Julietta's defense.

I realized while listening to Julie that I too can write a great disseration about a topic that is engaging and new. But I just have to get myself to work on it. That means interviewing, which I am somehow reluctant to do. I feel like I should have some sort of plan that I then follow, but this paper is not that kind of writing experience. This is a much more doing and reflecting and writing at the same time. So I am going to work on a reflective piece and get an email written to the moms and kids. Set a date for starting interviewing. Have questions for Peter to look at. Talk to him about what to do with the third chapter. And how I want to organize the paper. I really want it to read like a story or stories of the people and what they have discovered of themselves, both through their school experiences and through the questions and research that I have engaged them in.

I need to find the note book because I know I have a bunch of things written about myself and raising Thorkell.

My biggest question is what is the paper trying to say. Will I find out that race doesn't impact the kids schooling, or only that it doesn't affect the kids schooling except in the fashion that it affects other non white and more specifically black children.

Questions?

Tell me about your school experiences? What was primary school experience like? Tell me about your family? In what ways? Tell me about your friends? How are they like you or different from you? Tell me some things or words people friends and family would say to describe you to others?

Did you ever feel like you were treated differently from other students at school?Did you ever feel discriminated against in school?

Tell me about your child rearing practices? How did you deal with discussion of "difference" with your child/children? Have you ever felt that your child was discriminated against, can you tell me about it?

Tell me what the concept of race means to you?

Starting up again

I woke up this morning all worried about virtually everything. School, money, the mortgage, the house repairs, not having a TAship, Thorkell not coming home for days, the money I spent on Brother Gregario, whether or not I am doing the right thing, the empty apartment downstairs... I could go on and on, but I will stop here because I trust myself to do the things right and have the proper outcome even while it might not seem like it at the time.

So after reading a Sun article on biomimicry, I thought of writing again. I have had a longish hiatus from it I would say. So now to think out the problems in my thesis I am currently facing. Since I have to be a bit spartan for the moment I think I will be low tech and record the interviews for the time being as I sort out the questions I plan to ask. So, I will ask Julie and Cherry maybe Hrafn to talk to me, and then also talk to Jordan. I think with the students I am going to do it in a very casual fashion like a come over and cook with me so that we are doing something while we talk. I find that a bit easier to do with Thorkell. It seems as I have their captive attention and keeping them engaged in something is as important. And in the mean time I will rewrite the 3rd chapter as much as possible to hand over to Peter. The most important thing right now is to get going, the sooner I start talking the sooner I will start writing and producing usable data. I am not sure what has me so nervous about this paper. I know this topic like the back of my hand. I know the pitfalls, not black, special catagories, trying to create a new status (intermediate) for multi-racial people, black is black.

Really what people like Rainer are arguing is that black is black and white is white, which falls into the same fallacy that he is arguing against. I realize that many or even most people see it that way. Just the notion that I still get surprised responses from people to find out that Thorkell is my natural born child is and indicator of how entrenched racial dichotomization is in this society. I think one of the things I will do is start each chapter with an anecdote from our lives, and trip of discovery of this highly racialized world. Yes race is a fallacy as Rainer claims, but that does not mean the racism and racial ideology are not real lived experiences. Just say that you are not going to claim your "mixed" heritage does not eliminate or even measurable change how society views you or your ideas. By saying I am not black I am not white or mixed race, does it mean that you have transcended race? I am not so sure, because it is such a strongly constructed social value to deny it, is perhaps to be a bit complicit in arguing for the melting pot notion, where we don't see race or rather we should not see race. I am not by any means arguing for assimilation, or for children to argue for blackness status, but here in the US where the tradition has been assimilation or exclusion based on phenotypic identifiers, trying to stand outside of the group has insidious consequences. It keeps people out of the mainstream of success and in groupings that affect them economically, educationally and socially, not that I haven't talked about all this before numerous times.

