The history gap: Collective memory, journalism, and public discourse on racial achievement disparities in progressive communities

Abstract

This study examines the way history is invoked in discussions about the racial achievement gap in three progressive cities in the United States. It considers how community members and institutions have tried to act as keepers of collective memory—and to subvert that collective through counter-memories—through various public communication channels. Using interviews and textual analysis, this study builds an argument about how K-12 racial achievement gaps are covered with a present-mindedness that obscures the historic social, cultural, and economic forces that created opportunity disparities between student groups. The journalism on these disparities, with its limited historical contextualization, reifies the dominant progressive ideology in all of these cities. This study found that in place of traditional media and any formal historicizing, city officials, activists, and alternative online publications stepped in to “remember” in sometimes more complex but often polemic ways that created a politicized, divisive bricolage of historical interpretation.