Where We Go from Here: Lessons from Derek Chauvin’s Trial

As Judge Peter Cahill read the verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd, the camera zoomed in on Chauvin’s face, and I suddenly found myself wondering about all of those educators who taught Chauvin in school. How did they feel in this moment, hearing the jury’s verdict convicting him of murder on three counts?

I’m relieved that Chauvin is being held accountable for the murder of a black man. I’m grateful that a white police officer is finally being convicted for heartless and illegal brutality. But I’m not celebrating. For one, I can’t help but think about George Floyd’s family, especially his daughter, Gianna, who, at the delicate age of six, has been robbed of one of the most precious gifts, the embrace of her father. I’m thinking about the pain that Ma’Khia Bryant’s family is currently enduring. I also know that one just verdict does not translate into racial justice in America or into the kind of police and social reform we so desperately need. We still have a long way to go on both fronts — and there remain many forces of resistance working to undermine such efforts.

I don’t feel sorry for Chauvin and yet, in the most humane version of myself, I am struck by the way in which he, too, has been caught up in America’s long-raging racist storm. I’m struck by the way our government and community practices can infuse a young man with lies about human value — and how these lies, over time, can ignite the flames of one man’s racism and lead to such brutal results. I’m struck by the way our nation has enabled Chauvin to believe that because he is white he could kneel on a black man’s neck, that as a police officer he could kill a defenseless man and lie about it afterward. I’m struck by the way he could do all this without a shred of concern for George Floyd’s humanity or life. Without a shred of remorse. And now Chauvin and his family will pay the price. 

We are all responsible for our behavior, of course, but sociological theory makes it clear there are numerous ways in which we are all influenced and shaped by our families and friends, by our schools, by the institutions in which we work, by national politicians, by movements in the broader culture and how those movements are expressed in and elevated through social media. We act in and are acted upon by our society.  

This is why it’s Chauvin’s teachers that I keep coming back to in my mind. I want to be clear: all those educators who taught Derek Chauvin over the years are not responsible for his violent actions. Yet I can’t help but wonder how they feel, knowing that they are part of this broader social system that failed in this case. A core premise of schools is to help all American children develop into caring, contributing citizens. So I wonder how his teachers felt during the trial. Were they devastated? Did they wish they had done more to teach Chauvin about justice, help him develop a deep understanding of the historical roots of racism and the need for and importance of racial equity? It may be unfair to say that his teachers failed him, maybe not. But I do know that, for all of us who work in schools, we must ask ourselves if we have done everything we can to develop our students into caring citizens — into people with an ingrained respect, love of humanity, and a dedication to justice. We cannot be responsible for the actions of each individual we teach, but we are 100% responsible for what we teach them. As educators, our call to action, then, is to remember always that our children will embody what we teach them and what we don’t teach them. 

In an ideal world, this trial would be a moment of collective pause. One in which we as a nation stop and ask ourselves not only how we let things get this bad, but also what we are going to do next. I hope we all understand that, while justice was served in this one case, our nation continues to fail black and brown bodies. I hope that we all mourn the loss of George Floyd and empathize with his family and community. I hope we all feel sorrow for the deep loss that Gianna Floyd no doubt feels — one she’ll carry with her for life. I also hope we appreciate the tireless and persistent activism we’re seeing now on behalf of racial justice. While we condemn the rising racism in America over the past four years, we should find a way to be optimistic that, with this verdict, our nation has taken a significant, even monumental, step toward justice. There have been transformative moments in our history that have forced us to face ourselves as individuals and as a society. I hope we’ll see this trial and verdict as one such moment — as a tipping point for transformative change. 

Because I work in the field of education, I particularly want all of our schools to refocus with deeper conviction on matters of social and racial justice within our school communities and curricula. Along with anything else we do in school, we all need to teach racial literacy. We need to teach our kids that Black lives truly matter. And we also need to commit to facing the parts of ourselves that require the most growth, in order to do our best in helping to create a just society. More than anything, on a heavy day, in a complicated year, we need to remain committed to love. 

Jadihel Taveras is head of school at Esperanza Academy.

It Feels Like Society Keeps Trying to Count Me Out

The first time I had the feeling of being counted out by society, I didn't know how to respond. This was in my senior year of high school, Winter 2004. Thinking about next steps in my academic career, I brought a Norfolk State University application to my high school guidance counselor hoping she would assist me in filling it out. I had known the counselor for some years and heard she was “the expert” I could turn to for support. Being the first in my family to even consider college, I also had no one within my circle who could help. 

I should say here that I am a Black woman, and the counselor is White — as were the vast majority of adults during my time as a student. The counselor invited me into her office and took the application from my hand, while motioning for me to have a seat. I assumed she would look over the application and guide me through the process of filling it out so I could present myself as a good candidate. Instead, she turned and dropped the application in the wastebasket and told me I would do really well in trade school. Trade school, she said, would prepare me for the work field. She then proceeded to sign me up for a local trade school while I sat stunned and dejected. When I left her office, I felt too ashamed to tell anyone else that I had even thought about going to college. 

I eventually shook off the counselor’s low opinion of me and applied to college, where I thrived and got my degree in education. In fact, in 2012, when I became a teacher, I ran into my former guidance counselor. We were working in the same school. When I reminded her of our previous conversation, she apologized — though she also said she did not remember the incident.

Still feeling a bit stung, I accepted her apology. I knew I needed to let the incident go. I couldn’t allow her to write any more chapters of my life story. 

Sadly, however, this wasn’t the only time a White adult in school tried to count me out. As noted, upon receiving my Bachelor’s degree, I became an educator. This was my way of putting the pen to the paper in my life story, a way to rebuild my self-esteem and prove society wrong.

But society wasn’t going to make it easy for me. As a young Black teacher, I had to endure a painful professional meeting with my principal, who made it clear that my college, as she put it, “had done a disservice by giving me a degree.” To this day, I’m not sure what she was referring to. She provided no concrete examples or evidence for why she thought I was an ineffective teacher. Her criticism really bothered me because I was an unsupported first-year teacher, one of three educators of color in that school. I not only worked hard to get there, but I also had an exemplary record. Tears streamed down my face for days. But again, I didn’t want her to hold that kind of power over me. So, once more, I shook off the put-down. This time I re-enrolled in my university and quietly worked on a double Master’s degree. I didn’t do this to prove the principal, or anyone else, wrong. I got my double Master’s degree because I wanted to be a phenomenal educator who could support students well — especially students of color. I also knew I needed to try to persevere whenever society tries to count me out.

Now as an educator, I lead teacher professional development sessions in culturally responsive teaching. I want to make sure that all teachers support all students well. I want to see that students of color, in particular, break through barriers and shatter glass ceilings on their way to successful careers in school and life beyond. I love my work. It’s my passion, my calling, my way of showing society to be careful who they try to count out. It’s also my way of helping to build a better society, an antiracist society.

But even now, I can still run into educators who look through me. Recently, I met my daughter’s eighth-grade teacher on Zoom. It was in the fall of 2020, three weeks into virtual classes. This was the first time the teacher and I had a chance to connect — and sitting there with my baggy white T-shirt overlapping my cocoa brown skin, my brownish-blonde balayage locs, I could not mask my excitement about meeting the teacher so, together, we could help my child succeed in a high-school level math class while in eighth grade. 

