Revisiting Mockingbird (Again)

This past week, I was co-facilitating a workshop on the N-word with Dr. Eddie Moore Jr. The essential point of our workshop is to acknowledge that the N-word shows up in the vast majority of American schools, if not all, and that educators need to have a clear, well-reasoned response when it does. What we know is that few educators, especially white educators, know how to respond when the N-word is spoken in schools or when it appears in a literary work under discussion. Not surprisingly, such workshop conversations eventually lead to the question of how teachers approach Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which remains at the top of the list of most-taught books in U.S. schools.

In the workshop, I brought up my own early struggles as a teacher trying to figure out how to discuss To Kill a Mockingbird, with its appealing coming-of-age story countered by numerous instances of the N-word and its troubling portrayal of Black characters in a white-dominated, racist culture. After the workshop, a participant shared with me an essay by Zach Graham, “My ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Problem — and Ours.” This essay is an open letter to teachers asking them to either teach To Kill a Mockingbird with far greater nuance and honesty about the book’s racial themes (among others) and connect them with contemporary American society and the lives of students or don’t teach it at all.  

As a Black student in a predominantly white middle school, Graham had a bad experience with To Kill a Mockingbird. As an adult, he re-read the book to see if it still felt problematic. He writes, “I’ve just finished re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I can firmly say that the reason I didn’t connect to the novel as a middle schooler was because it wasn’t written for me. I was moved to write this letter to you because I don’t want any of your students to have the same experience I had. To Kill a Mockingbird is a white story written by a white woman in which Black people are depicted as ignorant, hopeless, and in need of white saviors.”

I am certainly familiar with this objection to the book, and it is one of the many reasons I would not teach it again. But I appreciate that Graham also details several new arguments against the book that I had never considered — particularly against the way most white teachers frame the themes. Quite frankly, I think the letter is brilliant, and I hope every English teacher will read it 

To Kill a Mockingbird just celebrated its 64th anniversary, and has been the number one book taught in the United States for decades. My question is: Why? I have been grappling with this question for quite some time now — and for those of you who don’t already know, my daughter’s name is Harper. 

As we prepare for the new school year, I wanted to bring this question to the fore again. Why teach To Kill a Mockingbird? What do you see in the book that makes it essential to your curriculum? If you’re teaching it, are you considering the book through a racial lens? Are you attentive to how students of color feel about the book? What do you say to students about the use of the N-word in the novel? How do you relate the themes to the lives of students and the world they see? If you have dropped the book from the curriculum, why? And what other books are you using that engage students well across race, gender, and other social identifiers?

Below is a link to an earlier blog post I wrote on this topic, along with two podcasts we created for Teaching While White in an effort to find some answers specifically about the merits or harm of continuing to teach this highly celebrated and problematic text. 

My hope is that, as Zach Graham encourages, we either help each other teach the book with a deeper understanding of its themes and effect on our students, or we don’t teach it at all.

I hope you will use these resources to engage in conversation with colleagues about what you teach and why. We’d also love to hear from you. Please tell us what you think about To Kill a Mockingbird’s place in our curricula. The more we know, the more we can offer in our workshops, podcasts, and writing.

Blog Post:

Rethinking How We Teach Books in School

Podcasts

To Teach or to Kill a Mockingbird

Mockingbird in the Classroom: The Student Experience

Embracing AP African American Studies

One could argue that the lead story in education over the past year has been the rise of artificial intelligence and its nascent impact of both teaching and learning — not to mention the rest of society. It’s a story that will continue to unfold and require our attention. In fact, the infusion of AI into education has reached the stage where it’s already become the sole subject of some education conferences.

While I know the question of AI matters a great deal, a story that deserves at least equal billing this past year has been the extensive political backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well at the widespread banning of related books and courses, and even the utterance of certain concepts in schools. Like AI, this unfolding story will impact teaching and learning for years to come.

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down race-conscious college admissions, some conservative groups have been emboldened to go after DEI programs across the K-16 spectrum, as well as in the business world. To date, more than 20 states have weighed or passed new laws designed to eliminate DEI initiatives. While these groups may argue that the use of race in any form is discriminatory and that their aim is to make education race-blind, and thus democratic, the reality is that such efforts effectively stop our progress in achieving racial equity in the nation — that is, stop progress in actually becoming the democratic nation we say we are. The whole point of DEI programs is to support the development of diverse communities that serve all citizens well. And research has made it clear that such efforts are effective — and needed, if we don’t want to keep our nation stuck in an inequitable state.

Regarding book banning, PEN America says it has recorded 5,894 instances of book banning in schools between 2021 and 2023 — with Texas and Florida leading the way. Many of the books are related to race and sexual orientation — that is, to books that support a cultural plurality. Among the banned books are some by African American writers of exceptional talent and vision, including The 1619 Project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones; Black Looks: Race and Representation, by bell hooks; Beloved and The Bluest Eyes, by Toni Morrison; Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson; and Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson.

While it’s important that we all do our part in responding to these efforts to turn back the clock on equity and justice in schools and society, there is some good news worth noting. Starting next fall, all high schools, public and private, can sign on to teach the official AP African American Studies course. After completing a rigorous research and design phase, involving the input from more than 300 college faculty and guided by a panel of expert teachers — and following a two-year pilot program involving more than 15,000 students and hundreds of teachers in 40 states — the AP African American Studies course will be widely available.

You can learn more about the program from the College Board.

What I like about the course, based on what I’ve read and on both student and teacher feedback from the pilot program, is its interdisciplinary nature, helping students — white students and students of color — acquire a core knowledge of African American history and culture and develop their analytical skills in order to put that knowledge to work in a contemporary context. Focused on four central and important themes, the course exams the Origins of the African Diaspora (~900 BCE–16th century): Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance (16th century–1865); The Practice of Freedom (1865–1940s): and Movements and Debates (1940s–2000s). The College Board says it will continue to evolve the course as needed, especially as it starts to incorporate events from the early 21st century.

