Thursday, March 20, 2008

Is education reform more about class or race?

In reforming education, there is no separating race relations from economics. This is a package deal and the idea that one is more key always will leave you imbalanced. Systems of oppression won’t go away because money is given or even evenly distributed. Evenly distributing money doesn’t balance the playing field. On one hand, since the field is already unlevel, if we evenly ration money it just exacerbates present inequities; furthermore, this distribution of wealth does nothing to rid us of white privilege. I know no one wants to believe this has much weight, but honestly, how many Euro-Americans would trade to be black?

Similarly, fixing race relations won’t completely quell educational issues either. I mean, because everyone at some point hypothetically has equal access, a well-proportioned representation of every people group throughout all levels of power structures in society, and social norms come to be by meshing all ethnicities’ norms as one (so as to rid stereotypes), we would still have social class issues. Class issues play out in very insidious ways.

These two monsters are inseparable. This is unfortunate. Until racism ceases, you will here about it. I can promise you that. If you’re tired of hearing about it, do something about it. Have you done any research on the statistics of who makes up what we call “the poor”? That might be informative. In most cases, poor is synonymous with people of color. Finally, I’m racking my brain trying to think of one school in Portland that is predominately white which is considered poor; I can’t, but can you think of one?
Posted by Don Mateo A.K.A. Matt Ross at 04:11:02 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

A journal reflection from a university studies class intitled Educational Equity

Matthew Ross
Deb Arthur
UNST 421
 Final Reflection

          For my final reflection I’d like to reflect and express my thoughts on what I see as a perpetual problem in the classroom and what I think needs to be done to rectify it. Even in 2008, students of color get marginalized[1] in a fashion that normalizes this behavior. Over the past three to four years, I have either worked or volunteered in up to 5 different schools. During this time I’ve worked with a variety of teachers, from different genders to different people groups, from different styles to different pedagogical beliefs. One trend that I’ve noticed as a constant throughout my experience has been the marginalized treatment of students of color. Students of color aren’t the only students who get treated this way[2], yet this group is consistently overrepresented in the number of students who get left out of quality education.

          This marginalization is subtle and thus difficult to explain. From my recollection, I don’t think there was one teacher that had ill intentions; in fact, I think they all had good intentions. It seems as though they all wanted to be fair and provide an equitable education to all their students. My time at LEP has been very similar. Though LEP is what I would consider progressive, and as a whole the school models a huge step in the right direction, I find even there this seemingly hidden missing link between the students of color and their teachers. I’ve noticed that many of the students of color notice this disconnection (though most cannot articulate it) but the teachers and other students seem to be oblivious to it. What does this disconnection look like in classroom activities?

          To conserve time and to express the severe nature of this reality, I’ll give a few examples of marginalization from LEP, the progressive school. Several instances, from two different teachers, that equated to the same outcomes come to mind. Though I only worked with each teacher for four weeks each, I noticed similar patterns. The teachers started class with a warm-up; went over the warm-up; explained the work for that day; and handed out a worksheet that allowed students to practice what had been discussed by the teacher. Having passed out the worksheets, the teacher proceeded to make rounds or circle the class answering questions. I happen to be doing the same thing. Every session I had in this class I noticed the majority of the students of color up from their seats, talking, going to the restroom, but seldom doing any work. Both well-intentioned teachers circled but circled around the students of color. Only when a situation became too loud or physical would either teacher tell these students to sit down. Not one student has ever been disciplined or made to stay after school. Few of these students learned any of the procedures that they were “taught” (this is in a math class). When I would ask the students why they weren’t doing their work, they assured me that they were passing the class but they were emphatically bored. They also expressed not being made to do anything besides be there. This was consistent and has been a perpetual experience I’ve had in educational settings.

