Fourteen Souls, 19 Days, and 1,600 Dreams: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Politics of Interruption

• In Event: The Edge of Race: Critical Examinations of Education and Race/Racism

Abstract

This paper discusses the efforts of a community to resist racist marginalization in an urban public school system. The numbers 14, 19, and 1600 refer to the 14 community members of Little Village (a working-class Latino/a community in Chicago) who staged a successful 19-day hunger strike to secure a high school for their community. Sixteen hundred is the number of students who currently attend the Little Village/Lawndale multiplex. The multiplex contains four high schools (Social Justice, Multicultural Arts, Math, Science and Technology, and World Languages), all of which were part the hunger-strikers’ and the community’s demands voiced to the central office of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). While the story of the initial hunger strike will serve as the backdrop for this paper, I will focus on my specific engagement as a member of the design team charged with developing Social Justice High School (SOJO). Included in this discussion are critical questions that underline the importance of community participation and the difficulties of remaining responsible to a community based initiative while operating under the auspices of CPS, simultaneously resisting White Supremacy.

The paper concludes by reviewing my work in a SOJO classroom. By dually enrolling students in a course at a local university while teaching the actual class on their high school’s campus, I sought to practice a politics of interruption regarding the access of African-American and Latino/a youth to higher education. Upon completion of the course, students received elective credit for the class that could be used at any four-year institution. Throughout the duration of the course students were challenged to address issues of inequality and devised several strategies to address issues and concerns they saw as pertinent to their communities. During the course, students were challenged to investigate policies and practices that directly affected young people in schools (i.e. teacher pay, immigration, homelessness, police brutality, school discipline policies, etc.).

The proposed work employs qualitative methodology through ethnography and archival research. Divided in three sections (SOJO, University of Illinois at Chicago, and CPS) the research seeks to identity the conditions that contributed to the creation of the course while acknowledging the political, social and economic factors that impact college access for students of color. Borrowing from Barbara Tedlock’s (2000) definition of ethnography, the hope is ‘to place specific encounters, events, and understandings into a fuller, more meaningful context’ (Tedlock in Denzin and Lincoln, 2000, p.455). Where the class would appear simplistically as a college program from many angles, ethnography would identify the various underpinnings that lead to the organization of the course as explained by the creator, participants and supporters. Operating from a ‘base-narrative’ approach, (Dippo in Gitlin 1994, p. 206), the research uses the creation and implementation of the course as the central theme. Gathering narratives from participants from the aforementioned groups, the research develops a data set from which to extract and interpret.

Author

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago