Recognizing Others: A Call for Accomplices On the Path to Equity

NAGC has issued a powerful statement of organizational commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. We commit ourselves to repairing the gap, well- established by scholars within and outside of the NAGC community, between White and BIPOC students’ access to gifted education. We commit ourselves to repairing the employment gaps, also well-established, between White and BIPOC teachers and administrators in K-12 and higher education. And we wish to look at ourselves in the mirror and repair membership and leadership gaps right here within our own organization. We have become aware that the procedures for determining who qualifies for advanced learner programs and the data describing the typical characteristics of gifted persons have been overwhelmingly based on observations of White individuals, who are then thought of as exemplars of normal giftedness. Lower assessment scores among BIPOC students can then, in our atomized, individualistic, competitive culture, be separated in our minds from social contexts and viewed as inherent lack of ability in these students. We ignore the historic social impediments White culture has placed in their way. I would add that many of us have begun to be aware that the very notion of giftedness adheres to a conceptualization of intelligence and a view of achievement central to a modern, White cultural milieu that characterizes other cultures as exotic, non-traditional, and more primitive. As cultural historians and others have noted, this is the same worldview that for political and economic reasons historically divided human beings into races, connected race to skin color, and created a hierarchy of value with whiteness at the top. We have difficulty seeing giftedness as situated, that is, as arising in differing ways within differing social and cultural contexts.

DEI plans, valuable as they are, treat the symptoms of underlying issues which we should be addressing. Racism — the racializing and hierarchization of humans — and the social and economic systems that maintain it, have created the gaps we wish to address. We should be informed and aware of these influences so that we can do whatever is in our power to advocate for change. At this moment in our country’s history, there are those who wish to prohibit the accurate teaching of these influences, which they have bundled under the purposefully inaccurate label of “CRT.” These teaching bans are now expanding to include social and emotional learning programs as well. NAGC should be at the forefront of resistance to these prohibitions. Advanced learners rely on, and insist on, accurate information with which to explore and understand the world. More importantly, silence on the social history of our country in favor of sentimental myths represents a willful and harmful failure of recognition of large portions of our population. In those we fail to recognize, we engender feelings of shame and defect, not to mention cynicism arising from the fact that their history with Whites is well-known to them but intentionally ignored in school. In those White students whose history we do claim as the ultimate truth, we engender a false, self- serving, and precarious sense of reality. All of this is inimical to educational motivation and emotional wellbeing.

While all of NAGC’s DEI proposals are crucial and deserve our sincere, continued support, it is important to understand the urgency to address this issue of recognition. Closing equity gaps risks becoming simply a performative gesture, amounting at most to inducting non-Whites into a White world. This would represent a lack of recognitionof non-White cultural traditions and their human value. An organization such as ours, committed to acknowledging and meeting the needs of advanced learners, certainly has the ethical obligation to include learners of all colors in that mandate. We also have, I would argue, the ethical obligation to expand our understanding, and recognition of world views having differing concepts of intelligence and how it is assessed. An obligation, that is, to recognize others who make up the “nation” in NAGC’s title, and to engage in a conjoint exploration of ways of meeting the needs of those we can all consider to be gifted. Mutual recognition and conjoint effort hold the promise of reversing the divisions currently threatening both our advanced learner community and our country as a whole. The horizons of the conscious worlds we inhabit are flexible; they expand as we exercise our capacity to empathize — to see the world as others see it. With greater understanding comes the potential for new solutions to old problems.