          Who is at fault here? Don’t students play a role in their education? Though students play a role, a huge role in their education, teachers are who the majority of where this marginalizing comes from. What I have described is a situation where certain students are allowed to fail. There’s typically one trained professional in each classroom and one person getting paid to educate. Too often students of color get neglected by their teachers. The two teachers I described spent the majority of their time helping the students who are “perceived” as “docile”, “smart”, “focused”, and “well-behaved”. I understand the comfortability of primarily working with these students, but is that what teachers get paid to do? No. Teachers get paid to facilitate the education of all of their students equally. Teachers shouldn’t get paid to exert high expectations only on those students that they like and allow the others to fend for themselves—this too often results in the failure of students of color. I call this lack of attention, neglect, and lack of discipline, allowing students to fail. I wish there were a lot more Dr. Lorraine Monroe’s around. These teachers would either have to shape up or ship out.

          I pose as one major reason for this marginalization, a missing component in teacher preparation—the ability to adequately relate to students of color and teach culturally relevant curricula. Traditional multicultural classes, the ones that most teachers receive, is an oversimplified, romanticized, surface overview about fostering appreciation of diversity; whereas what is needed is a critical multiculturalism or antiracist education that says: 

”although we cannot ignore social, cultural, and home factors, much of the blame must be located in    institutionalized racism in the classroom, school, and society. Differences in performance are understood as being produced not by differences in ability or motivation, but by the organization, conduct, and content of pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment” (Lewis).
Though many Euro-American educators fail to notice the aforementioned situations as relating to race, this behavior is well-documented as typical. The behavior the teachers exhibited is typical and the notion that it had nothing to do with race is typical. Race works in ways unseen and unacknowledged even in situations in which race doesn’t appear to be central.

            I’ve noticed this denial and attempt to avoid racial language in this class of future educators. People try using code words to describe race relations and situations like inner-city, low-income, at-risk, low-achieving, urban, ghetto, underprivileged, low-class,  underfunded schools, etc…everyone knows exactly what you mean why don’t you just say it? This avoidance or desired ability to conceal race language is also typical and has been revealed in the literature. Gloria Ladson-Billings points this out in an explanation of this phenomenon: 

“Kochman (1981) detailed the differences in communication styles that made it difficult for his White and African American students to make sense of each other’s perspectives. According to Kochman, when his African American students were upset about things expressed in the classroom, they tended to get angry, speak loudly, and challenge those ideas. Conversely, his White students’ response to things that made them angry or upset was to become quiet and withdraw from the discussion. The White students judged the African American students to be too emotional, confrontational, and argumentative. The African American students judged the White students to be duplicitous, secretive, and not forthcoming”.

Avoiding conversations of race and racism does damage to both privileged and marginalized groups as it serves to reinscribe and crystallize present inequities. Some appear to believe that if conversations on racism are avoided then the problem will magically just go away. Every single person raised in a racialized society is racialized; meaning, every person has a racial identity that has a profound effect on their interpersonal relationships and life outcomes. This is unavoidable and should become common conversation in and out of k-12 and post secondary classrooms. This is not a panacea but a necessary start in the right direction if race relations are ever to really be mended.

            In her now famous essay about white privilege, Peggy McIntosh, a European-American woman with a primarily White audience in mind, poses a few alarming questions and cautions against idleness: 

“Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if White individuals changed their attitudes. But white skin in the United States opens many doors for Whites whether or not we approve…to redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tools here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects…What will we do with such knowledge?…it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrary awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base”.

These are the questions that educators and those who consider themselves “liberal” and “progressive” must answer. What will you do with your privilege? Will you use it for libratory purposes or continue to bury your head in the sand? A truly democratic education must take action against racism and the assumption that Eurocentric thinking is superior—the solution to ethnocentrism[3] is critical multiculturalism, or the inclusion of a variety of cultural perspectives on their own terms—no hierarchies.

