The Multiracial View from the White House
Multiracial President Obama recently announced a White House
Initiative on Educational Excellence—for African American students. These
efforts are nothing new; there are similar White House Education Initiatives for
Hispanics, American Indian and Alaska
natives, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. How great for those groups!
Who is missing? White students, but everyone thinks all
white people are rich and getting wonderful educations at pricy private schools
and …let’s look again…oh yes….multiracial students, of course.
We still have overcrowded schools, not enough funding, the
drop-out problem, less-than-great test scores, and on and on. The President
said that the goal is to produce “a more effective continuum” of programs for
African-American students. I’m not even sure what he means by that. I bet Ben Jealous,
CEO of the NAACP does. He commented, “If fully implemented, we are convinced
the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans will
make sure school discipline is fair, special education assignments are based on
needs, not race, and all of our nation’s most motivated students have fair
access to advance placement classes.”
Oh. This is about making sure, according to the NAACP that
black students get treated fairly, but based on needs, not race. I’m not at all
sure how that works for black students, if it’s not based on race, unless this
is just to throw money at a group problem. But just how does that work for a
multiracial student?
Enter the US Department of Education, which says every
school district in America
has been told to allow students in K-12 to check two or more races. It claims to advise each school district to separately tabulate the numbers of multiracial (or check two or
more in their language) students. It also looks to us at Project RACE
that they are, indeed, reassigning those numbers back into a single minority category. By the way, the African
American Initiative will be housed in the U.S. Department of Education.
