Nick Vander Puy explores the issue of "White Privilege" in this culture. to listen to this story click here

 

 

Toxic Atmosphere at Lakeland Union High School

by Nick Vander Puy

           

About half  the  American Indian students who start school at Lakeland Union High School in Minocqua never graduate. The school administration wanted to find out why.  So they hired an educational consultant Nicky Bowman from Bowman Consulting to evaluate the school’s educational atmosphere. The study was released to the public this past  November.  The Bowman study found Lakeland Union High School has a largely negative   atmosphere for native students. 

            Nicky Bowman is a Mohican Indian .  She lives near Shawano, Wisconsin.  She’s also a PhD candidate at the UW Madison. She has broad experience attending, teaching, and evaluating schools in Wisconsin. 

            Bowman and her staff interviewed more than three hundred native students who attended Lakeland High School.  They also interviewed some caucasian  students

            This study was the first time the school has been officially evaluated from an indigenous perspective.

            The original theory for Bowman’s study at Lakeland Union was that low parental involvement was the reason for low Indian achievement. Bowman found this was a factor, but there were several more important  reasons for low Indian achievement.

            Bowman describes the atmosphere for native youth at Lakeland High School as “toxic.”

            Here’s how Nicky Bowman defines “toxic.”   “It’s an organizational culture where students don’t feel safe. It’s a culture of low expectation. When you look for resources for a particular community in this case native American you do not see a lot of positive role models or information used to bolster these students who come you know from families who have less resources you know they’’re a lot more at risk than other students who re in the community.”

             Some of the most glaring examples of this are there are very few Indian teachers and no Indian administrators at Lakeland.  Bowman mentions other examples. “We looked at every bulletin board and counted every piece of paper.  We looked at every single classroom.  All the curriculum that was in the class room. We looked wherever we could, we didn’t get access to personnel files, but we looked at professional development binders.  We looked at training certificates that might be hung up.  We looked at professional development plans, websites and their resources. There is very, very little on native American.”

            When the study was done Bowman found only one book in the Lakeland library about the Anishinaabe.  There were about sixty books about Native Americans and they were mostly  about Indians not living in the Midwest.   And they were mostly written by non-native authors.

            (Editors note: Since Bowman did her study there are now more than four hundred Native American titles in the Lakeland library.)

            The Intercultural Leadership Initiative offers the  biggest presence of native American resources in the school.

            Bowman recommends hiring more native staff at Lakeland,  as well as  using local native historians and cultural advisers.

            She says, “When you have an environment that builds children up and is not toxic you show there are role models, and successes, and leaders, and employ people and have resource materials and share the learning experience, so if you’re teaching history, you have the American history teacher in there and you bring in your local tribal historian  to talk about how local history goes along that same timeline. You know, you have those kinds of teachings and discussions with students in your classrooms.  That’s what a good environment looks like.”

            Bowman thinks the definition of educational success at Lakeland Union High School  must expand beyond academic test scores and college entrance exams.  For native students and others living in poverty, emotional and social needs must be met, too.

            She recommends addressing students’  fears about harassment and intimidation.  She encourages partnering with the Lac du Flambeau community to bring in native teachers, healers,  and peacemakers. “We wonder why our kids have the highest suicide rates, and we wonder  why our kids are drinking and driving and doing drugs. They need to have Patty Loew in their school more, Rick St. Germaine in their school more, so they can see there are a lot of Indians out there who are sober, happy, that hold good jobs, and bring other Indians up, with them, and other non-Indians, too. Medicine wheel teachings, red, white, yellow, black. We’re to respect the races.”

            The study acknowledges twelve teachers at Lakeland who offer a nourishing atmosphere for native youth.

 

“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

by

Nick Vander Puy

                Dr. Peggy McIntosh is a Caucasian woman who  teaches at Wellesley College near Boston.  She says “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness,  not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.  During the late nineteen eighties she wrote an article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

 

NVDP:  What is the Invisible Knapsack?

 

McIntosh:  Well, it is something I discovered I have on my back, from birth, by being born white in the United States, And I didn’t ask for it, I can’t be blamed for it, but it seems to me it is an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but I was not meant to know that I had these special assets. And it like having on my back a weightless invisible knapsack, that contains maps and passports and clothes and tools and blank checks and  visas and code books and guide books and tickets and special provisions like an emergency blanket or flashlight or you know freeze dried food. That’s to say I have been given a lot of things I can count on, and I can’t feel this on my back, but those that weren’t given one can see it on my back and, whereas I can’t see it.