References

Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York : The New Press.
Delpit, L., & Dowdy, J. K. (2002). The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts On Language and Culture in the Classroom. New York : The New Press.
Delpit, L., & White-Bradley, P. (2003). Educating or Imprisoning the Spirit: Lessons From Ancient Egypt . Theory into Practice, Vol.42, No. 4 , 283-288.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Theory into Practice, Vol. 34, No. 3 , 159-165.
Ladson-Billings, G. (Spring 1996. Vol.35, No.2). Silences as Weapons: Challenges of a Black Professor Teaching White Students. Theory Into Practice , 79-85.
Landsman, J. (2004). Confronting the Racism of Low Expectations. Educational Leadership , 28-32.
Lewis, A. E. (Winter 2001. Vol. 38, No. 4). There Is No “Race” in the Schoolyard: Color-Blind Ideology in an (Almost) All- White School . American Educational Research Journal , 781-811.
Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2000). Intercultural Communication in Contexts 2nd Edition. Mountain View : Mayfield Publishing Company.
McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Wellesley College Center for Research on Women , 1-3.
Noddings, N. (2005). What Does it Mean to Educate the Whole Child? Educational Leadership , 8-13.
Peterson, B. (2006). Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers. Wisconsin .
Pransky, K. (December 2002/January 2003). To meet your students where they are, first you have to find them: Working with culturally and linguistically diverse at-risk students. The Reading Teacher , 370-383.
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development. New York : Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Schwartz, F. (1981, Summer). Supporting or Subverting Learning: Peer Group Patterns in Four Tracked Schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol.12, No.2. , pp. 99-121.
Thompson, A. (1997). For: Anti-Racist Education. Curriculum Inquiry , 7-44.


[1] Teachers must move outside their own conceptions of “best practices” to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Marginalization begins when students must leave their home cultures at the front door of the school upon entering.

[2] Both White and non-White students get marginalized, but the overwhelming percentage of students who get marginalized are students of color. How often do you see the highest percentage of marginalized students in a study being White?

[3] Ethnocentrism refers to the assumption of a particular culture as the norm, other cultures being viewed through its lens and in relation to the taken-for-granted culture. Accordingly, outside cultures may be sentimentalized, marginalized, condescended to, demonized, exoticized, diminished, or ignored. Definition by Audrey Thompson

Posted by Don Mateo A.K.A. Matt Ross at 17:00:01 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Audrey Thompson constrasting ethnocentrism and racism

This is an excerpt from Audrey Thompson’s article For: Antiracism Education. I’m finding that she does an excellent job describing that which is hard to nail down; furthermore, she also gives concrete examples. This portion is meant to be somewhat tantalizing to some and an eye-opener to others…I suggest finding her articles and reading them!

The framework I will assume regards racism as institutional and structural as well as embodied and cultural. According to this framework of analysis, racism is a system of privilege and oppression, a network of traditions, legitimating standards, material and institutional arrangements, and ideological apparatuses that, together, serve to perpetuate hierarchical social relations based on race….
Ethnocentrism refers to the assumption of a particular culture as the norm, other cultures being viewed through its lens and in relation to the taken-for-granted culture. Accordingly, outside cultures may be sentimentalized, marginalized, condescended to, demonized, exoticized, diminished, or ignored. Textbooks that take the colonial period of North American history as “the beginning of the story,” for example, or world maps that adopt graphic conventions allowing the United States and Europe to appear disproportionately large, demonstrate ethnocentrism. Great Books programs, too, work within an ethnocentric framework when they celebrate an unbroken line of white, Western, male authors. Because the problem in ethnocentrism is a refusal of pluralism—of multiple points of view—the solution to ethnocentrism is multiculturalism, or the inclusion of a variety of cultural perspectives on their own terms.

By contrast, racism is not merely a matter of failing to recognize other standpoints, “centers,” or perspectives, but refers to the stigmatizing of outsider groups as inherently inferior, whether such groups are seen as threatening, unworthy, or unreliable, on the one hand, or as benevolent and “childlike,” on the other. Among the most overt forms that racism takes are exclusionary hiring practices, district redlining, stereotyping, “scientific” explanations of sexual prowess or I.Q. along “race” lines (although “race” itself, of course, is not a scientific category), police abuse and false arrest patterns, hate crimes, and, most obviously of all, eugenics and genocide. Yet racism also may take a seemingly benign form. Sentimentalizing Native Americans as “noble savages” or glorifying the purity and “primitivism” of African art, for example, are ways of insisting on a different kind of human status for the groups in question. The problem is not simply that Native Americans or African art forms are viewed from outside the framework of their own cultures, but that “noble savagery” and “primitivism” are implicitly Social Darwinist metaphors. Although African Americans or Native Americans or other groups may be characterized as more “pure” than whites, the upshot is still that whites are more civilized than others and that they bear a paternalistic relation to the “childlike” races. The paternalistic stance of whites may be more easily recognizable in forms of racism shaped by fear and hatred, but even sentimental versions appeal to racial difference as a way to organize relations between whites and other groups in hierarchical terms. Both forms serve the interests of whites at the expense of oppressed minorities.

