Colormute : : Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School / / Mica Pollock.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter PUP eBook-Package 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Pollock, Mica,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2009]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

This book considers in unprecedented detail one of the most confounding questions in American racial practice: when to speak about people in racial terms. Viewing "race talk" through the lens of a California high school and district, Colormute draws on three years of ethnographic research on everyday race labeling in education. Based on the author's experiences as a teacher as well as an anthropologist, it discusses the role race plays in everyday and policy talk about such familiar topics as discipline, achievement, curriculum reform, and educational inequality. Pollock illustrates the wide variations in the way speakers use race labels. Sometimes people use them without thinking twice; at other moments they avoid them at all costs or use them only in the description of particular situations. While a major concern of everyday race talk in schools is that racial descriptions will be inaccurate or inappropriate, Pollock demonstrates that anxiously suppressing race words (being what she terms "colormute") can also cause educators to reproduce the very racial inequities they abhor. The book assists readers in cultivating a greater understanding of the pitfalls and possibilities of everyday race talk and clarifies previously murky discussions of "colorblindness." By bridging the gap between theory and practice, Colormute will be enormously helpful in fostering ongoing conversations about dismantling racial inequality in America.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. We Don't Belong to Simple Race Groups, but We Do -- 2. Race Doesn't Matter, but It Does -- 3. The De-Raced Words We Use When Discussing Plans for Racial Equality Can Actually Keep Us from Discussing Ways to Make Opportunities Racially Equal -- 4. The More Complex Inequality Seems to Get, the More Simplistic Inequality Analysis Seems to Become -- 5. The Questions We Ask Most about Race Are the Very Questions We Most Suppress -- 6. Six Although Talking in Racial Terms Can Make Race Matter, Not Talking in Racial Terms Can Make Race Matter Too -- Moving Forward -- Practically Speaking: Words for Educators in Particular -- Notes -- Bibliography