Rock, Paper, Scissors and Educational Anti-Wokeness
The anti anti-racist are taking civil rights investigations and educational data, the presumed weapons of educational equity, and putting them at the service of the status-quo.
The summer of 2020 brought a fresh wave of social justice consciousness fueled by irrefutable video-recorded acts that reflected deeply entrenched systemic racism. As a human of conscience, you could not look away or deny not only the evil acts but the culture that made them possible. It was hard to find an educator that wasn’t declaring themselves an anti-racist, barely grasping the concept and implications. We marched, we made statements in social media, we mobilized resources. Many of these efforts were surface and performative, arguably the vast majority of them, yet others have taken some hold. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, talent and culture efforts have been underway across the education sector even amid the challenging pandemic year. As itty bits of progress are being made, it is no surprise that a year later we find ourselves amid a fresh way of anti-wokeness and anti anti-racism that has great potential to freeze and crumble much of the little ground made.
Rock, Paper, Scissors
The anti-wokeness crowd has pulled out their white supremacy culture weapons and pulled out their most lethal tool, bits of reductive hard data. Using the rock, paper, scissors childhood game as a metaphor, the historical and cultural fabric that makes systemic racism pervasive and invisible is like the paper. Think about that paper as our history, our internalized racism, the stories we tell that sustain discrimination, the caste system that define the American society, and the coded words we use to convey and maintain the discriminatory racial constructions. That paper holds that story. The scissors are a tool to start breaking that down. Acknowledging systemic racism, addressing diversity, investing resources, being humble and open to explore the issues and questions are all little cuts into that paper. The cuts that overtime have any potential of disintegrating it and allowing us to reform and build a more just society and story. And then comes the rock, the bluntest, crudest and most concrete of the three objects. You use the rock to break the scissors. Stop the awareness, obliterate the little cuts into that paper, make it impossible to even explore what’s on the paper. The paper can indeed cover the rock, because it’s a bigger more complex story, but without the scissors and the breakdown of that story there is no real movement toward justice. Anti anti-racists are reconnecting with their blunt tools and in many cases will be using the very same tools that we’ve been guaranteed drive equity, such as standardized tests, to justify that anti-racist efforts must be stopped.
The “richness” of data
Education data, which has been the cornerstone of accountability and national and state equity driving efforts, carries and maintains almost all of the purported characteristics of white supremacy culture. Perfectionism, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, only one right way, either-or thinking, individualism, and objectivity are some of these preferred ways of being and solving issues that are embedded in our reliance on educational data to understand the much more dynamic and fluid process and outcomes of learning. The data usually is the result of standardized tests that measure really well the accomplishments of students at well-resourced schools with family wealth and assets that allow them to dedicate themselves to out-of-school honing of their skills and practice. Rich kids do better in standardized tests than poor kids, period. Standardized tests measure something, but that which it measures is not the objective truth of capabilities and potential and must be considered within a larger context of entrenched inequality. This is why the movement for test-optional college admissions has continued to gain ground, accelerated by the pandemic but likely to be a permanent shift given the gravitational pull of decisions in the state of California.
Pulling out the rocks
The education anti-wokeness movement seeks to deny systemic racism with the blunt tool of educational data and the reductive and burdensome legal mazes of civil rights complaints. Earlier this week, an organization that unironically calls itself Parents Defending Education submitted a complaint to the US Department of Education against Columbus City Schools in Ohio, requesting the district be investigated for their own declarations that systemic racism exists at their district. The organization argues that if such a thing as systemic racism exists then it must be measurable and legally provable and thus the mechanism to solve it is via a complaint to the office of civil rights in the USDOE. In other words, let’s take the complex narrative that we can only honestly capture by going beyond the data, by exploring internalized racism and implicit bias, by giving it room to be tackled by first acknowledging it, and shut it down. The anti anti-racists turning into the advocates of civil rights is on the one hand an unexpected turn of affairs and also a most likely outcome when we have allowed imperfect educational data to be our ultimate and in some case the only measures that we use to drive equity and justice. Because we have reduced human growth and learning to concrete data points that do not measure fairly capabilities and potential and have failed at systematically appreciating and measuring the more dynamic, emergent, and collective aspects of learning, we have indeed created our own rock that is ready to crush the scissors of change.
The anti anti-racists turning into the advocates of civil rights is on the one hand an unexpected turn of affairs and also a most likely outcome when we have allowed imperfect educational data to be our ultimate and in some case the only measures that we use to drive equity and justice.
The whole point of naming systemic racism is to address the fact that not everything can be neatly captured on video, in statistical differences in test scores or other concrete and highly documented measures of discrimination. Recognizing that racism is pervasive and systemic is also saying that it can’t always be readily seen, as a matter of fact, it means that we’ve become so accustomed to it that we confuse it with what is natural, with truth. It is recognizing that racism is a human and complex issue that will require human and complex solutions. So, what better way of stopping this kind of courageous work than by insisting that there be a burden to provide concrete proof in order to be able to do anything about it?
Recognizing that racism is pervasive and systemic is also saying that it can’t always be readily seen, as a matter of fact, it means that we’ve become so accustomed to it that we confuse it with what is natural, with truth.
In our individualistic society we like to believe that it is the heroic and inherent qualities of a person that allow them to succeed and refuse to believe the invisible flying carpet of privilege that lifts some and keeps others down. Our cultural bias toward the individually heroic have fueled our love of anything that reduces humanity to what is objectively measurable and legally controllable. Even our most progressive educational efforts are bound by our obsession with the measurable. In the summer of 2021, the progressive scissors that have been ready to cut through the paper holding our racist history are subject to the crushing blows of the rock of educational data, legalese and individualism. The deniers of systemic racism will force at every turn the primacy of reductive data and evidence.They will seek to reduce the issues to individual cases and exceptions that ought to be managed as such. We will be tempted to simplify and reduce learning, our humanity, to data points and instances. We must be vigilant and weary of the path ahead, lest we find ourselves advocating for teacher body cams.
