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Philosopher Derrick Darby and Educational Historian John L. Rury offer an interdisciplinary examination of reasons for and potential redress of the academic achievement gap between black and white students in the USA. Their guiding question is: “Why [do] the origins of the black-white achievement gap matter for understanding the operation of dignitary injustice in schools” (p. 3)? Principally, their response lies in what they call Color of Mind, a “flawed foundation of both racially unequal achievement outcomes and racially unequal opportunity” (p. 11). Dignitary injustice, which they characterize as the failure to “recognize the equal dignity of all persons, as happens when schools prevent blacks and whites from relating as equals,” is central to their main claim that Color of Mind largely accounts for these misdeeds (p. 3). Thus, they aim to explicate how “dignitary injustice results when laws, practices, or social arrangements constitute an affront to our equal status” (p. 4).
After laying out the central aims of their monograph in the introduction chapter, Darby and Rury spend the next four of the ten chapters that comprise this book tracing an intellectual genealogy of the Color of Mind throughout US history. To do so, the authors primarily engage secondary source material. Their evidence and methodology “combine history and philosophy to uncover the racist origins of the black-white achievement gap to argue that this relationship is a problem of justice, and to explain what must be done to address it” (pp. 4-5)....