Notes From The Back Of The Room Analysis

To better understand this concept and all of its parts, I looked at an ethnography conducted by Karolyn Tyson, titled, “Notes from the Back of the Room: Problems and Paradoxes in the Schooling of Young Black Students”. She looked at two predominantly Black schools, one was a public school that was 90% Black and the other school was a Black independent school, that just so happened to be religious. Both of these schools had predominately black teachers and principles. Both of the schools principles emphasized, “the importance of providing positive and self affirming experiences and environments for black students’ self esteem and, subsequently, achievement” (Tyson). So both of these schools focuses were affirming black racial identity and building

Tyson found there was a big pressure to conform by the school’s authority. This regulation of behavior by black teachers upon the Black students was all about racism, racial images, stereotypes and representation. This is summarized by Landson-Billings, “Black students are given very strict guidelines for behavior on the bus or in public because loudness and boisterousness could make white people feel like all blacks are this way”. I would even go a step further and say that this is regulation of behaviors is to make it so white people do not feel uncomfortable and “keep the peace”. Again, blackness is regulated for white people comfort and for the creation of a homogenous culture. This leads to an over compensation of black behaviors by Black authority figures because they want to instill the high lest level of “professionalism” to not confirm the negative stereotypes of black individuals In this way, Black teachers, “resist ‘dominant representations of the Black self in order to avoid the appearance of inadequacy’ … teachers resistance was practiced as conformity to mainstream norms.”