Stubborn Roots

Stubborn Roots Prudence Carter

“substantive inclusion,” TheaRenda Abu El-Haj,Elusive: Wrestling with Difference and Educational Equity in Everyday Practice (New York: Routledge, 2006).

I learned that students’ cultural flexibility has much to do with the schools’ own organizational and cultural flexibility.

A Black person is a person that knows where they come from. That you stand up for what you’ve been taught, you know.

Sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel argues that there is no reason why entities should have only one fixed meaning and that the world can be much richer when individuals possess “flexible” minds, are willing to “step out of their skins,” notice certain structures and choose to destroy them from time to time, and even retain their selfhood when they choose.17 At the individual level, educators and students need be neither too rigid nor too malleable culturally. To be cognitively (p.10) “rigid- minded” (that is, having an unyielding commitment to the mutual exclusivity of outsiders) or “fuzzy-minded” (unfocused with no attention to structure, appropriate resources, and boundaries among the in-groups and out-groups) stunts the well-being of many individuals and organizations.18 While Zerubavel’s social psychological work focuses primarily on the individual level, I consider cultural flexibility a multidimensional concept whose scope spans from the organizational (school) to the group level (for example, social class or ethnicity) to the individual (student and educator).

What do I mean by “boundaries”? Sociologists Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnar have written the following: “Social boundaries are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social opportunities.”

“symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space.”23 Symbolic boundaries are the cultural tools that individuals and groups struggle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality.

Some would refer to this latter aspect of the boundary as “tilted” or asymmetric.30 This imbalance illuminates what Pierre Bourdieu has labeled as “symbolic violence”31—the persistence of the system of cultural meanings embedded in some “good” schools to exclude, minimize, and render invisible the experiences of students from nondominant groups.

Boundaries as group- and organization-level phenomena are reproduced in schools, which maintain a specific cultural habitus. “Habitus,” another concept that French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized, refers to the set of entrenched cultural dispositions—habits, views, or styles, for instance— that individuals, families, and communities hold, based on differences in their socioeconomic positions in society.38 Sociologist Patricia McDonough has applied Bourdieu’s “habitus” concept to capture how organizations act in systemic ways and use policies, practices, symbols, and codes to either enhance or diminish the outcomes of the individuals who operate within them.39 “Organizational habitus,” according to McDonough, differs from what we consider “organizational culture,” because it goes beyond an understanding of the meaning-making processes conferred on practices by individuals in the organization and instead encompasses how these practices affect the lives and welfare of those participating in it.