Civics Education for Cultural Change
Observing the changing cultural and social landscapes in the United States in recent years, it is not difficult to notice the trend toward a reckoning with longstanding racial injustice in the nation. Educators who are White and work in the predominantly White suburbs or rural regions may assume this trend is primarily the reality and concern of urban areas and believe they can continue to teach as they have in the past. But holding such a perspective is untenable.
Nationally, this reckoning with racism has been slow to come, long overdue, and is nowhere near complete. From the demands to remove monuments that venerate the Confederacy to sustained protests in response to racial violence, broad-scale activism is gaining traction. Schools cannot afford to remain remote from the calls for racial justice. It’s time for all of us in education to step up, acknowledge the problem, and examine how it plays out in our school communities and curriculum. I know many White educators who say they understand the need for change yet remain hesitant to change their classroom practices. For teachers who feel unsure of their role in addressing the subjects of race and racism with students, such insecurity may be palpable but should not engender paralysis. In every subject area, there are ways to step up.
Here I want to speak to White educators who teach history and social studies. In addition to any of the work you do to be an active advocate and ally to colleagues of color, to address and understand your own White identity and privilege, to engage in work to support your students of color well, and to address implicit and explicit bias in your community, there are clear steps you can take in your classroom. In particular, if you are receptive to the imperative to end racism but are uncertain of the connections you can make to the curriculum, there is a natural conduit for this type of teaching and learning: civics education.
I understand that the focus of social studies, and the teaching of civics in particular, has long been debated, as it should be. But I hope it’s abundantly clear that in order to teach about civic engagement today, about citizenship, we need to both make sure we include all students in the conversation and address key issues facing the nation. I also hope its clear that for far too long we’ve associated the teaching of civics with inculcating an acritical stance toward U.S. history.
In other words, civics classes can be — indeed, should be — reimagined to focus on historical and contemporary issues related to racial justice and our efforts to improve our democracy. It’s not just OK to focus class time on adversity and activism, it is essential to teaching about citizenship.
Civics classes can focus on contradictions in the promises and ideals of life in a democracy, past and present. They can intersect with the study of racism and the long struggle for justice. This approach offers needed space to the too-often untold stories of underrepresented communities and encourages conversations about the essential civic questions connected to the concepts of “we the people,” consent of the governed, or forming a more perfect union.
In the summer of 2020, we heard the sustained chant of “Say her name” repeated by hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country. The police shooting of Breonna Taylor and the rhetoric of not erasing her personhood and memory is a message that should be heeded by White teachers as they make inroads into teaching about racism and injustice through civics education.
In school, we need to say her name — and the names of many other Black women who have fought hard for racial justice or who have been the victims of injustice. Tell their stories. Make their agency known to students. It’s particularly important to unearth the history of Black women who have organized, written, marched, performed, and demanded that racism be confronted and the lives of Black Americans improved through racial justice. This is civic education.
For too long, the histories of People of Color have been poorly tacked onto the curriculum in a half-hearted effort to make classrooms appear more inclusive, multicultural, and culturally affirming. To date, in most schools, this effort has been considered a kind of enrichment, supplementary to the “real” goals of learning. Today, there is a clear social imperative to recast this content and these stories as fundamental to the voices and narrative that students are exposed to in school.
More often than not, the message sent in classrooms is that knowledge is objective in spite of the power dynamics at play in selecting, privileging, and displacing information in the curriculum. Knowledge in classrooms is never value-neutral and certain representations take on a degree of normativity while others are excluded entirely. What results is that subjectively constructed knowledge becomes dominant and hegemonic. When this happens at the expense of Black women, in particular, a curricular disservice has implications that reverberate far beyond the school.
Because the history taught in schools contributes to the national consciousness, a line can be drawn from classroom experiences to collective identity formation. As an extension is the possibility for those who are excluded or marginalized in the curriculum to appear as outsiders or the other. Black women remain under-seen in curriculum yet can be woven — should be woven — into history as exemplifying the sort of agency that is fundamental to cultivating students’ understanding of what civic participation is all about.
Poet and scholar Claudia Rankine posed the question, “What does a victorious or defeated Black woman’s body in a historically White space look like?” This question is an entry point into the study of Black women as activists who harnessed the media tools available to them to protest, organize, and raise awareness about racial violence in the United States. This is a civics lesson and these stories merit substantial attention within a framework of civic learning that introduces students to questions of democratic participation, protest, activism, social movements, leadership, and coalition building.
Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Mamie Till Mobley, and Nina Simone all offer valuable civic lessons for students and can be introduced together around a common theme. Each of these remarkable women focused on the insidious reality of lynching in the United States and harnessed their pain and trauma for social change.
Each of these four women endured tragedy yet proved resilient enough to wage public campaigns against the violence perpetrated against their community. Ida B. Wells used journalism and the written word to articulate her stances against lynching. Billie Holiday used melody and her stage to perform haunting renditions of “Strange Fruit,” its lyrical allusions to the brutality of lynching undeniably potent. Mamie Till Mobley published the photographs from the funeral of her mutilated son Emmett in Jet Magazine, using photography to force readers to see the gruesome outcome of lynching. Nina Simone also used music — particularly her song “Mississippi Goddam” — to powerfully lament the frustration of White supremacy and lynching.
Through journalism, photography, and music, these four women offer a template for civic action. They deployed media to disseminate their messages. Each challenged the status quo, which would have otherwise demanded their passivity. They sustained their work over time. Collectively, their efforts spanned decades and generations, from the late 19th century through the second half of the 20th century. This is its own civic lesson about the gradual nature of change and the need to sustain campaigns beyond one moment and one leader.
These are not the only Black women in U.S. history worth highlighting, of course. I offer this list as a sampling that illuminates one potential direction for White social studies teachers to venture as they make inroads toward inclusive and justice-oriented civics teaching.
These four women and their public actions reveal the intersections between calls for racial justice and civic participation. They are inseparable. To teach civics devoid of reference to and immersion in the history and contemporary manifestations of these struggles is to deny students access to the fullness of civic life and the presence of Black women within the pantheon of empowered civic actors throughout U.S. history. If classrooms are spaces where students develop their critical consciousness alongside their capacity for contributing to society, they deserve to witness the enterprise of civic participation. This enterprise is the prerogative of so many Black women. The curriculum should reflect this fact.
Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates bemoans “the system that makes your body breakable.” These Black women acted to change that system. White educators can act for change by harnessing the current energy around teaching a more complete and honest understanding of civics today centering the dynamic stories of these Black women as important and undeniably rich lessons in American citizenship.
In 1939, Black educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune asked, “What does democracy mean to me?” Her answer: a country in which Black people could live “fearless, free, united, morally re-armed.” This vision of democracy does not emerge from the ether. It is arrived at through deliberate work. This work extends into the classroom.
Daniel Osborn is a program director at Primary Source, an education nonprofit committed to promoting multicultural, global, and culturally affirming approaches to teaching and learning. Daniel is the author of Representing the Middle East and Africa in Social Studies Education: Teacher Discourse and Otherness. Osborn’s scholarly background is in Middle Eastern and Jewish History and, also, History and Social Science Curriculum and Teaching, with an emphasis on multicultural and global education. His research explores the relationship between historical narrative construction, collective identity formation, and the portrayal of subaltern communities in social studies textbooks and classroom discourse.