But disappointment came quickly. The meeting went all wrong. The teacher couldn’t even fake a smile the entire time we talked. Her demeanor, tone, direct critical statements toward my daughter and me were so disrespectful and unprofessional. The teacher, who is White, acted as if she understood my daughter better than I did. She talked down to me as if I did not have a place — or perhaps didn’t know my place — when it comes to my own child’s academic journey. She ended the conversation by saying she wanted to immediately demote my daughter — this hard-working child of color (who has an IEP) — to a lower-level math class. 

So, here I was, once again hammered by the feeling that society was still trying to count me out. To make it worse, I was witnessing the way society wanted to count my daughter out, too.

Sadly, this teacher’s attitude toward my daughter is not unusual. I know that many other parents of color have had similar experiences with White teachers. I am determined, of course, to help my daughter succeed. But it would be so much better for her and other children of color if White educators would take more care, be more supportive, and understand what they need to do to help all children succeed. In my professional and personal experience, I know it can be done.

Related to my work helping develop culturally responsive teachers are my efforts to help other parents of color understand how to be assertive in the academic world. I help them understand the importance of building a supportive, caring team around their children of color. I also want students of color to know and actively hear that they have strengths, too. But wouldn’t it be better if this message were coming from every educator, too? Wouldn’t it be better if all educators worked to ensure the confidence, competence, and connection for all students while also finding ways to productively partner with parents? 

There is a new generation of educators who truly want to equip students of color and their families with the necessary tools to ensure their voices are heard. They want students of color and their families to be seen and respected. They want students of color to get the kind of education the teachers would want for their own children. The most impactful educators support students of color by meeting them where they are and growing with them from there. These teachers know that safety and acceptance, with no biases or judgments, must be the foundation for every interaction with students of color, but also that respect has to be worked for and earned. 

Unfortunately, not all White educators have come to this understanding. In my work to help educators become culturally responsive, a central element is helping White educators understand how to talk with and support students of color and their families. Overall, it starts with educators committing to bringing their best selves to the learning partnership with students and their parents. What does it mean to bring your best selves to your teaching practice? 

When it comes to classroom practices, I encourage you to focus on the following:

•  Learn about your racial identity and how it plays out in your work in school. Take the time to dive into your past and upbringing to better understand what might allow you to feel superior to your students and families of color — and how such feelings are counterproductive to teaching. 

• Engage in the professional development related to antiracist education and culturally responsive teaching. This will ensure that you grow as a teacher — especially in your ability to relate to students of color and their families. 

• Check your mindset daily. Be careful that your actions, intentional or otherwise, are not counting certain students out!  

• Stop counting children of color out of advanced education opportunities. This includes students with IEP’s. More often than not, students of color are unfairly tracked to lower-level courses. Too many White educators hold low opinions and expectations of students of color and even lower opinions and expectations of students of color with IEPs. A key aspect of culturally competent teaching is that you hold and communicate high expectations for all students.

• Focus more on engaging in student-centered learning and reshaping your curriculum so it's culturally inclusive. These are central elements of both culturally responsive teaching and quality 21st-century teaching. 

In terms of developing strong relationships with parents of color, I encourage the following:

• Start with the obvious: There is never a reason to talk around or down to a parent of color, or blatantly ignoring them. And you should never yell at a child. There should never be a moment where a parent of color feels like you are disciplining their child for them. Keep the real expert, the parent of every child, at the forefront. 

• In the spirit of collaboration with parents, create an open, two-way system of communications — so you know their expectations for their child and they know your expectations for all students.

• Get to know the cultural background of all of your students. If possible, visit the homes of students of color and their parents. Think in terms of earning their respect and trust.

• Invite parents of color into the school and your classroom and make them feel welcome. Host family nights to get to know them and invite them back as an expert around a cultural tradition or topic in their family. Support and empower parents of color in taking part in parent-teacher organizations and related committees. Send to each home newsletters that celebrate the work you and the students do collectively.

• Don’t make assumptions about a child’s academic aspirations. Ask. Then support them.

I often imagine how differently the conversation with my child’s 8th-grade teacher would have gone if her teacher had an understanding of and had acknowledged within herself the full impact she can have on my daughter’s academic journey. My greatest hope is for this message to help other educators understand that the vast majority of parents of color hold their children to the highest expectations. What they want from teachers is a shared commitment to helping ensure the best outcomes for their children. The growth of students of color requires educators to check their biases so they can see students of color for all their potential greatness. Only then will we really start to see more positive shifts toward shrinking the racial achievement gap in education and doing our part to build a truly antiracist society.  

What I want is for no students of color to ever feel counted out of society.

Shay Carter-Shifflet is a certified Culturally Responsive Teacher and the Diversity Resource Leader for her elementary school. She is a wife, mother, and dedicated educator in her eighth year of teaching and looking to make a difference in the education system everywhere, starting within her hometown.

Whiteness at Work: On the Use and Abuse of Radical Candor in K-12 Schools

In the summer of 2020, against the background of widespread national protests against police violence, frank conversations about anti-Blackness unfolded around the country. In addition to discussing once again the depraved violence of racist policing practices, we, as a nation, endured a reckoning regarding the impact of racism and anti-Blackness in a variety of workplace settings. From corporate, higher education, and tech fields to the world of art, food, and fashion, few industries emerged unscathed. 

Over the last few years, scholars and activists have sought to expose  the structures of the nation’s White supremacist work culture. (See, in particular, Matthew Desmond’s article on the link between our current economy and plantation life, as part of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project.) Consequently, much of the national conversation in the summer and fall of 2020 focused on the inner workings of such a culture — from race-based pay gaps and disparities in hiring and promotion to the daily slights and microaggressions suffered by employees who are people of color, and more.

These issues have also surfaced within the nation’s K-12 schools, both public and private, and are driving important and long overdue conversations on what equity, inclusion, and justice should look and feel like in our schools. What is distinct about the White supremacist work culture in our schools, however, is the form it tends to take. In schools, we are more likely to confront what I’d call a “soft” White supremacist culture — a term that encompasses various forms of racism seething just below the workplace surface but that are carefully masked in politeness. This kind of soft racism, it turns out, is embodied in the leadership of all types of schools, even — perhaps especially — those we associate with the liberal left. And though the word “soft” may lead one to believe the racism is less significant than harder, more direct varieties, it is just as deleterious to morale and dignity in the way it produces and reproduces a White supremacist work culture. 

Such a culture damages everyone within schools. But for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), this workplace environment is particularly toxic — undermining students’ ability to learn and thrive and for educators to push for needed curricular and cultural change. For those involved formally and informally in leading diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at schools, soft racism has been a major challenge in their work to support students and educators of color and to guide institutional change. One result in schools is the vicious phenomenon wherein BIPOC DEI leaders and educators cycle in, out, and through companies and schools at an alarming rate. In schools, this revolving door hurts not just these educators, but all of us — students of color, most especially.

While it is important that we render visible these damaging and insidious workplace norms, it’s also important to think carefully about how we collectively respond to them. In the last few years, many schools have embraced an approach to institutional change known as Radical Candor — a concept designed to improve organizational culture through direct, honest conversation and feedback. On paper, Radical Candor sounds like an ideal approach to help schools break through the culture of politeness and surface issues of racial inequity and injustice that need to be addressed. But engaging in Radical Candor requires attentive, knowledgeable, self-aware leadership. It can be done well or poorly. It can lead to institutional change or reinforce the status quo.