In its efforts to get this course right, the College Board collected feedback from teachers and students and experts involved with the pilot program’s first year and revamped the framework to include more key foundational concepts and core knowledge, particularly regarding community organizing, systems of oppression, and the all-important concept of intersectionality.

In all, this AP program is designed to be the equivalent of an introductory college course in African American Studies and related subjects. To date, more than 200 colleges and universities have signed on to offer credit or advanced placement for students who have performed satisfactory on the AP African American Studies Exam.

I mention this as a way to encourage educators to support the establishment of AP African American Studies at their schools and in their districts and states to ensure that the course is widely available. As noted, the past two years have shown us that a political force in the nation has been aiming to halt the progress we’ve made in developing quality, equitable education across race, gender, and socioeconomic status. This AP course can help us begin to repair that damage. For many students, it may also be their sole academic exposure to the full spectrum of African American history and culture 

I say this even knowing that the AP courses and exams, collectively, come with their own set of issues — including the matter of equitable access, especially when it comes to tracking students. While we collectively work to address those issues, however, I think it’s fair to support the AP African American Studies program for the good it can do. Essentially, it represents an important step forward in our students’ understanding of African American history and culture — and thus offers a fuller picture of American history and culture. Students who engage in such learning also improve their ability to process the steady procession of current events related to race. Finally, the AP course helps raise the general profile of such study in school, which is so valuable in a time when we continue to grapple with race matters in the nation. If your school offers AP courses to advance the learning of its top students, then AP African American studies should be a part of the mix.

In a recent statement, Brandi Waters, the lead author of the course framework and program manager for AP African American studies, said, “This is the course I wish I had in high school. I hope every interested student has the opportunity to take it.”

I certainly would have benefited from such a course back in the day. The clearer our vision is of the past, the better we can make decisions today — and the better our democracy will be in the long run.

  Michael Brosnan is the senior editor for Teaching While White and writes often on matters of education. He also the author of three books of poetry, including the recently released Emu Blis, Bums Lie, Blue-ism (Broadstone Books, 2024).

The Supreme Court, Race, and College Admissions

 Like many of you, I’ve been digging into the details of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College — and reading articles, commentary, and other public responses to it. I also went back and re-read a piece I wrote for Teaching While White at the start of this lawsuit in support of Harvard’s admissions practices aimed at racial diversity.

If given the opportunity I might rephrase a few of my comments in that earlier piece. But it essentially sums up how I feel on this matter. All things considered, the U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting affirmative action based on race boils down to a victory for privilege and power and represents another blow to democratic principles and justice.

At the start of the lawsuit, Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, told the New York Times that the use of race as a contributing factor in college admissions “falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life.”

This was essentially the view the majority of the Supreme Court justices would come to embrace as well.

While in the theoretical realm I imagine most of us would agree with the notion that one’s race or ethnicity should never be used for harm or gain, Blum’s overall position is such a disingenuous one to take when it comes to real-world college admissions. It has been clear for decades now that to be white is to have a leg up in various avenues in life, especially in college admissions. The whole point of affirmative action has been to make college access fair and just — and the statistics make it clear that these efforts have been paying off, even as racial injustice persists more broadly in our society. College admissions, in other words, has been a positive example of what a conscious commitment to racial justice can do in an otherwise stubbornly racist nation. And I think efforts on this front have encouraged colleges and universities to further refine their admissions policies for greater equity and justice all around. There is still plenty of room for improvement, of course, but the pathway is clear.

If Blum truly cared about justice, as his statement implies, he would not have attacked the one system that is working well and causing no harm. Rather, he would turn his attention to fighting the serious forms of racial discrimination that persist in housing, jobs, precollegiate education, the criminal justice system, health care, banking, and elsewhere. There’s plenty of evidence that racial bias in favor of whites in such systems actually do cause lifelong harm to others.

The goal of this lawsuit, it strikes me, was never about racial justice or civil rights, but about restoring a form of injustice that serves to preserve the inequitable status quo. I know that Blum has denied that this has been his goal. But it’s hard to see how attacking an admissions system that creates fair access and a racially diverse student body among a pool of fully qualified candidates can be viewed as a moral good.

A key argument in favor of dismantling affirmative actions is that we’ve come a long way as a nation and that the consideration of one’s race should no long apply. T’would be nice if this were true. But racial injustice and imbalance still tilt the scales toward white Americans. A key statistic is that of family net worth. At the start of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the net worth of white families was ten times that of Black families. Today? The net worth of white families remains ten times that of Black families. When it comes to college admissions, I read recently that middle-class Black students are far more likely today to attend schools with fewer resources than their middle-class white peers. As a new study, highlighted in the New York Times, notes, even as top colleges and universities aim for greater diversity, they still favor the wealthy by a significant margin; the wealthy are admitted to Ivy League schools at a higher rate than the average student. So even when it comes to college experience, even in an era of affirmative action, Black students remain at a disadvantage.

There are plenty more statistics one could point to that demonstrate racial inequities in American life. If you are looking for a good source of information on race and economic justice, a great place to start is with Matthew Desmond’s recent book, Poverty By America.

As for Asian Americans, a majority disapprove of the Supreme Court decision and resent feeling as if they are being used as a wedge, in effect, to dismantle civil rights. Many leaders of the Asian-American community have also spoke out about the harm this decision will do to their communities. As Aarti Kohli, executive director of Advancing Justice’s Asian Law Caucus, noted, “This ruling will particularly harm Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and Southeast Asian communities who continue to face significant barriers to higher education.”

I don’t want to go on here about what I see as the faulty and reductive logic in the court’s decision and in Justice Roberts argument. I imagine you have read plenty on the subject and have a clear opinion. I mostly wanted to go on record again in favor of admissions practices that improve the make-up of the student bodies at top colleges and universities so they closely represent the nation’s citizenship regarding race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, and more. I also want to go on record in support of colleges and universities in their efforts to create a broadly diverse student body — including matters of nationality, background, interests, talents, and experience — in order to offer a dynamic learning community. The research is clear on both fronts: creating diverse student bodies is both a just practice and smart educational policy.

