How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Author:Ibram X. Kendi [Kendi, Ibram X.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

When my freshman year grades came as spring ended in 1997, I was proud of them. Three Cs and two Ds. Enough to remain on the basketball team. My parents were horrified, enough to propel their decision to move to Virginia. They were surprised when I agreed it was time. But I was ready to go, too. My whole environment had become confining. Like those White teens being into White supremacist organizations, I didn’t feel like I belonged.

My brother and I lived with my aunt for a few months as my parents looked for jobs and a home in 1997. We attended Centreville High School in Virginia. My parents found a home in the next town, Manassas. We transferred after the Christmas break to Stonewall Jackson High School, a predominantly White school named after the enslaver of six people and a general in the Confederate States Army. In 1861, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens declared “our new government” rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” Nonetheless, in 1962, White community leaders branded the school with Jackson’s name like a middle finger to the civil rights movement. In 1972, the Prince William County school board voted six to one to continue Jackson’s commemoration when the school moved to a newly constructed building. The school’s name did not change until 2020.

My parents managed to enroll me in Stonewall Jackson’s International Baccalaureate (IB) program, a set of rigorous college preparatory classes that are akin to Advanced Placement (AP) classes. I don’t remember John Bowne having IB or AP classes for its students of color. For the class of 2011, the College Board found that 79.7 percent of Black high school students who would have done well on an AP course did not take one. Qualified Native (73.7 percent) and Latinx (70.4 percent) high school students were also far more likely to be left out of these courses than White students—even as the number of White students left out of these courses is also incredibly high (61.6 percent). With such vast racial disparities, how is performance on these college prep courses a “race neutral” college admissions factor? How is the SAT exam a “race neutral” admissions factor when its creator, Carl Brigham, was an avowed eugenicist and producer of racist ideas? In 1923, Brigham declared, “The intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Alpine, Mediterranean, and negro groups has been demonstrated,” with standardized tests providing the proof. Beyond its racist origins, how is the SAT exam a “race neutral” admissions factor when the scores don’t necessarily correlate with success in college but do correlate with the wealth of the parents of the test takers—and White people have nearly ten times more wealth than Black people? How is grade point average (GPA) a “race neutral” admissions factor when students taking IB classes get their GPAs artificially boosted? When I was in my high

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.