Systemic Racism

If a teacher or professor doesn’t see a student’s opinion or work because he/she is basing the student’s performance on his/her race and culture, then that student has a narrow chance of succeeding in the classroom. Systemic racism describes what happens when institutions discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly, against certain groups of people to limit their rights. Systemic racism in America exists and all students are not treated equally when everyone needs to have the same opportunities to excel.
Accordingly, educational resources in the United States follow the lines of race and social class where “students of color” have less access to demanding curriculum, hence students find inequity. Educational resources are not divvied up
While Benjamin Blaisdell is a White teacher, he shares his practices to help teachers realize that systemic racism does exist in education. According to Blaisdell (2005), teachers who claim to be colorblind “enact practice that seems to betray this belief. When they claim not to be colorblind—i.e., that they see color and race—and acknowledge that racial background does make a difference in somebody’s life and educational chances, colorblindness can still affect their teaching practice.” He also expresses how CRT (Critical Race Theory) has helped him address the issue of race in teachers’ teaching practices and thinking with predominantly white teachers while CRT scholars say that “racism is the underlying cause of inequities in law, employment, health care, housing, and education” (Young, 2011, p. 1434, para. 4). Using his experiences and interviews he has conducted amongst other teachers has also helped him identify where the problem lies— individual concepts of what racism is. Most teachers Blaisdell knows are oblivious to the fact that they treat students differently because they do not understand the “racial quality of their own teaching” (Blaisdell, 2005), therefore this affects the student’s performance because they are constantly trying to overcome hurdles in their personal lives as well as hurdles at
Subjects and ideologies about race and immigration in the United States portrayed in narratives that talk down, consequently antagonizing them. Underrepresented students need to understand that their experiences in the classroom are “essential in order to better serve their educational needs” (Rojas-Sosa, 2016). In some classroom settings, some instructors justify their actions, but the freedom of speech amendment and censorship that doesn’t allow open discussions about racism. A student we shall call E is from Mexico plus Spanish is her first language. “When describing her experience of students laughing at her because she has a difficult time speaking English in the classroom” (p. 79), it hasn’t affected her “long term,” yet she felt ashamed at the time. It wasn’t because of the students’ attitudes towards her but because she felt as if she hadn’t completed the assignment correctly. Furthermore, the teacher did not stop the students from laughing at her, which made her feel worse. Another student, M, is from the Dominican Republic and recognizes that occasionally there is tension in the classroom when other students have expressed offensive opinions because they don’t understand the closeness she feels with the relevant cultural background material discussed, and they don’t understand why she might feel offended by their opinions