Incidents at Fenway — And What It Means for Educators

Last week, Adam Jones, a player for the Baltimore Orioles, reported that a Red Sox fan threw a bag of peanuts at him (hitting a police officer instead) and repeatedly called him the N-word. A few days later, while Mercy Mungai, a Kenyan woman, was singing the national anthem, another Red Sox fan turned to fellow fan, Calvin Hennick, and made racially insulting comments about the singer. Hennick, who is white, was attending a game with his bi-racial son and his African-American father-in-law. He asked the man to repeat the statement, then reported him to the Red Sox organization.

For us, these two incidents and the responses to them were revealing on a number of levels.

One would expect the Red Sox organization, when called out in the press about racial taunts directed by fans toward players, to express shock and dismay — as it did. One would also expect that the second incident a few days later would result in a racist fan being barred from Fenway (although barring him for life — the first Red Sox fan to ever be barred for life — is actually impressive).

We hope the Red Sox will remain vigilant and respond clearly to any future racial incidents.

But we also think the expression of shock is a bit disingenuous. Our guess is that, to most readers, these racial incidents at Fenway -- and similar incidents at other parks and arenas nationally — aren’t all that surprising. If someone were to take a survey of African-American professional baseball players, we’re fairly certain we’d find that many if not most have been recipients of racial taunts in Fenway and elsewhere. This is probably true of African-American athletes in most sports. We’d also bet that if you surveyed white athletes, they would say that, while they’ve never been the recipients of racial taunts, they are aware of African-American teammates who have been.

After the second incident at Fenway, Calvin Hennick, a former Boston Globe freelance writer, said, “People are feeling very comfortable with bigotry that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

We agree, and could spend time here digging into the reasons why this is so. But we want to focus on what white people can do in response to these incidents. Since this blog is focused on white teachers, we also want to offer a few thoughts for those who may want to talk with their students or colleagues about these or other racial incidents.

Our basic point is that when it comes to addressing racism, the intentions are almost always better than the outcomes. At Fenway, for instance, we have no doubt that the Red Sox leadership does not intend to tolerate racial taunting. But revelations by players both on the Red Sox and other teams make it clear that the use of the N-word and other racial taunting has been going on for a long time. And this is true in most regions of the country. In other words, our white-dominant nation tends to tolerate a certain level of racist behavior as long as that behavior doesn’t rise to the level of press attention or public outcry.

Sam Kennedy, president of the Boston Red Sox, may tell the Boston Globe that the team “wants to be at the forefront of this discussion and try to improve in this area,” but in a better world, it shouldn’t take a clearly offensive racial incident reported in the press for an organization to jump to action.

The problem, as we see it, is that most of us who are white are overly cautious about even mentioning race or acknowledging the larger culture of racism. Some of those who acknowledge it do so in a defensive manner — acting as if every incident is an anomaly, or claiming that such behavior is not representative of them (or, in this case, the organization, the fans, or the city). And then there are some, like former Red Sox pitcher Kurt Shilling, who are quick to attack anyone who claims they are the recipients of racial hatred.

Shilling’s response, in fact, follows a classic pattern, which Globe writer Christopher L. Gasper pointed out in a follow-up opinion piece, “Racial Taunts Stir Up Ancient Pain in Boston.” Whenever racial incidents rise to the level of front-page news, many white people tend to shift quickly into some kind of defensive posture. Gasper argues that, instead of slipping into this defensive mode, the first step should be “admitting there is a problem.” Pretending the incident is an anomaly won’t prevent future incidents and attacking the reputation of the whistle-blower only makes things worse. Open dialogue is a better approach.

It was wonderful to see Red Sox fans applaud Adam Jones the next night — as a sign of support for the player and appreciation for him standing up for racial justice. But applause is not the same as dialogue. We get it that Bostonians would prefer not to have the nation pointing fingers at the city. We know that most Bostonians want the city to be a racially welcoming city — and many do what they can to make that true. But the reality is that city has a long history of racial incidents such as the ones at Fenway. There is much more to the city than this, of course. And Boston is not alone when it comes to racism, not by a long shot. But the city is not free of racism — and this fact needs to be addressed both by those in positions of authority and by those of us who have a voice in schools.

