further pursuit of flow

"If one has more fully explored one's racial identity, might that contribute to higher levels of academic achievement?  Is a student who has a complex understanding of their "Blackness" or "Whiteness" or "Puerto Rican-ness" more likely to have elevated academic potential?"
(N&T 127-8)
Exploring, trying on, testing, hiding, and acting out identities has become a prominent theme in this course over the past few weeks.  In order to develop optimally and realize an authentic self, adolescents need time and space to figure out who they really are, who they want to be, how they want others to see them, and who others want them to be.  These are Ward's "homespaces" in chapter 6 on Gender, and Marcia's "identity moratoria" in chapter 2.  The equivalent spaces in chapter 7 on Race can be seen (I think) in Cross' African American racial identity development (pages 136-7), and Helms' White racial identity development (pages 146-7).  It seems that maybe the key stages are the "Encounter" status in Cross, and the "Disintegration" status in Helms.  I might be wrong because the statuses are less clearly defined as to when the search for racial identity really starts for a person (or I'm missing something).  At any rate, the statuses that comprise the two identity development "progressions" are really eye-opening, especially when you think that you may have a black student in the immersion/emersion stage working alongside a white student in the reintegration stage.  yikes. 
A couple of quotes:
"Despite the meritocratic rhetoric of public education, schools have been and continue to be instrumental in reproducing the racial hierarchies of the larger society in which White is privileged and Black is marginalized.  Black-White identity encounters therefore cannot be understood without interrogating these power differentials.   Seen in this way, any developmental practice that proceeds as if these encounters occur in a raceless or somehow color-blind ecology is not only counterintuitive but developmentally negligent." (144)
"Denying the salience of race in our work with youth may in fact contribute to the legacy of racist, exclusionary, and debilitating practices in schools.  In fact, research has indicated that endorsement of "color-blind" racial attitudes is significantly associated with greater levels of racial prejudice and a mistaken belief that society is just and fair." (125)
So N&T make these, what I find to be, scathing indictments of those claiming not to see color, and then ask the reader the questions that I began this blog entry with.   Their point is that acknowledging and not pretending to ignore issues involving race that arise in schools, can help adolescents shape their journey towards an identity by providing them with another important lens.  Depending on the situation, they now have a creativity lens (chapter 3), a possibility lens (chapter 4), a gender lens (from last chapter) and a race lens in their arsenal. 
But it's up to educators to help them focus these lenses in productive ways.  If successful, the students can be actively engaged in their learning in the classroom--completely present as authentic selves, in pursuit of flow. 
Thought I'd include a ted talk by the "father of flow" Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (chapter 4).  It's 19 minutes, but pretty cool.