Many things stood out to me while reading The Dream Keepers, but one of the biggest was the discrepancies between disciplining African American students vs. other students. It seems strange to me that teachers would discriminate based on the color of their skin in schools like that (expecting students to not meet standards because of their ethnic background), but you definitely see it in schools even today. The teachers in my school sometimes make comments about the Hispanic students and their behavior in terms of the cultural differences between the white students and the Hispanic students (the school I'm teaching in is 52 percent Hispanic), but from what I've noticed, the majority of the serious behavior issues in this school are from the Caucasian students.
Either way, I think that these teachers do not even realize they are holding these different cultural groups to different standards, and this topic was something I had not thought of until I was sitting down and reading this text. What also sort of appalled me was the distinction one person made between "White backs," or students from 'good homes', and "black blacks," or students from 'bad homes'. I think if someone is raised in a bad home they're more likely to be bad, regardless of race, and that distinction was assinine because they were only using one race to make that distinction. It does not really have anything to do with race at all, from what I've seen. Students from bad homes have more issues, regardless of race. Perhaps what they're seeing is actually students in that particular district or school who are of a particular race happen to fall into a specific socioeconomic status that lends them to a "bad home," rather than it being an issue of culture or ethnicity?
Sometimes you hear people say things and you realize that if they were just more well informed they wouldn't say that. Other times you hear people say things like "white blacks and black blacks" and you think to yourself: Is this really the 21st century? Of course, it is the 21st century yet there are still people with those kinds of views out there. It seems odd that people still think skin pigment has something to do with how well someone will do in school or how good their home is.
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