‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t:’ Black parents’ racial realist school engagement

ABSTRACT

Conventional scholarship frames parent involvement in schools as crucial for student success, often depicts Black and Brown parents as under-engaged, and implies their increased engagement would lead to the end of racial disparities in education. This study challenges this traditional discourse and introduces the notion of Racial Realist Parent Engagement. Racial Realist Parent Engagement is a practice and theoretical framing drawn from Derrick Bell’s notion of racial realism and a qualitative multicase study of the school engagement experiences of 16 Black parents. These parent participants resisted antiblackness in their children’s schools while simultaneously recognizing racism to be a permanent and inevitable aspect of schooling. Racial Realist Parent Engagement shifts parent involvement theory, policy, and practice to a more complex understanding of the purposes and benefits of parent engagement for Black and Brown families – and demands expansive racial justice policy for student learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Parent involvement
• parent engagement
• family-school relationships
• Black parents
• critical race theory
• antiblackness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. By ‘real’ Bell does not mean race is a biological fact (it is a social construct that is fluid and changing), but that racism has very meaningful and real consequences.

2. Dumas (2016) and Dumas and ross (2016) draw from Afro-pessimist ideas and scholars (Hartman 2007; Sexton 2008; Wilderson 2010) to theorize antiblackness in education policy despite ‘living in an officially antiracist society’ (Dumas 2016, 15), which they argue is needed because of the ways Black people are continually dehumanized with the persistence of what Hartman (2007) calls ‘the afterlife of slavery’ (6).

3. Lydia was the only participant who had children with someone who was not Black.

4. The number of participant observations varied depending on my availability and the scheduling of school events.

5. I provided case study drafts to all focal participants except Angie; I lost touch with her after data collection ended when she moved and her telephone number changed.

6. Citing Bell’s Rules of Racial standing, Gillborn (2008) writes that ‘radical analyses by whites [can] play an important role in challenging the assumption of “special pleading” and bias that greets Black radicalism’ (199).