Carter's Keepin' It Real

"...children can't achieve unless we... eradicate the slander that a black youth with a book is acting white." Obama, Democratice National Convention 2004

Carter resonated with the other authors we've read in class, but I saw a particular connection to Finn.  Carter makes the point that "educators must recognize the values of different students' cultural repertoires and the impressions that students get from the appearance racialized form of tracking."  Finn spoke of the different types of education that students receive: domesticating education and empowering education.   Carter's examination of the contrast between upper level academic classes encourageing  students to be assertiveand critical  and the low-track classes encouraging conformity, passivity, and defiance mirrors Finn's ditinction.  Rayisha explains “you got to have a teacher that inspires you, that lifts your spirit up, makes you want to get up and go to school” (71).  Maybe she is talking about a teacher who provides students with 'literacy with an attitude.'  Finn talked about Paulo Freire who started an adult literacy program for the illiterate poor in Brazil.  He believed all literacy programs would fail as long as the students saw literacy as part of an outside culture.  He discovered his students equated learning to read and write as part of the identity of an alien culture.  They saw very little possibility for change in their lives, and "if they thought about it" they would see "any effort they put into adopting the culture of the rich would be vain since they would not be accepted among the rich [...and] the only result would be that they would become aleinated from their own people" (Finn 156).  These ideas are reflected in many of the noncompliant believers' explanations.    Freire decide the only way to be successful would be to teach his students that culture is made and thus it can be changed, and show them the literte are powerful  and they were not.  The cultural mainstreamers and cultural straddlers seemed to understand this.


 Carter tells us acknowledging  and affirming the multiple capitals that come through our school's doors each day can increase the students’of the nondominant culture attachment to the school.  This attachment piece is really important. “For many African American students, nondominant, or more specifically ‘black’ culture capital matters because it signifies in-group allegiance and preserves a sense of belonging” (41).   Students develop boundaries for these groups and guard them to preserve their distinctiveness.    “How race links to culture allows the holders of capital to limit access to outsiders” (56), and this is true of social groups as well.  I thought of Molly Brown in the movie Titanic.  Molly and her ‘new money’ tried desperately to fit in, but her confusion over which fork was the salad fork distinguished her as someone who was “acting rich” and thus she was snubbed by those who were "authentically" upper class.  Season 4 of The Wire (an amazing show about the many angles of the Baltimore drug scene) examines the schools.  This season connects to so many of the topics we have discussed in class, but after reading about Carter’s idea of cultural boundaries  I thought of a specific episode where an educator took four of the most at risk students in the school to a fine dining restaurant as a reward for academic achievement.  The students were excited about this adventure, but it proved to be an uncomfortable experience for all of them.  They did not possess the culture capital and know “the rules” of fine dining.