Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (6 page)

This point is clearly illustrated in Herbert Kohl’s essay, “I Won’t Learn from You.”
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He describes observing a history class being taught in a public junior high school in San Antonio, a school that served low-income Latino students but had very few Latino teachers and no Latino administrators. As the White male teacher began the day’s lesson on “the first people to settle Texas” by asking students to read from the history textbook, the students demonstrated their disengagement by slumping in their seats, rolling their eyes, grimacing, and refusing to volunteer. The teacher began to read aloud the history text’s account of the first settlers of Texas—pioneers from New England and the South—when one student interrupted. Knowing full well that Mexicans (his ancestors) lived in what is now known as Texas long before any New Englanders arrived, the student blurted, “What are we, animals or something?” The teacher, ignoring his student’s point completely, replied, “What does that have to do with the text?” In apparent frustration, the teacher left the room, leaving his visitor, Herbert Kohl, in charge of the class. Kohl reread the passage from the text and asked the students whether they believed what they had just heard. His question captured their attention, and he continued, saying, “This is lies, nonsense. In fact, I think the textbook is racist and an insult to everyone in this room.” Kohl’s response to the text opened the door for an important dialogue. He writes:

Kohl captures the essence of their resistance in this conclusion: “To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity”—or as I would say, your identity—“causes a major loss of self. The only alternative is to not-learn and reject their world.” As the noted theorist Jean Baker Miller once said, we all want to feel “seen, heard, and understood.”
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At its core, that is what affirming identity means. It is not just about what pictures are hanging on the wall, or what content is included in the curriculum, though these things are important. It is about recognizing students’ lives—and helping them make connections to them. In Kohl’s example, the State of Texas or the local school district may have required that the teacher use that particular history text, but the conversation was not scripted. It was Kohl’s willingness to acknowledge the contradiction between the students’ lives and the text that affirmed them and engaged them.

Affirming identity is not just about being nice—it is about being knowledgeable about who our students are, and reflecting a story that resonates with their best hope for themselves. This distinction is aptly captured by Mary Ginley, a teacher, who writes:

Affirming identity is about asking who they are, and where they want to go, and conveying a fundamental belief that they can get there—through the development of their intellect and their critical capacity to think. Any teacher—White or of color—willing to work at affirming identity will have engaged students.

However, the task of creating identity stories is not that of the school alone. Of course the messages we receive at home from family and friends from the time of our birth are powerful parts of our narrative as well—for better or worse. But as educators we must acknowledge the impact of the many hours spent in school and the influence even one teacher can have on the story a student tells him or herself—also for better or worse. We cannot control the stories others are telling—but we must take responsibility for the identity stories we tell.

The community network of adults can help build that narrative as well. For example, I was recently invited to speak to a group of African American high school students who were part of an Atlanta-based organization called the W.E.B. DuBois Society in Atlanta. The students in the W.E.B. DuBois Society voluntarily come together on Saturday mornings to hear speakers and to discuss ideas in a context that affirms their shared cultural heritage. Collectively they are told a story about the legacy of academic achievement of which they are a part. In preparation for my visit, they had all read my 1997 book about the experience of race in predominantly White schools, and they came with copies in hand, ready to ask me some very well-prepared questions. These students shared in common the experience of being in independent schools or suburban public schools where they were in the minority. On that particular occasion, they were joined by the principal of one of the schools represented who was also interested in hearing my presentation. While the W.E.B. DuBois Society was not an organization under the direction of the principal, his presence clearly symbolized the school’s support for the students’ participation.

The image of these young teenagers voluntarily spending a Saturday morning focused on academic content runs directly counter to how many people ordinarily define Black adolescent popular culture and activity. But the adults in their environment have created a space for them to come together that clearly affirms their shared sense of identity in positive ways, helping them to tell a story about themselves as young scholars capable of high academic achievement, and they have responded with enthusiasm. We all want a good story to tell about ourselves. We have to provide historically marginalized youth with the information and feedback to help construct that story and then celebrate them when they do.

What about affirming the identities of White children? White children in a largely White school environment typically see themselves in the curriculum. They learn about White authors, scientists, inventors, artists, and explorers—most often male, but not exclusively so. The opportunity to envision oneself in similar roles is regularly offered to White children through the example of White adults. While certainly there is ethnic variation, socioeconomic variation, and religious variation that mediates the ease with which a child might identify with such examples, it is still likely that there will be places where White students see themselves reflected, at least in the faces of their teachers and their administrators—the adults they arguably observe most closely doing their jobs in the larger world for the most extended period of time—a privilege that students of color cannot take for granted. While the individual narratives they are constructing in childhood will vary with family circumstance and personal characteristics, as they do for all of us, the group story of what it means to be White is a story of achievement, success, and of being in charge.