The term “Radical Candor” was developed by Kim Scott, a high-tech entrepreneur and organizational consultant. At its core, Radical Candor is an organizational approach designed to break through the wall of reticence (or politeness) to get at institutional issues that need to be acknowledged and addressed. With the concept, Scott sought to introduce a corporate management style that is relationship-centered and focused on transparency, honesty, and trust-building. The argument essentially boils down to this: care personally, challenge directly. The emphasis on care is essential. According to Scott, being a good manager requires a tremendous amount of “emotional labor,” which, while “the most depleting part of the job,” is “the key to being a good boss.” 

When Scott’s book on Radical Candor first appeared in 2017, it was initially greeted with widespread enthusiasm and led to the launch of a Radical Candor executive education company, a podcast, and a new and improved edition of the book — all in the span of two years. But the revised edition of the book in 2019 strikes a decidedly less confident, more cautious note than the original. In the new preface, Scott opens with an anecdote demonstrating how the Radical Candor philosophy has been, much to her dismay, co-opted and adapted by bad-faith actors, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not. As she learned, “some people were using Radical Candor as a license to behave like jerks.” She goes on to discuss the ways that one should actually apply the Radical Candor philosophy to organizational change. 

 In recent years, I’ve noticed how the notion of Radical Candor has migrated to the world of K-12 education, shedding some of its most critical features along the way. In addition to the challenges Scott notes above, the Radical Candor approach in education is often wielded by those in power — especially White managers who have yet to begin their work as anti-racist allies and who predominate within the highest tiers of K-12 administration — as a tool to demand disclosures from BIPOC that are to their personal, psychological, and professional detriment. This kind of use of Radical Candor is not about transparency; it is intrusion. And such intrusion is in line with Scott’s own fears about how her work has been misunderstood and misappropriated. As Scott states, “Relationships require some privacy.”

According to Scott, not only has Radical Candor become a cover for too-direct critique in general, and thus what she terms “obnoxious aggression” on the part of some managers, but it has also been interpreted as an invitation that we are welcome, indeed entitled, to the inner lives of others. Therefore, when used incorrectly or understood incompletely, the notion of Radical Candor can chip away at “psychological safety” and our ability to create a “productive, happy culture.”

Scott’s observation is important. However, even when used appropriately, the framework contains potential major drawbacks for BIPOC. After the book’s publication, Scott, a White woman, found herself challenged by critiques that her work did not sufficiently take into consideration the risks BIPOC run should they wish to adopt a radically candid approach with their White, White-passing, and White-adjacent colleagues. As she heard time and again, Radical Candor is “more dangerous for women than for men, and even more dangerous for Black women than for White women, for gay women than for straight women.” 

Ironically, in an act of radical candor, critics of the approach have asked Scott directly, “Are you sure Radical Candor is safe for people who don’t have the kind of privilege you do?” 

Within the predominantly White world of K-12 education, it is well-established that BIPOC educators experience racial battle fatigue. These dynamics are heightened in the feel-good environment of schools — particularly liberal-leaning schools — where educators are frequently enjoined to “bring your whole self to work.” But this invitation neglects the reality that, for some of us, bringing “our whole selves” to the workplace is dangerous, personally and professionally. Why? Because in a school culture where the balance of power and authority is held by White people, it is personally and professionally risky for those without power or authority to say what they really think about sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression in the school culture and work environment. Is it safe for a woman of color in a predominantly White school to point out the various biases she has experienced directly or noticed among other colleagues? What would she suffer if she were to ask a White supervisor who is unwilling to consider his or her White identity to do just that? 

Even in schools that pride themselves in trust-building, there are very often barriers not to be crossed. To transgress those boundaries is to court controversy and often invite severe consequences to one’s professional standing within the organization.

For the vast army of women of color who lead DEI work and report to White men in senior positions within their schools, the perils of being subjected to a misinterpreted version of Radical Candor are high indeed. As I’ve heard time and again from my colleagues, in the hands of some White male leaders who have yet to undertake both anti-sexist and anti-racist personal introspection, Radical Candor winds up being a mandate for enforced transparency and “vulnerability” on the part of BIPOC who work under them. Often, they are asked to share the confidences of fellow BIPOC students and colleagues. They are publicly encouraged in staff meetings to share their grief about the pain of racism as a way to activate the empathy of White colleagues. They are then asked to listen to and provide emotional support to White male colleagues who need assurance that they are “good” people, even if their actions (and inactions) fail to demonstrate real anti-racist commitments. 

The problem is this: A selective application of the Radical Candor concept in schools winds up being less in line with the intended spirit of Radical Candor — honest conversation that leads to needed institutional change — and more reminiscent of White male entitlement to the emotional lives of women, especially BIPOC women. Indeed, Kate Manne has recently written extensively about this phenomenon in her book on the subject, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.

What I’ve noticed in working with schools is that the culture of politeness and the use of Radical Candor tend to mix like oil and water — as apt to create more damage as to do any good.

In their efforts to lead institutional change, it is important for educational leaders to understand that the notion of “nice” takes on a specific valence for BIPOC and more often than not brings us back to the White supremacist workplace norms that scholars and activists have identified over the years. In workplaces, the discourse of nice preaches that any form of disagreement is taboo. In this atmosphere, voicing concerns or reservations about bias and oppression within the community is easily construed as aggression in a culture that proclaims it is conflict-averse. For BIPOC, the culture of nice in equitable institutions constantly breeds inner conflict. They frequently find themselves torn between calling out oppressive structures and keeping their concerns to themselves lest they suffer retribution for challenging the White power structure. This inner conflict, of course, is yet another sign of a toxic work culture. In addition, the enforcement of a culture of nice contains certain worldviews that function too often to silence the voices of BIPOC by claiming that they would be listened to if they would just speak in the “right” tone. “Nice” is thus weaponized against BIPOC, used as a silencing tool. Combine this with the fact that BIPOC are exposed to versions of obnoxiousness and aggression that masquerade as Radical Candor and we have the perfect storm of conditions for a workplace climate steeped in soft White supremacy.

Given the severe psychosocial toll this workplace culture takes on our colleagues of color and, by extension, our students of color — not to mention the damage it does to the mindset of white people and the overall quality of our school community and program — it is high time for us to disrupt these dynamics within our institutions. 

Here are some suggestions for White educators in leadership positions:

1. By all means, embrace the spirit of Radical Candor but understand its limitations. Seek out other frameworks that build the courage and compassion necessary for challenging conversations in the workplace. I recommend Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s Thanks for the Feedback, Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations, Stephen M.R. Covey’s The Speed of Trust, or these resources from the Better Arguments Project. Consider discussing these ideas in a professional reading group to help ensure full comprehension.

2. Accept and respect boundaries that your BIPOC colleagues may erect. Hopefully, this article has demonstrated how and why Radical Candor doesn’t always work well as a workplace philosophy for BIPOC. Now, too, you may have a better understanding of why some BIPOC might have had to build walls to begin with — to protect themselves. Try to see this as a rational response to the irrational world in which we all must live. Some are already too vulnerable in this society to make themselves even more vulnerable at work, especially if they have had negative experiences trying to do so in the past. 