The other side the advocates for separate identity are to my mind equally misleading. There are some excellent points made in their writing. But they are too insular in many ways. Root (1999, 2000...) repeatedly references her own writing on the issue. Her view of the multiplicity of identities that a person has, has been written about in the multicultural literature. Most of the models discussed by people talking about race are deviation on a theme. There is very little attempt to move past Cross and Erickson's schema on identity and identity development. Yet here we are at a major cross roads in how the world works as a whole, we are more interconnected, more travel savvy, more worldly in many ways. The number of people marrying or co-habitating outside of their culture and ethnic group has continued to rise in the last few years. Before it was a matter of and Irishman marrying an Italian woman, or as in Sweetland, a Norwegian marrying a German right after the First world war (, 2007). This type of marriage has been fairly well tolerated by mainstream white culture for a long time, but to move beyond that and marry not just a black person, but perhaps an Arab, Muslim is still seen as a bad thing. The most common argument that arrises is how terrible it will be for the children. They will be so confused? They will never have peace since they have two halfs or even smaller partitions that will continuously be at war with each other. This thought process was believed not only to apply to mixed color families, but also to people like my parents who married outside of their cultures, and produced two bi-cultural children. What really happened with us was that we found ourselves to be more flexible more aware of peoples otherness with out it being something to judge, fear or ridicule. Our parents were well educated academic professionals, who in many ways were not as racially sensitive as we are, but they were people who were always willing to question whatever beliefs that failed to meet their equity criteria.

I have to admit in many ways we were very marginalized as children, perhaps I was more so than my brother, since he was so much younger when we moved back to Iceland in 1978. I had already been in school for four years. I was a good student, liked by my teachers, I had some reasonable friends, and some not so reasonable ones as well. But when my mother uprooted us from Stoughton MA that summer, I doubt either she or my father really understood what it meant to bring two "half breed" children to live in a cultural homogeneous culture that still fails to count us as true members of the Icelandic culture. Icelanders are accepting of foreigners, but as in most places, they need to keep to their assigned place or it becomes difficult for the immigrant. But we were not immigrants per say. Both Hrafn and I were born in Iceland, born full fledged Icelandic citizens. At first when we got to Iceland I spent hours after school working on homework, as well as language skills. I could speak Icelandic quite well, after all I spent most summers with my dad there, while my parents were separated, and my grandparents spoke no English what so ever. But as many multicultural individuals know, speaking a language and writing it are to vastly different things. For me it just so happened that my parents picked one of the more complex languages for us to learn, by dint of my father being Icelandic.
My mother taught herself to read and write Icelandic, since in those days the only texts on learning Icelandic were based on old Norse and the Icelanders had still not devised a means to teaching Icelandic as a second language (it is questionable whether they have yet succeeded in this endeavor). So many an afternoon was spent at the dining room table in an endless struggle to remember how many n a definite noun needed, depending on its gender, number and case. My mother was nothing if not a demanding, but patient teacher, but then I was a good student. I had always loved school, school was fairly safe, although that became a little less so in Iceland where the students and even teachers would make fun of or ridicule my language skill, my lack of writing skill based on the Icelandic cursive rather than the American version, my inability to draw a house or to knit. Of course it didn't help that my parents put me in a class of students 1-2 years older than I was and then transferred me to the only catholic school in town where all of the students in my grade had been together since first grade. (I am not writing this as a pity party, but rather to explain how I came to be who I am and how I came to do this kind of research).
I was perhaps a classic definition of the marginal, which Park (193#) proposed as an identity for minority people in the US. I never really fit in. I spoke excellent Icelandic although I sometimes said things that were clearly not Iceland, words or phrases my brother and I made up. Which often garnered the comment "Æ thetta er bara Brynja." (“Oh, that's just Brynja."). Or when I returned to the US, the repeated “Wow, you speak excellent English.” That said I functioned really well over all in Icelandic culture. I was an odd duck anyway, my parents didn’t own a television, but we had a computer by the time I was 9, in 1979. I played the violin, read a great deal, mostly because I spent a lot of time as a pre-teen and teen very ill, with allergies and eczema. My parents were professors, my mother also chaired the Fulbright Committee for many years. We were well known, but always considered rather odd not really part of the encapsulated culture of Iceland.

Dead Prez They School

Notes on Branch's "race and human development"

Race and ethnicity are closely related, but not the same. "Race is a concept that is derived from a genetic designation based on phenotypic characteristics (i.e. physical features such as, skin color and hair texture). It is an idea that is clearly rooted in history. Race as a category, may subsume several ethnic groups and in doing so, obliterates any uniqueness associated with more narrowly defined ethnic categories. An ethnic group can be thought of as a group of people with a common historical heritage, originating in the same place, and sharing cultural expressions such as manner of dress, art music, food, literature and other concrete manifestations" ( Branch, 1999, p. 7).
Little on race and racial attitudes and behaviors in adolescence. Race is often examined in discrete moments, childhood, teens, and adult. Rather than a continuous line throughout an individuals lifespan. Carter argues that this affects our understanding of race and racism on human development. One of the important issues to examine include how parent, teacher and peer relationships affect an individual's racial identity development. Race is usually looked at in a uni-polar fashion, that is to say either / or constructions the classic polemic in US racial identity.

