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Article: LONGING TO LOSE THE SKEPTICISM: RACE RELATIONS AND EDUCATIONAL EQUITY IN THE OBAMA ERA
- Article from:
- Michigan Quarterly Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright University of Michigan Summer 2009. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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When I was a child, African American teachers in my de facto segregated schools in the Deep South encouraged students to believe that they could become anything that they wanted. "Work hard and just believe that you can do it," they would say to motivate us to do well academically. Education was the rational means to gaining access to professions beyond those of barber, teacher, preacher, and undertaker - the main routes to the middle class in the black community for my parents' generation. I took this edict seriously and worked hard, sometimes the only African American in a cohort in the elite Ivy League institutions that I navigated in the late 1980s and 1990s. Ironically, the lessons ...