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Racism And The American School System

Decent Essays

Racism, the discriminatory belief that members of a certain race are superior or inferior to another, creates problems that are more intricate than they are skin-deep. Racial stratification emerges not only throughout individual interaction based on personal bias, but rather emerges within cultures and institutions themselves. Some would be naïve to think that racism merely hurts the feelings of the oppressed. The full extent of racism is wide-reaching, and it impacts matters much more complex than a person’s emotional state.
Take, for instance, the issue of “silencing” in the American school system. This problem was studied extensively by Angelina Castagno, who observed the impact of legitimating whiteness in the Zion school district of Utah. Silencing is defined by Jim Cummins as “the formal and informal ways schools control who can speak, what can and cannot be spoken, and whose discourse must be controlled” (Castagno 2008:318). There is a strong desire among many educators to avoid conversations that bring up such charged topics that may result in the triggering of social anxieties. Castagno observed how the students that attempted to bring up such topics as unequal distribution of power and resources or feelings of inferiority were typically the minorities in the classroom, and they usually got shut down. For example, if a student were to make a “just because I’m Black” comment, they would often be met with a reply such as “Don’t say that” from the teacher (Castagno

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