Because of Race Ho Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools [Paperback]

InBecause of Race, Mica Pollock tackles a long-standing and fraught debate over racial inequalities in America's schools. Which denials of opportunity experienced by students of color should be remedied? Pollock exposes raw, real-time arguments over what inequalities of opportunity based on race in our schools look like today--and what, if anything, various Americans should do about it.

Pollock encountered these debates while working at the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in 1999-2001. For more than two years, she listened to hundreds of parents, advocates, educators, and federal employees talk about the educational treatment of children and youth in specific schools and districts. People debated how children were spoken to, disciplined, and ignored in both segregated and desegregated districts, and how children were afforded or denied basic resources and opportunities to learn. Pollock discusses four rebuttals that greeted demands for everyday justice for students of color inside schools and districts. She explores how debates over daily opportunity provision exposed conflicting analyses of opportunity denial and harm worth remedying. Because of Race lays bare our habits of argument and offers concrete suggestions for arguing more successfully toward equal opportunity.

Mica Pollockis an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author ofColormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School(Princeton) and the editor ofEveryday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School(New Press). [This book] challenges assertions that discrimination against minority children isn't provable, shouldn't be discussed, or can't be fixed. Because of Race. . . explores how everyday interactions produce racial disparities in schools. . . . Pollock argues that Americans have entered a 'new civil rights era,' . . . [and] ends her book with a passionate call for the pursuit of everydalƒ…