Glossary

While a school might be demographically diverse, schools that cluster a disproportionately high percentage of White students relative to their district or community typically concentrate not just the White student population but Whiteness and its attendant unearned privileges.

We make a distinction between “desegregation” which is about moving bodies to create what, on paper, are more racially or socioeconomically diverse schools, and “integration” which is about creating an equitable, multiracial community. When we enroll our child in a global majority school, we are desegregating our child. This is an important first step, but only the beginning of our work.

Diverse schools may have an impressive demographic makeup of students from all racial, ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds. However, we are thoughtful in contextualizing them within a broader understanding of the district/city/town. These schools may be concentrating White children, or children from wealthier families, even if those families are in the majority at the school.

White people are, in fact, not the demographic majority of humans on the planet; White is not “majority” and people who do not identify as White are not “minority.” Ideally, people should not be described by what they aren’t (as in, “non-White”). For this reason, in instances where we are referring to people who do not identify as White, we say “global-majority.” This term is often used to describe school demographics but also stands alone as an identifier to replace the more pejorative term of “minority.” Similar to where you might see someone use “BIPOC,” “Black, Indigenous, and racialized,” or “Black and Brown,” people of global majority is an imperfect phrase that serves a particular function in describing people across cultures who may have little in common other than their not being White.

We refer to schools that predominantly serve global-majority students, in which White &/or privileged students may be the ‘only’ or ‘one of a few’ White kids in the school as integratING.  While this might be a bit aspirational, this serves to distinguish already-integrated schools from schools that are in the process (however slow) of integrating.

Schools that serve a demographic of students that is largely reflective of the city/town/district in which it is located are referred to as integrated schools. However, what might look integrated ‘on paper’ demographically-speaking, may not actually be integrated at the classroom level.

Ultimately, our hope is not only that a school is integrated, but that the students in the school are also integrated in the classroom. Are the magnet, gifted, specialized, advanced programs in the school predominantly White and affluent, or do they also reflect the demographics of the broader community?

To be race-conscious, and to parent race consciously, is to reject the color/race evasive tactics that were au courant in the 80s and 90s (and still are among certain people), and to address race and challenge racism head on. For White people in particular, this includes honest dialogue about “the inherited experience of being White, as well as the history of Whiteness,” as Jen Harvey puts it, and actively modeling what it means to be a White person committed to equity, justice, inclusion, and belonging  – manifesting a future in which Whiteness no longer has the power to define people’s reality by imposing a racial hierarchy.

These are schools that serve relatively similar demographic percentages of students to the numbers served by the district, city or town. Ideally, this looks beyond race to other factors of marginalization and privilege from native language to socioeconomic status to sexuality to dis/ability.

When we use this term we’re not referring to individuals and their immutable characteristics (skin color) but rather to the insidious beliefs, assumptions, policies, etc. that fuel and uphold an institutionalized system of anti-Blackness, or White supremacy.

Because few of us think of ourselves as White supremacists, many of us do not recognize our complicity in the system. Whiteness signifies the unearned privileges and behavioral license (tacit exemption from stated rules) that the socially dominant group enjoys by virtue of race, and the cultural norms that support that hierarchy.

White people are the designated beneficiaries of White supremacy culture, but the cultural norms that support it are internalized to some extent by everyone in our society. We seek to de-center Whiteness by asking, “How do the attitudes and behaviors we bring to a given situation serve to reinforce a system designed to privilege White people, marginalize Black and Indigenous people, and assign everyone else value based on their relative proximity to either Whiteness or Blackness?”