The Marginalization and Othering of Students of Color in Catholic Jesuit Education

• In Event: Striving for the Common Good: Mission-Based Equity and Inclusion in Catholic Education

Abstract

Catholic schools promote values of community, belonging and tradition. Yet I argue that students of color, or students from historically underrepresented groups, struggle with a sense of belonging at Jesuit schools. General Congregation 34 noted this distance between those strained relationships: “we recognize that we have often contributed to the alienation of the very people we wanted to serve” (as cited in Traub, 2008, p. 16).
Every school is a microcosm that identifies which norms and behaviors will transfer into social currency that is assigned value within that specific setting. Bourdieu (1986) explored the various forms of capital in the essay The Forms of Capital, and through his analysis of economic, cultural, and social capital noted that all forms of capital have been assigned value by others (p. 16). The identification of behaviors that are deemed valuable, and the corresponding transfer of social capital occurs implicitly and explicitly every day on school campuses, informed by the dominant narratives that frame the organizational culture. As such, the danger is obvious when the dominant narratives unequally allocate value based on the existence of insider and outsider groups.
In educational settings where the dominant cultural narrative and the student lived experience are misaligned, as in the case of students of color in private schools, the student’s transformative educational experience can largely be negative and isolating. In instances where the school’s dominant cultural narrative is one that inadvertently “others” an entire group of students, the results could be disastrous. Phelan, Davidson & Cao (1991) offer that for students who experience this cultural misalignment, “many adolescents are left to navigate [these] transitions without direct assistance from persons in any of their contexts, most notably the school” (p. 224). In addition, these feelings of isolation can lead to a loss of a sense of “wholeness” in the student, and ultimately many students adopt dominant cultural traits or behaviors in order to achieve a stronger sense of cultural consonance. Educational institutions can correct these structures of dissonance by identifying the organizational structures that promote domination and selective transmission of cultural capital. Phelan, Davidson & Cao (1991) call schools to a deeper, organizational-level understanding over a surface, individual-level examination: “we need to identify institutional structures that operate to facilitate boundary crossing strategies and that do not require students to give up or hide important features of their lives. This requires more than understanding other cultures” (p. 247). Ultimately, if our schools are to educate the “whole” child, we need to see the whole picture of how Jesuit schools are “seeing” all of their students.

Author

• Sonya Arriola, University of San Francisco