A new era of civil rights
HGSE Associate Professor Mica Pollock

In a recent article on issues of race and equal opportunity in contemporary American education, HGSE associate professor Mica Pollock refuses to refer to the current period as the "post civil rights era." She prefers to call this "the new civil rights era" – and not just because she agrees with political theorist George Lakoff that to accept the other side's framing of an issue is to lose the debate before it starts.

Pollock, whose research is informed by her work experience in the US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, writes, "I believe it is a new civil rights era because the quest for equal opportunity takes place in a new social context of resistance to equal opportunity claims." She identifies three phenomena that are characteristic of this new era: inequalities of opportunity are more likely to be the result of "an aggregation" of ordinary practices and policies rather than explicitly discriminatory laws; when racial harm is done, it is not always clear that it's intentional; and third, claims of discrimination are more likely nowadays to be met with skepticism or resistance, precisely because "ordinary people" don't see that they also participate in producing inequality.

To continue the quest for equal opportunity in education, Pollock calls on both educators and policymakers to adopt a stance in favor of "everyday justice" to counteract the "ordinary practices that continue to do so much harm to children of color." She urges both educators and policymakers to ask themselves, in the course of "each ordinary move" affecting children:

• Am I offering equal access to the opportunities and benefits of education, rather than denying it?
• Am I moving this student closer to opportunity rather than farther away from it?

There is a paradoxical dynamic Pollock has identified, that is often at work in the discussion of race and opportunity: "endorsing the idea of equal opportunity but resisting the provision of opportunities in specific instances."

To deal with these problems, Pollock recommends four strategies for advocates of equal opportunity in education:

• Look for precise evidence of harm when seeking to end a discriminatory practice or policy, rather than just railing abstractly against racially unequal treatment, outcomes, or institutions.
• Avoid imputing racist intent on the part of those who may be causing whatever the problem is. Instead, focus on the harm experienced by children and parents.
• Compare the opportunities for children of color not only with those of white children, but also with opportunities deemed academically adequate and even humane. This avoids the zero-sum game of putting children of color in competition with white children for opportunity.
• Develop a "rights discourse" among educators: frame a discussion that helps them understand that children of all races have a right – a civil right, even a human right – to learn.

Mica Pollock's article, "Toward Everyday Justice: On Demanding Equal Educational Opportunity in the New Civil Rights Era," was published in the Ohio State Law Journal, vol. 67, at p. 245. The paper is also available from the Harvard University Achievement Gap Initiative web site.

By Ruth Walker