This series on ethnicity and 2e takes a closer look at how twice exceptionality intersects with ethnic stereotypes, often adding another layer of “difference” to students. Also see: “Taming the ‘Tiger Mom’ Stereotype.”
It’s hard enough to be gifted with a learning challenge and be recognized by educators as twice-exceptional. When a layer of racism is added to it, it becomes nearly impossible.
“Unfortunately,” says Dr. Donna Ford of Vanderbilt University, author of several books on diversity and ethnicity, “most teachers are white and female and used to looking at what they perceive to be wrong with black students, particularly black males. They look for deficits and make referrals to special education, but not gifted education.”
African-American students are
disproportionately enrolled in special ed classes. Only a small percentage get to go to gifted classes. The low percentage of cases of identified twice-exceptionality among these students is, according to Ford, “problematic,” and points to the stark difference between equality in access to education and equity in education.
A teacher in a
recent study by Renae D. Mayes of Ball State University reports that people have a vision of “what giftedness should look like.” It doesn’t look black.
“What’s called soft racism is often implicit bias,” Ford says. “It’s really hard racism and it’s so detrimental and blinding in terms of teacher expectations of black students. It does a lot of damage.”
Generally, in education, there is a widening achievement gap between black and white students. According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 39 percent of whites were considered proficient at eighth grade mathematics versus nine percent of blacks. There are many factors for this, including — not incidentally — the depressing fact that a large number of African Americans grow up in
poverty or in
emotional, financial, and physical insecurity.
Among the most dangerous causes for this discrepancy is what Donna calls “the expectation gap.” Whites simply
expect more from their schools than do blacks. “White families know how to demand for the rights of their children,” Ford says. “They know which teacher to call. They have connections, which is the heart of white privilege. That privilege is not the same for any other population, whether by race or economics.
“African Americans, regardless of income, worry more about the repercussions of speaking up and advocating for their children. Parents are afraid to complain because they don’t know what the school will do to their child. White families know how to litigate through the system. They know how to self-advocate, they know they can—and they know they will—be heard. Black families do not. That has been our experience, to be not listened to, to feel that we don’t even have the right to be heard.”
She offers her own story. When her gifted son was in the fifth grade, she and her then husband, the dean of education at a prominent university, went to a parent-teacher conference. The school wanted to put him in a special ed class. “I was like, ‘Oh hell no, you aren’t.’ We shut that down.”
Ford and her husband were able to fight the school system partly because both were acclaimed experts in the education field. But being a full professor with an endowed chair in a high-ranking institution wasn’t enough to erase any doubts Ford might have had about advocating for her child. “I still worried about how my speaking up would impact my son if I went to complain at his elementary school,” she says.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”What’s called soft racism is often implicit bias. It’s really hard racism and it’s so detrimental and blinding in terms of teacher expectations of black students. It does a lot of damage.”[/perfectpullquote]
Most families, black or white, don’t come with that kind of pedigree. Still, the school tried to put her son in a learning-disabled class again in the eighth grade, with the same reaction. Ford explains that her son is twice-exceptional, but the school focused only on his deficits, not his gifts.
The family later moved to a predominantly white school district in Ohio when Ford’s son was in 12th grade. Ford says she felt like she had to tell her son, “Khyle, you got to wear some khaki pants, matching shoes and shirt. If people talk to you, you use mainstream English.”
Then came time for Ford to formally enroll her son in the school.
“I went to the school office with him to enroll him” Ford says, “and the secretary said, ‘Well, where are his special-ed papers?’ Now, I’m going to cuss and you can go ahead and print it, I said, ‘What the f— are you talking about?’ I had to remind myself to be college professor Dr. Ford, not Cleveland Donna Ford. If I had not been empowered, he would never had been seen as twice-exceptional, not a young black man. This can happen to any child, but black children are misdiagnosed in unrepresentative numbers. A lot of that has to do with cultural differences.”
The problem is that in the same way “different” students are usually labeled by their deficits, instead of their strengths, often times black students are misdiagnosed with hyperactivity or other learning challenges because educators are not sensitive to the African-American cultural context. “Blacks tend to be more vervistic,” Ford says, “more responsive to culturally relevant pedagogy.”
Ford asserts that the black community tends to be less individualistic and more communal, with black students responding better when working with people.
“The black cultural strengths include an oral tradition, vervisticism, movement, and collaboration. These aspects are misunderstood by white teachers, who tend to see them as something wrong, rather than part of what’s right. So black kids often don’t get the twice-exceptional label. They get the special-ed label.”
Ever since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, there have been concentrated efforts to make education not separate, but equal. It was meant to reverse the punitive effects of a deeply segregated country and, perhaps lessen what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “double consciousness” of blacks having to be constantly aware of how they are perceived by white people. However, equality alone was not the problem. A lack of equity is. Equity takes into account differences, whether of black and white culture or learning styles. Equity doesn’t artificially try to make all people the same. Instead, it gives all different types of people the same access to opportunities. It honors uniqueness.
“Most educators don’t understand the difference between equal and equitable,” Ford says. “Equal means two people are running a race. But it may not be equitable if one of those runners has fancy sneakers and the other is barefoot.”
This is where the fight against racial discrimination parallels the fight for learning differences. “Equality means students may have different needs, but we’re gonna teach them in the same damn way,” says Ford. “Whereas equity means that all students have different needs and so they have to learn differently.”
Just as our society is finally learning that separate cannot be equal, the social, economic, and cognitive disparities in our educational system will persist until we learn that equality is not the same as equity.
