How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Communities of Color, Self-Determination, and Historical Educational Struggle

• In Event: Roots, Realities, Refusals, Reinventions: Critical Reflections on the Histories and Futures of Liberation Education

Abstract

In this paper, Au, Brown, and Calderon seek to reclaim the multicultural roots of U.S. curriculum by providing a compelling, if partial, history of the educational realities and refusals of several racially oppressed groups. Over 100 years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois (1994, originally published 1903) posed the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” as he considered the positionality of Black people in America. Presenters use this as a lens to consider the ways that non-white communities in the U.S. have historically been framed as a “problem” within systems of education. In this context, they discuss the historical struggles that communities of color have waged to control, and make meaning of, the racism in systems of education.

Au, Brown, and Calderon begin with how the U.S. government framed the “problem” of Native education, including the cultural genocide of the boarding school curriculum, and the resistance of Native communities (Au, Brown, & Calderon, 2016; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; Trafzer, Keller, & Sisquoc, 2006). They likewise examine the educational struggles of early Chinese and Japanese Americans. Faced with tensions created by nativist, white supremacist xenophobia, these groups both fought for inclusion in the mostly White system of public education and developed primary and secondary level educational institutions of their own (Au et al., 2016; Azuma, 2005; Kuo, 1998). Next, presenters address the colonial histories of Mexicans in the Southwest and how U.S. expansion influenced the segregation and subsequent schooling of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the early 20th century (Gomez, 2005). They document the long intellectual history of Mexican Americans struggling to revise the school curriculum, questioning the Americanization goals behind the official curriculum, and offer a powerful counter-narrative showing the hidden and overt agency of activists confronting the symbolic violence of education (Blanton, 2003, 2015). Finally, they examine early African American educational discourse, including the critiques African Americans have leveled against traditional notions of curriculum found in children’s literature and school textbooks (Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2015; Brown, 2010; Brown & Au, 2014). They share the work of different authors and ideas across the Journal of Negro Education, noting the role of this scholarship in challenging the normative constructions of blackness, curriculum, and pedagogy that were pervasive during the early 20th century (Au et al., 2016).

Authors

• Wayne Au, University of Washington - Bothell

• Anthony L. Brown, The University of Texas - Austin

• Dolores Calderon, Western Washington University