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Wednesday, March 5, 2008

How People Resist The Notion of Systemic Oppression

Recently I read an article by educator and scholar Dr. Barbara Applebaum. The paper is entitled, Engaging Student Disengagement: Resistance or Disagreement. In this article Applebaum focuses on the struggles social justice educators face from students who refuse to engage and substantively analyze inequities in our society on the basis that they claim to not believe they are happening. Both Applebaum’s analysis of this phenomenon in education and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s critique of the general public in Racism Without Racists, dovetail perfectly and give an enlightening perspective that all educators and social justice activists should employ. An excerpt from Applebaum’s article reads:

              “I will briefly focus …on the variety of discursive practices available to systemically privileged students, because such discursive practices make it difficult for a teacher (and the student) to recognize when a student refuses to engage, a refusal that involves premature dismissal of whatever the student hears….These rhetorical strategies work to obstruct engagement so that any complicity in systemic oppression can be evaded…the types of discursive strategies…are remaining silent, evading questions, resorting to the rhetoric of ignoring color, focusing on progress, victim blaming, and focusing on culture rather than race. In all these cases, although it may appear that the student is just stating an opinion, their discourse also works to redirect the conversation away from having to consider how systemically privileged students might be complicit in systemic injustice…such students often do not realize how dismissive their discourse is of the experiences of marginalized students and so they are totally bewildered when marginalized students retreat in frustration”

Posted by Don Mateo A.K.A. Matt Ross at 00:55:16 | Permalink | Comments (1) »

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Why Can’t We?

For years I’ve heard people say, “you guys use the N word, why can’t we?”. This same theme happens with other people of color. For instance, Latinos don’t like it when people other than Latinos use terms that are traditionally derogatory towards them. Being that I work with middle and high school students, I hear this question come up all the time. I’m beginning to wonder if this question is on the rise. Perhaps it’s influenced a bit from hip-hop and rap. At any rate, I want to give a non-academic response to why those who aren’t from a particular ethnicity can not use terms that are traditionally derogatory, even if the people within that ethnicity use them.

When I was growing up, specifically around the time my brother and I were 16 and 12 respectively, I vividly remember frequently being upset with my parents and calling them every bad name I could come up with. Don’t mistake me, I have had the greatest parents that I could imagine. I just happen to be a kid that wanted to do what I wanted to do and they didn’t let me. During this same time period I remember playing down the block from my house with neighbors at a time that I was upset with my mom. I was bad mouthing her when one of the fellas shouts, “yeah, she ain’t #$%^”. Immediately, and simply as a reaction, I slapped him as hard as I could. I then proceeded to tell him not to ever talk about my mother like that–I gave him a look like there was plenty more where that slap came from. Though it would pad my ego if it were, my point isn’t to let you know how I ran my block. There’s a distinct connection between this story and the use of derogatory language.

Just as that young man wasn’t allowed to say bad things or use derogatory words about my mother, so is it true that people outside of a people group can not use terms that are derogatory about a people group. To make it more complex, it isn’t even PC to use these terms around any group, especially the group for which the term has a connection to.

Finally, I have a question for those who complain about not being able to use these highly sensitive words. Why would you ever want to use the N word or any other word that carries this type of connotation? What is it that you would get out of using it? This is where critical thinking should be applied. Do you really want to use and be associated with words that have that kind of association? People within certain groups are on a different ground and though it may not be that tactful, they have a right to use these terms when others don’t. To this day, I can say anything I want about my mother; if you do, be looking for that overhand right!