As Harvard said in response to the decision, the university remains committed to “the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”

We’ve come too far in our collective efforts to improve access to higher education to let this decision stop us in our tracks. We know that the results of such efforts have been positive and beneficial to the society as a whole. In fact, one recent pole notes that 63 percent of Americans support affirmative action in college admissions. The Supreme Court decision has created another hurdle to this work, but I know there are plenty of smart, caring folks who are working hard at the moment to develop new admission systems to achieve the desired outcomes.

I hope the rest of us will support them in finding this path forward. And I hope that all of us will do what we can in our lives to embrace and support antiracism broadly. Racism has been a central disease in our nation since its founding. It continues to thrive when we make no effort to counter it.

Michael Brosnan is the senior editor for Teaching While White. He is also the author of two books of poetry, The Sovereignty of the Accidental (2018) and Adrift (2023).

Toward an Ethic of Mutuality: The Work of bell hooks

In working on an essay recently about Wendell Berry and his book-length essay on American racism, The Hidden Wound, I came upon a related collection of essays by bell hooks, belonging: a culture of place. In her book, hooks (who always used the lowercase) references Berry often and with deep respect. Although Berry is a white man and hooks a Black woman and outspoken feminist, they share a number of core views that, for both, rose out of their childhoods in Kentucky and from their decisions as adults to return to live in the state. Their paths in academia, as students and professors, took them both to California, New York, and elsewhere. But in time, they felt the need to return to Kentucky in order to reestablish a connection to the land and to that all-important sense of community they found there. Turns out, this move also drove them both to write often about the link between environmental justice and racial justice.

Writer and social activist bell hooks

Hooks’ essays in belonging: a culture of place were published in book form in 2009, though they were individually published at various points over the previous decade or two. In all, the essays are compelling, essential works for their insights into what it takes to build a racially just America, as well as for their observations about the troubling impact of capitalism on our views of and connection to nature. As I read, I found myself jotting down numerous passages. One stood out for its direct link the work I do related to education — and that I know is in the hearts of all educators striving for change in our schools and communities.

In “Again — Segregation Must End,” hooks, who died in December 2021 at age 69, explains her return to Kentucky, particularly to the town of Berea, where she would eventually become a fixture in the community and serve on the faculty at Berea College. She admits she knew little about Berea before her visit as a guest lecture years earlier. But she quickly embraced the town — which was founded in 1855 by John Fee, a white abolitionist, and dedicated to the principles of antiracism. The work of antiracism is immensely challenging everywhere in the nation today, but the efforts being in made in Berea, and elsewhere, gave hooks the hope and energy that enabled her to dedicate her life to this work — to her belief that change can come.

In the end of the essay, hooks writes:

“Those of us who truly believe racism can end, that white supremist thought and action can be challenged and changed, understand that there is an element of risk as we work to build community across difference. The effort to build community in a social context of racial inequality (much of which is class-based) requires an ethic of relational reciprocity, one that is anti-domination. With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality.”

What hooks understood so well is that mutuality is a key element in our positive social evolution. And when mutuality thrives, we thrive.

We Must Dismantle the “Matrix” from Within: Liberatory Practices in Counseling

If our goal in schools is to help all students thrive and become their best selves, equity and inclusion cannot be an afterthought. There is no way to support student mental and emotional health without challenging the multiple and interconnected ways in which the culture of white supremacy privileges some “selves” above others.

For school counselors and school psychologists this work poses a challenge. We live and work within systems designed to socialize youth into specific cultural values and norms that have emerged from our country’s history. These values and norms are never neutral. They prime and shape behaviors in ways that reinforce the inequitable and exclusive status quo. So we find ourselves operating in a system that we are also encouraging our schools to help dismantle and our students to transcend and transform. To put it another way, we work within and for the very “matrix” that has shaped and influenced us and that we know to be the cause of harm. It’s quite the conundrum for those of us committed to walking an antiracist path.

I was recently speaking with another educator, also a parent, about the challenges of integrating antiracist values into our educational practices. We were noticing, for instance, how we often go to great lengths to teach students how to win arguments, and at the same time wonder why, as a society, we seem to have little ability to handle disagreement or have any taste for finding common ground. In the vast majority of schools, individual achievement and competition are so valued and rewarded that we still don’t know what our world could look like if we centered collaboration and cooperation as key values — if we focused on lifting each other up and sharing resources. Because we operate within systems ultimately designed to both teach and maintain inequities and disparities, it often feels virtually impossible not to be complicit in them.

If you are a school counselor or psychologist who is wrestling with a sense of disconnect between your work and your professional goals, there are steps you can take to align them better. For one, it is useful to think of antiracist work within systems through a “harm reduction” lens —“harm reduction” not being the end goal, but a useful approach while wider transformation is still afoot. In other words, while we are unlikely to disentangle ourselves completely from the legacy of white supremacy, we can still incrementally disrupt it. If we engage in hurt reduction as a regular practice, we are helping to put enough pressure on the system itself so that, in time, it will not be able to function as structured.

At its core, the process of incrementally enabling for more and more liberation in our students rests on two key assumptions about white supremacist values and norms. We can assume that:

1.  these values and norms are woven into the protocols, policies, and practices of our jobs and institutions. Therefore, even our counseling practices and therapeutic goals will reinforce oppression rather than promote liberation — at least to some extent.

2. these values and norms impact everyone in the system. Therefore, every concern a client brings to us is shaped by white supremacist ideology — at least to some extent.

Pretending this is not the case will not make the continued noxious effects of white supremacy any less real. On the other hand, assuming that our clients’ struggles and the way we try to help them are intertwined with oppressive forces, allows us to see where we fall short of our liberatory goals and make it possible to do something about it.

