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.