Resisting the Pushback Against the Work for Racial Equity and Justice
Generally speaking, we see the election of Joe Biden as a good turn of events for the field of education. It means that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — with her expressed wish to defund public schools and promote for-profit schools — will be leaving the office in January. Whoever is appointed as the next Secretary of Education will more than likely have a background in education (Biden promised) and focus on supporting teachers and strengthening our public education system so it serves all children well. We’re particularly pleased that Biden has appointed Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at Stanford University and president of the Learning Policy Institute, to oversee this transition. We imagine that Dr. Jill Biden, a longtime community college professor, will also help shape the process.
That said, there are plenty of current challenges in the field education. For us, a key concern is the recent backlash to all efforts at establishing racial equity and justice in schools and the nation. We could chalk up this backlash to President Trump and the polarization he has created. But past behavior in this nation also suggests that, regardless of the administration in Washington, whenever there’s a concerted effort to address racism in the nation, forces of resistance rise up.
As Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, points out in his recent book, Begin Again, the history of resistance to racial justice is clear. Following the emancipation of enslaved people, the reconstruction that was supposed to take place turned into the violent Jim Crow era of murder, intimidation, and suppression. The civil rights movement of the 1960s led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, but these, too, were followed by countering measures that limited or outright denied People of Color access to good housing, education, and jobs while also driving a higher percentage of People of Color further into poverty and to mass incarceration on a scale the nation had never seen. The 2013 Supreme Court decision to strike down a central provision of the Voting Rights Act has also made it easier to racially discriminate at the polls in key states.
In Caste, Isabella Wilkerson also points out that since LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, no Democratic candidate for President has won the majority of White voters. In this recent election, the majority of White voters once again chose the Republican candidate — the one with a long history of racist comments before and during his time in office.
To date in America, caste has long trumped justice, trumped the common good and clear efforts to build a true democracy. You’d think we’d collectively be better than this by now. Instead, the nation seems caught in a pattern that is difficult to break — and one that, if not addressed now, we fear can permanently break America.
Whether by design or happenstance, the stories — or, as Glaude puts it in his book, the lies — we tell ourselves about America allow America to avoid addressing the unjust treatment of Black and other People of Color. Martin Luther King, Jr. is broadly admired and celebrated now, but if he were here today he’d remind us in no uncertain terms that we have yet to embrace or achieve the central goals he died for — the goals of securing equal rights and liberties for African Americans and ending poverty, preventing labor exploitation, and creating overall economic justice.
This is the landscape in which we all work now. For those educators who are committed to an antiracist curriculum and teaching practices, and to racial justice more broadly, it’s important to understand this pattern of backlash and how best to respond.
The Backlash
In his recent book This Life, Martin Hägglund, a professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale University, writes, “An indispensable part of the struggle [for racial and social justice], is to clarify to ourselves what is wrong with our current form of life and where we are committed to going.”
Then he adds: “In order to engage the question of who we should be and what we should do, we must recognize that we ourselves produce the communal norms that we seek to defend, critique, or transform.”
In essence, Hägglund recognizes how difficult it is for any of us to see what we’re collectively doing. It takes hard work and a certain amount of courage to step back and study the human landscape to figure out what we’ve gotten right and what we’ve gotten wrong. What we need to strengthen and what we need to change.
The current Black Lives Matter movement is doing this hard work. Its call for whole-scale changes to policing in America — and for addressing systemic racism more generally — is front and center in our nation’s third collective attempt to end institutional and cultural racism. There’s a whole host of community leaders, religious leaders, educators, writers, activists, and others who are dedicated to this work as well. It’s great to see that we have gained momentum. But it’s important to also know that there are others who, for various reasons, want to undermine these efforts. Some engaged in resistance want to change the subject, shift the focus, by saying “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” — as if those pushing for racial justice were secretly trying to harm White people and police. Such misguided responses seem to rise out of a combination of fear and misinformation. Other efforts, though, are more targeted against people who are actively working for change. One recent example of this backlash has been the attacks on the work of Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, and other authors and consultants dedicated to help White people better understand the concept of Whiteness as a culturally created phenomenon that has led to and sustains racial division and inequity and undermines justice.