I think of this approach as a way to change “the matrix” while working “within the matrix.”

This transformative practice is not easy. Indeed, at the start much of it may sound overly abstract or theoretical — and perhaps disconnected from our work. The reason for this is that, living within the matrix, most of us are not aware of our own racial socialization in our everyday lives. It takes a sustained period of conscious attention to understand how wide-ranging this socialization is. My neighborhood, my home ownership status, the friends I have, my child’s school options, what I do for a living, how easily or confidently I navigate my career, how much leisure time I have, where I travel, what I value, my access to health care, my degree of physical and emotional safety and so on — all have deep roots in my sociopolitical standing within white supremacy. While none of these outcomes may be wholly determined by my identities, my identities are profoundly impacted by them in myriad ways. Seeing these roots is seeing “the matrix.” And seeing our own lives in context of the “matrix” allows us to see the “matrix” in the places we work and in the lives of the students we want to support. The more we see, the more we can disrupt. And the reverse is also true: if we don’t see these tentacles of white supremacy in our own lives, we are bound to reinforce an oppressive system in our work lives. There is no neutral standing.

A book I co-authored with best-selling author and educator Dr. Ali Michael, Our Path, Our Problem: Collective Antiracism for White People, provides a step-by-step framework to optimize antiracist lenses in both your own life and work. And in this book chapter you’ll find detailed clinical examples of how to apply this framework to clients.

But even before you get to these, or engage with other antiracist resources, it helps to develop a set of questions that provide a lens of equity and justice to your work. For each student you meet — no matter the gender, race, or socioeconomic status — consider asking the following questions from a systemic perspective:

•  Where does the student internal sense of worthiness, self-efficacy, and life aspirations originate?

  • E.g., where does a cis-girl’s doubt of her mathematical abilities come from?

• Who benefits (both in terms of finance and power) from that internalized sense of self?

  • E.g., who ends up having easier access to high-paying STEM jobs or decides what research questions get answered?

• Does the student’s concerns emerge from failing to live up to white supremacist values and norms, from fitting too well within them, or from trying to dismantle them?

  • E.g., continuing the example above, what is the role of stereotype threat in a student’s academic success and professional aspirations?

• Do the tools I’m offering support the student to better fit within white supremacist values and norms or to better resist them?

  • E.g., does assertiveness training for a marginalized student without a larger classroom/faculty intervention help the student in question or put the student at greater risk?

• Should my interventions be geared toward increasing resilience or toward empathy building in the student?

  • E.g., is empathy building in mainstream students needed to help create a culture of inclusion? Is empathy intrinsically antithetical to white supremacist thinking for some, and a survival mechanism for others?

• Are counseling or advocacy skills needed to support this student?

  • E.g., is it the student’s worldview that needs intervening, or a school policy or norm. 

If we want to chip away at white supremacy from the ground up and the inside out, we must move from taking symptoms at face value to considering them always and for everyone in their cultural, historical contexts. Doing anything else inevitably reaffirms and reinforces the status quo.

The good news is that, to the extent that we dare to become a conscious, collective force within our schools, we have tremendous power. Let’s harness it!

Eleonora Bartoli, Ph.D., is a consultant and licensed psychologist specializing in trauma resilience-building, and multicultural social-justice counseling.

Black History Month, 2023

We are grateful that, back in 1986, an act of Congress dedicated February as the official month for spotlighting Black history and culture. It’s important that all of us have this dedicated time to both engage in public education and celebration of historic and present-day Black contributions to society and culture. It’s important that we have this time for Black Americans to take part in their own community celebrations. It’s important we have this time to center public conversations on the question on what we collectively need to do to create true and lasting racial justice in the United States. And it’s important that we have this time to offer special programs in our schools that help students develop an accurate understanding of our history as well as the remarkable contributions of Black Americans.

Like so many others, we believe that these celebrations and conversations need to take place year-round. But as a baseline, the designated Black History Month ensures that, at least for one month, we will collectively elevate Black history and culture nationally to the center of our attention. It is a key element of our larger collective efforts to create a multicultural, antiracist, just culture.

So it was with dismay that we woke on February 1 — the day to kick-off these conversations and celebrations — and read about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s efforts to tamp down and outright silence conversations about, and academic study of, matters of race and society. This news was also linked to the College Board’s announcement that it was making changes to the soon-to-be released AP African-American History course curriculum that would eliminate or push aside references to key figures in contemporary Black culture.

We have plenty to say on DeSantis’s political maneuvering and his efforts to suppress the study of Black history and culture in schools or any conversation about race. Among other things, we support the petition signed by over 40,000 people, including Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, that encourages the Florida State Board of Education to override Gov. DeSantis’s decision to reject the AP African American Studies course and demands that the board establish a plan that ensures all K–12 students have the opportunity to learn about Black history.

But here our focus is on how, amid all the troubling political and cultural resistance and misplaced fear, we can help educators navigate their own professional and person antiracist journeys and continue to develop the skills and knowledge to serve all children well. Below are links to some recent resources that we hope will help in this process.

While the question of the teaching of Black history and culture is foremost on our minds today, we also don’t want to forget about the recent brutal murder of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers. The question of racial justice in our legal systems is one that impacts the lives of all of our students and communities and intersects with the K-12 curriculum in numerous and important ways.

The Urgency of Black History: A Collection

For the start of Black History Month, Education Week’s Guest Editor, LaGarrett J. King, put together a valuable collection of articles for educators. In his introduction, King, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo and the director of the university’s Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education, reminds us that the teaching of history is not about instilling patriotism. Rather, “history is about helping us understand our shared humanity and the decisions people make in the context of their time.” More poignantly, he adds, “We are not a historically mature society until we acknowledge that everyone’s history matters.” 