3. Begin and continue your education as an anti-racist. In addition to educating yourself on race relations and Whiteness in this country, find ways to live the lessons you are learning. More than lofty words and phrases, quiet action is the surest and most effective way of building real, authentic, trusting relationships with BIPOC colleagues in your life. 

4. Form anti-racist White affinity groups where you can speak with your White colleagues about the ways in which you may unconsciously prop up White supremacist work cultures of the hard and soft varieties. Use the links in this article, and perhaps this article itself, to help spur on those conversations. 

5. If you have the resources, bring in external consultants who can help you uncover varieties of Whiteness at work within your school. I emphasize that these folks should be external for a few reasons. First, they are more likely to have expertise on this niche subject, and thus more likely to lead it effectively. Second, they are less likely to suffer politically and professionally than you and your like-minded colleagues from delivering content that others might find tough to hear. Third, external consultants bring a critical outside perspective that uncovers problematic dynamics internal to the workplace, dynamics to which insiders of the organization may have understandably developed blind spots over the years.

Nimisha Barton is a scholar-activist and diversity and inclusion consultant who works with schools and private colleges and universities. She is currently working on her second book, Just Future: A Brief Guide to Abolitionism in Education.

Teaching Racial Truth in America: This Year’s Black History Month Is a Clarion Call

Black History Month this year follows a long disturbing year of violence against Black Americans and an appalling rise of White supremacy nationally, culminating with the White nationalists’ attack the U.S. Capitol in early January. Clearly, there is much to talk about, in and out of schools.

We agree with critics of Black History Month who argue that the magnitude of Black history cannot be contained within just one month. More to the point, in schools, Black history needs to be understood as central and inseparable from U.S. History — and, thus, should be threaded throughout the curriculum year-round. To that end, we urge educators in all subject areas and grade levels to reexamine their curricula with this goal in mind. 

Until that day, however, having Black History Month is better than nothing at all. This year, in particular, February offers educators the opportunity to start the process of digging deeper into Black history and culture in America — including Black contributions in all areas of study — while also examining with students, in age-appropriate ways, the incidents of racial violence and injustice in contemporary society. For educators, we also think it’s worth connecting the dots between some of the problematic curricular practices within K-12 American education and the White supremacy that fueled the sedition by White nationalists at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. These insurrectionists, after all, were educated in our schools.

To date, it seems, we have collectively lacked the will to dispel American myths about race and racial history — including the myths embedded in the culture at our nation’s founding. Our Declaration of Independence, to take the most glaring example, invokes the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as reason for the colonies independence, while these very same colonists stood on stolen land and offered no such dignity to the human beings who had been living here for 10,000 years or more. The Declaration of Independence also pronounces that “all men are created equal” while most of our founding fathers enslaved Black people. Ten of the first twelve U.S. Presidents owned enslaved people. The other two, the Adamses, rented them. Yet to date, schools still downplay this racist dichotomy — or, as the Trump White House’s disturbingly politicized 1776 Commission Report does, excuses such behavior because slavery was in wide practice at the time. 

When it comes to Black history in America, our schools have been willing take small steps in recent years, acknowledge some core elements of Black history and culture, but we continue to dismiss its centrality in American history and society. It makes good sense to teach about Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but we need to go far beyond and much deeper than a barebones outline of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. We need all Americans to have a clearer perspective on the full range of our racial history from the founding of our nation, through major historical moments and movements, to current events and contemporary culture. We need to make this curricular shift because it’s the right thing to do. We also need to make it so that when future politicians try using fear, lies, mythology, and conspiracy theories to divide us by race for their own political gain, we will collectively see these immoral acts for what they are. We won’t rise to the bait as so many Americans did this past year.

With a day left in the Trump administration, the White House published its 1776 Commission Report in a last-ditch effort to create division and promulgate myths and lies about our history while simultaneously attacking those of us who are asking that the telling of our history be honest and inclusive of all people. To add insult to injury, the administration released the report on Martin Luther King Day. Mainstream historians are clear: what the commission calls a “pro-American” curriculum is in reality politicized propaganda, a pro-White Supremacy curriculum. Boston College history professor and Substack phenom Heather Cox Richardson, writes, “Made up of astonishingly bad history, this document will not stand as anything other than an artifact of Trump’s hatred of today’s progressives and his desperate attempt to wrench American history into the mythology he and his supporters promote so fervently.”

We are glad that the Biden administration has moved quickly to disband the 1776 Commission and take the report off the government website, but the fact that it came into existence at all speaks of the power in politics — that a group with a bully pulpit can widely promote political views that aren’t aligned with truth. American citizens can only resist these efforts if they are offered a yearly diet of truth — and schools are central in this work. 

At Teaching While White, we see the 1776 Commission Report — and all related efforts to diminish or erase the history of People of Color in America — as forms of curricular violence. The omission of not only Black history but that of Native Americans, Latinx, Asian-Pacific American, and other historically marginalized people is designed to render the contributions and realities of more than 42% of the American population as insignificant, at best.

Of course, the erasure of historical truth also threatens the grasp on reality for White people. Once the myths are solidly planted, then reinforced, many White people can come believe that the country’s accomplishments, progress, and history is owed to them. Then, when presented with a more accurate, factual information on race, White people can start to believe that they are the one’s under threat, the ones at risk of being erased. Allowing White people to believe that that they are at the center of everything and reinforcing that myth in the telling of American history is also violence. As James Baldwin says in A Talk to Teachers, “As long as our intention is to maintain the myth... [it] means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children — some of them near forty — who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.” 

Our childish belief in White domination and superiority has been on full display for far too long, and racial maturity is long overdue. 

Our schools are designed to educate students for both their personal success in life and for engaged citizenship. We can’t do this well if we don’t teach students the truth and if we don’t help them — each and every one — develop a strong, honest sense of identity and belonging.

It’s right to examine the steps the founding fathers took in establishing our nation on democratic principles. But it’s also right to examine the shortcomings and missteps at the start of our nation that continue to reverberate today. We must teach explicitly about power, systems of advantage, colonization, and marginalization and their role in American history and today. We need to equip our students with the critical-thinking skills to analyze and call into question media and political messages that aim to prop up the myths of meritocracy, White saviorism, and rugged individualism. We also need to acknowledge and celebrate the full-range of contributions of Black Americans to society — over time, in all fields — as well as the contributions of Americans from other currently marginalized groups.

In his Talk to Teachers, James Baldwin also notes that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” This February seems like the ideal time for all of us to commit to the process of long-needed curricular reform. Below are some resources for talking to students about the insurrection on January 6 as well as for teaching the truth of our country’s “larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible” history. 

• The 1619 Project

• Teaching Hard History: American Slavery

• Teaching History’s Black History Month Resource Collection

• Center for Racial Justice’s Black History Month Resource

• Evolving Our Narratives About Race in Schools

• Resources for Teachers for the Days After the Attack on the U.S. Capital 

• Responding to Insurrection at the Capital

• How to Teach Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb”

Jenna Chandler Ward is the co-founder of Teaching While White. Michael Brosnan is the Senior Editor.

Insurrection and White Complicity

Two weeks into 2021 and any residual feeling of a Happy New Year has disappeared with the craven acts of the U.S. President encouraging a willing mob of White nationalists to attack the U.S. Capitol with the goal of undermining the democratic election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. As many others have said, this insurrection on January 6 that left five people dead and caused extensive damage to the U.S. Capitol was at once shocking and yet completely predictable.

