Third-graders and social identity maps (op-ed)

 

I started kindergarten at a private Christian academy.  My parents didn’t send me back the following year due to financial difficulties.  So, I completed first grade in public school.   My parents solved their economic problems and sent me back to the Christian academy.  However, I returned to the Christian academy with a problem of my own. 

Apparently, my time away from the Christian academy’s rapid reading program left me behind the other students who were there since kindergarten.  I wasn’t the only student behind.  There were three others.  All three were first year attendees, but all four of us were black. 

Between 2^nd and 3^rd grade the Christian academy provided all the extra resources to get us up to speed.   I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember the four of us leaving the school building to have extra reading sessions inside an RV (reading van) that parked in front of the school twice a week.

Even at that young age, I noticed it was the black students that needed additional instruction while the white students did not need extra help.  It would have been easy for all four of us to internalize we were behind because we were black and our classmates were advanced because they were white.  I can’t speak for the others, but I never developed an inferiority complex, and I believe it was due to the fact that I attended a Christian academy.  Our teachers taught us that we all were “children of God” with individual gifts that made us unique, but “equal in the eyes of God”. 

Years later, in college, I took a course called Foundations in Education.   One of our reading assignments was a book by Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu called – Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys.  Kunjufu identified a problem, he labeled – 4^th Grade Failure Syndrome.  Kunjufu suggested black boys do not transition well from primary level learning to intermediate level learning.  By 4^th grade students are ready to transition from learning to read to reading to learn.  However, if the student struggles with this transition, then reading becomes a hassle, learning becomes a chore, and the student becomes less enthusiastic about education.

Since the transition between 3^rd and 4^th grade is vital to student development no interference should be allowed.  That’s why Christopher F. Rufo’s report in The City Journal about a teacher instructing third-graders to create social identity maps in Cupertino, California was bothersome.

According to Rufo, a third-grade teacher began a lesson on “social identities”.   The students were asked to create identity maps, listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics.  The teacher explained that the students lived in a dominant culture of “white, middle-class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speakers – who created and maintained this culture in order to hold and stay in power.  The teacher told the students those with privilege have power over others.  The teacher explained “there are parts of us that hold some power and other parts that are oppressed” even within a single person.  Then the teacher asked the students to circle on their identity maps which of their identities held power and privilege.  Then the students were asked to describe which aspects of their identities do not hold any power or any privilege.

The irony, Rufo pointed out, the elementary school is 94 percent non-white, the majority of the families are Asian-American, the median household income of Cupertino is $172,000, and the school ranks in the top 1percent of all elementary schools in California.  Rufo pointed out that no one there is oppressed.  The Asian-American parents complained about the lesson because they claimed it divided American society into oppressed vs. oppressors.

That’s a legitimate complaint.

But I fear the outcome if these social identity lessons trickle down into poor inner-city schools, whose parents don’t monitor their class work.  Imagine after black third-graders circle black on their identity maps, these black third-graders are going to be told that the black part of their identity has no power and has no privilege in America.

What would prevent these third-graders from internalizing that falsehood?

First published in New Pittsburgh Courier 1/27/21