Black kids are struggling

 As mentioned earlier, my preliminary data analysis suggested a paradox: Black students seemed to be simultaneously hyper visible and invisible. This paradox was often referenced when participants tried to make sense of why Black students seemed to struggle more than their peers who were not Black. For example, consider how this participant tries to make sense of why there are so few Black young men enrolled in advanced level courses: 

They’re struggling with something else, the weight of something that’s making it harder for them. That’s sort of what I notice. I don’t know if I notice it because I’m expecting to see it because it’s both part of my own experience and part of the sort of national conversation now. (Emphasis added, Participant M, Phase Two Booklet, p.2)

This response offers further evidence that participants understand “struggle” as tethered to individual students: “They’re struggling with something else, the weight of something that’s making it harder for them” (Emphasis added). This is consistent with how other participants made sense of the paradox of hypervisibility/invisibility of Black students. Many participants acknowledged Black students -- and students of Color, in general -- are likely having different experiences in this predominantly white school when compared to their white peers. Nevertheless, the participant responses also suggested the white faculty who participated in this study stand by their colorblind pedagogies as a way to create a consistent (read: fair) experience for all students. Their responses suggest the student experience only diverges in the classroom when the class discussion centers on student identity and/or racism. For example, this participant’s response about Black students struggling to blend in because they are commonly understood (read: looked to) as being particularly knowledgeable about race and the racist history of the United States:

But in some ways, it’s worse when it’s just one or two Black kids who are sort of responsible for speaking to experiences that they haven’t had. I feel the worst for them then. When I feel like they’re having to do heavy lifting that they often really don’t want to do. Often, my sense of the Black kids I’ve had in my classroom is that they do not want to stand out. It depends which kid, but a lot of them, it’s just like, “Please just let me fly under the radar. I just want to not call attention to my difference.” Which is a bummer. I just think it’s a really huge problem in the school. (Emphasis added, Alex 03:38, Participant interview, 05/30/18)

This response seems to suggest the only difficulty Black students experience is when something draws attention to their “difference,” e.g., when the topic of race or systemic racism happens to come up. From this discursive perspective, strictly adhering to a colorblind pedagogy seems “perfectly logical” -- that is, the teacher understands their role as maintaining/protecting the neutrality of the space inside the discursive classroom boundary. However, Ladson-Billings (2016) asserts, from a Critical Race Theory perspective, 

[a] race-neutral perspective purports to see deficiency as an individual phenomenon. Thus, instruction is conceived as a generic set of teaching skills that should work for all students. When these strategies or skills fail to achieve desired results, students, not the techniques, are found to be lacking.” (Emphasis added, p.25)

This assertion is consistent with how participants -- regardless of their content-area -- framed “solution-oriented” initiatives as intended to support students at the level of the individual. For example, one participant explained that everyone in their department was asked to read Steele’s (2010) Whistling Vivaldi over the summer. Although they met to discuss their thoughts on the text, the status quo seemed to remain intact:

So we did and that sort of convinced me like, ‘Okay, then I’m going to do this thing that Professor Steel recommends that inoculates kids against stereotype threat.’ But I don’t know-- we didn’t really go anywhere with that reading. We all did it. We might have noted that I guess small things can have powerful effects. But there was no department-wide conversation that went beyond that. And there was nothing put in place. So I felt very strange. If the person who assigns it believes that this is legit and has a real effect, why doesn’t he do this [laughter] in his class? Or why don’t we all do this if we feel this is based on real science. (Participant I, Phase Two Booklet, p.3)

This response suggests a desire to universally “inoculate” students from stereotype threat: “Why don’t we all do this if we feel this is based on real science.” It also offers further evidence of the problem being understood at the level of the individual student experience. The suggestion that students underperform because they are aware of the existence of stereotypes about people who share their social identifiers is consistent with Cornelius’s hypothesis for why the level of engagement of Black students seems to decrease when the class discussion centers on systemic racism:

What I have noticed is that Black students tend to be a little less willing to jump in when we’re talking about, for instance, sort of systemic racism, in [Zora Neale Hurston’s (2006)] Their Eyes Are Watching God, or something. Right? Because they don’t want to be asked to be the token. Right? They don’t want to be like, “Well, let me speak to this.” And right? And they have the sense that everyone’s looking to them. (Cornelius 16:15, Phase One Interview, 06/12/18)

As educators at a predominantly white institution, we must be brave enough to admit that despite our best intentions, we may be looking for “solutions” to reduce the struggle of students of Color by “breaking off” or “fixing” whatever was causing their particular struggle. 

The default narrative of the “struggling Black student” is not unique to our particular community. Much has been written about how students of Color experience predominantly white institutions in the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) network (e.g., Parsons & Ridley, 2012; Brewster & Stephenson, 2014). Many schools in the NAIS network are looking for ways to reduce the occurrence of “difficult psychological experiences which most -- not all -- [students of Color] are likely to face” in predominantly white independent schools (Thompson & Schultz, 2003). These experiences and the need to find ways to support students of Color attending predominantly white schools is also well documented in educational research (e.g., Stevenson & Arrington, 2009; DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2012; Parsons & Ridley, 2012; Shange & Slaughter-Defoe, 2012).

A way forward >>>