All of these articles are of value to our readers, but we are particularly grateful for Wintre Foxworth Johnson’s piece, Black History Belongs in Early Elementary School. Johnson, an assistant professor in the department of curriculum, instruction, and special education at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, makes the essential point that the elementary school years are the ideal time to start engaging students in conversations about race — a point we make at every opportunity.

Open Letter to Florida Teachers

Monika Williams Shealey, the senior vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Rowan University, wrote this open letter to Florida teachers encouraging them to collectively support and lobby for the state’s acceptance of the AP African American Studies course. We like Shealey’s overarching argument that diversity, equity, and inclusion and antiracist education are not, as some would argue, “code for ‘let’s divide our society by focusing on race.’” But more valuable to our readers is her central argument that our collective understanding of what a good education entails has evolved for the better over the past two decades. “There was a time when many in our broader community believed that education should focus solely on developing skills in reading, writing, and mathematics,,” Shealey writes. “We now know that specific skill development is only one component of education. The needs of our global society demand that we also facilitate broad-based knowledge acquisition, critical thinking, creativity, intellectual curiosity, and acceptance of self and others as cultural beings.” This work includes helping all students develop a clear understand of the racial history of the United States and its impact on our culture today.

Teaching for Change

Teaching for Change — an organization promoting education that provides students with the skills, knowledge, and inspiration to be agents of change for a better world — offers numerous resources to help teachers center antiracism in the classroom. Key among these are the steps involved in establishing an antibias school program. In conjunction with Rethinking Schools, Teaching for Change also offers The Zinn Project. Since 2008, the Zinn Education Project, through its curricular offerings, has introduced students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. Teaching for Change also supports Black Lives Matter in Schools, with February Action-Week campaigns focusing on four main goals, including mandating Black history and ethnic studies in schools.

Access to Advanced Courses

A key element of antiracist education is ensuring that all students are treated equally regarding grading and access to advanced courses. The Education Trust, committed to advancing policies and practices to dismantle the racial and economic barriers embedded in the American education system, has untaken research that identifies the barriers that keep Black and Latino students unequally represented in advanced coursework. The Trust also offers steps states, districts, and schools can take to change this trend for the better —  including expanding advanced coursework opportunities in schools with a majority of Black and Latino students and providing the encouragement and support that enables students to engage with and succeed in such courses. A key part of this process is supporting teachers in their antiracist teaching practices.

The History News Network

After reading about the recent proposed changes to the AP African American History course, the History New Network posted this short response, with links to articles written by a number of the Black writers and scholars the State of Florida doesn’t want students to read. For educators, Robin D. G. Kelley’s Boston Review piece, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” is valuable in helping educators delve deeper into the actual experiences of Black students in school and college. Kelley, the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, writes that the campus protests during the start of the Black Lives Matter movement “articulated the sense of betrayal and disappointment that many black students felt upon finding that their campuses failed to live up to their PR.”

 Keeping Our Empathetic Connections

While the question of criminal justice reform lies mostly outside the purview of schools, we know it impacts the lives of all of our students in ways that require our attention. For teachers, it’s important not to let race-based incidents — such as the murder of Tyre Nichols — wash over them. As Ali Michael, author and co-director of the Race Institute for K-12 Educators, notes in her thoughtful essay, all of us who are white need to dedicate time to read deeply and reflect on what we read. Simply skimming news headlines is the pathway toward cultural numbness. It’s important that we pause and reflect — and, yes, to cry at times. Michael offers us her method of staying attentive in order to staying engaged in antiracist work — in schools, the community, and the nation.

Prepare Yourself for Tomorrow

A good companion piece to Ali Michael’s is a recent post from our wonderful workshop colleagues, Tamisha Williams and Lori Cohen. On Williams’s Newsletter, the two educators and school consultants write about the importance of preparing yourself for tomorrow. We appreciate the clarity of their professional checklist regarding how one processes one’s thoughts and feelings following a public incident of racial injustice or violence. It also offers teachers a way of supporting their students in their processing of these public acts of violence. A key goal for white educators here is to “recognize the impact of white supremacy on the events that have unfolded and keep learning about antiracist actions you can take.”

Additional Resources

We know there are many places one can turn now to get the news or to read reactions to the news. We hope the above resources will help specifically with understanding how to respond as educators in a way that leads toward needed change. The Teaching While White website also offers numerous other resources — including resources focused on the role of white teachers in antiracism. We hope they help you with your teaching practices and keep you grounded in the essential work of supporting all students well.

The Wound Is No Longer Hidden

In their new book, Learning and Teaching While White, my colleagues Elizabeth Denevi and Jenna Chandler Ward reference Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound, a book-length reflection on race in American first published in 1970 — with a couple of updates since. As they note, Berry was one of the first white writers to deeply examine the effects of modern-day racism on white people. At the time of The Hidden Wound’s publication, most whites generally thought of racism and racial inequities as a problem affecting people of color only. Whites working for racial justice saw it mostly as a matter of offering more opportunities for blacks in particular. There was little effort given to examining the historical and ongoing negative effects of our racially divided nation on white people themselves.

So Berry makes the central point crystal clear at the start of his book:

“If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself. But I am sure it is not so simple as that. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost is perhaps greater than we yet know.”

This passage has been referenced often in subsequent books and articles on antiracist work. And indeed, it’s quite prescient in its observation of our culture. The years to follow would prove Berry correct. Racism has hurt us all and continues to do so today. The effects vary by race, gender, and individual experience, but the damage is clear all around. The decades of slavery, the era of Jim Crow, and the ongoing racism and racial inequity may have made life relatively easier for white people than for people of color, but they have nevertheless damaged everyone in this culture in various ways.

Contemporary research has proven this point over and over — and, indeed, Berry’s essay has been foundational in future studies of whiteness and white identity in American society and underscore the argument that all of us have an obligation and interest to engage in antiracist work.

