The Doormat Effect: Education & Institutionalized Racism

No one should be treated differently but addressing race and inequitable education is toxic; but in Minnesota, spending more than $600 million a year on closing the achievement gap with ZERO successes in any district is considered a win?  

By Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT - Journal of A Black Teacher©  2022 All Rights Reserved (Editorial Opinion - Not Written for the Guilty or Weak Minded)

Besides everything else, W.E.B. Du Bois must have also been a fortune teller back in the day. 

In all of his authored books, Du Bois sternly warns Black folks in the United States about our Black and Brown children being used as “doormats to be spit and tramped upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers.” Today, the proverbial ‘doormats’ and ‘spit’ come in the form of the generational minimal proficiencies for Black and Brown children born in the United States, and the phenomenon has spread quickly to our new kids - some Somali, Latin, and Asian children whose families exited a bad situation in their home countries only to be sorted and categorized right into the current matrix of the Black American-born school students. First of all, I would like to make it clear - I am not a victim, I am a Black teacher that is very interested in the politics of how we switched ‘education’ with schooling? 

Second of all, despite all of your historical assumptions about Black men, I am not angry but I try to be a little intellectual, not the stuffy type but more like the ones that see the world with a sense of intrigue -  searching for the parties responsible for the continued generational failure of our Black and Brown scholars in the 6-12 systems of public education. From my experience, some school systems have fallen into being living contradictions; they say one thing but do another. If the job of public schooling is to create world-class/life-long learners, a firm message should be sent to parents, students, teachers, and the broader community about steps to correct the current system but it's dependent on how deep those inside the construct want to go outside of their own personal comfort zones and culture. In some cases (data-facing), education is now more politically correct theater with asinine union initiatives of passion for COVID-19 versus the education of our best and brightest. For years in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul), we have watched generations of low-income secondary students pass through schools without the proper preparation for excellence. The data will show high suspension rates, low MCA testing scores with proficiency rates so low in some subjects that MDE doesn’t bother to measure. Let’s not forget about the increase in special education recommendations with facilitators not in the least matching the culture, content, or collective of this disproportionately overrepresented group of kids that just need a good teacher, not an IEP or a SPED designation - but hey, I’m not knocking SPED, with the trauma our kids have to deal with and some never reaching self-actualization, it’s a wonder the ‘school’ piece hasn’t imploded. 

Yes, the burden weighs heavily on family structures. We know that many of the students come from single-parent homes; a few are unsheltered and cannot focus and continue to act out in school presenting challenges for administrators; where do you send suspended unsheltered students?  Local politicians are more likely to fund a nonprofit for another failed mentoring program that has repeated they cannot fix anything with our children but the checks are great! Why can’t we attend to the guiding structure of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? 

I am writing out of frustration from all the inadequate systems in our children’s public school systems across the United States and the systems in place that would never put a teacher-in-training in a black teacher's classroom in an urban school district; this is real. The historical assumptions vis-a-vis Jim Crow have evolved past and are stronger than in 1954. 

The system that bought us the catastrophic failure for black educators is today alive and thriving inside your local urban, inner-city, majority non-white high schools. Brown versus the Board of Education remains the catalyst of historical assumptions and the evolution of rising gaps in education for all children. If you remember, over 38,000 black teachers in the South and border states lost their jobs after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 - but that didn’t matter even though some black teachers in Topeka were content providing the city’s black children with a separate, but enriching educational experience. W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent black leader and founder of the NAACP, believed blacks were better off maintaining their own distinct communities. Du Bois eventually distanced himself from the NAACP, as his views shifted away from the Association’s stance of “unmitigated opposition to segregation.” Du Bois concluded that opposition to segregation in fact “undermine[d], not enhance[d], black pride.” Du Bois cited the benefits of blacks attending their own schools and churches, living in their own neighborhoods, and “associat[ing] with black friends.” Du Bois saw segregated schools as a way to protect young black children and give them a chance to attend a school where they were safe, welcome, and “trained by teachers of their own race, who know what it means to be black in the year of the salvation of 1935.” Du Bois believed black teachers understood what it meant to be black and were better equipped to connect and empathize with their black pupils. According to Du Bois, it was either that or using black children as “doormats to be spit and tramped upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers.”

While there are only very few discussions about how best to improve schooling for Black and Brown students, same-race student and teacher classrooms and cultural competency are the overarching themes in arguments about why increasing the number of minority teachers will solve the educational problems of minority students. I’m not saying that only black teachers should teach black children but we are at a point in history when if we don’t weed out low expectations by non-black teachers the whole system will implode - of course disproportionality keeping children of color at a “doormat” level - the current data is clear on this Doormat Effect.

The words “diversify the teaching ranks” as it pertains to the educating, licensing, and hiring of black male teachers has created a catastrophic downward spiral for children of color in public schools. If black school children in the K-12 system do not see a black real model, as in a black teacher, it duplicates the social and economic rhetoric that black men are unemployable, in jail, absentee fathers, and do not care about education. In my opinion, the lack of black male teachers is partly responsible for the wide gap in education between black and non-black students.

The problem I am reflecting on is growing out of the gender, race, and color inequities in the teaching corps as I see it in Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) and the Master of Arts in Education (M. A. Ed.) program classrooms in Minnesota. This also reflects on the lack of male teachers of color, not only in public school systems but also at the university level. Some local universities’ Schools of Education do not have any Black American, or African heritage male professors or instructors. This translates to a gap in cultures when the teacher from one culture confronts many cultures at once. In Minnesota, we have seen on-campus, higher education in-classroom failures firsthand. Today’s current systems were described in detail over 30-years ago with author Noam Chomsky wrote: “The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”

We know that Minnesota universities continue to produce proportionally fewer teachers of color than K-12 student demographics would predict. At this point, there are many solutions that would address the issue of cultural competence in classroom instruction at the university levels, but who will listen? Addressing the segregation of classroom instruction is first an economic justice concern, then a social justice or equity concern that pays zero. The pushback, especially in Minnesota can put a person in a very difficult position. My goal in this reflection is to let you know that I am out here; I see what’s happening and I will not remain silent.

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Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT is an educator and senior editorial columnist and cohost for Our Black News - an ad-free online weekly multimedia program that broadcasts out of the Twin Cities (MN). To contact, please email him at dwradon@gmail.com.