The Silenced Dialogue: Connections with other Past Readings

Reading the Silenced Dialogue by Lisa Delpit was definitely a challenge. It was hard to read and hard to understand at same time. My brain was like this...

Yet, after reading it several times, or going back to certain paragraphs, or lines, to help me understand it, I started to connect the reading to other past articles we have read in class. Once I started understanding it, it all made sense. Ideas kept coming to my mind relating this reading not only to past articles but also to trends that I see around schools I have visited. For instance, how the majority of teachers are white in places where the majority of students are black or non-white. Also I started to think about the Impact that having black teachers might have for black students. Those ideas are some points I would like to bring to the class discussion, because this article really made me think about that, how black students from all ages don’t have many black role model teachers to look up to, and I wonder why there aren’t many black teachers, and if there were. I wonder the impact it might have. 

 

The Link below expresses that idea of how teacher diversity does matter.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2011/11/09/10657/teacher-diversity-matters/

As I mentioned, what really helped me understand The Silenced Dialogue was relating it to the past readings we have done in class, especially White Privilege by Peggy McIntosh and Privilege, Power, and Difference by Allan Johnson. The article started off by stating how white teachers “listen but don’t hear”. They don’t hear and simply don’t want to hear what black educators have to say. They simply nod and move on, they think that they know to educate all kinds of students, forgetting that perhaps black teachers have more to say because they can relate to their black students. White teachers can try to understand, but they don’t have that first- hand experience, therefore Instead of blocking black educators, they should appreciate their insight and try to use their advice to be more helpful to black students.  In Privilege, Power, and Difference by Allan Johnson, he mentioned that whites “don’t want to look at what the words point to, [that simply] people don’t want to look because they don’t want to know what it has to do with them and how doing something about it might change not only the world, but themselves”.  This idea helped understand perhaps why white educators don’t want to hear. Why they refuse to admit that they don’t know everything and that advice from their black colleagues is needed, and why they simply nod and don’t care.

Therefore after being ignored so many times black teachers stop communicating, resulting in the lack of a mutual agreement between teachers to help their students, not just having the “privileged group” make the decision for all. This reminded me of the “obliviousness [that exists] about white advantage that serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it” as it was mentioned in White Privilege. Perhaps white educators have the best intentions, but they have to stop and realize that change is needed, that we can’t just have them make the decisions alone without considering the opinions of black teachers. That is why “several black teachers cannot help but conclude that many of the “progressive” educational strategies imposed by liberals upon black and poor children could only be based on a desire to ensure that the liberals’ children get sole access to the dwindling pool of American jobs”. We can’t and educators certainly can’t let things be the same, and let the privileged continue to be so, and the unprivileged to lack the support and help they need.

The picture below shows the percentage of teachers in United States by race/ethnicity and sex. IT shoes the lack of black and non-white teachers in he education system.

Number and percentage distribution of full- and part-time public school teachers, by race/ethnicity and sex: 2007–08
Sex	Total
		White	Black	Hispanic	Asian	Pacific Islander	American Indian/Alaska Native	Two or more races
Number (in thousands)
Total	3,405	2,829	239	240	42	6	17	31
Male	821	685	56	58	9	1	4	8
Female	2,584	2,145	183	182	33	5	13	24
Percentage distribution
Total	100.0	83.1	7.0	7.0	1.2	0.2	0.5	0.9
Male	100.0	83.4	6.9	7.1	1.1	0.2	0.5	0.9
Female	100.0	83.0	7.1	7.0	1.3	0.2	0.5	0.9

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Schools and Staffing Survey, "Teacher Data Files,” 2007–08, unpublished tabulations.