But re-reading The Hidden Wound recently, I had a sense that few of us, myself included, have dug deep enough into Berry’s argument to understand exactly how wide and deep the wound actually is, then and now. It’s not just the immorality embodied in a system that favors some over others. It’s not just that it’s wrong to participate in the suffering of others. It’s not just that the inequities by race keep us from fulfilling our collective democratic principles. It’s not just that racist laws, practices, and perspectives divide us and have kept us from learning from each other. It’s not just that the white power structures have denied opportunities to black people and other people of color that might otherwise have led to greater discoveries and contributions to society. For Berry, it is all these things. But it’s also that racism has led us to create a badly misshapen society that is driving us toward ruin. It has enabled a hyper-focus on economics to dominate our democratic society in unhealthy ways. It has supported and encouraged the maintenance of a power elite that has created and sustained an underclass and has used the poor for its personal gain in ways that have made ours the most economically inequitable nation in human history. It has corrupted the key spiritual concepts of Christianity and moral living. It has undermined our ability to build and maintain a thriving community life. It keeps nearly all of us anxious and uncertain about our place in society. And it has been a key factor in our separation from the natural environment — enabling us to wreak unprecedented havoc on the natural world and refrain from taking action that would prevent future damage.

Driving home this latter point, Berry reminds us that native populations in North America lived in a kind of sustainable harmony on this land for 10,000 years or more. We’ve trashed the place in less than 300. 

If you are staring at any of the above points with questions or doubts, I encourage you to read The Hidden Wound. Berry’s points are well presented and defended. That the majority of white people can’t see these wide-ranging effects clearly, Berry argues, is due to the fact that, in order to maintain unjust structures, we are encouraged not to examine them. “However conscious it may have been,” he writes, “there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional.” And the point of this ongoing obfuscation? To “shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism.” Part of this obfuscation, of course, is how we’ve imagined and taught our history in school for generations. “As a people,” Berry says, “we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.”

Change is inevitable, of course, but the kind of change we need only comes about with greater clarity of vision and purpose. In much of Berry’s writing — in The Hidden Wound and in many of the other 50-plus books he has written — the central argument is a moral one based on principles that underpin our democratic founding but that have never managed to take center stage. The book encourages nothing less than the reimagining of our democracy — with greater attention paid to environmental ethics and local communities.

I see elements of Berry’s argument in the efforts of educators who are working for more racially equitable educational systems and programs. But I think it’s worth looking more deeply at what exactly we’re hoping to achieve — and how our push for racially equitable schools is connected to other essential changes in our democracy and how we talk about those changes in our schools. Beyond the question of academic content, it’s also worth thinking more deeply about the need to protect students from the kind of academic and social structures that aim primarily to create a system of winners and losers — a system that has been at the heart of racism and economic exploitation since the start. 

In rereading The Hidden Wound, I found myself wincing at Berry’s choice of language in places, but I admire his willingness, especially in context of the late 1960s, to examine his life and work closely and consider the broader implications. As he puts it, “Once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.”  

It's telling to me, too, that writer bell hooks — a Black writer and activist for gender, racial, and environmental justice — was a fan of The Hidden Wound and of Berry’s life and writing more generally. In fact, in her early academic career, hooks taught The Hidden Wound in her college courses — and would go on to reference Berry’s work steadily in her own writing over the years.

For all of us white educators who work in schools and care about the future of this nation, it’s important that we keep Berry’s perspective in mind. It’s important that we engage in, and encourage others to engage in, greater personal reflection on the development of better community and cultural practices. In doing so, we can see the connections more clearly. We can, for instance, see the intersection of antiracist work and environmental advocacy. We can examine the way racism has undermined our religious lives and our sense of spirituality more generally. We can understand the need in schools for real balance between academic achievement and multicultural community development. As the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the question of the admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, Berry’s essay can help us come to a clearer understand of what diversity is, how it functions in schools, and how it contributes to community and national health and happiness.

Wendell Berry’s wide-reaching exploration of racism asks a lot of us — but his aim is the kind of moral outcomes we all seek and yet seem to struggle so hard to achieve in this nation. In a conversation with Berry, bell hooks once asked him about the complex threads of connections he makes in his writing. Berry responds, “Well, we are under obligation to take care of everything and you can’t be selective if you are going to take care of everything.”

Michael Brosnan is the Senior Editor at Teaching While White. He is also the author of two books of poetry — The Sovereignty of the Accidental (2018) and ADRIFT (2022). More at www.michaelabrosnan.com.

Native American Heritage Month Reflections and Resources

Last week, I was working with students from my instructional leadership class and we were talking about the importance of November being Native American Heritage Month. While we agreed that schools should pay attention to Native American history and culture year-round, we felt that the November focus has value. Schools everywhere are still in desperate need of antibias resources, current information, and teachers who can ensure that our Native representations are accurate, address present topics, and explore the diversity of American Indians and nations across our country. 

In light of this need, I asked my students to review the Native American resources we’ve posted on Teaching While White, and then discuss the implications for instruction. Here are three takeaways, among the many, that stood out to me:

1. “There is so much of my OWN misinformation that I need to unlearn and interrogate so I don’t perpetuate myths and stereotypes with my students.”

2. “I just realized that everything I currently teach about Native Americans is all in the past.”

3. “We need to include what is happening in our local community. I’m going to schedule some time to meet with our local tribal community and see how we might partner with them on an initiative.”

These sentiments, and others, echoed those shared by Claudia Fox Tree — educator, social-justice advocate, and member of the Arawak Nation — when we interviewed her for our podcast, “Recovering the Voice of Native Americans in the Classroom.”  They are also available on Fox Tree’s website, where she offers excellent resources on a variety of topics that can help teachers enhance their pedagogical approaches and curriculum. 

At Teaching While White, we continue to be so grateful for Claudia Fox Tree,  her work and scholarship.  And we encourage educators to focus their attention this month on improving their knowledge of Native American history and vibrant culture, as well as its intersection with all other subject matter. We encourage educators to engage in reading, listening, and reflecting, then to examine, revise, and strengthen their antiracist commitment as we collectively affirm Native American voices and experiences in all of our classrooms.