We’re thinking particularly of John McWhorter’s mean-spirited Atlantic article, “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility,” in which McWhorter’s aim seems primarily to excoriate Robin DiAngelo without worrying about accuracy or offering alternative solutions. While the article drew a great deal of attention, it also seemed to lie outside of the Atlantic’s normal journalistic standards. In its effort to belittle DiAngelo, McWhorter manages to misrepresent the book, impugn her work, and dismiss some many of those who have strived to create a more racially just world.
Brett O’Bannon, a Peace and Conflict Studies scholar, in “It Always Comes After the ‘But,’” carefully deconstructing McWhorter’s attack on DiAngelo — noting in particular the way McWhorter casts “her ideas in the worst possible light, or to such a degree that it completely inverts the explicit meaning of DiAngelo’s text.” He also reminds us that White Fragility is actually “a book focused on issues of systemic racism, white privilege, and its tendency to leave white people emotionally ill-equipped to talk about these matters.”
It’s worth exploring the motivation for such misrepresentation and aggressive personal attacks. But here we simply want to say that such a backlash is not surprising. There’s a pattern, in other words, designed to gird the status quo and dismiss those pushing for racial justice.
The backlash is evident in critics who use the term “Wokeness” to lump everyone who is standing up for social justice together into some kind of misled collective. It is evident in many schools where those standing up for racial justice are dismissed as “social-justice warriors.” It is even evident in clashes among supposedly likeminded people who get caught up arguing about terminology or methods related to antiracist work to the point of stalemate. Overall, the backlash aims to confuse the demands for fundamental dignity and civil rights with demands for privileges. Whether by design or default, it supports the status quo.
Writer Andrew Solomon says that genius reflects “the ability to add something of value to human consciousness.” He encourages us to harvest our “experience in the service of something larger in a way that will be moving or beautiful for the people who encounter it.”
For those who have stayed the course in fighting racial injustice and addressing white supremacy, it helps to understand that backlash is part of the process. It seems it’s always going to come — and even come from people you otherwise admire. So, it helps to have a way to address it.
How to Respond to the Backlash
Here are some steps you can take in response to criticism of your efforts to work for racial equity and justice in schools.
1. Don’t doubt yourself.
Whiteness, by design, flies beneath the cultural radar. But once you see it for what it is — a system that, on average, benefits White people while hurting People of Color — the moral thing to do is work to change the system. All of us who engage in this work, of course, benefit from having colleagues, allies, mentors, and critical friends who will hold us accountable, support us, and challenge us. But we should never doubt the overall goal.
2. Be clear about why it matters to talk about Whiteness.
A great resource is Emily Chiraiello’s article “Why Talk About Whiteness?” posted on the Teaching Tolerance website. In the article, Chiraiello quotes documentary filmmaker, director and producer Whitney Dow, creator of The Whiteness Project: “Until you can recognize that you are living a racialized life and you’re having racialized experiences every moment of every day, you can’t actually engage people of other races around the idea of justice.”
Chiraiello adds: “Dow’s work, among other activism and scholarship focused on whiteness, has the potential to stimulate meaningful conversations about whiteness and move white folks past emotions like defensiveness, denial, guilt and shame (emotions that do nothing to improve conditions for people of color) and toward a place of self-empowerment and social responsibility.”
3. Get your ducks in a row.
The facts of racial inequity are widely available. Find your source, keep good notes on talking points. Familiarize yourself with the roots of racism — which can be traced back at least as far as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, when in response to the uprising the nation’s elite established a more rigid racial class system to divide poor Whites and indentured servants from enslaved African Americans.
4. Embody Martin Luther King, Jr.’s belief that “a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
It’s not always easy to identify the source of threats to racial justice that are deeply embedded in our culture and history. But if you agree with King, you will happily do the work — especially if you are an educator responsible for shaping future generations of citizens through your curriculum and teaching practices. Of course, there are other models of inspiration, too, in addition to King. The point is to find your mantra and repeat as needed.