But how do White children see
others
reflected? Are they learning about people of color as equals or does the curriculum continue to reinforce old notions of assumed White superiority as the result of unchallenged stereotypes and unrecognized omissions of information about the societal contributions of people of color? Are they receiving information that will help them navigate a global society, information that will help them engage with people who are different from themselves in that environment? In the absence of such information, the story is incomplete and they are not well served by their education.

For more than twenty years I taught a course on the psychology of racism, in the context of predominantly White institutions. The students in my class, most of whom were White, would often express anger and a sense of betrayal when they discovered new information about the social history of race relations in this country that they had never learned in their K–12 education. “Why didn’t anyone tell us this before?” they would ask.
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Having the information helped them understand the context for their cross-racial interactions, and it helped them see how they could be active agents for change within their own spheres of influence, knowledge that was empowering for them. The sanitized versions of U.S. history that distort reality (as in “the first settlers of Texas” in our earlier example) and obliterate the presence of so many—men and women of color who shaped and participated in the making of science, art, literature, the economy, in short, the fabric of our society—leave White children at risk for the arrogance that comes from ignorance, and unable to make useful sense of the world around them.
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Consider this conversation between two White women in the days following the news coverage of the flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Frances Kendall, author of
Understanding White Privilege
, writes: “One of my family members said to me, ‘Weren’t the White people smart to buy their houses on higher ground?’ Her unexamined belief system was that everyone had the same real estate opportunities and the White people just
happened
to make the right decisions.”
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How was it that she did not know about the long history of housing discrimination, racial covenants, and the economic deprivation associated with slavery and legalized segregation that placed Black neighborhoods below sea level in New Orleans? Kendall explains:

Given the discomfort associated with this history, it is not surprising that teachers might avoid talking about it. But there is an alternative to silence and misrepresentation that can affirm the identities of White children as well as build capacity for connection across racial lines in the future. If we were given a full understanding of our past and present, we would learn about the cross-racial coalitions that were built at every period of progress in our history. We would learn about the courage, cooperation, and perseverance demonstrated by Whites in alliance with people of color in response to social injustice.

There is an institution in Cincinnati that exemplifies this vision of education. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was created there on the banks of the Ohio River to preserve not only the memory of the history of cross-racial cooperation when White abolitionists helped determined Africans escape from the bondage of White slave owners, but to also call attention to contemporary struggles for justice and freedom around the world where people of different backgrounds have worked together to bring about change. This is the history that every child in America needs to learn, but it is especially important for White children, in order for them to be able to acknowledge their Whiteness—a social identity that still has meaning in our society—with a story that is a source of pride, rather than shame or guilt.

In a race-conscious society, the development of a positive sense of racial or ethnic identity, not based on assumed superiority or inferiority, is an important task for everyone. It is an important task for people of color. It is an important task for White people. Sometimes when people hear the phrase “White identity,” what comes to mind are connotations of White supremacy, as embodied by the Ku Klux Klan, perhaps. But of course the notion of White identity relevant here is not one based on a sense of assumed superiority. What is necessary, rather, is recognition of the meaning of Whiteness in our society. As many scholars and writers have explored in recent years, Whiteness is not an identity without meaning. Some White people who haven’t thought much about these issues will say, “Well, you know, I’m an individual. I want you to see me as an individual.” And of course, each of us is an individual, and we want our individuality recognized. But we each also have a social identity, with a social history, a social meaning. Recognition of the meaning of Whiteness in our society is recognition of the meaning of
privilege
in the context of a society that advantages being White.

Now, urging White teachers and students to recognize the meaning of their Whiteness is
not
equivalent to asking them to feel guilty about their privilege, although sometimes guilt
is
part of that exploration of identity for many people. Feeling badly about one’s own Whiteness is a stage that many people experience.
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It’s certainly not the goal of the educational process nor should it be the end point. Ideally, we should each be able to embrace all of who we are, and to recognize that in a society where race is still meaningful and where Whiteness is still a source of power and privilege, that it is possible to resist being in the role of dominator, or “oppressor,” and to become genuinely antiracist in one’s White identity, and to actively work against systems of injustice and unearned privilege. It is possible to claim both one’s Whiteness as a part of who one is and of one’s daily experience, and the identity of being what I like to call a “White ally”: namely, a White person who understands that it is possible to use one’s privilege to create more equitable systems; that there are White people throughout history who have done exactly that; and that one can align oneself with that history. That is the identity story that we have to reflect to White children, and help them see themselves in it in order to continue the racial progress in our society.