Posted by Don Mateo A.K.A. Matt Ross at 09:09:54 | Permalink | Comments (1) »

Monday, March 3, 2008

Students of color acquiring dominate discourses

I can’t get away from the Lisa Delpit article I just read called, The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse. A discourse in this context being an identity kit; in other words, ways of saying–writing–doing–valuing–believing. In this article Delpit contends:

“Acquiring the ability to function in a dominant discourse need not mean that one reject one’s home identity and values, for discourses are not static, but are shaped, however reluctantly, by those who participate within them and by the form of their participation. Many who have played significant roles in fighting for the liberation of people of color have done so through the language of dominant discourses, from Fredrick Douglass to Ida B. Wells, to Mary McCloud Bethune, to Martin Luther King, to Malcom X…the point is not to eliminate students’ home languages, but rather to add other voices and discourses to their repertoires…In the mouths and pens of…countless others the ‘language of the master’ has been used for liberatory ends”.

Wow! What if teachers and their students actually comprehended this.

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Friday, February 29, 2008

A question mainly to Euro-Americans…

What are a few ways that whites can use their white privilege as a means of creating social justice; in other words, name a few concrete examples of how Euro-Americans can use their white privilege for liberatory purposes and to challenge European tenets? Please feel free to list as many as you would like!
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Thursday, February 28, 2008

The power of implications…

“…when one speaks of welfare in this country, whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not, one is almost always speaking of black people, not because black people are the only ones receiving state aid (indeed more whites receive benefits from the myriad of social programs than do blacks) but because that is the image that we have been encouraged to have when we hear the term. And that image has become implanted in the minds of Americans, especially white Americans, to such an extent that it is almost automatic, and it allows politicians to criticize ‘welfare’ and ‘welfare recipients’ without ever mentioning race, knowing all along that their constituents get the message, with no wink or nod needed to seal the deal”.  
                                                                                                             Tim Wise (White Like Me, pg. 124)
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Monday, February 18, 2008

The notion of being colorblind to race in dangerous…

The connection between colorblind racism (the idea that one doesn’t see and thus respond to people on the basis of their color) and abstract liberalism is very subtle and hard to ascertain. Here, I provide a brief attempt to shed light on its connectedness through a hypothetical example.

Abstract liberalism: “This frame incorporates tenets associated with political (e.g., ‘equal opportunity’, the idea that force should not be used to achieve social policy, etc.) and economic (e.g., choice and individualism) liberalism in an abstract and decontextualized manner. By framing race-related issues in the language of liberalism, whites can appear ‘reasonable’ and even ‘moral’ while opposing almost all practical approaches to deal with de facto racial inequality. For instance, by using the tenets of the free market ideology in the abstract, they can oppose affirmative action as a violation of the norm of equal opportunity”.
                                                          –Eduardo Bonilla-Silva—

I must say, it’s frustrating at times that I must bring up race so often; unfortunately, I’ve  noticed that if I don’t no one else will. It’s like it plays no significant role in our society. Our society is predicated on race, who are we fooling? Race is a salient part of every major sector of North American life. It will continue to be unless we all begin to communicate about it. Acting as if it isn’t there or as if we are colorblind is only perpetuating existing inequities. Let me give an example.
                                                                                    
 Let’s say Benji and I raced and I accumulated a 50 yard lead. A judge then told us both to stop where we were. She then said that we were starting over, except we were keeping our established places. We take back off running. Should Benji legitimately be expected to catch up, let alone win? Is that fair? We would then be acting as if I didn’t have a huge lead. We wouldn’t be considering the fact that Benji doesn’t have a realistic chance given outside circumstances. To add insult to injury, if Benji doesn’t catch up, what we will say is that he simply didn’t work hard enough. It would also then be realistic for him to not run as hard–but not because he was lazy or didn’t want to “work hard”–he doesn’t see catching up as viable. Do you, the reader, see how insidious this is? This is the plight of many students of color.

The faulty notion of being colorblind which is so prevalent in this country does just this; it’s indirect, slippery, and “seemingly” non-racial, yet maintains racial privilege. Existing racial privileges, to those with white skin in this country, are crystallized by colorblindness. In the example above, I was given privilege, but it was at the expense of Benji. That’s the way white privilege always works. It’s a double-edged sword. One get’s privilege but at another’s expense. I do believe that the one getting privilege loses something as a result of this privilege as well; that is a whole separate topic and will have to be dealt with later. Colorblindness and abstract liberalism have a unique and menacing connection.

