The Entanglement of Literacy and Racial Justice – Prendergast

During the Brown vs. Board era the phrases “equal protection” and “importance of education” were redefined. However, as an attempt to make things equal and fair for everyone within the public education system, the conclusion was nowhere near fair. Catherine Prendergast in the article title, “The Economy of Literacy: How the Supreme court Stalled the Civil Rights Movement, argues that during the Brown vs. Board Era, literacy became white property, part of the white identity and a way to continue to devalue African Americans/Latinos in education. She used two major legal cases to depict this argument. The first one introduced was Washington vs. Davis (1976) where there was a mandated police force entrance written exam. The exam was found to be intentionally racially discriminatory and the results showed that African Americans were failing at twice the rate that whites were passing. The second case was Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke in 1977. A student named Alan Bakke got rejected from the University of California Davis medical college twice. The student felt as if he was getting discriminated against for being a white man. Prendergast aligned these two cases to demonstrate both perspectives of the “literacy crisis.” Similar to Prendergast the article “Resistance and Accommodation in Inner-City Schools” by Louis Miron and Mickey Lauria shows how kids tend to struggle when they experience an atmosphere with a lack of caring. The articles focuses on the African American student body of two inner city high schools, they briefly brought up that not only African Americans are shown to struggle on achievement tests, Latino students are as well. The article began by talking about minorities in a public-school setting and mentioned how they, “vigorously wish to compete for academic excellence…… [but are] denied the opportunity” (Miron and Lauria 1998). Prendergast mentions in the introduction and the chapter that literacy is used as a marker to continue to separate students within schools. This contributes to the overall achievement gap and other learning gaps that deeply impact the student. Not only can the reader see from Prendergast that literacy has continued to develop as a way to disrupt racial justice but as a way to devalue minorities in comparison to whites.