New Orleans – June 26, 2018
6:00 pm
Summer Principals Academy | New Orleans at Teachers College, Columbia University presents a series of faculty evening book talks open to the public and hosted at Loyola Law School’s campus in New Orleans for educators and education leaders. This event sponsored by Teachers College, Columbia University.
Deconstructing Race: Multicultural Education Beyond the Color-Bind
Dr. Jabari Mahiri
In this moment of an unapologetic return to identity politics, mitigating the detrimental impacts of the hierarchy of races is ever more important. Schooling in the United States, and thus the role of educational leaders is critical in challenging and changing the problematic narratives in our society that perpetuate divisions along racial lines. Based on a conceptual framework of micro-cultures drawn from analyses of ethnographic interviews with informants who are socially defined within each of the five racial categories ascribed by white supremacy, I argue for a new literacy regarding the idea of race as it is performed in U.S. society. Terms of a new literacy include pigmentocracy, illegible skin, Ameritocracy, racial imposters,race traders, and clapping back. This book makes the case that the role of education is imperative in understanding the complexities and contradictions of how the idea of race is enacted to increase marginalization and exclusion, and also, importantly, what educators can do about it.
Jabari Mahiri
Jabari Mahiri is a Professor of Education and the William and Mary Jane Brinton Family Chair in Urban Teaching. He is Faculty Director of the Multicultural Urban Secondary English MA and Credential Program, Faculty Advisor and Principal Investigator of the Bay Area Writing Project, and a board member of the National Writing Project. He also was a board member of the American Educational Research Association from 2014 to 2017 and board chair of REALM middle and high schools in Berkeley, California from 2011 to 2017. Before coming to the UC Berkeley, he taught English in Chicago Public Schools for seven years.
Two of Dr. Mahiri’s seven academic books are Deconstructing Race: Multicultural Education Beyond the Color-Bind (2017) that received the 2018 PROSE Award for Educational Theory, Honorable Mention and Digital Tools in Urban Schools: Mediating a Remix of Learning (2011). He also is editor of The First Year of Teaching: Classroom Research to Improve Student Learning (2014) with Sarah Freedman and What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (2004). Additionally, he published a children’s book entitled The Day They Stole the Letter J. Dr. Mahiri also was guest editor for two special issues of Multicultural Education Review on the theme “Cyber-lives: Digital Media and Multicultural Education” published in 2017.
