Book Review: Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools
by Mica Pollock
Publication Date: Aug 10, 2008
List Price: $52.50
Format: Hardcover, 296 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780691125350
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Parent Company: Princeton University
Read a Description of Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
’Today, racial inequality of opportunity and outcome in education is still the result of past generations of explicit policy decreeing that white children were to have better schools than non-white children, of the subsequent exacerbation of poverty along racial lines, of the nations failure to actively desegregate, and of the intersections between opportunity denials in health and housing as well as in education. But racially unequal educational opportunity and outcome today also result from ordinary actions and inaction by well-intentioned people ’ in part, within schools and districts themselves…
Explicit resistance to opportunity for non-white people today has been replaced by stated general commitments to racially equal opportunity as a basic American value. But’ such generic commitments are often trumped by opposition to concrete efforts to equalize particular opportunities for people of color.’
Excerpted from the Introduction (pages 11-12)
Why is it that a half-century after Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark, U.S. Supreme Court case mandating the desegregation of the country’s public schools ’with all deliberate speed,’ the bulk of African-American children are still forced to attend poorly-equipped, predominately-black, inner-city schools where the dropout rate is around 50%? And why do even those fortunate to be enrolled at a supposedly integrated institution still find themselves cordoned off with other kids of color in Special Ed classes or steered onto a non-academic track?
These are the sorts of questions addressed by Professor Mica
Pollock in Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and
Opportunity in Our Schools. Pollock, who now teaches Education
at Harvard’s Graduate School, became acutely aware of the
persistence of inequalities in educational opportunities while
working at the Office for Civil Rights during the Clinton
administration.
In that capacity, she heard hundreds of complaints from minority
parents about how their children were being discriminated
against in a variety of ways, ranging from being denied access
to basic resources to being discouraged to being unfairly
disciplined to being subject to subtle forms of de facto
segregation.
In trying to right the assorted wrongs, Professor Pollock
repeatedly encountered considerable resistance from school
administrators who had become quite adept at rationalizing the
difference between their servicing the needs of black and white
students, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had long since
declared such ’separate but equal’ accommodations
unconstitutional.
In clear and convincing language, the author exposes the primary
four fallacious arguments bureaucrats generally rely on to
maintain the status quo. And she subsequently offers several
concrete suggestions for how this society might arrive at true
equal educational opportunity.
A groundbreaking book which blows the cover off the country’s continued shameful color-coded patterns when it comes to access to quality education.