Another Take on Race Relations

Other People’s Children by Lisa Delpit

It is rather difficult as a white, middle-class teacher in a mostly Latino and African American school for me not to get defensive taking a class like this one. While everything we are talking about in class and everything we are reading seems to be true on some level or another, it seems as if the problems have been pointed out for many years: while America boasts about being a “melting pot” and open to all cultures of its inhabitants, there is a pervasive “white” sheen to everything, making the country more of a wok, where the ingredients are pushed off to the side and mixed together only when the cook is ready to add them. Cooking receptacles aside, the problem has been established over and over again in the essays we are reading in class; what seems to be lacking is some kind of attempt at a resolution. I am always interested in reading about the great extent to which White America is completely oblivious and ignorant to people of all other cultures (I never include myself in the groups who are being oblivious and ignorant, of course), but I’m with Mr. Cosby in a sense. When are we going to strive towards (some sort of definitive, albeit, convoluted) closure?

In the essay “Silenced Dialogue” Delpit explores five aspects of power (The Culture of Power) that exist in the common American public school. These exist at East Aurora High School – as I mentioned before, I don’t deny that this exists, I just want to read more about proposed action. The faculty of EAHS is predominantly white middle-class. That is the culture that, up until about five years ago, was the main reference point for how rules were created and enforced, leaving room for terrible contradictions in terms. For example, the school provides no bussing, and the population is mainly working-class, so many students are on their own to get to school before first bell. Many kids are on some kind of attendance probation by the end of the first semester because of being late for school. The communication of that culture also exists. There is a woman who has run the English Department computer room for twenty years (although the last training she received was on Apple II’s, in the 1980’s!!!!) who has established a bizarre succession of red tape for students to enter into the computer room, creating forms to be filled out and signed by parents and cryptic I.D. markings as well as making all freshman students sit through an hour-long orientation, complete with an actual earthquake drill. The only students who are ever seen in the computer room on their own time are the students who have bothered to submit to her explicit (all the hoops) and implicit (“I’m just trying to keep out the riff-raff”) interpretation of the rules. Many of these students happen to be white. The students who will not deal with the goofy rules find space in other computer labs within the school – mainly ones run by teachers of African American and Latino backgrounds.

One of my colleagues taking this class said that the content of Lisa Delpit’s book is unfairly presented to make all the problems of the non-white, non-middle-class students created by the white society. My reaction to this is that there is an astonishing number of African American and Latino students failing at East Aurora High School alone, and these students can verbally lay out the hierarchy of the Culture of Power at EAHS (That’s how I got the computer lab story – which I then researched [I don’t care what race or ethnicity they are, they are all still adolescents… Agism? OK. I’m guilty. Sue me.] and found to be valid). As a school leader, which is essentially where I’d like to end up after my coursework at North Central College, I’d like to continue to affect the already turning tide of Culture at EAHS and make it a Culture where everyone knows the rules and how to follow them.