Happy Holidays?

  So, I usually try not to rant, but my hometown has gotten really out of hand, and I think its most recent event fits in with our coursework quite well. As of right now, 111 people have been arrested on drug charges. Arrest began around 4 a.m this morning.  On the website for local news, 36 faces are displayed along with the full name of those indicted. The ages ranged from 16 to 68. At this moment, I'm still trying to process my own feelings. I read "The New Jim Crow" in our course, and I had my qualms with the text. However, I'm simply boiling over with grief and anger right now. This operation is not clearly draw against lines of race, but class. Still, all I could say was, "This is the mess Alexander is talking about." While I cannot declare anyone guilty, I'm simply disgusted at how my local law enforcement carries out these operations.

  1. They choose to do 'big' operation near the holidays. Most of the time they have 2 or 3 months worth of evidence against these individuals, but they choose to do these bust during the holidays to 'make a statement.'
  2. 4 a.m? Really?
  3. There's no consideration for the children.  My sister is a social worker for Child Protective Services. She will once again not have a Christmas because these 'round ups' are kept under wraps until hours before. Therefore, the children have such little time to become acclimated to a 'parent-less' household.  Note, many of these individuals could have been arrested over the summer. I'm not saying that that would be better... but,  there's a specific reasons that they wait until days before Christmas. This is pattern----My senior year of high school, 7 of my cousins were arrested on drug chargers. Most used the money to help their parents make ends meet. They were under investigation for 7 months. The 'authorities' arrested them one week before graduation-----"to make a point."
  4. People are just amazed---in an inconceivable way. It's like some grand celebration.
  5. I am completely against revealing names and faces to the public. No one has been convicted. If most of these people are acquitted, the community can remember a face and continue to marginalize the individual. Thus, perpetuating the cycle.


   I don't want to ruin anyone's break or holiday, but I really wanted to share this in a space where I felt like people could openly discuss the issue in an 'informed' way. I wanted to vent in a space where I wouldn't have to first convince the person to see that x,y and z are occurring. You all get it.

   Lives just being torn apart, man.

If you haven't already, take a look at this Op-Ed about NYPD in New York public schools:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/take-police-officers-off-the-school-discipline-beat.html?smid=pl-share

(I hadn't heard about Dennis Rivera, the kindergartner who was cuffed in 2008, so here is an article about that incident as well: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/5-year-old-boy-handcuffed-school-hospital-misbehaving-article-1.341677)

I can't even comment on this, it's too much.

The Power of Someone Believing in You

Many time throughout my life I have heard the saying that one person can make all the difference in another person's life. I have always believed this to be true. Yet, I could never really pinpoint an adult in the context of school who really motivated me or enlivened me. To be honest, I always thought of myself as forgettable. I could tell that many teachers and professors forgot my name or even sometimes called me "María". I really hated that. However, in college I did have a few professors who really made a difference in my life, who made me smile and who motivated me. My most positive experience of them all came my senior year of college. It was in a Spanish literature class, towards the end of the semester. We had to write a ten page research paper as our final. The professor offered us the option to turn in a first draft which she would read and give feedback on before our final draft. She graded that first draft and gave us the opportunity to improve that grade. If you received a good grade on the first draft, you would not have to submit a final draft. When I received my first draft back there were red markings all over it, a sign that she read it in detail, but at the top it read, "Marina you did a great job. You can leave it as it is, but if you choose I can help you edit it and you can sent it into Elements" (an undergraduate scholarly journal). My first thought was "wow!" I never thought that my writing was good enough to be sent to a scholarly journal. She believed in me and my capabilities and in turn I began to believe in myself. Even though I was not published in the end, I did gain something. I learned to believe in myself and have faith in my academic abilities. I learned that I was capable of being a great writer and much more.
I look back so positively on that experience. I learned that one person really can make a difference, especially in education. My professor made such a difference in my life because she believed in me. I hope to be able to give my students the same confidence that she gave me, because knowing that someone believes in you is a powerful thing.

Harlem on Our Minds: Incomplete in the Best Way Possible

Donovan Brothers and Sisters,

Thank you so much for bearing with us while we constructed our impressions of Harlem on Our Minds. It is finally done, so we hope you enjoy!

Valerie Kinloch's book contained a number of important key points. First of all, as Luis pointed out and we riffed on as conversation for a while, it is notable for its state of incompleteness. The premise of Kinloch's research was to engage students at Harlem High School in action research in their communities. However, her research was fluid and evolved from critical interpretation into concerted local involvement. With the specific issue of gentrification in mind, the author encouraged students to forge their own definitions of what the process meant for them as it happened to their home, with emphasis on connections between place (specifically, Harlem) and identity, and also on documentation of the historically Black community vis a vis white students and professionals taking up temporary, high-rent residency. Conversations among students on "reading" Harlem, particularly with one "literacy learner, soul, singer, and street survivor" named Philip, grew into videoing culturally significant spaces under threat as they changed. Soon students and teachers collaborated on interviewing and surveying those on both sides of the race and class lines of Columbia University's eminent domain-rationalized gentrification (and that of middle class "dancer's through Harlem on the whole), and spoke out at a Tenants Association meeting.

