Revisiting Curriculum as Racialized Text: The Myth and Math of Black Lives Matter

• In Event: The Miseducation of Curriculum: Schooling and #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

The field of curriculum studies has several longstanding dialogues that describe how schooling is organized to reify ideas and ideals of whiteness (e.g., Grant, Brown & Brown, 2015; Watkins, 2001; Winfield, 2007). However, despite this strong scholarship, broader sociocultural understandings still view events like Black on Black crime and police-related Black homicides as evidence of a racial rather than a cultural issue. These sociocultural understandings are iterated in schools through misleading benefits of affirmative action or deceptive statistics about the achievement gap.
Building on the idea that the curriculum is a racialized text (Berry & Hughes, 2005; Winfield, 2007; Watkins, 2001), this paper describes and critiques the curricular text and numbers used by organized opponents of campaigns like Black Lives Matter by providing counter-evidence and flaws in their reasoning and arithmetic. In particular, this paper emphasizes, the misleading benefits of affirmative action in college admissions and the misleading numbers relating Black on Black crime and police-related Black homicides.
This is significant for at least the following reasons. First, it calls into question the normalized statistics and quantitative research that is used to further sociocultural and political raced and racist understandings. Second, it further examines our understandings of curricula as it relates to various forms of data collection, analysis and the dissemination of this knowledge as normalized racial texts. Finally, it re-calls our racial epistemologies that are engendered through the curricula as it is built and maintained within raced and racist understandings.

Author

• Sherick A. Hughes, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill