Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma

Abstract

commitments to racial inclusion but settled for the watered-down approaches to diversity they believed to be the only politically feasible pathways to any form of inclusion. Having better insight on these motives and understandings would be helpful. Without them, one is left to believe that most decision makers were either duplicitous or incredibly na€ ıve in their constructions of diversity. Only one of these conditions, however, forecloses hope. These questions, however, do not undermine the absolute excellence of the findings and analysis in The Enigma of Diversity. In a macro sense, Berrey has perhaps produced a quintessential exploration of the counterintuitive effects that may result when fluid ideological meanings combine with brittle organizational practice. More narrowly, her insightful observations across time, location, and context have uncovered how malleable, "feel good" definitions of diversity become the apparatus for frustrating opportunities for real racial progress. Once again, we are not saved.

Fostering Movements or Silencing Voices: Learning from Egypt and South Africa, Leading Against Racism

“…These locally situated school leaders were ultimately silenced by those who are rewarded by outside Western interests, which further reinforces educational reform efforts that undermine a localized curriculum and inhibit principal capacity to implement culturally responsive approaches. Placing the critical multicultural framework from which these leaders approach anti-racist leadership in conversation with Derrick Bell's (1980) concept of interest convergence, we position the adoption of Western-based reforms as limiting possibilities for locally-derived, community-centric, anti-racist, classconscious educational change for the specific purpose of benefiting the larger White Western world. Synthesizing Bell's (1980) monumental work, Brophy (2011) defines interest convergence as the notion "that White people will support racial justice only to the extent that there is something in it for them.…”

“They can’t handle the race agenda”: stakeholders’ reflections on race and education policy, 1993–2013

“…What Hayles points to here is the dynamic that critical race theorists describe as 'interest convergence' (Bell, 1980). Based on analysis of US civil rights legislation, interest convergence suggests that apparently progressive moves in race equality are most likely be secured where they secure the interests of white elites as well as accommodating the demands of black communities.…”

Special Issue Race Ethnicity and Education: Initial teacher education: developments, dilemmas and challenges

“…The goal of CRT in education is to excavate how race operates in society and in education, at both the structural and local, everyday levels. This is accomplished through various strategies that include (1) counter-storytelling, an approach that calls attention to the voices of marginalized people of color by listening to how their own experiences, and the knowledge that emerges from them, illuminate and disrupt dominant narratives about race, racism and racial progress in society and schools (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001); (2) recognizing Whiteness as a form of property that offers to White persons and their interests various rights and privileges that include the right to disposition, the right to use and to enjoy, and the right to exclude (Buras, 2011;Harris, 1993;Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995;Vaught & Castagno, 2008); and (3) the nature, paradox and limitations of interest-convergence (Bell, 1995a;Donnor, 2005), or the strategy of addressing racial inequities in the context of remedies that serve and maintain dominant White interests. With its focus on centering race in the examination of societal relations, CRT in education offers a lens to understand the obvious, and more insidiously subtle ways that race operates in the context of teacher education.…”