Race In Education Research Paper

One might wonder how different the world would be if everyone had the genetic mutation and were colorblind to the biological color of race. Michael Omi and Howard Winant defined race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to difference of human bodies. Race has had a big factor in the history of the United States and even into present day it can decide who gets educated and who gets a quality education. One should not be ignorant to race, as not many people would deny that race exists. However, the issue is whether someone’s race affects their individual life outcomes, especially in the lens of education. Simply put, citizenship in the United States was equated by minorities to have a share

of the power and access to education. Citizenship was also equated to being white with the emerging idea of the one-drop policy . Analyzing why whites were educated during this era revolves around the definition of citizenship and how many non-whites and blacks were not even truly considered citizens.

This is part of the inclusion behind Thomas Jefferson’s thought process as to why he considered public education essential for a successful democracy, however he was merely advocating for the republican version of education in which those in and with power would be educated. With the start of the Common School Movement of the 19th century, there was the basic premise that “anyone” could attend schools supported by tax dollars. However, “anyone” in most cases did not include non-whites and women. The reference to race in this paper will be to the social construction of race in the United States and how educational outcomes were and are determined by how the United States has associated race to citizenship. United States policies have also originated from the notion that whites were intelligently and overall more superior to people of color, for example the eugenics movement. The people who write and create policy also play a major role in which polices get enforced, whose plights they decide to hear, and how policies are executed. The irony behind this notion is that although people of color have comprised the United States population since its creation, the people who write policy has remained the same, shockingly for about

two centuries. For example, 100% of the legislative body and policy makers were white in the 19th century, and even in present day in the year 2016, 85% of the House comprise of Whites and 96% in the Senate. Although democracy can be defined many ways, people will often list “a government for the people, by the people” as well as “freedoms and equality among people.” However, due to the overemphasis of race in relation to citizenship as a way to foster exclusivity with whiteness and justify otherness in origins of the United States, the policies ranging from the notion of citizenship for blacks and to immigration policies within our government has ebbed and flowed with this foundation in unjustifiably maintaining the inequalities and gaps seen in our education system today.
II. Context
Citizenship and education was a foundation on which a successful democracy would thrive, as Thomas Jefferson would agree. Therefore, citizenship and education were often intertwined as the notions of being American and some can even argue the very definition of being an American citizen itself. Neither citizenship nor education were seen as a “right”. If citizenship is defined as being white, having a share of power, and access to education, then it may help explain the white opposition to African American education in northern and southern communities in the early 1830s. Many whites and courts during this time saw the education of African Americans as threatening to their racialized notions of American citizenship. As found in “Schooling Citizens”, common schools were “intended to provide common set of experiences and values to in turn [invoke] what it truly meant to be American (Moss 2009, p. 8)”. Common schools were established on the basis that they could create good citizens, unite citizens, and decrease levels of crime and poverty. They were often based on Protestant ideals, pedagogy, ad anti-Catholic biases. Although common schools had a promise to expand educational opportunity, it had unsettling implications for African Americans [blacks] at the time because their body politic and essentially citizenship remained uncertain and contested. Common schools essentially privileged citizenship instead of equality and thus school reformers were able to inadvertently reinforce efforts to deny black people access to public school (Moss 2009). Through the invocation of the ideals of civic inclusion rather than social justice in order to promote public education, reformers implicitly were able to justify denying African Americans, as noncitizens, equal educational opportunity. Moss makes the argument that citizenship was a marriage with public schooling. For example, African American educational activists tried to contest school segregation not because of poorer quality in black schools, but from a desire to capitalistically focus on the linkage between schooling and citizen as articulated by school reformers. If citizenship included power and access to education, blacks were willing to make that sacrifice for education. African Americans highly valued education and due to lack of provisions meant African Americans had to pay for books and teachers and they also lost their children’s wages while they were in school. This was a huge financial sacrifice onto black families, but they were still willing to make these sacrifices anyway. Frederick Douglass puts this desire for attainment due to “knowledge [being] the only power present that could have been wielded by colored people of this time and that knowledge was the preliminary step to all power.” Simply put, common schools or public education in the 19th century held a strong connection to being a citizen, and as defined through this paper as being white and holding a share of power. The reasoning here being that if the connection between citizenship and education were to be broken or distributed among other races, then the very concept of American citizenship itself would be expanded to include non-whites. In “Policy Design and Democracy” and Social Construction of Target Populations, Scheinder and Lawrence argue that policy design and policies are written by people based on their knowledge and assumptions on how to fix that certain problem (Scheinder & Lawrence 1997). To put this argument into context, since the legislative bodies that oversee educational policy are often white, then it theoretically follows that the concerns of whites and their right to education are prioritized over non-whites. Scheinder and Lawrence (1997) further add to the definition of citizenship so far, by adding that the right to vote and to make voices heard in government is what defines a citizen. Thus, it follows that “complaints are seldom heard about people denied the right to vote, to express their opinions, or to run for office” (Scheinder & Lawrence 1997, p. 4 ). Their argument contributes to the idea that educational inequality was this link between race in relation to citizenship and the link between citizenship and public education. After the common school movement was the Americanization movement which still essentially maintained the notions of whiteness and citizenship. Evaluating this movement through the lens of policy and framework of government offers a critical analysis of the politics behind educational inequality.
III. Policies during the Americanization Movement
Immigration policies and immigration itself contributed to the rise of the Americanization movement. Analyzing from the vertical policy dimension of Fitzgerald it can be found that within domestic politics, institutions often dictate policy and also respond to pressures from [the citizens] below (Fitzgerald 2015). Not only were citizens of this time most, if not all, white. Furthermore, the U.S. immigration policy during this time found that race (as national origin) was the key determinant of inclusion in immigration policies. For example, the National Origins Act was created in 1924 and remained in effect until 1965, which established country quotas based on 1890s census and held a strong bias toward Northern European immigration. This shows that this preference and bias in immigration reflects who was seen as American or could achieve the ideals of American citizenship. Making of Americans: The Fire of Patriotism lays down the framework for the creation of the Americanization movement during World War I as a means of institutionalizing “Americanization” as well as “cultural assimilation” (King 2000). The marks of the Americanization movement was that blacks were legally recognized as citizens in accordance to the law and it occurred after the abolishment of slavery. This may be seen by some as a step in furthering public education for blacks since blacks had increased access to education that they were often denied during the common school movement. The difference here was that people of color and blacks were now seen as citizens in the eyes of the law. However, with this new notion of citizenship for this group came the “promise of education” as previously defined. The basic premise, however, remained the same was that whiteness was still insinuated and institutionalized in the idea of being an American citizen. Therefore, the Americanization movement was born to promote citizenship through the indoctrination and culturally assimilation of immigrants by teaching them the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, liberalism, and Christianity ideologies and concepts in order to separate them from their own culture and into the idea of American whiteness. There is a shift here from the common school movement in that although now immigrants and minorities had greater access to schooling, however, the ideologies behind this American education system still held notions of whiteness as being an ideal citizen. Analyzing from the ideas presented in this paper so far, although there was this shift in access to public education, the association between whiteness, education, and citizenship remained relatively the same. Now knowing the ideologies behind the two main movements of public education, analyzing the politics of educational inequality with the knowledge of the structure of government in facilitating educational policies and reform will offer another critical lens.