Racism in Schools

The Ideological and Material Basis of Racism

Racism in schools happens in two ways. First, an ideological process is in place, which can be described as a set of attitudes and belief systems that create a two-school phenomenon whereby African American and Latino students suffer daily assaults to their dignity and White and Asian American students experience a “lift” with respect to their sense of personhood. Admittedly, the Asian American case is a bit more complicated to the extent that Asian American students are disciplined through a regulating perspective that constructs them as “model minorities,” which compromises the ultimate claim that they have succeeded. In short, the model minority myth disciplines Black and Latino students with the narrative that if one minority group has succeeded in a racially unequal condition, so can others. The issue is not so much that Asian Americans, as a pan-ethnic group, have shown incredible rates of educational attainment surpassing even White students, but rather that using Asian Americans as models for U.S. democracy conveniently forgets the continuing discrimination they face in U.S. society. For instance, their education does not translate into the outcomes scholars would expect, such as higher incomes and leadership positions when compared with Whites with similar credentials, not to mention the linguistic racism that Asian Americans face in public schools and higher education. In fact, Asian Americans show rates of achievement despite the presence of racism and not the absence of it.

Second, racism takes place on an extra-ideological plane wherein a set of material relations cannot be overcome simply through a shift in attitudes and beliefs. Minority students also suffer a concrete form of racism determined less by low expectations (despite their presence) and more by unequal access to appropriate resources and adequate facilities. Within this condition, their education, let alone excellence, is thwarted by the lack of updated books and materials on one hand, and dilapidated bricks-and-mortar on the other. Thus, a complete picture of racism in schools considers two powerful dimensions in the lived experiences of minority students as they become victims of lowered expectations in the first instance and a materially deprived existence in the second. Concentrating on the first dimension while ignoring the latter reduces racism as fundamentally an attitudinal relationship absent of its material force, whereas reducing racism to material relations forgets the psychic damage of a schooling process designed for the exact opposite: to cultivate children's minds. An accurate analysis of racism in schools is attentive to the extra-ideological material relation and the extra-material ideological relation.

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