Perpetuating Racial Inequities in Education: An Examination of Pre-Service Teachers' Interpretations of Racial Experiences

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Introduction The challenges that African Americans experience in U. S. schools can be attributed to dynamics of race. Winant (1994) contends that race remains deeply fused with power, order, and indeed meaning systems of every society in which it operates (p. 2). As such, people have come to believe that visible differences, or race, are linked to differences in mental capacities, and that these innate hierarchical differences are measurable by cultural achievements of such populations (Montagu, 1997, p. 44). Wynne (2005) wrote the political tenor of this country has turned towards a of all groups of children and adults who are comprised of anything that is not mainstream White Euro-centric (p. 59). Such a climate is upheld by nature and structure of country's educational system. This Nazi-like paranoia identified by Wynne (2005) is simply a more recent characterization of white supremacist ideology prevalent in American society. The prevalence of such an ideology adversely influences a country's efforts to achieve educational equity because climate impacts teacher perceptions. The goal of this article is to examine ways in which White supremacist ideology influences education that African Americans receive. We do so by examining some of scholarship on disparities in American education. Review of Relevant Literature The existence of a White supremacist ideology shapes trajectory of scholarship designed to examine and uncover strategies to improve academic performance of students of African ancestry in United States. As such, instead of an examination of ways in which school practices, policies, and personnel create and perpetuate underachievement of these students, we find that a significant amount of scholarship tends to focus on how to fix student or chronicles efforts of schools who believe fixing student is primary path to academic success. In The Closing of American Mind, Allan Bloom (1988) charged that attempts to transform school curricula to incorporate non-Western thought and traditions under-minded fabric of American society. Non-Western students should simply assimilate culturally in order to succeed. Hernstein & Murray (1994) argued that academic disparities between African and European American students was due to black intellectual inferiority. Similarly, Sewell (1997) found that British teachers pointed to African-Caribbean sub-culture as main reason why schooling process was not working (p. 68). John Ogbu (2003) asserted that African American students held high academic expectations but did not necessarily work to meet those expectations. He surmised that this, in part, perpetuated existence of a Black-White achievement gap. While he acknowledged that students felt teachers did not demonstrate caring, he never examined how school or teacher practices shaped students' to work hard. Furthermore, dynamics of teacher-student relationships that enable students to adopt a particular work ethic was overworked. Thus, Ogbu's (2003) work suggests that if African American parents supervised their child's homework and if students worked harder, achievement gap could be bridged. Assumptions such as these, that are not interrogated, inform way that school curricula, school and teacher practices produce African American children who are academically disengaged. A line of inquiry has emerged which examines ways in which school practices and teacher perceptions create inequities within classroom. After all, teachers' perceptions about race are a reflection of broader society and inevitably how teaching practices are influenced. Pinar (1993) notes that school curricula marginalize contributions of people of color while highlighting accomplishments of those of European descent, thereby creating distorted national identities. …