veraretouch

Parts of this book I loved and parts I found frustrating For its use of rhetoric that suggests wealthy people are committed to restricting the language use of the poor for the sake of increasing the power of global capitalism. I know this happens, far more often than I would like to admit, but the rhetoric can sometimes be exhausting. What I valued really deeply was when authors got into the complexities of why, when, and how this may happen, even inadvertently. The book had 4 chapters that were particularly compelling along these lines: The chapter "Even Sweet Gentle Larry" recounts the experience of an African-American Elementary school aged boy whose teachers perceive him as bad - a fact which stuns the outside researcher, who sees him as kind-hearted and well-behaved. The researcher shifts her focus for the study and uses this as a springboard to interrogate the way teachers discipline or assign blame to students who act out of a different cultural background than that which is familiar to the teacher. "For What it's Worth," another chapter, compares two Jr. High aged Latino boys, questioning their repression or amplification of not only the Spanish language, but also particularly Latino ways of acting/appearing. In particular, the chapter explores what is lost when one boy attempts to fully assimilate to White culture. The chapter on white culture was particularly relevant, I thought, because it unpacks the experienced reality of White privilege in working class homes - that is, working class students don't feel like they experience white privilege and that's why they can't see or understand the concept. I found this chapter so useful because it helped open my eyes to the reasons I struggled early in to grasp the concepts of institutional racism and white privilege. Coming, as I did, from the working/lower middle-class, I didn't feel privilege at work in my life in the ways that are often suggested by a superficial exposure to the term white privilege. And the last chapter, while not diving into specifics, does acknowledge that government oversight will not solve the problems of the achievement gap or educational inequity. Rather it must be a joint effort by people who are invested in particular communities and willing to hear and plan based on diverse experience.

2022-11-14 13:47