 By the time you read this blog entry, you’ll have no doubt consumed extensive news and commentary on these events. At this point, we mostly want to underscore the way the nation’s continuing history of racism enabled the election of Donald Trump, fueled mob action on the January 6, and led the Capitol Police to at first nonchalantly meet this mob of White supremacists carrying Confederate flags and deadly weapons intent on following the President’s call for violent action on his behalf.  

Some have suggested that these MAGA-hatted criminals are members of the conservative fringe in this nation. But to us and many others, they clearly represent an outward expression of the White supremacy that has dominated this nation from the start and that still lies close to its heart. In an interview on MSNBC, Brittany Packnett Cunningham pointed out that at an entirely peaceful BLM protest in 2014, police declared it illegal to stand still for longer than five seconds, and protestors were forced to literally “walk in circles to prevent arrest,” yet these rioters were allowed to occupy the floor of the U.S. Capitol. This mob, Cunningham notes, erected “a noose at a building that enslaved African-Americans built.” She accurately points to the complicity of elected officials, media outlets, and law enforcement. The Proud Boys and other Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6  are, in other words, not the fringe but the embodiment of 244 years of widespread national racism that the powerful in our nation collectively try to cover up, pretend doesn’t exist, and at times, outwardly support.  

We continue to hope that moments of blatant racial hatred such as this will be impossible to ignore and will command a national racial reckoning. But given that there have been many similar inflection points and that racial injustice continues to be a central storyline in America, we know that the kind of change needed will happen if we not only name the racism, but keep front and center the history of racial power embedded in the founding of this nation. Our role as educators requires that we tell the truth, both about the history of systemic racism and how it evolves into events such as the insurrection we saw unfold at the Capitol. In other words, a conscious focus on antiracism must be at the forefront of all American institutions — especially in our classrooms.  

In its condemnation of these events, the New York Times Editorial Board said that it is “easier to diagnose the causes of the chaos than to craft solutions.” We do not entirely agree. In many cases, we have known the way forward but have lacked the will and perseverance to make lasting change. In fact, there are and have been many hardworking, morally driven, dedicated teachers, politicians, intellectuals, writers, religious and community leaders, educators, and others, who have offered solutions designed to move this nation from a faux democracy to a true one. As James Baldwin noted in his speech and essay “A Talk to Teachers,” “It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, ‘I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.’ The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people.” 

When it comes to action, we’re thinking in particular of the recent efforts by Stacey Abrams and other Black women in Georgia, to increase voter registration, which in turn led to the election of Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, the latter being the first Black U.S. Senator elected in the South. This is the kind of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-the-work-done response that is needed now — and the kind of leadership the nation needs. In particular, this country needs to follow the leadership of those most directly impacted and marginalized by racism, People of Color, if we are ever to stop the cycle. 

At Teaching While White, our stated goal is to help White educators develop the skills to teach effectively about racial identity and racism to all children. Implied in this work is the expectation that our schools will strive collectively to be antiracist institutions, which means schools have to explicitly name the ways they have colluded with racism along with how they want to challenge racism system wide. We also want the U.S. Department of Education to work much harder to support antiracist education. This work includes everything from the way schools are financed to the way national standards and curricula are shaped to the rules that protect all children from harm, and more.

Over the coming year, we’ll have a great deal more to say about this most recent push for racial justice and equitable education. Becoming an antiracist educator, of course, is an ongoing, constant process. There are times when we feel overwhelmed, and this may be one of those times for you. The important thing is that we cannot give up. 

For our White educators, we want you to double-down on your work to develop your antiracist practice and to work with your colleagues to make substantive curricular and institutional change. Remember that working in isolation makes shifting our practice more challenging, so don't work alone. And it helps to have models we can look to for encouragement. We’re turning to Stacey Abrams — and hope White educators will join us in acknowledging her work and also channeling her energy and drive in the push for transformation we know our nation needs. 

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.”

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. 

Evolving Our Narratives About Race in Schools

Teachers around the country are looking for ways to improve the dialogue and learning in their classrooms about race and racism. As we have noted in previous posts, students need to engage in these conversations and lessons so they can develop a strong understanding of their own racial identity and the identities of others. When they do this, they are in a position to analyze how racism operates as a system and to develop their skills to both interrupt bias and support racial justice. 

Currently, too many conversations about race with students remain simplistic and often follow familiar and unhelpful themes. Students of Color — which include Native, Black/African American, Latinx, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and multiracial people — tend only to see themselves represented in the curriculum via racial oppression, positioned as victims of White oppressors. At the same time, resistance movements are glossed over and often told through the lens of “exception” — the story, say, of the one Black person who made it to freedom or who fought segregation to play major league baseball. Conversely, Whiteness continues to be presented as the norm in most curricula. Indeed, the assumption tends to be that the person we are reading, studying, or talking about in school is White — unless stated otherwise. Typically, the only time Whiteness is named explicitly is in the context of racist White people, the active oppressors. Students don’t often learn about those White people who have stood or stand in solidarity with People of Color to challenge racism. 

The goal in teaching about race and racism is certainly not to whitewash the history of racial terror in this country, but to offer a more complex narrative in which White students can see a different way forward other than being either silent or oppressive, and Students of Color can see themselves outside of the relentless stereotypes that continue to pervade the curricula in U.S. education. It is not an either/or world. So we need to stop offering students simplistic and inaccurate versions of history and racial identity, often relying on myths and stereotypes as the frame for conversations on race in school. We need teachers, in other words, to develop more critical and accurate narratives, nuanced portraits that embrace racial identity and challenge racism. 

This moment in our nation’s history feels like an opportune time to reassess the ways we teach and learn about race in the classroom and to reflect on how students see themselves racially. Rudine Sims Bishop and Emily Style introduced us to the concepts of “mirrors and windows.” In their paradigm, mirrors provide students with the opportunity to benefit from having the histories, perspectives, experiences, interests, identities, and contributions of those who share their identities reflected back to them in learning environments and experiences. Windows, meanwhile, provide students with the opportunity to learn about and value the histories, perspectives, experiences, interests, identities, and contributions of people whose identities differ from their own. The problem we currently face is that White students tend to have far too many mirrors, or foggy mirrors, which tend to be inaccurate and simplistic. Our job as educators is to increase the number of windows for White students while increasing the number of mirrors for Students of Color so that all students have a clearer understanding of themselves and the world they are learning to navigate. 

More Expansive Windows

Prior to the beginning of K-12 learning experiences, children are inundated with the message that Whiteness is the dominant culture. Whiteness is never explicitly named, of course, but it’s deeply infused. This extends from the images in the media and children’s books to the content with which we engage students in schools. To counter these images, teachers need to provide all students with regular opportunities to engage with an accurate and inclusive account of history as well as with content representing the lives, interests, contributions, experiences, and perspectives of all races of people — and not just during designated history/heritage months. Teachers need to teach students to ask questions instead of making assumptions about social issues, engage in productive struggle as they challenge false narratives about people from marginalized groups, and develop their ability to continue this learning. 

