Voices of Change: Student Voice and Resistance Pre and Post Brown

• In Event: Research, Remedy, and Repair . . . Lessons From the 70th Anniversary of Brown

Abstract

Our education system has, since its inception, been a site of contestation and struggle (Giroux, 1983), as policy makers, business leaders, educators, students, families, and communities hold differing perspectives as to the purpose of schooling. The grand narrative of US public education is one of opportunity- that via education, anyone can become anything- with hard work, grit, and determination. The reality, though, is that our education system was designed explicitly to control, to track, to sort, and to possibly “rake a few geniuses from the rubbish”(Thomas Jefferson, 1772). Education for Black students in America is rooted in oppression- from the anti-literacy laws that forbade the enslaved to read or be taught to read to the “separate but equal” doctrine that was upheld following emancipation which was challenged in the Brown v the Board of Education case. What Brown did not do is take on institutionalized racism- it forced schools to allow Black students to attend, but they did not have to hire Black teachers, and they did not have to respect/love/care for Black students- one might argue that the 70 years post Brown has been an exercise in watching the system find new ways to segregate Black bodies- the way our curriculum is structured (Black history is either centered around slavery, or erased other than a few celebrations in February) and enacted (SPED, choice, honors/ap, other ways to track/sort), the way our discipline system ensures that Black students are pushed into the school to prison pipeline, the way our climate ensures ongoing marginality, by being rendered both invisible and hyper-visible, by microaggressions and other forms of psychic violence.
Paulo Friere (2005) laid this tension bare in his efforts to develop an approach to education that would liberate the oppressed from educational systems that reify and reinforce systemic inequalities- what he named as Critical Consciousness. His work identifies challenges of individual and social harms as a result of internalized and structural oppression that are fundamentally dehumanizing and create an ongoing cycle of oppression in which systems perpetuate themselves, and the oppressed participate in their own marginalization. Jemal (2017) shifted the conversation about critical consciousness into two dimensions- Transformative Consciousness and Transformative Action- a conversation to which we will return in our conclusions to this article.
In the next section, we examine how the structure and culture of schooling creates and maintains oppressive conditions for Black youth, followed by an exploration of the ways, before, during, and post Brown, that Black students have engaged in collective resistance. We end with recommendations for building the capacity of all youth to engage in collective resistance, via sociopolitical development and transformative student voice.

Authors

• Shelley Zion, Rowan University

• Jamar Durelle Brownlee, Rowan University

• William A. Rozycki, Rowan University