"Why work here? this place is so ghetto": Portraits of teaching with and for racial justice in an urban school"

Abstract

Popular representations of urban public schools are replete with failure. In turn, for Black, Indigenous, and persons of color (BIPOC) to escape the racially isolated and poverty-stricken neighborhoods and schools, they must be exceptional (Love, 2019). Advancing this narrative most effectively is the use of “common-sense…the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 769). Consequently, systems of oppression remain unchallenged. In the case of urban schooling, common-sense takes the form of disciplining BIPOC youth who do not comply with classroom rules or school procedures, which allows for the over-policing of these young people (Dumas, 2018). In social studies education, this has resulted in the formation of the civic opportunity gap, wherein urban school teachers provide fewer opportunities to engage in best practices of civic-education, such as simulation learning and field trips, relative to those who teach in wealthier and whiter schools (Kahne & Middaugh, 2009). Instead, civics education is replaced by character education that evaluates BIPOC youths’ capacities to comply with disciplinary procedures, conflating civic engagement with compliance, rather than empowerment (Love, 2019).This project explores the question why teachers would work at urban schools, or as a student put to me, “why work here? This place is so ghetto.” More specifically, I ask, “how do educators make racism legible in their daily experiences at school?”; “How do teachers resist racism in their praxis with youth and adults?” and “what do teachers do to sustain their anti-racist work in the context of anti-Blackness?” Situated in a multi-year critical ethnographic examination of the ways that anti-Blackness plays out at Racial Justice Community School (RJCS), I explore the ways that the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011) reinforce and disrupt the politics of anti-Blackness that public schooling is founded on (Watkins, 2001). Drawing on portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), I depict four RJCS teachers’ struggles to resist anti-Blackness in their classrooms, resisting the historic deficit orientations toward urban schools. Two forms of anti-oppressive politics emerged in the project: the creation of homeplaces and sites of transgression (hooks, 1990). BIPOC teachers were able to create homeplaces through racial solidarity with BIPOC youth, cultivating a sense of community that paralleled familial relationships beyond the school. Sites of transgression were fostered by white teachers. Through their personal aims to resist whiteness in their own lives, sites of transgression became spaces where white teachers and BIPOC youth could build solidarity as they imagined different relationships to one another (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012). These themes suggest that the politics of belonging are critical to fostering anti-oppressive civic education by humanizing BIPOC youth. Consequently, professional development scholarship and teacher education programs demand an interrogation of investments in the relationship between what constitutes good teaching and anti-Blackness. This is particularly imperative as the persistent theme of this project remains anti-Blackness through the school community.