Seminar on Racial Scripts and Counterscripts

Erin Nishijima, Cristina Barriot, Grace Deery-Schmitt, Maria Lee

ED C&I 505 - UW

Final Project

Racial Scripts - what are they?

• Natalia Molina coined this term in the book How Race Is Made in America

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• “Racialized groups are linked across time and space: once attitudes, practices, customs, policies, and laws are directed at one group, they are more readily available and hence easily applied to other groups.” (Molina, 2013, p. 7)

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• Racial scripts allow us to see racialization as a shared process between groups, they highlight actors, and they allow us to more readily identify resistance.

Counterscripts - what are they?

• “...racialized groups put forth their own scripts, counter scripts that offer alternatives or directly challenge dominant racial scripts.” (Molina, 2013, p.7)
• Antiracist alliances form because racialization is a relational process; diverse groups share parts of their stories when they recognize that they have been racialized by the same racial scripts.
• Counterscripts come from racialized groups sharing their own narratives. They can be large scale or through daily resistance.

Counterscripts -why they are so necessary

• Levins Morales and Natalia Molina offer perspectives that help us understand the weight of counterscripts.
• “One of the great lies of imperial history is that only members of the elite act, and everyone else is acted upon.” (Morales, 1998, p. 4)
• “[Counterscripts bring] an entreaty to see how these practices of resistance, claims for dignity, and downright refusal to take it anymore cut across a range of communities of color, thus once again showing us how they are linked.” (Molina, 2013, p.11)

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Racial Scripts - Let All of Them Take Heed: Guadalupe San Miguel Jr.

• Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. makes reference to the myth of the “Mexican American Indifference” towards public education (xvi)
• The Mexican problem: 1920s reports discuss the problems schools were having with Mexican children and how to resolve them. Note: Mexican Children or families were not asked what problems they had with the school system but the other way around. The information came from educational researchers, teachers and administrators. Let’s think about positionality here. (P 19).
• Direct quote from the Texas State Department of Education in 1922 “the English language is our most precious national possession.” With regards to enforcing English among immigrant students (p 35).

Counterscripts - Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. Let All of Them Take Heed

• The struggle for dual language education, specifically bilingual education rights debunks the myth of Mexican American indifference.
• We see Mexican American resilience in the struggle to maintain Spanish, customs, and sponsor their own social activities. San Miguel notes “novel cultural patterns, linguistic forms, and social organizations reflecting their bicultural existence in the new American social order were also developed.
• Efforts reversed traditional English only language policies at schools.

Racial Script

Getting Around Brown by Gregory S. Jacobs

• Black communities meant uneducated and poor communities.
• “Yet as long as being black remained a disproportionate determinant of poverty, race and class could not be separated”. (155)
• “There’s deep rooted prejudice that still exists today - that ‘I as a white family want my kids to go to school with white kids’”. (185)

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• The racial script of black youth being uneducated based on skill is incorrect because throughout the book, economic growth and boundaries pushed for segregated schools. These segregated schools were caused by realtors pushing ideas into white families to create more profit.
• “Columbus schools were identified as repositories for poor and minority children, by mid-decade the district as a whole had been so branded”. (132)
• “Desegregation means DeUrbanization” “Don’t Bus, Come Live with Us” (133)
• “Developers argued that their decision making was driven by money rather than color, that they aspired to minimize risk, not racial mixing”. (137)

Racial Scripts

Mestizaje & the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There is No Blackness

Taunya Lovell Banks

“...Mexicans were constructed in both Mexico and the United States from the mid-nineteenth through the twentieth century. I conclude that in the United States, Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans often were classified as white for political purposes. Nevertheless, many prominent members of the dominant American society considered persons of Mexican ancestry non-white, and in the nineteenth century some politicians saw some Mexicans as possessing African ancestry and thus theoretically akin to black Americans” (pg. 204)...

• Mestizaje, Mestizo, Mexican:
• “Racial caste” created
• Closeness to whiteness did NOT benefit them even though it was sought out
• Closeness to blackness did NOT benefit them even though it was put on them by white supremacy
• Labels, names, roots → not unpacked with true histories in mind → only focused on Black/White binary and created conflict

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Counterscipts

Mestizaje & the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There is No Blackness

Taunya Lovell Banks

“When discussing race, ethnic, and gender subordination in the Americas, scholars must acknowledge the lingering effects of war, colonialism, capitalism, and slavery, as well as the way in which different imperial powers, like Spain, England, and more recently, the United States, have dominated the Americas during different eras over the past five centuries” (pg. 233).

• This has to be done with ANY aged scholar
• Use of relational history - not separate

Racial Scripts - Example 4

A script we’ve seen applied across racialized groups at different times is justification of exclusion based on cleanliness, disease

-1921 Political Code of California (Blalock Moore, 2012, p. 361)

-Segregated swimming pools in Chicago (Neckerman, 2007, p. 103)

Counterscripts - Example 4

Protest of segregated public spaces

-For example, Glen Echo Amusement Park 1960

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Black Placemaking in Chicago (Hunter et al., 2016)

“They are all former residents of the Stateway Gardens public housing complex on Chicago’s South Side. They come together annually to share their memories of life in the projects, to celebrate their friendship and kinship, and to stake their place in Chicago despite efforts to remove them.” (p. 9)

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So what’s next? Questions we have and what we can do

How are racial scripts different/similar from stereotypes?

How can teacher preparation programs have instructors become knowledgeable about their positionality and how to reduce harm and resist racial scripts?

How can asserting intersectional identities be conceptualized as counterscript?

Counterscripts are undertold - at times it felt hard to find examples/how can we highlight counterscripts

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Sources Cited

Hunter, Pattillo, M., Robinson, Z. F., & Taylor, K.-Y. (2016). Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(7-8), 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276416635259

Jacobs, Gregory S. Getting around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools. Ohio State University Press, 1998.

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Levins Morales. (1998). Medicine stories : history, culture, and the politics of integrity (1st ed.). South End Press.

Lovell Banks, Taunya. (2006). Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, So There is No Blackness. Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal. Vol. 15, 199.

Molina. (2013). How race is made in America (1st ed.). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/j.ctt4cgfv5

National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior. (2021, August 3). A Summer of Change: The Civil Rights Story of Glen Echo Park. NPS.gov. Retrieved May 23, 2022, from https://www.nps.gov/glec/learn/historyculture/upload/Civil-Rights-Site-Bulletin-508-2.pdf

San Miguel, G. (1987). Let All of Them Take Heed. Texas A&M University Press.