The lessons for educators are clear. There are few, if any, institutions in America where racism isn’t a palpable undercurrent. If the predominantly white professionals in charge of schools aren’t encouraging and allowing the community to speak openly about how race shapes the culture, the undercurrent will survive intact.

“Racism can’t be regarded as Bigfoot, some imaginary menace that few have witnessed and that even fewer believe exists,” writes Gasper. This is the sort of mindset that allows us to act shocked when a public incident hits the press. This is also the mindset that allows us not to speak up when we witness an incident.  

Gasper concludes his piece by saying, “We need to dial down the denial and treat these reopened wounds as serious.”

All of us who are white and who profess a concern for social justice must engage on a more consistent and deeper level. For those of us in schools, these incidents remind us that having an “inclusion” statement needs to be more than a wish to attract diverse students to our schools. It needs to be the key that opens up conversation that acknowledges the truth and the pernicious effects of racism.

Enid Lee, an amazing teacher educator, says we should always “assume racism is operating until proven otherwise.” What might it mean to start from the premise that racial bias is operating? How would that change the way we approach situations?

How might your whiteness impact the way you interact with students? Are there any assumptions you make about particular students based on your own positionality?

Do you have a strategy for engaging colleagues or students if they raise a particular racial stereotype or bias? When you get uncomfortable, “how are you going to lean into that discomfort?” asks Randolph Carter, Director of East Ed. What’s your catch-phrase: “Wow, that makes me really uncomfortable” or, “Can we talk about what you just said later?” after you have the chance to breathe and collect your thoughts.

As a white teacher, can you point to moments in your curriculum when you specifically locate yourself as white and/or teach about whiteness? For example, students get to identify and represent themselves racially either in writing or in pictures. Or, white authors are noted for how they represent whiteness as frequently as authors of color write about race. And, when you teach about immigration, students learn that when the Irish first came to the US, they were not considered white. Be sure to name whitenesswhenever possible.

Ultimately, can we recognize, and then quickly abandon, the little voice in our head that first tries to protect us from admitting racism is happening? The part of us that still hopes -- in the face of all evidence to the contrary -- that racism is “over”? Can we hear it, and then quickly remember that the little voice keeps racism firmly in place? And can we learn to trust ourselves enough to know we can admit racism and the floor will not drop out from under our feet? We must stop treating these incidents as “surprises.” If we know that racism is still operating, we can and must get there first.  Let’s be proactive and not wait for a crisis to address issues of race. 

We would like to hear from any readers on how “you lean into discomfort” in your school. What do you say? Do you have a go-to catch phrase to interrupt bias? Let us know!

More on Foggy Mirrors: Allowing Whiteness in the Classroom

I thought it might be helpful to say more about the notion of “foggy mirrors” and why white kids need to explicitly talk about whiteness, not just race, in classrooms. The specificity is important.

Research cited in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s NutureShock reveals how hard it is for white families to talk about being white and what that means for both them and the society. Rather than talk directly about race, most white parents encourage their kids to “respect everyone.” As a result, many people assume that white children are generally neutral about their interactions with students of color. But it turns out that most white children are unable to connect the abstract notion of “respect everyone” to a clear sense of how to be respectful in racial interactions.

Patricia Marshall, in Cultural Diversity in Our Schools, found that white kids, just like white adults, experience anxiety due to the demographic shifts that have led to larger populations of people of color nationally. In turn, that anxiety can, and often does, encourage notions that white culture is the "right” culture, and that whites are, in fact, losing ownership of what they stereotypically think of as “American” culture.

In such a landscape, school becomes a critical site for learning about one’s racial identity. As Marshall puts it, without teacher intervention:

Students are unlikely to recognize the inherent racial-group hierarchy manifest in the mainstream focus of traditional curricular content and the marginalization of people of color through add-on units in February or any other time of the school year… Educators need to create deliberate learning opportunities that promote healthy racial identities.

And here, perhaps, is one of the most important reasons why white students need to learn about whiteness: “White students with a more developed sense of their own racial identity tended to espouse fewer racist beliefs” (Carter, 1990).  