5. Understand the link between race and poverty.
For those who want to shift the conversation on race to a conversation on class, we would argue that this is fine to do so as long as the conversation returns to race. In other words, it’s right to acknowledge the suffering of all poor people in nation. There are around 14 million White people living below the poverty line. These folks suffer every day and need our support. For the sake of all who suffer, we need to create a more just nation in which all jobs can offer a living wage and in which all people have access to good healthcare, healthy food, and quality education.
Yet, while race and class do intersect, to only talk about class means that we don’t address the many issues related to race, miss the link between race and economic injustice, and thus can’t end systems of racism that collectively make life worse for People of Color than for White people.
6. Figure out how you want to address racism in your personal and professional life.
What can you do on a personal level to increase your understanding of how you’ve been racialized? What do you know and where can you turn for more information? How can you engage on an institutional level to help reshape your school as an antiracist institution? What can you do to improve your antiracist teaching practices? What interpersonal skills do you need in order to talk with and work with colleagues on changing the curriculum and culture of your school?
Clarifying your thinking will strengthen your resolve when faced with challenges.
In particular, we encourage you to consider ways, as Loretta J. Ross, a visiting professor at Smith College, puts it, to call people in, not out — to find ways to engage, not alienate; connect, not separate.
7. Know that backlash is to be expected.
We’d like to say don’t be surprised, but it’s still surprises us that otherwise good people can turn away from the work of social justice when challenged by enough people in the broader culture. This is how movements die. The longer you engage in this work — stay the course, engage in professional development, do your reading, working with colleagues, paying attention to the way you work with students and adults across race, etc. — the more you’ll be able to address any form of backlash.
8. In school, along with supporting Students of Color, be sure to help White students find ways to be who they are while also addressing racism.
For educators, the work for antiracism in schools and society, involves supporting all students well. To this end, it’s important to help White students develop a healthy racial identity and to know there are plenty of examples of White people who have worked to end racism. Teaching Tolerance offers good resources to help with this work. For ways to improve the classroom dialogue and learning about race and racism, we encourage you to read “Evolving Our Narratives About Race in Schools” and “White Fragility in Students” on our website. The site also offers a host of related resources.
9. Need inspiration?
There are lots of place to turn when you feel down. You can certainly look to friends and colleagues for support or re-read books or articles that inspired you to engage in this work. We particularly recommend reading or rereading the work of James Baldwin. He understood the roots of racism in America as well as anyone. He also understood our responsibility to changing our culture. “Not everything is lost,” he writes. “Responsibility cannot be lost; it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”
10. Take it personally — but don’t take it personally.
OK, we know this is confusing. We simply mean that this work involves all of us. On the one hand, we need to personally commit to racial justice in schools and society. On the other hand, we’ve all been shaped by the American culture. For those of us who are White, a sense of Whiteness is in our DNA. We’re bound to demonstrate it at some point. If we are called out for saying the wrong thing or engaging in implicit bias, or if we come to understand that our curriculum has inadvertently supported the status quo and thus hurts students, we can’t let these revelations trigger a defensiveness that turns us away from engaging and changing. A combination of humility and courage can help us stay the course.
Don’t get us wrong. We are in favor of open debate about what matters in society and school. We are just not in favor of disinformation, personal attacks, and efforts that are designed to be hurtful and not helpful. The aim of antiracist work is to create a more just, equitable society. The aim of Teaching While White — the work we engage in — is to help White educators develop the personal and professional skills to do their part to create a more just and equitable society through their work in schools. If you are onboard with this goal, we encourage you to come to greater clarity about your own commitment to antiracist work in your school and community and how you can respond to any and all inevitable backlash.
In his book, How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi is very aware that all the efforts to create an antiracist world are challenging and continuous. The goal is not to expect a perfect world. We couldn’t do it even if we wanted to. But if we stay the course, we will, as Kendi puts it “come upon the clearing of a potential future: an antiracist world in all its imperfect beauty.”
Equally important, he adds, is that we embrace “the basic struggle we’re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human as well.”