ABSTRACT
Introduction When asked for his definition of “equal,” Thurgood Marshall once answered, “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.” Here Marshall established coevalness, or the “sharing of the present time” (Fabian, 2002, p. 32), as a condition of justice. This article also examines a socio-temporal aspect of education and justice to examine schooling and inequality 50 years after Marshall made his remarks on behalf of the plaintiffs in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. As I discuss in the sections that follow, the unequal material conditions of education before the civil rights movement, as implied by Marshall’s answer, were racially inflected expressions of what Johannes Fabian (2002) calls the allochronism of anthropology or, in simple terms, the denial of coevalness. As Fabian explains, the denial of coevalness is effected primarily through language or, more specifically, through allochronic discourses. Allochronism has a discursive function which shapes racial norms in U.S. society in ways that make them “commonsense” and susceptible to be taken for granted by most individuals. W. E. B. Du Bois alluded to these intricate discursive processes as he reflected on the meaning of his life’s work late in his life:
[N]ot simply knowledge, not simply direct repression of evil, will reform the world. In long, ... the actions of [women and] men which are due not to a lack of knowledge nor to evil intent, must be changed by influencing folkways, habits, customs, and subconscious deeds. (Du Bois, 1997, p. 222)
Given its emphasis on placing at the center of analysis the stories that people of color tell of their experiences, critical race theory (CRT) is an especially useful tool for examining how socio-temporal notions of race inform the naturalization of oppression and the normalization of racial inequality
in public schools and society. These discursive processes are shorn of the more explicit and formal expressions of power that we typically associate with oppression and inequality (Crenshaw et al., 1995), and the narratives of people of color often bring them into relief with a clarity that is seldom communicated through dominant technologies (Bell, 1999; Collins, 1990; Delgado and Stefancic, 1991; Matsuda, 1996; MacKinnon, 1993; Young, 1990). In the following account, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (1991) describe the purpose and goal of racially-specific narrative intervention in the context of legal studies:
Legal storytelling is a means by which representatives of new communities may introduce their views into the dialogue about the way society should be governed. Stories are in many ways more powerful than litigation or brief-writing and may be precursors to law reform. They offer insights into the particulars of lives lived at the margins of society, margins that are rapidly collapsing toward a disappearing center. This is not just true of our times. In biblical history, storytellers for oppressed groups told tales of hope and struggle – for example, that of the promised land – to inspire and comfort the community during difficult times. Reality could be better – and perhaps will be. Other storytellers have directed their attention to the oppressors, reminding them of the day when they would be called to account. Stories thus perform multiple functions, allowing us to uncover a more layered reality than is immediately apparent: a refracted one that the legal system must confront. (Delgado and Stefancic, 1997, p. 321)
Against this backdrop, the analysis presented in this article proceeds as follows: In the first section, I frame my larger argument within a critical race analysis of the literature and primary data related to the concepts of time, narrative, and educational inequality. I then examine the implications of narratives in a discussion of their possibilities and limitations of CRT for researching the schooled lives of black children and youth. This discussion takes seriously a major criticism of CRT: that it relies too heavily on storytelling and narrative data. As I explain below, from an epistemological standpoint, criticism is warranted when truth claims are made exclusively on data derived from subjective ontological categories. Along these lines, I propose critical race ethnography as one measure to build around and advance the rich corpus of CRT studies. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis presented in this article for urban school reform within the contexts of the post-industrial United States and the “runaway world” of globalization (Giddens, 2000).