The research makes it clear. Just talking about race, in the abstract, is not enough; students need to have the time to explore their own specific racial identity. And when it comes to white children, exploring racial identity will not only create students with a stronger sense of self, but it will also help to undermine racism.

Yet teaching white children about whiteness can be challenging. There has always been a strong social norm in U.S. society that sanctions white people who talk explicitly about race. When I was growing up, I was quickly hushed if I mentioned the specific race of a person of color because, as the logic went, to name race was to be racist. And the notion of calling myself “white,” as opposed to Italian or Irish (my nationalities of origin), was the same as calling myself a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It just wasn’t done. That norm, shared widely among whites, had a profound effect on our society. It not only kept racism firmly in place, but also kept white people from understanding they have a race and, thus, any responsibility or agency around racism. “Good” whites did not talk about race, and so they could not be called racist. One result of this today is that many white educators have a difficult time talking with white kids about race. At the same time, most white kids resist this conversation because they, too, have been so strongly normed to either avoid or to challenge any conversation about race.

This combination becomes pernicious in school settings, as noted by Julie A. Helling, a professor at Western Washington University:

White students also get to learn in an educational system that is still predominantly taught by other white people. This creates a level of comfort for white students that might not exist for students of color. While many white teachers are doing great work, racism still exists in the classroom, however unconscious… Quite simply, students of color have to spend much of their energy on racism in one form or another, and white students have that same energy to spend on education. If one’s time is taken up either responding to racist statements or behaviors — or anticipating that these things might occur — one does not have as much energy to put elsewhere.

Without any mirrors to reflect and support their culture, students of color spend a lot of energy navigating whiteness, the dominant culture. Meanwhile, the white students are just swimming along in the water they know so well — or rather don’t even see because it is just that, the air they breathe. So, while the white students’ experience is reflected all around them, the reflection is nebulous. It’s foggy because it is never named for what it is: white identity, unearned privilege, and power.

Helling goes on to describe a really challenging moment in her class when her white students began to push back on the notion of their whiteness. Yet her willingness to stay in it with them, to wade into the conversation, as opposed to running from it, made all the difference. When we have high expectations for all our students — including the expectation that white children can learn to acknowledge and understand what unearned, white-skin privilege has meant and continues to mean — then we are giving them real mirrors. They can see a true reflection, not one that has been muddied and obscured.

And once they know who they are, then they can be in true collaboration with their peers of color.

Works Cited:

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, NutureShock: New Thinking About Children, Twelve, 2011.

Robert T. Carter, “The Relationship Between Racism and Racial Identity Among Whites: An Exploratory Investigation,” Journal of Counseling and Development, 1990.

Julie A. Helling, “‘Allowing’ Race in the Classroom: Students Existing in the Fullness of Their Beings,” New Horizons for Learning, Johns Hopkins University.  http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/multicultural-education/allowing-race-in-the-classroom/.

Patricia L. Marshall, Cultural Diversity in Our Schools, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002.

Foggy Mirrors

The original idea for Teaching While White — our new blog aimed at helping white educators understand their work in a multiracial society — owes its inception to a chance meeting that we, Jenna and Elizabeth, had back in 2009. During a humid DC summer, we came together with teachers from other schools to examine issues of equity and diversity. From that collaboration, Jenna went back to her school to continue teaching and to help found the Multicultural Teaching Institute (MTI). Her work with MTI focuses on trainings and consulting for schools and a yearly conference for teachers. Elizabeth continued with her work with schools on issues of strategic planning to increase equity in schools. We reunited last spring at a professional development conference and in a subsequent conversation the idea for this blog was born.

As white female teachers with years of experience leading diversity work in schools, we feel uniquely positioned to frame these conversations and to shine a light on something that is rarely illuminated: the role, responsibilities, and needed skills of white educators in helping students become racially literate.

Why is this a topic most shy away from? In the United States, white culture has become synonymous with normalcy and even “American-ness.” As a result, attempts to have conversations about how racism is perpetuated by and impacts white people usually leave all participants frustrated. In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, a lecturer at the University of Washington and an expert on multicultural education, explains that the primarily white space within which most whites move “protects and insulates white people from race-based stress.” She goes on to say that these isolated environments “offer racial protection which builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress. This leads to white fragility, where even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”

What is true in society at large is also true in schools.