Thoughts on Rainer Spencer

Rainer Spencer's newest book Challenging multiracial identity talks about how ludicrous the idea of multiracial identity is. His primary arguments are as follows. 1. By trying to claim space in a clearly incorrect racial environment, we are committing the ultimate fallacy. Given the fact that we know that race is not a physical, scientific category for humans and as we have not too long ago recognized race as a psycho-social-cultural classification anyone who claims "multi-racial" identity is buying into the dominate paradigm that there is a difference in races, based predominately on phenotype. Ultimately what people are doing is continuing to validate a false categorization. 2. He feels that researchers have used misleading information on multiracial people and created a "fake" baby boom notion, as if multiracial people were not part of the entire history of the US. He argues that authors such as Root, and Korgen, have with a clear agenda recreated the notion of biracial identity to serve specific ends of their research. This is a weighty critique. While he is correct in claiming that multiracial, or really what should be called multiethnic people have existed world wide for as long as the human race has existed, what he is missing is that what these students and multiracial adults, advocates and others are looking for is to break the bonds of the white/other dichotomy that exists, both in the public arena as well as in the academic literature even if they are not doing it quite as eloquently as Spencer would have it done. Given that multiethnic, among others white and black, people existed in early US history where poor whites and Africans mixed and intermarried, there is a long history clouded by racism and prejudice that preceeds the "interracial/ multiracial movement". (More on this in a bit). 3. much of the movement and research on multiracial children and adults is fueled by white mothers looking to free or release their children from the bonds of racism and give them access to the halls of white privilege.

This last one is perhaps the one that struck me the most and made me question the purpose of my research. Am I just doing to make my own voice heard or do I have other reasons more noble than self aggrandizement? So I have to take apart not only what I am doing, but what Spencer is arguing. Because we are white women we fail to understand what the impact of claiming whiteness for our children does to the "fight" against racial categorization. True we are nothing new the past is littered with families who were mixed. For me and how I perceive Thorkell and his friends who have white mothers and sometime claim multiracial, or black or white identity it is more of a recognition of the complexity of the individual rather than what this society continues to do which is down grade everyone to a color or to the "normal" column. This means that I see blacks ie African Americans (AA) as multiethnic as well. Since as Spencer points out most AA are in fact as much mixed as European Americans (EA), but this fact is overlooked in the hypodescent "rule" (not really a rule but an arbitrary means of classification). We are either white or black and never can and will the two meet.

What bothers me is the idea that we are just one thing. It as if to say that I cannot be both Icelandic and Irish-American or that Thorkell is not Icelandic/Irish and Haitian American. He can very well claim all of those ethnicities to varying degrees, based on his knowledge of the cultures and cultural experiences. He can learn about them, even take time to live them, which he has with both the African American experience, and the Icelandic experience. I do not want him to claim whiteness or blackness without understanding what these categories mean. I want him to know the fallacies that lay behind these monoracial claims and arbitrary assignment to a category that occurs on forms and in schools. My primary concern in doing this research is to understand how the students construct identity for themselves given the push and pull nature of friends, family and educational organizations. To be treated one way or another is unfair, and this is especially true of minority children in schools. Because of the long history of pathologization of African Americans, the image that we have of them in schools is very tightly tied to this negative stereotype based on color and hypodescent.

Back to Spencer's arguments, no I do hope to claim whiteness for Thorkell or force him to claim that type of public social space for himself. I do however suspect that one of the reasons many biracial children run into discipline problems at school is that they are versed enough in the paradigm of whiteness to recognize when they are being treated unfairly or differently from their peers. If they have little knowledge of the dichotomy or have been exposed to a more equitable none racialized environment, this could cause confusion, perhaps even push children to sympathize/empathize with or categorize themselves similarly to other minority students. The whole point of my argument is: there is so little that we do know about "mixed race" indivuduals especially in a school setting. Do all mixed race students experience the same thing? Not likely. Do they all try and buck the system? Probably not, since that is affected by social life, home life, class and gender. What makes one student buck the system and another go with the flow? Is there a class difference in how students categorize themselves? Probably since there are class lines that cross the strata of US society that have little or nothing to do with skin color or race.

