On My Bookshelf
Mica Pollock (photo by Rose Lincoln, Harvard News Office)
Professor Mica Pollock studies how youth and adults struggle with questions about racialized inequality and diversity as a routine part of their lives. She is the author of Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School, winner of the 2005 AERA Outstanding Book Award. She is also editing the forthcoming Everyday Antiracism: Concrete Ways to Successfully Navigate the Relevance of Race in School (The New Press).
My work threads together a number of issues that might seem unrelated, and my office bookshelf is stuffed with books and papers related to several topics: race theory and race studies, youth studies, ethnography and fieldwork, talk and language, and global youth issues and American civil rights law. All of these topics tie together in my overall research agenda, which is analyzing everyday disputes over race in communities and schools.
As an anthropologist of education, I build theory on deep analysis of the race struggles of actual life in communities and schools. So, I need books that help me understand everyday arguments over how to think and talk about racial categories and racial disparities, how to defi ne and achieve racially equal educational opportunities and outcomes, how to understand the production of racial inequality, and how to intervene in racialized inequality systems. These readings help inform my fieldwork on these issues.
I've suggested odd pairings of books that relate to the odd pairings of scholarship I need to understand everyday race dilemmas and disputes in different arenas.
The Life of the Law: Anthropological Projects
BY LAURA NADER (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2002)
Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement
EDITED BY KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW, NEIL GOTANDA, GARY PELLER, AND KENDALL
THOMAS (NEW PRESS, 1996)
Nader is a legal anthropologist who has long been interested in ordinary struggles over legal processes. The Life of the Law discusses her career studying various aspects of law in the United States; it also is a nice guide for how issues of law fit into the discipline of anthropology. Nader shows how studying one overarching issue--disputes--throughout one's career can offer valid analytic benefits.
Meanwhile, the Crenshaw et. al. book is a key anthology of works on Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the United States. CRT is a subset of critical legal studies in which scholars of color particularly have analyzed core struggles over race in U.S. law.
I'm reading both of these works to support a book I'm writing on everyday American disputes over defining, discussing, and addressing racial "discrimination" in U.S. education today. The book is based on work I did after graduate school in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. In this book, Everyday Justice: Disputing Racial Discrimination in the New Civil Rights Era (forthcoming, Princeton University Press), I am looking at how parents, educators, advocates, and members of government argue over a core question of educational fairness in the current moment: which harms to students of color will we tolerate?
Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia.
EDITED BY LONNIE SHERROD, CONSTANCE FLANAGAN, AND RON KASSIMIR (GREENWOOD
PUBLISHING GROUP, 2006)
Coming of Age in Samoa
BY MARGARET MEAD (HARPERPERENNIAL MODERN CLASSICS, 2001)
The youth activism encyclopedia is a cutting-edge exploration of activism among youth, both domestically and worldwide. I have a short piece in it, but I'm trying to read the rest of it so I can get a sense of what constitutes youth activism today--and what youths' everyday struggles to solve social problems look like.
The second book is not about activism at all, but rather raises ideas for me about theorizing youth: it's a classic anthropological work from the 1960s in which Margaret Mead used her fieldwork on adolescence in Samoa to make core claims about American society's problems in socializing its youth population. Mead's core point, which has been both lauded and critiqued, was that youth in Samoa early in the 20th century had few social complexities to wrestle with, in comparison to American youth.
I'm reading both a cutting-edge and a classic treatment of youth because I'm developing a research project entitled "Global Youth/Global Justice" in which I am examining youth as challengers and negotiators of racialized systems of inequality and diff erence. This project examines youth activists who are debating how best to analyze and combat social problems across racialized and national boundaries; it examines young problem-solvers trying to understand and address complex systems of inequality. Today, as the activism anthology makes clear, youth worldwide are wrestling with analyzing and solving a host of fundamental social problems.
Finally, I'm reading a bit of fiction in my spare time, after my daughter goes to bed and I've fi nished my academic "homework" for the evening. I'm trying to get through Moo, by Jane Smiley, which looks at the interpersonal and political controversies embroiling a Midwestern university campus in the 1980s. Smiley seems much more Iowan than I have ever felt, despite the fact that I lived there for much of my childhood. The book is also a good foil for understanding my own faculty experience at Harvard!
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
