Julie Kailin - Antiracist Education: From Theory to Practice

For a history of this period, see Patterson (1971).

Freire writes: It was during my twenties that the verbal violence against blacks alerted my consciousness to the degree that I began not only to understand that Brazilian society was profoundly racist and unjust but this injustice provoked in me a sense of revolt and disgust. This awareness that began to take root, as I said, during my twenties, radicalized me to take a very critical position against all forms of discrimination and expressions of oppression, including the oppressive position to which Brazilian women, particularly women of color, were relegated. From Freire and Macedo (1993), p. 170.

Some years later, after the Freedom of Information Act was passed, my father requested the files that the FBI had on him, which revealed their visits to various unnamed persons and places. Though most of the information had been blocked out, making it difficult to know what it was the FBI had really done, certain things remainedthings that the FBI figured would not incriminate them, I guess. One of them was something to the effect that Mr. Kailin is a Jew but you would not know it because he is very quiet and well mannered and doesnt act like most Jews.

I discovered the details of this event nearly forty years later, when my daughter, Syovata Edari, then a senior in high school, resurrected the historical documents and wrote a history of this strike. Using my fathers archives and the newspaper accounts, she wrote a paper that won first prize in the Wisconsin State Labor History essay contest, African American Farm Workers Strike against Peonage in Wisconsin, published in Wisconsin Labor History News 7, no. 3 (September 1989).

Lakeview is the pseudonym that I have given to the city and the school district where I did this work and where I collected the data for this research. In chapter 6, I provide a more detailed profile of the district.

All of these statistics were published in the mid-1990s in a major report on race-based inequities in the school district where I conducted my research. The study was conducted by a conservative public-policy think tank. The results of this study were published in one of Lakeviews major newspapers.

While the medical and educational communities understanding and advances in the study and treatment of biochemical neurologically affected disorders have undoubtedly helped many childrenparticularly in this era, where there are so many chemical pollutants in the environmentthis is also a field about which we must be very cautious. For such diagnoses of behavior may be influenced by cultural and class bias on the part of practitioners, who may be advancing and projecting their own racism or cultural or class bias on their interpretation of the behavior of children about whom they are culturally ignorant. For many children, especially those who are poor or children of color, or those who are simply nonconformist, their difficulty in school is often labeled attention deficit disorder (ADD). But sometimes this may be more appropriately seen as interest deficit disorder, where the student may be unconsciously or consciously reacting to his or her marginalized status or simply turning off to boring material. For a critical analysis, see G. Coles (1988).

All individuals and places in the ethnographic section of this study have been given pseudonyms to maintain participants anonymity.

In conversations with Ladson-Billings, she told me that the white teachers in her study had transforming experiences that served as a linchpinthere seemed to be a central cohesive element in their background experiences that may have given them more insights on relating to and teaching children of color. For example, she said that one of them had been married to a member of the Black Panthers and that experience changed her outlook. Another teacher grew up in a Black neighborhood and her family had an antiracist consciousness.

See, for example, Becker, Geer, Hughes, and Strauss (1961); and Lofland and Lofland (1995).

National Center for Educational Statistics (1998), table 273, p. 174.

The figures are actually as follows: Of all professors, 86.8 percent are white, 0.5 percent are Native American, 5.3 percent are Asian, 4.9 percent are Black, and 2.5 percent are Hispanic. Whites constitute 90 percent of all full professors, 87.8 percent of associate professors, and 47.5 percent of assistant professors. Chronicle of Higher Education (1995), p. 22.

For a similar critique by a more mainstream educator, see also Goodlad (1984).

For informative analyses of globalization, see, for example, Chossudovsky (2000). See also Parenti (1998).

This expression is often erroneously attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who was fond of quoting this phrase, which was actually coined by the French writer Romain Rolland (1866-1944). See C. Boggs (1984).