 

NVDP: For instance, you are working at an exclusive woman’s college and I am sure there’re lot of people of color that are feeding you at times in the cafeteria and they’re cleaning the rooms and their maintaining Wellesley College. How did you become aware of this?  You are part of that power structure of  the elite…

 

McIntosh:  Yes

 

NVDP: What sensitized you? What brought you to this understanding?

 

McIntosh: What sensitized me was working with men over the matter of getting women into the curriculum of schools and colleges. And I saw that whether they were nice men had nothing to do with it, they felt that when you are laying ground work for knowledge, you really can’t get women in. Now this was in the 1980s. And they saw women as extra or superfluous or soft and unable then to be put in the basic curriculum of colleges and schools and I saw that niceness had nothing to do with it.  It wasn’t their fault, but they were taught that men were the real knowledgeable ones, men should write the books and run the universities. And then I realized the parallels. And the reason I was able to get it, is that I remembered I had read two essays by black women, in which they had said to their sisters, “If you go into woman studies just remember white women are oppressive to work with.” And when I read those statements, which were written by black women around the Boston area in the 1980s, I was astonished and my first thought was, I don’t see how. It’s ridiculous now Nick, but it wasn’t to me then, my response was, I don’t see how they can say that about us, I think we are nice. And then, years later when I began to see that men thought we couldn’t get into the college curriculum, yet they were very nice men, that came back to me. And I said, Oh Wow, okay, the men, it’s not their fault, but they were taught that men are the real knowers.  And I did not have the right sex to be entitled in that way, but I had the right color, because I was taught that white people are the real knowers and knowledge is from whites and about whites and the universities should be run by whites. And I had to ask could that have made me oppressive to work with… and the answer is “Yes.” So niceness has nothing to do with having been born into a system that put you ahead and I realized I was put ahead as a white person. That is what the invisible knapsack is made up of, those assumptions and entry ways into the power system.

 

NVDP: I am going to bring up one of those aspects in the invisible knapsack and that is this, when I turned on the TV this morning, I saw white middle class life reflected back at me. I did not see people of  color. I did not see any street people. I did not see any American Indians.  You mentioned that as being one of those unacknowledged, unrecognized factors in White Privilege.

 

McIntosh: Yes

 

NVDP: That’s also one of the issues at Lakeland High School, when Indian people go into that school they don’t  often see dream catchers, they don’t often see eagle feathers, they don’t often see Pendleton blankets, they see this kind of strong Germanic building structure  which is basically ‘White, white, white, white…’

 

McIntosh: Yes

 

NVDP: But then as you and I are talking here we will acknowledge this stuff… but we will go through kind of amnesia over the next half hour and we’ll forget about all this stuff, what is that, what is going on there? Do you know  what I am saying?

 

McIntosh:  One of the things… first of all I want to say about Lakeland High School, its not alone, but this is a major description of and symptom of White Privilege that a school reflects in the hallways, and in the curriculum and in the hiring and the rewarding of facility and students an assumption that ‘white’s are best’ and it’s  poisonous and it’s  not true. But the school gets structured around white privilege. And whites do it unconsciously. Now you talk about the amnesia that sets in. Actually you’re unusual, if you walk into a school, like the one you just described, and you notice even at the beginning that it doesn’t reflect the Indian students who are there, that it doesn’t mirror back Indian people to themselves, nor show windows… give windows to the other students into the lives, experience and worth of Indian people. So you’re amazing if you even see that on walking in as a white man, because most don’t see it.  Then you ask what happens after a half an hour if you develop amnesia over that. What has settled back in is like the default system in my psyche, is the feeling that ‘well, whites deserve what we have, it is really right that we’re in charge. And that is White Privilege, I used to just think that it was just life, now I see it as White Privilege – The assumption that I deserve more than other people because I was born to white skin.

 

NVDP: Ruby Paine has done a lot of work on the different language codes in the cultures of poverty, middle class, and wealthy. For instance in the culture of poverty, and this is for Indian, Caucasian, or Hispanic, Black, Asia, or Indian survival and relationship, are the two most important factors…the driving forces,  people are trying to survive and trying keep it together. Entertainment is also important. That’s not quite the case in middle class culture, more in middle class culture people are trying to succeed, they are trying to get into a college, they are trying to do well on their test scores. The driving forces are work and achievement. But those languages, those hidden codes in the middle class language, what are those hidden codes, and how do we deal with those, how do we treat those in a multicultural society?

