“I have a colleague at the college who’s been teaching there for 30 years who has never discussed race in his class. How can you be in Boston, Massachusetts, at this institution which was opened with the National Guard outside of its doors, and not talk about race?” Johnson asks.

Nevertheless, Johnson listed a number of ways that community colleges can effectively reach students representing a broad range of ethnicities, including breaking up ethnic cliques that form from the first day of classes. Johnson says typically, his African- American students will cluster together with Cambodians and Vietnamese students, while White students cluster with other groups, to the detriment of cross-cultural learning and open dialogue in the classroom.

Johnson added that in his classes, high-achieving White students will naturally cluster together and form study groups, and mixing lower-achieving Whites and other ethnicities in can help everybody.

“When you address these things up front, you create learning communities, you create this cluster, you do see that there is going to be some success and that students will do the work.

“You get what you expect. For most of the students at the community college, everyone is expected that they will fail, that they will end up incarcerated, that they will end up with a house full of kids - that’s what’s expected of them from the world, from their family members, from society and the culture at large. We can’t expect that in the classroom. When you expect a lot from them, they produce,” Johnson says.

For more information on NISOD and the number of community college resources it provides, visit www.nisod.org

--David Pluviose