion of every other social science,” (Ladson-Billings).

“But the problem of culture in teaching is not merely one of exclusion. It is also one of over determination. What I mean by this is that culture is randomly and regularly used to explain everything. So at the same moment teacher education students learn nothing about culture, they use it with authority as one of the primary explanations for everything from school failure to problems with behavior management and discipline,” (Ladson-Billings).

“Overwhelmingly, the students choose a student who is unlike them in racial, ethnic, and gender categories. Over and over students tell me about their problems dealing with African American boys,” (Ladson-Billings).

“The question that this pattern of speaking about students provoked in my mind was how it is that so many teachers have come to make a psychological diagnosis about students who are struggling in schools,” (Ladson-Billings).

“Our supreme reliance on individuals means that we look at students as individually responsible for their success in school. We lack complex understandings of how individual, family, community, school, and societal factors interact to create school failure for some students,” (Ladson-Billings).

“First, most of my students are white, middle-class, monolingual Midwesterners. They are surrounded by people who look, talk, and perhaps think as they do. When I try to get them to think about their culture, they are stymied. They describe themselves as having “no culture” or being ‘just regular’ or ‘just normal.’ When I point out the semantic challenge with their characterizations — by default people unlike them are ‘irregular’ or ‘abnormal’ — they fumble to correct that impression (my students are nothing if not polite),” (Ladson-Billings).

“In daily life, sometimes educators’ being colorblind is quite harmful to young people, since they live in a world that often treats them racially; sometimes a particular celebration of diversity can be reductive and stereotypic; sometimes seeing a person primarily as a member of a “race” detracts from recognizing our common humanity,” (Everyday Antiracism xviii).

“Really, everyday antiracism requires both addressing people’s experiences in the world as racial group members and refusing to distort people’s experiences, thoughts, or abilities by seeing them only or falsely through a racial lens. This applies when educators interact with students in classrooms, design and discuss curriculum, interact with students’ families, or even think about ourselves and our colleagues. Educators must analyze, concretely, when, where, and how it helps to treat people as racial group members, and when, where, and how it harms. Above all, educators must keep analyzing which of our everyday actions counteract racial inequality and which do not,” (Everyday Antiracism xix).

“First, everyday antiracism in education involves rejecting false notions of human difference and actively treating people as equally worthy, complicated, and capable,” (Everyday Antiracism xx).

“Second, everyday antiracism in education involves acknowledging and engaging lived experiences that do vary along racial lines,” (Everyday Antiracism xxi).

“Third, everyday antiracism in education involves learning from diversity in human experience, and valuing equally the knowledge and activity shared within various ‘groups’,” (Everyday Antiracism xxi).

“Fourth, everyday antiracism in education involves equipping ourselves and others to challenge racial inequalities of opportunity and outcome, rather ilian accepting racial disparities as normal,” (Everyday Antiracism xxi).

“The active effort to prove a lie-that the “races” differ in intellectual ability has taken its toll on every one of us, regardless of the racial category through which we live our lives. In contemporary America, it is difficult to think about racial groups without thinking about them as unequally intelligent,” (Everyday Antiracism 10).

“It is high time we got rid of the word Caucasian. Some might protest that it is “only a label.” But language is one of the most systematic, subtle, and significant vehicles for transmitting racial ideology,” (Everyday Antiracism 12).