White supremacy.
For many, it is a term that conjures imagery of White men in white hoods surrounded by burning crosses. It is not a term that, for most, conjures imagery of public schools, teachers and students. Instead, in a never-ending project to avoid speaking honestly about race and education, Whites liberally employ terms like diversity, inclusion, multicultural awareness, and other less urgent-sounding descriptors to discuss what, in my view, is an institutionalized White-supremacy problem.
An ongoing string of news coverage about race in education might have audiences believe that, indeed, we have a “diversity” problem in schools. From doing better to recruit teachers of color into our K-12 public schools and those of higher education; to diversifying literature curriculum at the K-12 and college levels; to being “proactive” in efforts to quell racialized and racist campus incidents with the ultimate goal of improving “race relations,” it would seem that, indeed, we have a diversity and multicultural awareness problem that can be solved by promoting inclusivity.
Such coverage might — insidiously — lead one to assume that these issues are fairly easily resolvable. Diversifying our teaching force, for instance, is merely a matter of recruiting and hiring more teachers of color, despite Dr. Marybeth Gasman’s finding that schools, particularly institutions of higher education, “simply don’t want them.” And perhaps it would seem that diversifying literature curriculum is as easy as choosing books and texts by and about people of color.
Unfortunately, even teachers who endeavor to choose texts aligned with the racial and cultural diversity of the children in their care are faced with teaching a prescribed, whitewashed, and Pearsonized curriculum in an effort to justify a district’s purchase of these expensive — and questionable — corporate materials. In such instances, mollifying a school district’s accountant, school board and tenuous state-sanctioned definitions of what it means to be literate is far more important than meeting the needs of students. Finally, the media address racist college students and the events for which they are responsible as though colleges have a race-relations problem, and not a problem with something deeper and more structural. Recent coverage seems to imply that such events might go away (or something) if more colleges simply require a diversity credit or two.
On one hand, that only 14 percent of Black students comprise college and university enrollment suggests that, indeed, there is a diversity “problem” that might seem to stem from inclusion and marginalization issues. But therein also exists a problem in the ways that we continue to talk about these things. Hiding behind the veil of “diversity” and “inclusion” allows us to avoid using more urgent and accurate terminology.
In other words, we do not have a “diversity” problem in education, per se. What we have is a diversity symptom of a larger problem known as White-supremacist institutions and those who invest in and benefit from them.
