Theme
Locating the problem inside the child so the system never has to answer for itself.
Journal entries
Aug 31, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 20–22
The world seems to divide along cultural paradigms about what neurodivergence means — and the older paradigm was never the deficit one.
Aug 28, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slide 17
Jim Sinclair and Lorna Wing changed what I think a diagnosis is. And I have to admit that a small part of me grieved when my own child was diagnosed.
Reading & influences
Article · Quaylan Allen
High school, not college — and middle-class Black boys, which strips away the class explanation entirely. Their families' resources do not protect them from being read as a risk. Directly relevant to my private-school setting, where adults assume affluence solves belonging.
Article · Rosalie Rolón-Dow
Names academic microaggressions specifically — doubts about intellect, invisibility except when race is the topic, curriculum that never reflects you. This is the bridge between microaggression research and racialized rigor: the slights are not social, they are about whether you are believed to be capable.
Book · Carol Gilligan
Gilligan's argument that women's moral reasoning was measured against a male standard and found deficient — when it was simply different — rhymes with everything I am learning about neurodivergence and about students measured against the white standard. The wrong yardstick is the story of my whole research life.
Article · Akhund
Reminded me that acceptance is not the new idea. Medicalization is. Communities have held neurodivergent people with reverence for as long as there have been humans; the deficit paradigm is a recent import.
Article · Luigi Esposito & Victor Romano, The Western Journal of Black Studies
The theoretical name for the part of racialized rigor I find hardest to say out loud. Harm delivered sincerely, as help, by people who would fail any test of explicit bias. "I'm hard on him because the world will be" is a sentence I have said myself. I need to be able to critique it without pretending I stood outside it.
Talk · Gloria Ladson-Billings, AERA Presidential Address
Reframes the whole vocabulary. A gap sits between two groups and implies somebody should catch up; a debt sits on the institution and implies somebody owes. If I am going to coin a term, this is the standard — the name should locate the problem in the right place. Racialized rigor has to point at the adults.
Book · Thomas Armstrong
The practical companion to the conceptual work. Armstrong's "positive niche construction" — changing the environment to fit the learner instead of fixing the learner to fit the environment — is exactly the move racialized rigor refuses to make: it demands the student adapt to a standard instead of asking whether the standard is just.
Article · Sarah Clark & Megan Soutter
A useful caution for my research vocabulary: schools love 'growth mindset' talk, but demanding risk-taking from students who are punished more harshly for mistakes is not mindset work — it is racialized rigor wearing a motivational poster.
Book · Thomas Armstrong
Armstrong's broader statement of the strengths-first case: neurological differences carry advantages, not just deficits. This sits underneath my whole neurodiversity thread — the spectrum image from my first presentation is, at heart, this argument.
Article · Derrick R. Brooms
Documents what it costs Black boys to succeed in schools like mine — resilience as a burden they should not have to carry. I want to ask the harder question: what if the school changed, instead of the student getting tougher?