Excuse Me, Your Privilege Is Showing (White Privilege in Ed Reform)
It always starts when someone brings up a point about race within your “own” ranks.
Whatever that means.
I’m OK with taking on the role as education’s Race Man, but the more I write about it, the more prevalent these discussions become. It’s almost as if people are waiting for [insert name of favorite White leader / blogger / activist / ed professor] to come in and tell you what you need to hear instead of listening to the concerned citizens of color right next to you, so let me come out and say this: this ride has many seats, so if you fall into the following, sit in all of them at once.
People within education reform ostensibly fall into three rails: the education reformers, the neo-lib-conservative conglomerate that calls themselves education reformers, and the maker-spacers / ed-techers who don’t want to get too involved with the politics because it’s so yucky-ucky-ucky. In all cases, everyone’s in agreement that these reforms and laws aren’t about rich students, but poor students. The dialogue always goes rich-poor-rich-poor when in reality, we also mean “richwhite-poorblack-richwhite-poorblack.” Most of us get that even when some of my White brethren have a hard time saying Black and use African-American instead. (It’s cool,