The Social Funding of Race: The Role of Schooling

ABSTRACT

Our nation is suffused in questions of race and racism. Despite much scholarly and public discussion we struggle to undo long-held assumptions about race and how it functions. This article looks at race from the perspective of a public commodity that the society “funds” in order to make it seem real and intractable. Throughout the article there are multiple examples of the everyday, commonsense things people in this society do to fund the concept and give it meaning from our children's earliest days. The challenge in a society that so “fully funds” race is it seems near impossible to “defund” the concept in teacher education to allow new teachers to approach the classroom as a space where race is not determinant and highly predictive of student achievement.

Notes

1 This is a pseudonym.

2 This is a retelling of this story from a previous article (Ladson-Billings, 1992).

3 Although Mario thinks of himself as “Italian,” he will learn that Italians were included in the category of whiteness sometime in the 20th century (Roediger, 2006).

4 This name is also a pseudonym.

5 Later Rehnquist would assert that the memo did not reflect his views, but rather the early views of Justice Jackson (Davis, 1984).

6 Although the focus of this essay is on race, I am cognizant of the way race and class co-vary and the tremendous overlap between the two subject positions.

7 What I find curious about “slavery” as the most cited reason is that discussions of reparations fall on deaf ears. People believe slavery is the cause of the inequity but do not believe attempts to remediate it are warranted.

8 This was obviously prior to the election of Barack Obama.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gloria Ladson-Billings

Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and faculty affiliate in the Departments of Educational Policy Studies, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the former president of the American Educational Research Association and incoming president of the National Academy of Education.