The feeling we got from this book as we discussed it was that it was a constant work in progress; a give and take between student agency and the direction of the facilitator. For future students or teachers looking to read this book, a good idea would be to read it with an open mind and with patience, it does not give clear cut answers on what it means to undertake participatory action research. However, the process of negotiation and growth that occurs with the students and Kinloch is extremely valuable. In the long run, it seems that students were able to fully realize and materialize their voices through a variety of media, something any educator can aspire to.

The New Jim Crow...What to know!

Good afternoon Donovans,

Sorry this has taken so long. When our group began discussing what we wanted to share with the whole class about Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, we instantly started pulling apart her arguments and critiquing areas of weakness. Alexander lays out her intention to write a book that is accessible to all at the very beginning of The New Jim Crow. As college educated individuals, we have been trained to examine the scholarship and pull apart the pieces that we read. It is important to understand before reading Alexander's work that this book is multifunctional depending on the background of the reader. 

In this vein, it seems appropriate to start with what this book accomplishes. The New Jim Crow is clearly meant to start a conversation, not to be the end of it. Although some of Alexander's metaphors are loose, she does not offer a magic bag of solutions to racism, denial of rights, and the system of mass incarceration in this country. Depending on the reader, Alexander also offers some enlightenment and increases the fluency of the reader to be able to have conversations with others regarding the systematic oppression of black men in our country. For example, Alexander uses court cases that many readers may not be familiar with to back up her claims. Furthermore, Alexander's work has the potential to reaffirm the realities of many Americans in this country and to connect the dots throughout history to unveil the deep historical roots of systematic racism that are often seen as "in the past" due to the prevalent "color blind" attitude of our current society. For example, this can be a reaffirming and empowering text for many of our students. Lastly, Alexander uses language that is specific and clear, making this text accessible for a wider variety of readers, thus, providing many readers with a "fluent language to defend their experience in their knapsack." Alexander undeniably succeeds in arming her readers with knowledge. 

The New Jim Crow unveils two critical points: What is the system and how is it self protected? Our group pulled two specific quotes to share:

What is the system?

"Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination--employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps, and other public benefits, and exclusion for jury service--are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it," (Alexander, p. 2).

How is it self protected? 

"...lower courts consistently rejected claims of race discrimination in the criminal justice system, finding that gross racial disparities do not merit strict scrutiny in the absence of evidence of explicit race discrimination--the very evidence unavailable in the era of colorblindness...many people may not believe they are motivated by discriminatory attitudes but argued that we all have internalized fear of young black men, a fear reinforced by media imagery that has helped to create a national image of the young black male as a criminal," (Alexander, p. 113). 

Our group would also like to share some of our criticisms. 

• It is so hard to disagree with Michelle Alexander's claims that it is easy to read this text without being critical of her sourcing and research methods. 
• Her argument focuses on the War on Drugs as the catalyst for the mass incarceration of black men but negates to acknowledge that this war targeted and still continues to target a specific socio-economic demographic of black men in the U.S. 
• The largest hole in Alexander's work is that she does not devote time in the text to analyzing the economics in low income areas that make these individuals vulnerable in the first place. Instead, she focuses on race. As Aleshia said, "arresting black men in low income neighborhoods is like shooting fish in a barrel but why are they in the barrel?" We talked a lot about how in order to really change the system, we need to disassemble the economic system at work. We talked about the historical racism that occurs in relationship to economics. The system of American slavery is a prime example of this because the system was based in economics, yet the discourse we use to analyze the system is race. 
• Lastly, as Aleshia shared with us, the rate of black women being incarcerated is growing at a faster rate than that of black men. Alexander's chapter on, "Where are all the good black men," does not even give a nod to the incarceration of black women and this is undeniably an issue that we need to be very concerned about. What are the choices that black women are making due to their economic realities that are making them vulnerable to this system?

We hope this was helpful in understanding the complexities of this text. The New Jim Crow is definitely worth reading but we caution you all as readers and as potential teachers of this text, to further the thinking of you and your students to consider the nuances of the economic foundations of the issues Alexander lays out. One suggestion is to incorporate other texts into your reading of this text like Angela Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete? 

Other group members or readers of The New Jim Crow, please feel free to add to this summary!

See y'all tomorrow,

The New Jim Crow Group

Takeaways: "Other People's Children"

As Professor Patel mentioned in one of our first seminar sessions, Lisa Delpit was one of the first voices in education to "get real" about the realities of urban education. It is incredibly difficult to boil down this book, a compilation of some of Delpit's most famous essays, into "just one thing", but here are a few points that our group found meaningful (feel free to chime in and clarify where necessary, group):

• Instead of the typical "deficit perspective" characterizing how many educators view students in urban schools, it is our critical responsibility as educators to connect to our students' rich tapestry of backgrounds and experiences with language.
• It is additionally our critical responsibility to connect students' background experiences with the "skills" required of the workforce, higher education, etc. We can do this while honoring our students' backgrounds and what they bring to the table by consciously making connections by aligning our praxis in a "real world" context.  We cannot pretend that gatekeeping points don't exist, but preparing our students for those gatekeeping points doesn't mean prioritizing "the standard" as "better".
• Educators of color, in the broader world of education theory and in school settings, are often silenced, ignored, and dismissed in lieu of the arguments of (mostly white) "authorities". Just as "nothing about us not by us is not for us", educators of color need to be heard - and lead the conversations. There should NOT be just one "default worldview" when discussing issues of urban education. Alternative perspectives are just as - and sometimes more - valid than the "standard".