1st Edition
Resisting Racism and Promoting Equity Through Community-Engaged Social Action Challenging the Big Lies
This book challenges pre-service and in-service educators to reflect critically on their assumptions and engage in praxis promoting racial and social equity. Grounded in policy contexts, historical understandings, and critical theories, this book describes innovative community-engaged approaches to resisting racism and promoting equity and features reflections and personal narratives from partners in change—including on-the-ground activists, voices from younger and older generations, educators, and first-time writers.
Fueled by the ideology of white supremacy for over four centuries that whites matter more than Blacks, the authors argue that racial inequities exacerbated during the Trump administration and the legacy of neo-liberal policies dating to the "New Federalism" fiercely necessitate invoking community-engaged strategies to advance equity.
This book advocates for collaboration among schools, community organizations, businesses, university centers, and community activists to address historically pressing issues, including systemic racism, declining educational opportunities, limited access to ongoing health care, and the decline of civility in public life.
Part I: Resisting Systemic Racism 1. Stepping Out of Our Lanes: The Big Picture and the Big Lies (Plural) 2. The Unfinished Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi: Narratives of Ordinary Citizens 3. When a Call for Justice Becomes "Defund" the Police 4. The National "Birth Defect": Systemic Inequity and the American Democracy/Nightmare 5. Education Policy and Leadership: Resisting the Shift to Neoliberalism in New Orleans Part II: Promoting Equity 6. Seed Times for Civil Rights and Citizen Participation: Reflections from a Social Welfare Historian 7. Math Literacy as a Community Organizing Tool: Narratives of an "Extraordinary Citizen" 8. Throwing out the Good with the Bad: A Counter Narrative of the New Orleans School "Revolution" 9. Traditional Leadership Theories Reframed: Moving African-American Women Leadership Experiences from "Margin" to "Center" 10. The Last Words
Biography
Luis Mirón is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Social Sciences at University of Holy Cross New Orleans, USA.
Paul Green is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside, USA.
"Mirón and Green have crafted an impressive study that combines thoughtful anger over a relentless American history of racial bigotry and oppression with their own agenda of potential correctives. To overcome years of unhelpful "neoliberal" policies – made worse by the Trump presidency and propaganda spewed by Fox News – the authors encourage the Black Community to come together to promote an overhaul of a broken educational system and to demand greater equity on other fronts such as housing and health care."
Curtis Wilkie, former Fellow of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics at University of Mississippi, internationally recognized civil rights journalist, and author
"Resisting Racism and Promoting Equity through Community-Engaged Social Action is a critical intervention in a time and context in which schooling has come under siege by narrow-minded politics and right-wing ideologues aiming to throw the country back into a pre-Reconstruction past. The scope and ambition of Mirón and Green’s book extends beyond mere diagnosis of the myriad problems associated with the racialized ordering of schooling. But the authors point, in addition, to workable solutions that draw on the wellspring of moral and material resources residing in urban communities in which too often, too many schools now exist as armies of occupation. The authors of this timely volume offer a vision that seeks to combine community-focused actions and interventions with the ameliorative strategies and investments of progressive educators and social actors committed to social change and meaningful futures for Black and Brown youth."
Cameron McCarthy, University Scholar and Former Director of Global Studies and Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