White Men Reimagined

Editor’s Note: This open letter from Jason Biehl, founder of Change The Narrative, is in response to an earlier blog post, “‘Calling In’ Our White Male Colleagues,” by Elizabeth Denevi and Jenna Chandler-Ward. Biehl’s letter is part of a series of response from white men on their perspective on white male engagement in antiracist programs, as well as on their own experiences with antiracist work.

Thank you for this “calling in,” Elizabeth and Jenna. It is right on time and I’m sorry that this white male resistance continues to be part of your experience in 2022. I felt a lot of resonance and familiarity while reading your words. 

I attended an all-boys prep school for nine years, so my healing journey from that experience, and white male patriarchy more generally, has been lifelong. When I reflect on my own journey, including becoming an African-American Studies major at UW-Madison at age 20 (in 1997), I see that continuing to seek out and learn from multiple nondominant perspectives — through readings, films, art exhibits, podcasts, as well as in-person relationships across race, gender, and class — has been key to my growth. In the process of learning that my experience was not THE American experience, I was able to engage and critique this country, and eventually myself, more honestly. I learned to embrace discomfort — to push myself out of my comfort zone, to be vulnerable, experiencing butterflies in my stomach and my voice shaking and cracking while asking a public question. This has happened often enough over the years that it’s no longer scary. Rather, it’s essential to who I am. So many Black people have been (and continue to be) patient, gracious, have invested in me, even when I’ve lacked perspective and humility, when my whiteness was weaponized and my masculinity was toxic. 

I’ve done years of self-work in an effort to heal and to become resistant to white supremacy and patriarchy, to overcome defensiveness or the impulse to make deflections and stay emotionally disconnected in the ways you’ve mentioned. That said, there are still times when resistance crops up. Occasionally, my partner will suggest something, say a house project, and my first impulse can be to resist. Perhaps there’s some root in financial stress, or in laziness? Yet, with time, I often come around, and she’ll say, “Oh, you needed it to be your idea.” What causes me to not be on board with her idea from the start? 

In my work with colleagues at Change The Narrative, we’ve named the need for white people to lean into honest conversation about race, racism, whiteness, and equity. But, yes, our experiences mirror yours. Cisgender white men are largely absent from this work (a Black woman friend and colleague recently called me “a unicorn,” which felt affirming and sad at the same time). When they do show up, they often show up in challenging ways, if not as an outright problem. In our antiracist workshops, some white men come around. But many don’t. They seem locked in deep-rooted entitlement. They remain stubbornly defensive, resisting reason, logic, and truth.

I’ve experienced more progress and possibility with young people, which makes sense. In a workshop at a Virginia school, a sophomore white boy completely pushed back on the existence of systemic racism. In response, I mentioned Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, the racial profiling along I-95 that showed how Black drivers were pulled over in numbers that more than doubled their percentage of the population. Unwilling to lose the point he said, “Well, maybe Black drivers are speeding more?” to which I responded, “Well, I certainly don’t believe that.” I’d given him something to reflect on and it felt like an opening. 

At a school in Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to facilitate an “interrogating whiteness” unit for the entire 11th grade. There was a conservative, gun-loving student who was resistant, and disengaged, early on. “You just want me to feel bad about being white,” he said.

I responded, “Actually, it’s the opposite. I want to be honest about our collective history and the advantages that have come with being white, so that we can show up in more healthy ways, compassionate and connected to our common humanity.”

By the end of the trimester, he wrote an email to me expressing concern at the anti-Asian violence that was happening across the country, as a result of the coronavirus and our previous president’s racism and hatred. I’ll never forget his empathy in the moment, and I could feel how much he had grown in a few months. 

You ask, “what keeps you engaged in the work?” For me, it is this: my own healing and growth leads me to believe that we can, and must, heal and grow as white men in this country. We need to love better. I see this as an embodied and revolutionary act. Back in 2016, volunteering with the Education team of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) DC, I felt quite alone as a cisgender white man in this work. Realizing that I lacked and longed for intimacy with other men, I organized a Masculinity and Whiteness reading group. I was not looking for going-to-the-bar camaraderie, but for men with whom I could question, soul-search and reckon, regarding our role in our communities. Thanks to some excellent facilitation from two men experienced in this work, we’ve been able to get vulnerable and dig into our real issues, ranging from personal matters to processing key public events such as Charlottesville, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and so much more. After Ahmaud Arbery was murdered, we wrote and read aloud a collaborative letter to the 12-year-old son (or grandson) of one of the killers. After the horrific murders of Asian and Asian-American women in Atlanta (and ongoing anti AAPI violence), we dug into the theme of fetishization, porn, and our own dating histories.  

While it has evolved into a second group (with some overlap), more than five years later this group is going strong, dedicated to our own healing, education, and action. So, I share your goal of bringing more white men into practicing antiracism, and am open to ideas for doing this work professionally, with leaders in schools, nonprofits, and businesses. It feels needed and aligned. 

We are in a moment, in fall 2022, where there is a lot of fear and reticence in doing this work while fascism and white supremacist terrorism have been on the rise in this country and within the Republican party. It is extremely painful that white men who look like me marched with tiki torches and racist slurs in Charlottesville, attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, and commit mass shootings in schools and public places.  

There is a parallel between white men being in crisis and this country being in crisis. 

If our men’s group has taught me nothing else, it’s that our masculinity is our primary obstacle to showing up as allies and in solidarity for racial justice. I believe that if we created more circles and communities for white men — encouraging each other to be vulnerable, to learn and to heal with regard to race, gender, and class — that interdependence, humility, generosity, and action rooted in solidarity and love, would come about more organically. 

The work is personal, thus can be painful. It requires a strength far different from the messages of domination as virtue that most of us received growing up. But we have to persist. We have to find the courage to realize our own stakes in the work of dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy for the sake of our collective future.