Typically, the more unearned, racial privilege a student has, the more removed she or he becomes from racial stress and the more isolated against learning the critical skills of adaptability, problem-solving, and negotiating across difference.

Students of color are, more often than not, required to grapple with and understand their racial identity and encounter race-based stress on a daily basis within a white-dominated world. Not only are white students at a disadvantage because of the fragility they experience when they encounter difference but they also often make it through their school careers never knowing that they, too, have a race, and that whiteness impacts the way they move through the world.

There are, of course, a whole host of moral and societal reasons for educators to address race in school from a variety of perspectives. But the research makes it clear that white children are at risk for being unable to navigate a racially diverse and ever-changing world. Most important, this lack of racial self-awareness will leave them unable to locate themselves within this new complex landscape.

Emily Style, equity educator and co-founder of The National SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), created a framework for educators called “Windows and Mirrors.” As Style notes, the framework seeks to:

Explore the need for curriculum to function both as window and as mirror, in order to reflect and reveal most accurately both a multicultural world and the student herself or himself. If the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self, education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education which is committed to affirming the essential dialectic between the self and the world.

Students, in short, should be able to see into their own lives and realities in a mirror and to gain empathy for others through a window into another world.

Schools are adding “different voices” into what they teach to provide more windows. But if white students are never made aware of their own racial identity, nor understand that it impacts their standing in the world, then their racial identity is never explicit. It remains obscured in that feeling that only students of color have a race — that they are different — and once again whiteness passes for normal. Therefore, what should be clear mirrors remain foggy, and that haze creates all kinds of misunderstandings and missteps.

Clearly, teachers are not the only ones who impact a student’s understanding of her or his racial identity, but they play a major role in creating racially literate students, who become adults in an ever shrinking global system. Racial literacy is a complex set of goals, but at its most basic, it is about knowing the history of race and racism in this country and its impact today, and being able to discern how that history, and the beliefs born from it, create systemic racism. It is our job as teachers to ensure that ALL students know their racial history. It’s not just learning about enslavement, or internment camps, or the Holocaust; it also learning about how “whiteness” created all of these atrocities, and how white people are implicated — then and now — and also negatively impacted by racism.

Here’s the tricky part. As Gary Howard, founder of the REACH Center for Multicultural Education, has warned “You can’t teach what you don’t know.” Teachers must be aware of how their race impacts what and how they teach. This blog seeks to explore what teachers are doing in their classrooms to explicitly teach whiteness.

We will focus on the following critical questions to guide our inquiry:

1. What are the best practices for making whiteness explicit in classrooms?

2. What skills do both teachers and students need to become racially literate?

3. How does investigating whiteness impact the identity development of white students?

4. How does investigating whiteness in the classroom relieve or create stress for students of color?

5. How do teachers who do not understand their own racial impact cause stress for students?

6. How do racially literate teachers ease the burden for students?

7. How do we measure success? What does it look like, sound like, feel like to be racially literate?

Seeking answers to these questions is not a frivolous pursuit. Most schools’ mission and inclusion statements demand that we consciously pursue racial equity within our institutions. It is an expected skill, just as utilizing technology in the classroom is an expected skill. Yet there is often little or no training or even discussion on how to move forward in this essential work

And here’s another foggy mirror: While 83 percent of K–12 teachers are white, 45 percent of the students in K–12 schools are students of color, thus ensuring a teacher population that does not reflect the racial makeup of the student body. It would be nice if we had a better racial balance among teachers. But even then, there’s clear evidence that white educators need to better understand their racial identities — why it’s important for them, their students, the school, and the community at large.

We hope that Teaching While White helps to defog the mirrors so that all of us who “teach while white” can see ourselves, our students, our institutions, and our work more clearly.

Read Jenna and Elizabeth’s bios here.

Works Cited:
Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2011.

Gary R. Howard, We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Classrooms,w.Teachers College Press, 2006.

Emily Style, “Curriculum as Window and Mirror,” http://nationalseedproject.org/about-us/timeline/26-latest-articles/41-curriculum-as-window-and-mirror.