It is true as Spencer notes a tick in a box on a form does not a human's identity make, but how does the repeated ticking of a box or boxes alter one's perception of self. We live in a society, we interact with people daily, many of us are lead to believe and buy into the social categorizations framed in the media, film, literature, schools, churches and on the streets. Once you have been told often enough that you are this or that, and in schools where children are young, impressionable and there to "learn" from their "betters", how can they not be colored by this fallacy of race. I certainly do not presume to know what my son or his friends feel or think, but I have listened long enough and felt the discrimination that they are subject to claim some authority of experience and knowledge on the biracial paradigm. Many times I have been treated as a lesser person, because I chose to bear a biracial child. I have seen the surprise on children's, parents', teachers' and school administrators' faces, when my son and I walk into a room, or when teachers hear me speak middle class educated English. Even when I have "outed" myself as an educator and an academic, faculty could not get past the color of my son's skin. They could not understand that he was not "African American" he was being raised in a household by his white upper middle class Socialist, Scandinavian, Irish Catholic mother and uncle. He was surrounded by his white family and his European history and heritage daily. How can that not have affected who his is and how he thinks. Spencer is wrong to assume that what white mothers/women want is whiteness for their children or that they are all trying to find voice through the marginalization of their children and the diminishment of their children's humanness and history.
I am not arguing for an added category on the census or on school forms. Minnesota is progressive enough to have added a check many or a mixed category on forms. I would love nothing more than to eliminate racial categories all together, but then what? Elimination of race does not eliminate the history of racism and the daily discrimination minorities face at the hands of a system that is so skewed to prefer middle class white history, life styles, thought and action. It would help to find a different means of tracking discrimination, but then how can we do that when discrimination is based on our notion of isms; racism, sexism, hedrosexism...I see valid arguments in Spencer's critique of previous research and applaud his call for more rigorous work on mixed ethnicity, but at heart his is but a critique that fails to change the status quo.

Thinking and getting over fear

I have been thinking about this paper for almost a month now. I have not touched the paper really. I did edit the third chapter and will do more on it today. Mostly getting rid of the unneeded things like the observation piece.
I attended a conference this weekend, only for one day, it was more than enough. I did however get some good ideas for the student project, which I think will work best if I can get Robin's friend to help me a bit. I might do a hip-hop workshop. I have had a lot of days where I feel like I can't really do this and that I am pretending to be an academic. I have come to realize that I really want to be an author, but am having a hard time justifying it to myself, and without that I can't do much. I think that is what bothered me about the prospectus meeting. It felt like a bit of an attack, even though it was not intended as one. It was just a matter of defining my subjectivity in connection to the fact that Thorkell and I have had some odd experiences and I have developed a distinct distaste for the American (US) education system, which seems to be failing students left and right.
Here in MN we have the highest achievement gap between white and non-white students. Just yesterday Mikey told me that his high school is reconstituting this year, which means it failed to meet NCLB standards for "three" years running. All of the staff has been fired and there will be new teachers in the fall. As far I know Arlington is predominately a minority school, and like north in Minneapolis, because of underperformance on national measures like No Child Left Behind. It is hard not to be subjective when you keep seeing students fall through the educational cracks.
On Sunday I attended Ben, Carl, Jordan, and Tyrone's graduation ceremony. They do it differently, usually having a smallish grad class, this year it was 43 students (their biggest ever), they have family an friends stand up and testify. This year only one person could stand up and it still took a full two hours. It was very moving, from students who were first generation to students who had academic parents and students with small children to Somali students who immigrated and needed documentation of high school graduation for work, and higher education. Some of the speeches were very moving. In some ways I think the school falls down on a few things, but that may just be JP, with Kelli belli. Part of my issue is that much of what he sees and learns he has already learned at least in the area of history, english, current events. Although this is a bit over statement, he has learned a lot, and just takes time off when he has already 'seen the movie.'

