Lisa Delpit’s Multiplication Is for White People: Raising
Expectations for Other People’s Children argues that “low
performance begins with American racism,” writes Mark Bauerlein
in Ed Next. Black males perform poorly because “our young men
have internalized all of the negative stereotypes.” Sometimes
black students are invisible, unnoticed, and disrespected, and
sometimes they are “hypervisible,” their normal youth behaviors
magnified into pathologies. They end up estranged from school
culture (“disidentification”), mistrusting their own capacities
and fulfilling belittling expectations. . . . The classroom is a
white, middle-class space often hostile to African American
norms. It downplays collaboration, she notes, even though these
students need it to “feel more secure and less vulnerable.” It
ignores past contributions to learning and science by African
Americans. It neglects spirituality, whereas “traditional
African education” incorporates “education for the spirit” into
everyday lessons. The demoraliz