Critical Commentary: The more things change, the more they stay the equivalent: assessing Black underachievement 35 years on, Heidi Safia Mirza
Searching for a power of the scandal of dimmed underachievement since it was first illuminated by Bernard Coards report, Mirza focuses her argument on the racialisation of education (pp. 7) and the ways this has failed three generations of teenage black people. Macpherson, in his seminal inquiry of the Stephen Lawrence murder, defines racial discrimination as conduct or words which advantage or impairment people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin; Mirza identifies its discordant manifestations, both subtle and blatant, and analyzes their contributions toward the propagation of the scandal.
Associations and Expectations
One of the subtle manifestations of racism Mirza reports on is the epidemic of the failure to recognise the consequences of stereotyping (pp.3). She refers to the Myth of the Afro-Caribbean butch the fallacious symbol of the aggressively virile black jejuneness and describes how it seeps into the classroom and the consciousness of teachers (pp.3). Upon recognising a black face among his students the teacher unconsciously and irreparably begins filing associations: urbanity, deprivation, violence, criminality.
Whether the teacher personally feels these associations be accurate is irrelevant they are labels drawn from a nightspots collected consciousness, and the difficulty in disassociating them from a black student is the cause of what Mirza identifies as a main perpetrator in black underachievement: pocket-sized teacher expectation. She describes the self-fulfilling prophecy of low expectations followed by low pupil outcomes (pp.4), and the resulting crisis of negative self-esteem that adds urge to the cycle (pp.2).
Lamenting its absence, Mirza mentions integral anti-racist training as a combatant to low teacher expectations (pp.4). Faced with the lack of positive black identity and...If you want to get a practiced essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com
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