 

McIntosh: Well, I am not an expert on Ruby Paine, but I do think in her prescription for change she tends to blame the victim, she doesn’t address how systemic white privilege causes poverty in a systemic way. She doesn’t talk about ‘white disrespect’ for relational life, she can describe relational life, but she doesn’t talk about the white privilege of putting everything on an individualistic basis. So as for the codes, the middle class white codes that you say are hard to break I think that its necessary for any of us who are feeling like outsiders, and sometimes as a woman, I feel an outsider to the structures of white quote success and power. It is necessary to learn those as languages, but they are not life, and you need to speak those languages in order to get ahead in those ways, but they don’t amount to value and worth necessarily. So I was taught to think as everybody as an individual, I have to think and act individualistically often and abandon, the other deeper teaching I was given which is ‘We are all in Relation’ but I need have to know that I have abandoned it. Abandoned it in this world in which I am forced to compete one-on-one against other whites to get something I need, for example, funding for the Seed Education Project on Inclusive Curriculum, but the basic values of the seed project are we are all in the body of world of life and we have equal worth. So I will use the language I learned in college and in  teaching to get the resources I need from white United States  benefactors and foundations in order to work for a fuller realization of what I was grounded in, which is ‘We are Bodies in the Body of the World.’

 

NVDP: Fredrick Douglas taught us that power never gives an inch without demand. This is an attractive article that you wrote, and I am going to try to tell that story on public radio next week, but there is still a Lakeland School Administration and there is still State Department of Public Instructions bucking your analysis. What do you think about Douglas’ advice?

 

McIntosh: I don’t find it completely compelling, because I have found myself, that there is a big relief in stopping being hated… or rather I don’t think I was hated… but stopping being mistrusted. And I would think that the folks at Lakeland would get tired of having the administration so mistrusted and hated and would want to change their ways just to improve the relations that they claim to want, the good relations they claim to want.  However Douglas was very smart, and when he said that power concedes nothing without a struggle… I am glad to see that when the Lakeland Administration refused to budge apparently Nicky Bowman’s advice was solicited, and she did a very thorough survey of all the available evidence to show the public that things are not quite all right in this High School, that even if racism is a nationwide problem,  this school seems to have an extra dose of it. And I am glad that the Intercultural Leadersip Initative is there in the school to help it become more a bi-cultural place.

 

NVP: One more question, I was up at Ashland, up at Northland College last fall when we listened to the thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, who got everybody into a circle, and we talked about the water and we talked about the coming hard times. I consider you a grandmother.   What is the role of grandmothers in this quest for more equality and justice?

 

McIntosh: To insist on the circle, to tell our stories, to listen to others stories, to learn from the relationality of the whole group. I am so glad that the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers had a circle, as they often have circles, but had a circle that you attended and that you can bring that way of communicating, in front of your listeners who are whites. In the Seed Project on Inclusive Currciulum, our opening circle of 60 people follows that format, one-by-one, we tell a bit of our story, it has to do actually with gender, one-by-one, read part or all or none of a piece we’d written called ‘Girl’ and its about… or ‘Boy’ and its about the voices in our head from early childhood telling us how to be a boy or girl. There is no abstract analysis of gender, there is only reading aloud from some of the voices in our head telling us how to be a boy or a girl. When 60 people do that and they all listen to each they come away with larger understanding of these large systems we are in, but nobody has said anything that is abstract, nobody has generalized, nobody has claimed they can tell somebody else’s story. The 13 Indigenous Grandmothers who gave parts of themselves as they went round the circle are doing what the whole world needs. We need that around the globe and we need to respect it. The White society I’ve grown up with disrespects that, they don’t think it is wise they think it is quote merely anecdotal, merely anecdotal… and I need to tell you Nick that my own research center refused to publish this paper, which is now widely quoted and translated around the world, it refused to published this paper on white-skinned privilege as I had experienced it because they said it is merely anecdotal and it lowers the standard, it isn’t about research. Each of us can research our own lives and speak what is true for us in the company of those who can listen and learn from and we all listen and learn from each other. That is the kind of circle that the indigenous women are holding that in doing that they model that for the whole world.

 to download this story as an mp3 click here

to download an additional story on this issue click here

---

Directions for Downloading This Radio Story
These stories have been compressed so that you can listen to them on your computer.
You'll need to download the story, however...a process that takes a few short minutes.
 Please read all directions before actually downloading.
 1. Hold cursor over link and click the right mouse button, then click "Save Target As" on the menu that pops up.
2. Then, select where you want to save the MP3 on your computer and click "Save".
A dialog box will pop up and the MP3 will start downloading. It will take a few minutes.
3. After it is done downloading click "Open" on the dialog box or go and open the MP3 from where you saved it.
4. Make sure your speakers are turned on and listen to the story. Enjoy!