In someways I think I have fostered his anathema toward school with my disappointment with education and learning. When I look back on his experiences, I realize that first, my mother's opinion on education trumped everything else for a good while. But over the years I have developed a critical eye toward how she and dad understood education. In many ways most people think of education in elitist terms. Education is about having a key to what is sometimes called the ivory tower, by reading the right authors and answering the right questions with the right keywords. And even in CSCL this happens.
Mom did not believe in charter schools I can see why as they do operate outside of the larger school district in which they are situated, having a separate school board, and not answering to the larger board. This can distort the power in favor of teachers or certain parents can hog tie the schools and through this create schools that are exclusionary to students. I am thinking of how the board at GRS was manipulated from being a Montessori to and IB program, without really talking to the community as they did it. This is the danger of a charter school. The other primary argument leveraged against charter schools is that they fail to graduate students that measure up to the state and national standards. This however is always argued from the perspective of large schools where data a plentiful for the success of the school, yet even most of these large schools are failing the students if the recent numbers about the Twin Cities are to be believed. For a long time I believed in the "canon" in fact in some instances I still do. There are things that students need to know. However, I limit that to part of the learning process and don't want to enforce the fact based kind of learning, that leaves out the analysis and critique of what is being taught. I don't mean that students should be able to argue every point i.e. their grades, but they should be able to discuss a relevant topic. I would like to say logically and "coherently", but those notions are culturally subjective and should not be used as a unique measure of learning.
Back to mom's influence. I used to believe that the teachers were right, that my instinct and my son's voice were not as valid. Certainly neither of us was trained as educators. In fact to my dismay I let this go on for far to long. The year Thorkell was 13 was when I woke up, realizing that Hrafn and I were "going after" Thorkell in a way that mom and dad had done with Hrafn. I knew all along that Thorkell was and is a very bright, much brighter than his classmates. It took me a long time to realize that the boy I knew as curious, analytical, and philosophical was still that same child in school, but that those traits were not what they were looking for. They wanted complacence, quietness, absorption and unquestioning working on repetitive tasks. I am not writing about anything new John Taylor Gatto, Frank Smith and even Paolo Friere talk about it. It has been called the banking model of education. The elite (not necessarily the smartest or most educated) choose the content that is deemed valuable, and it regardless of relevance or need gets taught to the next generation.

Subjectivity

Peter asked me about my "subjectivity" the other day when I went to see him. It was in regard to the fact that I have some decided opinions on the topic, being involved in the community as living experience. True I have been dealing with the confluence of blackness and whiteness for a few years now. The interesting thing about it is that I have only recently begun to look at the racism and race involved in this. Before now I just assumed that Thorkell was black, or mixed or biracial. But for much of it I thought of him as Icelandic or Irish American and Haitian, rather than a black or white child. In the last few months I have been reflecting on my experiences while he was growing up. I remember the looks I got in VA when we first got back from Iceland. And staring back at them when they gave me dirty looks for being so white with such a brown child. At first i ignored the looks, thinking that they were of little importance, perhaps I miss read them, and they were just curious or surprised at a white women having a none white child. Mixed race relations even in Washington in the early 1990's. From my reading the early 90 was a big boom in mixed race children, I am not sure that it is quite that way. I think it is a matter of people claiming a different category, they did change them for the census in 1990 and then in 2000. I think it is also a matter of changed attitudes, in the 90's it was more common to see interracial couples in the larger cities. That does not mean that they were not stared at or commented upon. But they seemed much less at the margins then they were before, while absorbed into the black community.
One of the things I remember from my childhood was the woman who babysat my brother, who was married to a black man. They had two boys. I never remember questioning the normalcy of this, the older son was my age, but went to a different grade school. The husband worked for Polaroid, and the wife was a stay at home mom obviously since she cared for my toddler brother. My mother later in life talked about them having social problems but not about how severe they were. I don't ever remember thinking that they were an odd couple or family. I liked being at their home. At the time they seemed good friends. I wish I knew a bit about how they were treated.
So even as far back as grade school I was in the presence of mixed race couples and children.
Then, the next time I remember thinking about race if it can be called that, was in Africa. I remember the horror of seeing the leper and how scared I was when she got into my aunt's car. I remember the cook and the gardener that my uncle employed. The cook was Kikuyu, a small light-skinned man, thin and wiry, and rather quick tempered. He liked my brother, but not me. The gardener was a Luo, tall very dark, with an easy smile. I remember being enthralled by him, he told us stories, taught us about the yard. He seemed to have boundless patience with us and never made us feel like we were in the way or taking up his time. He had an easy manner about him, loose-limbed and methodical, unlike the cook who was quick and impatient, catering to my brother when he bit off his tongue. I recall that the gardener was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen. So dark was his skin that it appeared black as night, making his smile seem whiter than white.
Then over the years in Iceland, where we are the whitest of white, I payed little attention to color variation of people. Even over the summers I had few non-white people in the sphere we moved in.

John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness

Michael Franti