Black and Brown Education in America

Integration in Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities

Author: Samina Hadi-Tabassum and Persis Driver Series: Culture, Humanity, and Urban Life

This book explores issues of power, identity, and politics and describes a new racial frontier for potential conflict and collaboration between two minoritized groups.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

This book explores issues of power, identity, and politics and describes a new racial frontier for potential conflict and collaboration between two minoritized groups.

Description

Black and Brown Education in America: Integration in Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities is a decade long ethnographic study of Maywood, Illinois, and the impact of its recent demographic shift from a historically Black middle-class suburb outside of Chicago with roots in the Black Panther Party to, now, a community with a growing Latinx population. It explores the intersection of race, culture, and language—and the ensuing Black-Brown identity politics—as well as the role of community organizations such as interracial faith-based churches and embattled school boards. Against a backdrop of racial tensions and heightened violence, the book also addresses transformative, liminal spaces where coalition building and collaboration bring the Black and Latinx communities together around common causes and unified goals.

Critic Reviews

Black and Brown Education in America is a groundbreaking work detailing the demographic shift that is transforming the United States through the lens of two inner-ring suburbs, Maywood and Melrose Park, Illinois, their schools, and neighborhoods. This work explores the relationship between long oppressed and exploited Black and Latinx minoritized communities and highlights the struggle of both groups to interact with each other and create better, more equitable lives—as well as the forces that oppose them. It is a must read for those who hope to understand what is going on in our urban areas today.

-- Dominic A. Pacyga, University of Illinois at Chicago

Constructed from a careful ethnography about intersections of identity, race, language, place, and space, this book shows us how communities come together through deeply complex historical and structural shifts. Conceptually rich, this book chronicles nuanced accounts of what brings Black and Latinx communities together. Black and Brown Education in America: Integration in Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities sheds light on what it means to live and learn in urban and suburban sociopolitical contexts. During a time when politics divide and harm, this book demonstrates what is necessary for people to work together for collective good.

-- H. Richard Milner IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Education, Vanderbilt University

Positioning belonging and identity as deeply entwined, the authors highlight who is ascribed belonging, how belonging is to be performed, and the tension between wanting to belong and hiding parts of one’s identity....This book shows why it is so important to recognize that the liberation of Black and Latinx communities is inherently interconnected; as such, the only way toward freedom, justice, and liberation is by working together.

-- Mariana Souto-Manning PhD, president, Erikson Institute