Abstract liberalism asserts that individual people decide their own fate and that in order to be successful one must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. This ideology doesn’t account for outside, non-merited, inhibiting circumstances that shape the realistic life chances of individuals regardless of hard work or intelligence.

I want to end with a quote from Michael Lewis out of his controversial book entitled, The Culture of Inequality. On page 8 Lewis gets at the heart of how abstract liberalism (though he doesn’t call it this) is maintained in the minds of those who ascribe to colorblindness. He asserts:       
                                                                                                                                                   “The emergence of this individualistic moral sensibility is of considerable significance, for as we shall see it has become central to the existence of the American culture of inequality—an interpretation of unequal outcomes given the assumption of equal chances. It is a sensibility that virtually ignores the impact of social structure upon personal achievement and mobility. According to this sensibility, it is the individual alone who is socially significant, who determines what his or her contribution to the commonweal will be, and who is therefore responsible for the degree of personal success achieved. Society is seen as benign, offering up opportunities and waiting to be enriched…therefore removes inequality of personal perquisites from the category of social conditions in need of reform. If inequality exists, it is nothing more than a reflection of different personal qualities”. (pg. 8)

More to follow…
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Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Black Studies 410 White Studies reflection #2

Reflection Two…

Were the ways that you were taught about your history such that fit and/or conflicted with the standard versions?

I was especially intrigued by the last section of the DVD, “Race: The Power of An Illusion”. In other readings, I’ve run across the name of one of the sociologists who spoke in the film, Melvin Oliver. He wrote a book with another person with the last name of Shapiro. If I remember correctly, Shapiro is an economist. This book dealt with the same subject that Oliver dealt with in the film, the relationship between race and housing. I can’t remember the name of the article that had him as a source, but I remember the essence of the quote. He and the co-author estimated that it would take something like 300 years in order to equal out the economic playing field between Blacks and Whites. I never forgot that.

I mention this because of the implications that accumulated and passed down assets have had (and still have) in American life. That part of history was left out of my traditional, public educational version of history. On the contrary, my parents have mentioned a bit of this. Just about two weeks ago, my father and I were conversing about his childhood over a basketball game. He spoke of how he was born into a sharecropping scenario. My mother, who is from the same town as my father, was also born into this type of scenario. Opposed to the standard version about sharecropping I received in high school, which focused on the “legal” aspects of what was supposed to happen, my father exposed me to the real deal.

Legally, sharecropping was supposed to be a situation that provided both signing parties a fruitful ending. It should’ve been a situation where a farmer fronted land and farming materials to a person or family that more often lived on the farmer’s land; housing was most often paid at the end of the year, the same time that the two signing parties “Evened up” from crop sales and fronted materials. Both parties were supposed to evaluate how much was fronted versus how much was made by the sharecroppers. The family that was fronted was supposed to have this great opportunity to “better” themselves and get off the ground; in fact, at some point, this family would likely have their own farm. This concept almost reminds me of banks and other creditors that front poor people money knowing that they likely will never get out of debt.

Anyways, what was left out of the standard version of history and that which my father filled me in on was how this actually played out in reality. Many sharecroppers had little to no education. It was thus next to impossible for them to adequately keep track of all their expenses. But regardless of this, the farmers always had the final say on how much was truly borrowed and how much was truly owed. This was enforced by intimidation if necessary. Lynching didn’t only happen when a Black man was caught having had sex with a White woman. Seldom did sharecroppers make anything after the tallying was complete; in most cases, they ended up owing money. Both situations kept them working for the boss and perpetually being in debt. This has far reaching consequences when we consider assessing accumulated assets and wealth.

Since my parents were born into debt, they started life with a serious disadvantage. Tim Wise speaks on accumulated wealth or debt in the first chapter of his excellent book titled, White Like Me. The disadvantage my parents received was passed on to me. People born into this world are born into accumulated assets or accumulated debts. Such is life. One of the problems with this is that in our country Euro-Americans were given such a head start in the “legal” form of housing acts (for instance) it now will take a really long time (if ever) to be rectified. Without programs like affirmative action, these legal privileges may never be resolved.

Posted by Don Mateo A.K.A. Matt Ross at 06:57:02 | Permalink | Comments (5)