Jason Biehl is an antiracist educator, born and raised in D.C., with over 20 years of experience working in education with youth from diverse backgrounds. In 2017, he founded Change The Narrative, and works collaboratively as an educational consultant to further racial equity within organizations and schools. As part of the Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ DC) Education team, he worked on curriculum development and organized a Masculinity and Whiteness Reading Group, which has become meaningful and transformative for white men in this work. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a major in African-American Studies and received his Social Studies teaching credential from San Francisco State University. He can be reached at jbiehl@gmail.com.

White Men Respond — Additional Reading

• White Men Respond, by TWW Staff

• Understanding the Atmospheric Nature of White Supremacy and Patriarchy, by Nick Hiebert

• Manning Up? An Open Letter, by Ryan Virden

• Learning to See Clearly, by Ayres Stiles-Hall

• Listening to Lucy: Why I’m Involved in Diversity Work, by Michael Brosnan

• Planting the Seeds of Self-Reflection, by Maurice Werner

Planting the Seeds of Curiosity and Self-Reflection

As recently as just before the pandemic, I was oblivious to antiracist work, or the need for it, as well as the idea of white privilege. In fact, I would’ve been resistant to the idea and would’ve reacted negatively and defensively. What changed things for me was, as a parent, sitting through an elementary school meeting in which parents and teachers were struggling to address the racial learning gap. For me, it was a literal “wake up” call.  

It wasn’t the fact that there was a huge discrepancy in the scores that got my attention. It was how the parents of color reacted to the suggestions of white parents regarding what to do about the gap. The white parents’ intentions were coming from a good place — wanting to help those in need — but I began to see how wholly inadequate, and offensive, the white parents’ approach was. 

It started with the white parents’ complete obliviousness to the existence of systemic racism. Comments and observations from white parents — essentially that the issue was about parents of color needing to spend more time with their children and engage more in their learning — were met with incredulousness from parents of color. I can see now that the issue was that there was no recognition among white parents that the children of color weren’t on the same playing field as their children. The white parents couldn’t see the cultural and institutional inequities, so they couldn’t understand that anything they did to help their children would not have the same effect if parents of color engaged in the same practices. Even the white parents’ attempts in the meeting to empathize with parents of color went awry. They simply didn’t have the life experience of walking around with darker skin in a white-dominated society. 

The (mostly white) school PTA hired a DEI consultant (who was a person of color) to address the issues exposed in this meeting about inequitable test scores. Part of the engagement to follow involved setting up parent affinity groups; one for white parents and the other for parents of color. When I was asked to join the white parents group, I was more open to doing the learning and the work than I would’ve been had I not attended the meeting. 

The first thing we did as a group was learn more about systemic racism, which included listening to and reading works by the likes of Garrett Bucks and Brené Brown, and listening to the Teaching While White podcast. This further opened my eyes to the depths of systemic racism. So when Garrett Bucks began offering his Barnraisers class, designed to engage white people in antiracist work in their communities, I signed up. Garrett did a great job of rooting antiracist work in the mold of successful community activism. It was not enough to donate or vote; we needed to get out there and be the change we seek. 

So when my employer created a diversity, equity, and inclusion council, I signed up for that as well. And when my community created a Racial and Social Equity committee, I volunteered. In all this work, the key lesson I have learned is to listen and be curious. Know that as much as I am convinced of my own beliefs, I don’t know everything, especially what is in others’ hearts. 

This notion was reinforced when the white parents and parents of color affinity groups were finally connected. Us white parents were so eager to show our black parent peers how much work we had done and how we were prepared to attack systemic racism in our school. It would be an understatement to say that we were shocked to learn that not only had the parents of color not focused on this, they weren’t all that receptive to the fact that we had. They had been laser focused on the issue of test scores and decreasing the racial gap in scores. To them, the answer was more teachers and better teachers who could work with at-risk students of color to help them learn. Another lesson in not knowing what I don’t know.... 

I’m all in on antiracist work now, but the more I learn, the harder I find it to bring other white men into the fold. I become more convinced of the need for this work daily, whether it is because of the events in the news or what I see happening in my own community. But at the same time, I only started doing this work because I became willing to learn and change, not because someone told me to, but because of what I was seeing and hearing with my own eyes and ears. 

Confronting and challenging my white male peers head on has gotten me nowhere. Most of us do not take kindly to confrontation about our fundamental views of the world, even from close friends. So I have taken another tack: asking more questions and demonstrating that I am truly curious about why they hold the views they hold. When appropriate, I offer alternative viewpoints that hypothetically might explain why someone might not agree with them, without challenging their views directly. I also seek out more viewpoints from people of color, whether it is work colleagues, neighbors, other parents at my children’s schools, or even podcasts like, “Be Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, so that I can integrate these viewpoints into my own. 

Of course, I don’t have all the answers. If anyone did there wouldn’t be the need for blogs like this and other antiracism efforts. However, I have found that the best way to grow our ranks is to plant the seeds of curiosity and self-reflection by inviting dialogue with others who view the world differently. Whiteness is a particularly difficult nut to crack because, by design, it is invisible to most white people. If we are to help drive change, our goal must be to both change our own practices and engage our white friends, colleagues, and community members in conversation — striving to make the invisible visible.

As they say in many 12-step programs, “It’s about progress, not perfection.”

Maurice Werner is a lifelong resident of the Washington, DC area and is the father of twelve year-old twin girls. He is an avid baseball fan and enjoys biking, hiking, and traveling. 

White Men Respond — Additional Reading

·       White Men Respond, by TWW Staff

·       Understanding the Atmospheric Nature of White Supremacy and Patriarchy, by Nick Hiebert

·       Manning Up? An Open Letter, by Ryan Virden

·       Learning to See Clearly, by Ayres Stiles-Hall

·       Listening to Lucy: Why I’m Involved in Diversity Work, by Michael Brosnan