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Offers rich, wide-ranging counternarratives to social, political, and educational discourses that characterize urban schools and communities as places of despair, revealing the resources and strategies of resistance that teachers, students, and families use to succeed and thrive.
Reauthoring Savage Inequalities brings together scholars, educators, practitioners, and students to counter dominant narratives of urban educational environments. Using a community cultural wealth lens, contributors center the strategies, actions, and ways of knowing communities of color use to resist systemic oppression. So often, discussions of urban schooling are filled with stories of what Jonathan Kozol famously referred to as "savage inequalities" in his 1991 book of the same title-with tales of deficiency and despair. The counternarratives in this volume grapple with the inequalities highlighted by Kozol. Yet, in foregrounding lived experiences of educating and being educated in schools and communities that were systemically isolated and disenfranchised then and continue to be thirty years later, Reauthoring Savage Inequalities brings nuance to depictions of teaching and learning in urban areas. In nineteen essays, as well as commentaries, a foreword, and an afterword, contributors engage readers in critical dialogue about the importance of community cultural wealth. They identify the sources of support that enable students, staff, parents, and community members to succeed and thrive despite the purposeful divestment in communities of color across this nation's cities.
"Reauthoring Savage Inequalities is groundbreaking, timely, and exquisite. It is both a response to Kozol's scholarship and a call to do research differently. In Savage Inequalities, Kozol exposes a particular deficit-driven narrative that plagues urban education. It depicts hopelessness and victimization. But what happens when insiders shape our understanding of education, oppression, and liberation? A fuller, richer, more complicated rendering begins to emerge. This edited volume draws us away from the narrow gaze of white interlocutors and exposes the fragility of scholarship saturated with whiteness and Eurocentricity. Reauthoring Savage Inequalities is what research becomes when you don't merely study the community but serves its people. When you are them and they are you. This kind of kinship leads us to grander validity and deeper answers—not merely in our findings related to urban education but in our work as human beings." — Vajra M. Watson, author of Transformative Schooling: Towards Racial Equity in Education
Foreword
William T. Trent
Introduction
Lori D. Patton, Ishwanzya D. Rivers, Raquel L. Farmer-Hinton, and Joi D. Lewis
Part 1. Resilience, Wholeness, and Thriving in Urban Schools (Self)
1. Peering Back in a Press Forward: Critiques of Educational Equality that Protect White Innocence
Chayla Haynes
2. Displaced Equalities: Exploring the Impact of Place on Urban Students
Jada Renee Koushik
3. Persisting through Life as a Result of My Urban Education: The Making of a Black Male Professor
Omari Jackson
Guest Commentary and Reflection: We Know Best What Tools and Resources Will Sustain Us
Dorinda J. Carter Andrews
Part 2. The Urban Community as Educator (Community)
4. Chicago's Other Children
Mirelsie Velazquez
5. Far from Savage: (Re)Turning to My Village and Revealing the "Two Worlds of Washington"
Steve D. Mobley Jr.
6. A Third-World City: An Autoethnography on Growing Up in Detroit, Michigan, and Becoming a Teacher
Amber C. Bryant
Guest Commentary and Reflection: The Complexity and Nuances of Origin Stories
Marvin Lynn
Part 3. Centering Students in Teaching and Learning (Students)
7. "People Don't Really Know Camden High": Student Perspectives on their Negatively Viewed High School
Keith Benson with help from Deliyah Whetstone, Tina Q. Baker, Merv Ragsdale, T'emon'et Elliot, Joel Tarte, Dwyane Cooke, Naima Battie, Ajianna Bailey, Joselyn Chevere, Rasheed Pollard, Ijshanna Martin, and Brene' Troutman
8. No Excuses: Believing and Achieving
Jane Bean-Folkes, Susan Browne, and Chanelle Rose
9. Avenues to Organic Engagement: One Counselor-Educator's Experiences Working with Community Agencies to Promote Educational Success in an Urban Community
Ahmad R. Washington
Guest Commentary and Reflection: There's More to the Story: Counter-Narrating Urban Failure and Success
Noelle W. Arnold
Part 4. Reflections on Educator and Institutional Influences (Educators)
10. Fictive Kin as Driving Forces for Academic Success in Detroit: Black Women's Narratives on Successfully Navigating through College
Diane Fuselier-Thompson, Ezella McPherson, and Carly Braxton
11. "Old School" Urban Education: How Friends, Families, Communities, and Teachers Support Success in Early Childhood
Theresa J. Canada
12. "I Have Seen the Mountaintop": Intersectionality and the Auto-ethnography of a Mediocre Student at a Gifted School
Heather Moore Roberson
13. Dispelling the Myth of Despair and Hopelessness: How Ethical Leadership Creates a Counter-Narrative to Kozol's Leadership Caricature
Lonnie R. Morris Jr. and Maceo A. Cooper-Jenkins
Guest Commentary and Reflection: Same Place, Different Race
H. Rich Milner IV
Part 5. Renarrativizing "Home" (Place)
14. And Still We Made It: Counter-Narratives of Success, Educational Attainment, and Opportunity in Atlanta
Brittany M. Williams and Lyntoria Newton
15. In Search of Oz: Culture, Education, and Counter-Narratives of Inequity in Southern Colored Schools
Toby S. Jenkins
16. Bringing the Love Back Home: An Ode to the Wiz and Growing Up in East St. Louis
Jodi L. Jordan, Deborah J. Patton, and Lori D. Patton
Guest Commentary and Reflection: Emerald City, Oz, and Savage Inequalities in Education: Centering the Ruby Slippers
Theodorea Berry
Part 6. Sunday Dinners with Love
17. The Meaning of Sunday Dinners
Raquel L. Farmer-Hinton
18. East St Louis: Where Our Black Lives Always Mattered
Dallas Jewell Watson and Joi D. Lewis
19. We Were Always a Community: Cooking, Eating, and Living in the John DeShields Housing Project
Ishwanzya D. Rivers
Guest Commentary and Reflection: "You Can't Keep Telling Us What We Already Know": A Fugitive End to Educational Narratives of Tragedy
David Stovall
Afterword
Tara J. Yosso
Contributors
Index