Facing Up to Structural Inequality: A Justification and a Reading List

This post originally appeared on Klingspace. Join the conversation there!

Lest we needed any more reminders of the importance of facing up in schools to controversies of equity and difference, MTV’s “Look Different” campaign recently released findings from a study “designed to understand and measure how young people are experiencing, affected by, and responding to issues associated with bias.” You might have read about it in this article from Slate, “Why Do Millennials Not Understand Racism?”

The study suggests millennials want to believe it’s possible at once to be both colorblind and attuned to differences of culture and experience. According to the study, “73% [of American millennials] believe never considering race would improve society,” while “81% believe embracing diversity and celebrating differences between the races would improve society.” Somewhere in those results, a large majority of respondents evidently don’t see how those statements conflict.

But I won’t engage here in the millennial bashing that, as Frank Bruni recently wrote, is uncomfortably in vogue in popular media of late. (By most definitions I’ve seen, I myself am a millennial.) Rather, I wish to remind myself and an audience of educators that our students’ misunderstandings are our responsibility.

The failure is ours. We’ve failed so far to teach that difference is about more than the holidays we celebrate and the ways our grandparents spice their food. We’ve failed so far to cast light on structural inequalities that persist despite our national progress over the past half century, despite our having elected a black president.

Inequality is not just “in the eyes of the beholder.” It is reality. It exists in the law, past and present. It exists in our schools, public and private. And it exists in the microaggressions that people of color encounter daily because yes, it exists in the eyes of those that levy those microagressions-- often (but not always) in entirely subconscious cultural biases learned from previous generations, from stereotyped depictions in popular media, and from each other.

Facing up to structural inequality can feel like perilous work in schools. We wonder, how can we expose it and not threaten civility in our own precious communities?

I don’t claim to have the answer. But for all the failures of our popular culture to address inequality courageously and civilly, some are managing both (see list at bottom). I rely on them to model the courage it takes to face up to inequality, and just as importantly, to remind me of inequalities of which I could otherwise go through life blissfully unaware. I have a long way to go in my own education about inequality and how to address it in schools, but I’m thankful for their influence.

For models, see Peggy McIntosh (and The National SEED Project), Jose Vilson, NPR’s Code Switch, and especially Ta-Nehesi Coates whose recent “Case for Reparations” could help restore some stunning omissions from typical high school American History curricula.

What would you add to this reading list?