To this end, we encourage teachers to do the following to add more windows into their curricula:

• Feature the contributions of people from marginalized groups who are not typically featured, and in fields where they are not usually celebrated (i.e., profiling Black and Brown mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and politicians without tokenizing or focusing on typical fields such as acting, music, and sports).

• When teaching history, have students explore the point of view (Who is telling this story? How might their perspective impact the telling of the story?)  and agency of all involved stakeholders to avoid the negative impact of telling a single story (i.e., How did enslaved people resist enslavement? How did the Indigenous respond to the Indian Removal Act?).

• Incorporate literature from multiple genres featuring people from marginalized groups doing everyday activities, and not only focusing on struggles, challenges, and injustices (i.e., Black and Brown characters in fantasy and science fiction stories, playing in the snow, knowing their own worth, having fun with a pet, playing an instrument, bonding with their dad, and trying to run from the moon). You can find these books and more in resources such as  Social Justice Books, Disrupt Texts Disrupting Genre list, the School Library Journal’s List of Middle Grade and Young Adult Books Spotlighting #BlackJoy, and the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) Social Justice Book List (broken down by grade level). 

• Incorporate Literature Circles where students can research and discuss short texts about historical and current events from multiple perspectives (i.e., Zinn Education Project’s Standing with Standing Rock which includes the perspectives of Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Members).

• Facilitate Café Conversations where students, in small-group discussions, represent the perspectives of people with critically conscious points of view about a particular issue. 

These types of learning experiences can help White students to build the understanding of and empathy for others that comes with having more windows, and ensure that students can critically analyze the impact of historical and current events, giving them the tools needed to move from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence. By ensuring that clear mirrors are a regular part of the learning for Students of Color, educators ensure that Students of Color experience accurate historical content, and see representation in the curriculum of their full, joyful, brilliant, creative, talented, insightful selves. It’s important for White students to experience this perspective about People of Color as well. 

But I Teach Math and Science . . . 

These challenges are more nuanced when engaging students in critical consciousness development practices in content areas such as middle/high school math and science, but it’s possible. Math teachers can follow Ms. Toliver’s example and explore math in the neighborhood, or incorporate content such as graphing, probability, statistics, and computing averages, fractions, percentages, and rates into the exploration of social issues such as wages/employment, policing/incarceration, poverty, racial profiling, wealth gaps, housing disparities, voting rights, affirmative action, and educational access. Science, technology, and engineering teachers can use the concepts of inductive and deductive reasoning as well as the scientific method and design principles to explore issues such as access to food and water resources, public health, and environmental challenges. Two valuable curriculum resources are Radical Math​ and The Underrepresentation Curriculum Project.

Clearer Reflections

By offering students windows through which they can examine race, teachers can provide opportunities for all students to learn about the impact of racialization and about people from other racial backgrounds. This, in turn, enables them to identify and address false narratives about marginalized groups that tend to proliferate when segregation keeps us from truly knowing one another. 

However, it’s also important for the school community to present Students of Color with more mirrors — with positive, affirming images of racial identity — that reflect the diversity and expansiveness of their identities. This in turn supports them as they counter any kind of deficit thinking or internalized oppression that can come from the relentless effects of misrepresentation, tokenism, and white supremacy.

Previously in the Teaching While White blog, we have discussed how many White students are unable to engage effectively in conversations around race, and when they do, how they exhibit many of the same behaviors of White adults: defensiveness, tears, stress, shame, and denial. More often than not, we hear White students complain, “You’re just trying to make me feel guilty!” or “I feel unsafe”— the latter which usually means they are simply uncomfortable.  

In an effort to help White students understand that they can engage productively in conversations about race, educators need to provide them with more antiracist mirrors — the work of White activists committed to challenging racial injustice in solidarity with People of Color. There is a wide range of examples of how White people, in the past and present, have worked to end racism. They represent many generations and life experiences — artists, clergy, journalists, teachers, students, athletes, and concerned citizens — all working to dismantle racist systems from their own sphere of influence. 

As a means of studying and learning from these activists, we offer these critical questions for consideration:

1. In considering the activists’ lives, what were the significant moments that led to their activism? What motivated them to work for change?

2. What skills do/did they need to challenge racial injustice?

3. What blindspots might these activists have?

4. How can White people work effectively in solidarity with People of Color? How do they keep from replicating the very system they are trying to challenge?

5. What is the value of a multiracial coalition? 

6. What actions might you take to work for racial justice?  

Break Glass in Case of Emergency

How can we shatter prior ways of engaging around race in favor of conversations that offer more opportunities for reflection, understanding, and action? We know that, for many White educators, the desire to be an effective antiracist teacher and citizen is strong. We know, too, that doing this work can be a struggle at the start — given that shifting one’s teaching and learning new skills are never easy. But we hope it is clear that we encourage and support you in this work. Without doubt, engaging in antiracist education means you will serve all of your students better, feel more fulfilled in your professional lives, and help shape a world that is more in line with the one in which we all want to live. 

Afrika Afeni Mills is the Senior Manager of Inclusive and Responsive Educational Practices and Instructional Coach for BetterLesson, an education organization designed to support teachers in developing the next generation of compassionate, resourceful, and iterative learners. She facilitates conference sessions frequently around the country.

Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi are the co-founders of Teaching While White.

A Note from Teaching While White:

White teachers who take on this work can still cause harm if they continue to see themselves as centered outside the issues of race and remain unaware of their own racial identity. If White teachers truly want to support students in developing their racial identity and help them become active antiracists, they must first develop their own racial consciousness so they can model for their students what it means to be a White and antiracist.  Following this prerequisite work, teachers can then engage in meaningful, truthful, and more nuanced conversations with students so that this rising generation has the critical consciousness required to dismantle racism. Here are links to some earlier blogs that can help White teachers develop their antiracist knowledge and skills:

“A Letter to White Teachers of My Black Children,” By Afrika Afeni Mills

“The Things They Made Me Carry,” by Thu Anh Nguyen

“What’s Your Pledge?” by Melinda Tsapatsaris

“Getting Names Right,” by Ali Michael

“Dear Student, You’re White,” by Julia Donnelly Spiegelman

Required Reading for Required Change

Harvard University Press recently published Race in America: A Reader, with a foreword and introduction by Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and a professor of history at Harvard University. This collection of essays by a number of esteemed writers and academics is an important sociological examination of American culture past and present through the lens of race. Given the urgency of this topic now, the press is offering the electronic version of the book for free, hoping to spark as much conversation as possible — conversation, that is, that will lead to way overdue change in America culture, politics, education, law enforcement, and more.

There are, thankfully, many excellent options when it comes to contemporary books on race and racism in America — from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow to Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns to Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. Directly related to education is the 2018 edition of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s groundbreaking book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? There are also a wide array of books on White identity and privilege. I encourage our readers to read any or all of these books and find ways to connect them to the work they do in schools.

In reading Race in America recently, I was struck by the ways this range of scholarship and race-related themes intersect with school culture and curricula. From the first paragraph in the first piece — Toni Morrison’s “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992) — it’s clear that education, though not addressed directly, is deeply woven into the race fabric of America. How deep?

“For some time now,” Morrison writes, “I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as ‘knowledge.’ This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States.”

Morrison makes it clear that American literary scholars have not only long favored the perspectives and writing of White males and that we have continued to promote such a perspective in the majority of our schools, but also that  “the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists” because of race and racism. “It may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness,’ the nature — even the cause — of literary ‘whiteness,’ ” writes Morrison.

This is a complex essay primarily aimed at literary critics and scholars. But for precollegiate educators, it helps to know we are caught up in this story — and that we can do our own investigation into how we think about what matters in literature — about how and what we teach. Why, Morrison asks, have we been evading race in our conversations about important American literature? She goes on to note how race plays a central role in the works of Henry James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and more. But the topic gets very little attention in literary criticism or in schools today. Is “the habit of ignoring race… understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture?” Morrison asks.

Ultimately, Morrison wants an honest, open scholarship that looks not only into the life and minds of the enslaved but also to “see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.” Just as literary scholarship has revealed the ways our culture has been deeply sexist, it’s time, Morrison says, to reveal the ways in which we’ve ignored race in the works of so-called major American writers (mostly white and male) and in the way we don’t elevate much of the work by African-American writers to the level of “literature of importance.” Morrison wants us to see the ways an “Africanist presence” pervades all of American literature — even as writers have tried to downplay or hide the fact. No doubt scholarship has improved since Morrison’s essay was first published, but her essential criticism still holds. If more of us who teach literature started examining the “great” books with this thought in mind, we’ll start to see how we can teach American literature with greater clarity and truth.

In Race in America, we are also brought into an Antebellum Slave Market in New Orleans. We are shown the struggles of Black Americans during World War I. We witness the condemnation of Blackness following the 1890 U.S. Census. We experience our nation’s abuse of the indigenous Utes through violence and broken treaties during the westward expansion. We watch as the U.S. government’s war on poverty morphs into the U.S. government’s war on crime — leading to the mass incarceration. Through Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity” (2018), we gain a deeper understanding of the complex challenge of forming an American identity as a person of color in a racist society.

Perhaps most instructive for educators is Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s essay that examines the racism that emerged from 1890 Census, the first to gather statistics about free Black people in America. While that statistics were likely accurate, the explanation for the statistics regarding Black Americans was guided by pure bias, leading to the notion among dominant Whites that Black people were a dangerous race with a penchant toward crime — a mindset that is still embedded in the White power structure of our society today. In this research lies the cautionary tale about how we tend to take our statistical truths and bend them toward self-serving story — in this case, proof of White superiority.

As educators, part of our job is to carefully examine all aspects of school life to see where the remnants of this mindset remain embodied — be it the literature we choose, the expectations we hold for students, our interactions with families, or our understanding of what it means to be a well-functioning, diverse school community — and then to excise them.

Race in America can help with this process. This book is also a flat-out great one to use with older students — as a way to help them better understand American history and culture and as a window through which they can see and discuss race in their own lives and engage in the process of cultural change.

Another important read today is Ibram X. Kendi’s September 2020 article for The Atlantic, “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?” In it, Kendi reminds us that amid all the fear and trepidation associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s good news: “[W]e are living in the midst of an antiracist revolution.”

Kendi believes this could, in fact, mark the beginning of the end of American racism, but in order for that to happen, we need to face up to the depth of racism is American history and culture. We can’t just aim to dismantle monuments, he writes; we need to embrace the “awesome task of reshaping the country with antiracist policies.” He wants us to see this moment as a point of no return in which we demand equitable results and demand that our representatives use their power “to radically reduce inequity and injustice, or be voted out.”

For those of us in education, this nationwide movement for racial justice offers an opportunity for us to both join the larger push for antiracist policies in every major American institution while also looking more closely at how racially equitable schools can and should be organized and operated.

Michael Brosnan is the Senior Editor at Teaching While White.

In Praise of Discomfort: An Open Letter to White Educators

Across the K-12 school landscape, statements of horror at the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd (and so many others whose names comprise a shameful, damning, ever-growing list) have begun to give way to calls for action. More and more, school leaders acknowledge that schools need to lead the charge against racism. Students of color in our schools deserve and demand our advocacy and activism; and fighting deeply ingrained prejudices and socially and politically encoded injustices seems simply to be the right thing to do.

The obvious question: How, exactly, do we do this “right thing”? Every time I hear or read an iteration of that question, I remember walking across a mall parking lot in the summer of 1989.

I was sixteen. My friend Aaron and I were leaving a theater in which we had been the only two white patrons, sharing space with about two hundred African-American moviegoers. But that wasn’t unusual enough to make me remember, all these years later. Every time Aaron and I went to our usual fast-food haunt, Terry’s Place, which was in Chicago’s west-side Austin neighborhood, two blocks from my home on the other side of the city border, we were the only two white customers. Sure, we’d had our share of those-two-people-look-different stares from little kids. But we were white, and had therefore internalized the message that we could pretty much go anywhere, within reason, and feel safe and secure. 

No, I remember that walk because of a feeling of discomfort that had comparatively little to do with the fact that Aaron and I had spent a couple of hours in in a theater with a majority-Black clientele. After all, we’d gone out of our way to attend that particular theater. It was the opening week of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and we’d sought out the only nearby theater that was showing the film.

It was, rather, Lee’s movie itself that had made me feel so ill at ease. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), Lee’s protagonist makes the conscious, considered decision to engage in an act of property destruction in the midst of street protests sparked by a white police officer’s murder of an unarmed Black man. And it took me more than a year to figure out why I’d been so shaken by this one decision by a fictional character. 

In the fall of 1990, I was a first-year student at Carleton College. One afternoon, the conversation in “Introduction to African-American History” left me walking in a daze across campus, feeling a discomfort that was as familiar as it was disconcerting: it was what I had felt in that parking lot after viewing Do the Right Thing. 

A group of students in class that day had made the case that any white person living in a society/culture rife with institutional racism was, by definition, a racist. The professor — who would later be a mentor of mine, but whom at that time I had just met — allowed this premise to stand as a given for the purposes of that day’s conversation.

I walked from class back to my dorm feeling that this formulation was unjust for two reasons. First, such a way of looking at things felt self-defeating, since it seemed to mean that in the United States no white person could be an antiracist, if every white person was by definition a racist. (This was, of course, long before the term “antiracist” was even in common usage. Helpful paradigms for talking about definitions of “racism,” like the one at the heart of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, were few and far between in most white communities.)

I discussed this first cause of my discomfort with my professor, one-on-one, outside class, and initially it seemed that his mentorship of me began in that private conversation. Only through confronting the second reason I’d felt so uncomfortable about that day’s class, however, could I eventually see that my professor’s mentorship had actually begun when he had encouraged a class discussion under the auspices of the white = racist formulation, in the first place.

Once I was able to get a bit of distance, it became clear that my biggest problem with that day’s discussion had simply been that it had hurt. My feelings had been injured; I had felt personally attacked. I’d found it deeply unfair to be made to feel prejudged, and in fact defined and named, based not on anything I’d said in class, or anything I’d done outside of it, but rather just on the basis of who I was.

Well. It wasn’t hard to see where one of the lessons was in that: if it hurt to feel prejudged for an hour or so, one needed to be capable of a serious leap of imagination to begin to comprehend the pain and frustration of being prejudged every day.

For a seventeen-year-old college freshman, it was a bit harder, but not impossible, to see beyond that first lesson to a second one: that my discomfort was not just acceptable, it was a necessary precondition for me truly to interrogate my own feelings, let alone larger phenomena having to do with race in America.

The sixteen-year-old version of me who had seen Do the Right Thing and been left shaken by it had sensed, but not been able to formulate, that vital fact. It wasn’t just that Lee’s film, and the protagonist’s decision at the climactic moment, made me uneasy. It was that my discomfort was necessary if the title of the film was to mean anything at all. A white person seeing Do the Right Thing will only begin to interact with the film in a meaningful way when she or he faces the way in which the film seems to say to the white viewer, “Are you disturbed by the idea that maybe the white world’s definition of the ‘right thing’ is utterly meaningless in the face of racist systems and racist violence? Good. That’s a starting point from which you can learn.”

Let’s take Lee’s lesson — and my professor’s — to heart. Let’s not just accept discomfort as part of the educational process. Let’s create the structures that encode discomfort into the educational process where necessary — doing so, of course, with the emotional (and physical) safety of young people in the forefront of our minds.

There is a huge body of research that demonstrates that learning is impeded by feeling unsafe. But feeling uncomfortable is not the same as feeling unsafe. Schools are often among the most psychologically and emotionally “safe” spaces in the United States, for their white teachers and students. It is people of color who are far more likely to feel and be unsafe in our schools. We white educators have to demonstrate our willingness to make ourselves — and, yes, our white students — uncomfortable if we want to do anything tangible about that fact.

How, precisely, can this be done? Any given department or division must ask that question in the context of its students, faculty, and program. I’ve worked for more than two decades in literary and cultural studies, so the first examples that come to my mind are in that arena.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is taught in literature, rhetoric, history, and American-studies classes as a masterpiece of writing and a vital historical document of the Civil Rights movement. But the often-traditional approach to King’s piece provides at least one easy “out” for white teachers and students: the letter is, among other things, a statement of nonviolent civil disobedience that can (and often is) paired with Thoreau. The radical justice for which King argues so passionately can be subsumed to the more general history of (white) nonviolent protest philosophy.

So, don’t pair King’s letter with Thoreau. Pair it with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which was published in the very year in which King wrote his letter, and which allows for no easy outs — for anyone.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a searing, brilliant evocation of many complex phenomena, including racial injustice. But it too seems to provide some easy “out”s for white teachers and students who are looking for one. First, it takes place during the era of chattel slavery, which can lead to the “well, that’s behind us” defense. Second, the novel’s sheer artistic fluency might encourage an instructor to focus only on style and structure, not on systems of racist horror.

So, pair the novel with another late-1980s masterpiece of American art and culture, released within two years of Morrison’s book: Do the Right Thing (which might need to be expurgated to fit school standards regarding adult situations, language, etc., but which can still be devastatingly effective). Consider the question of how these two texts, on their surfaces different in all kinds of obvious ways, speak to the same moment in America’s racial history. Examine what we can learn from Morrison and Lee about whiteness in the 1980s, and earlier, and in our own time.

And so on.

Of course, there is nothing inherent in King’s letter or Morrison’s novel that leads us as white teachers to search for an “out,” for a way to make studying the texts less threatening to ourselves and our white students. It is our defenses that do that. Neither text needs to be paired with anything to be a devastating indictment of white supremacy and, indeed, of the very concept of whiteness. It’s just that our default mode — I include myself here, remembering how, for example, I once taught Morrison alongside Woolf and Faulkner, almost entirely through the lens of 20th-century Modernism and post-modernism — has not been to seek out the discomfort to be found in these canonical texts. So, one way to change the default approach is to place the texts in new contexts, designed to allow for discomfort.

Another way would simply be to re-approach King and Morrison from scratch, with a specific pedagogical goal of looking for the pressure points that will help white people to feel a necessary unease about the implications of whiteness. 

Indeed, there are in school curricula innumerable ways to prioritize, rather than to try to minimize, discomfort with and about whiteness. Opportunities exist in every discipline. Perhaps some will seem more obvious than others: a psychology class foregrounding the structure of racial resentment, or a history class refusing to look away from those statements of Thomas Jefferson that might sound to 21st-century ears like Jefferson Davis.

But experts in all fields can no doubt create entire curricula predicated on the need to create space for discomfort with whiteness. An economics teacher can approach a foundational concept like supply and demand through the lens of redlining, and can define labor markets specifically through a study of how those markets have been shaped — or, more accurately, warped — by policies based in white supremacy.

Biology state standards always include genetics. It might well make white students, or even teachers, uncomfortable to be upfront about the fact that the field was in part pioneered by people working specifically to provide evidence for white-supremacist ideologies. What a perfect entry point that is into the reality that “race” does not actually, biologically/genetically, exist. Where there are environmental-studies courses, environmental racism can serve as the opening unit, as a way of focusing the entire course, rather than being an add-on later in the semester. Where there are not such courses, biology curricula usually include units on environmental studies, so the same principle applies.

The point is to work across the curriculum to create the kind of discomfort that breeds thoughtful self-awareness. So often, we talk about finding ways to engage our white students with whiteness without, you know, making them “feel bad.” This is a mistake. In an educational context, discomfort is a powerful tool.

I was far more prepared truly to hear Baldwin when I first studied The Fire Next Time because in the previous eighteen months I had had the two unnerving experiences described at the outset of this essay. I was sixteen when I saw Lee’s film, seventeen when I took Intro to African-American History, and eighteen when first I read The Fire Next Time. Learning to see my discomfort during the first two experiences for what it was and what it meant readied me to read Baldwin with my defenses down to an extent that would otherwise have been impossible. Baldwin’s unflinching clarity about the nature of whiteness got through to me in part thanks to the cracks that Lee and my professor had chipped into my armor.

It is important to note that in all three “teachable moments,” I was and felt completely safe. In the first case, I’d gone to see a movie with a friend; in the next two, I was in seminar classes taught by approachable professors at a liberal-arts college. Again, uncomfortable did not mean unsafe. In fact, in retrospect I wonder if my discomfort was only acceptable to me, insofar as it was, because I did know that I was safe. And in the course of those interrelated experiences I was precisely the same ages as most of our current tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders — who are just as able now as I was then to be able to handle discomfort, if it is managed within a safe overall environment.

We must remember that there are people who not only feel unsafe but who are unsafe, given their racial identities, in our schools. It is to them that we owe a willingness to give up our own comfort, if doing so can in any way increase their safety.

We cannot be content with hoping that approaches like curating “multicultural” reading lists and curricular materials, and creating “inclusivity statements,” and so on, are actually equal to the stark reality of 21st-century America. They are not. Millions of our fellow Americans — hundreds of thousands of our students —  are daily faced with existential pain born out of hundreds of years’ worth of institutional white supremacy.

If we as white citizens and educators aren’t willing to seek out and embrace the discomfort necessary to address the devastating consequences of that history, and of the privilege white supremacy confers on us, then we fail ourselves, our students, and our future.

Lucas Jacob is a high-school teacher and writing-instruction consultant based in Indianapolis. He has worked in independent, public-charter, and public schools across the United States and in Budapest, Hungary, where he was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow. Currently, he is on the staff of La Jolla Country Day School, in San Diego. He is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Seed Vault (Eyewear/Black Spring, 2019) and the chapbooks A Hole in the Light (Anchor & Plume Press, 2015) and Wishes Wished Just Hard Enough (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). More at www.lucasjjacob.com.