by Bree Picower
PRAISE FOR READING, WRITING, AND RACISM
“Bree Picower continues to lead in anti-racist teacher education. Reading, Writing, and Racism is eminently useful for pre-service and in-service teachers to reflect on how they may have perpetuated whiteness in their own teaching or experienced it as students themselves. This is a must-read for all future and current teachers interested in racial justice in the classroom.”
—WAYNE AU,
editor of Rethinking Schools
“Reading, Writing, and Racism is a critical and urgently needed text. Bree Picower brilliantly analyzes the long-standing and constitutive relationship between American schooling, curriculum, and structural racism. With strong theory, critical analysis, and actionable examples, Picower creates space to reimagine school as a site of anti-racist praxis. This book is essential reading for teachers, parents, and everyday citizens looking to dismantle White supremacy and expand justice.”
—MARC LAMONT HILL,
author of Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
“The egregious, racist actions of a subset of school teachers that have gone viral on social media may seem like outliers in an otherwise just system and profession, but they are not, as argued compellingly in Reading, Writing, and Racism. What and how we teach, and who teaches, and how we prepare them should not be presumed to be somehow immune from the long legacies of white supremacy and colonialism that have shaped US schooling from its very beginning. Reframing and reorienting more forcefully toward racial justice requires tackling these legacies head-on in programs that prepare, support, connect, celebrate, and hold accountable educators—and Bree Picower offers us frameworks, models, and hope for doing precisely that, when the need could not be more great.”
—KEVIN KUMASHIRO,
author of Bad Teacher! How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture
“Reading, Writing, and Racism places the emphasis on interrupting racism in teacher preparation programs and schools where it belongs—not simply on individual beliefs and actions but on primarily broader policies and practices that continue to maintain and protect racist ideology. Based on years of research and chockful of curriculum examples—both horrific and positive—and using case studies of actual anti-racist teacher education programs around the nation, Bree Picower’s book describes the myriad ways in which these programs address racism and center social justice. With powerful insights and concrete suggestions for transformation, Reading, Writing, and Racism is certain to help teachers, teacher educators, and administrators rethink their roles in preparing the nation’s teachers.”
—SONIA NIETO,
professor emerita, Language, Culture, and Teaching, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Brooklyn Dreams: My Life in Public Education
“Coupling an urgent call to action with the practical supports required to act, this book offers a vision for and examples of the kind of humanizing, healing practices that successfully prepare teachers to struggle for racial justice through their everyday work. For those committed to rooting out the curricular violence of Whiteness, this book is right on time.”
—CARLA SHALABY,
author of Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
“Reading, Writing, and Racism is a clearly written, no-holds-barred gem of a book that every teacher educator must read. Drawing on her incisive critique of curriculum and teacher ideology, along with interviews with racial justice teacher educators, Picower cogently frames how whiteness works in teacher education, while showing us how to upend it.”
—CHRISTINE SLEETER,
coauthor of Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research
“In concert with the current moment of racial reckoning, the contributions of Dr. Bree Picower push us to acknowledge and remember the totalizing power of white supremacy in curriculum. Her bravery, humility, and criticality offer strength for folks who dare to do revolutionary classroom work when the world feels like it’s upside-down. If you consider yourself an ally in the struggle for racial justice, you cannot turn away from this book!”
—DAVID STOVALL,
author of Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption
This book is dedicated to Antonio Nieves Martinez, a member of our educational justice family whose life binds us together and whose spirit guides our collective work to center love and liberation within education.
100 percent of the royalties of this book will be donated to two grassroots organizations led by people of Color dedicated to organizing for racial justice in education: the Education for Liberation Network and the Abolitionist Teaching Network.
CONTENTS
Foreword
INTRODUCTION: #CurriculumSoWhite
CHAPTER 1 Curricular Tools of Whiteness
CHAPTER 2 The Iceberg: Racial Ideology and Curriculum
CHAPTER 3 Reframing Understandings of Race Within Teacher Education
CHAPTER 4 Disrupting Whiteness in Teacher Education
CHAPTER 5 Humanizing Racial Justice in Teacher Education
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
The United States is not just racist; it is anti-Black. The word “racism” does not adequately describe the ways in which the US kills, destroys, and spirit murders Black people. As kihana miraya ross points out, racism “fails to fully capture what black people in this country are facing.”1 It has become a catch-all term used to explain the systemic denial of rights, jobs, housing, education, and healthcare to Black people. Yet the term “racism” does not include the extent of America’s disdain, visceral hate, and disregard for Black life, Black love, Black empowerment, Black resistance, Black joy, and Black education.
The year 2020 will be recorded as a year of disdain for Black life. The ways in which anti-Blackness and racism showed up in the everyday lives of Black people and how we fought back are a testament to our cultural means of resistance, survival, abolition, and Black joy, which we take with us into formal and informal educational experiences. America’s obsession with greed, violence, hate, and Black suffering always reaches into the most sacred spaces of American democracy, including schools. One of the most seductive features of White supremacy is the omitting and erasing of the history, culture, language, contributions, and humanity of all ethnicities and cultures that are not White, male, straight, and able-bodied. Beyond those identity markers, every other ethnicity has had to fight, protest, march, and petition to be included within public education. These struggles meant sending children of color into schools of anti-darkness, suffering, and structural erasure.
One way of erasing students of color, even while they gain access to schooling, was through the curriculum. For centuries, students of color have sat in classrooms never seeing their culture, history, or language. The life, love, and creativity of history has only been presented to students as the White man’s visions, dreams, and contributions. To some, the fight to be included in school curriculum may seem over because ethnicities have been given superficial months to celebrate our prolific history within the confines of thirty days, or only twenty-eight for Black history. But we want, deserve, and demand more than a month at a time. Our histories and herstories are bigger, richer, and more complex than this country’s compartmentalization of our lives into months and one-day celebrations of the culture and food that have nourished many of us, all while White supremacy and anti-Blackness attacked our souls.
What American schools fail to understand is that curriculum rich in the stories and lives of Black, Brown, and people of color humanizes
not only students of color but White students as well. The work of decolonizing the curriculum helps decolonize all children’s thinking, and that is what education for social justice should be. We cannot do the work of creating more socially just schools without removing curriculum that does not reflect people of color as human and the creators of our own lives and culture, who made contributions to this country and the world.
Too often teachers want to reflect a happy world to children, where no one was enslaved, no one was beaten, no families were separated, and White people never hurt anyone. These feel-good stories of White heroes and do-gooders uphold White supremacy and undermine the mental well-being of youth of color. To be frank, I am tired of seeing children, all children, opening up a textbook and reading about Black people as slaves and Native Americans as savages. I am even more appalled and angry when teachers do not see anything wrong with these representations.
What Bree Picower has done in this book is masterfully assemble the stories and the omnipresence of the #CurriclumSoWhite hashtag. Reading, Writing, and Racism tells the truth about America’s racism and its disdain for people of color through the lens of curriculum. But this book is more than stories of Whiteness in education; it also provides a road map to justice, specifically to humanizing racial justice in teacher education. What Picower does, so beautifully and with such grace, is to outline how we strategize in communities to disrupt, agitate, and eliminate Whiteness within the curriculum and teacher education. This is no small task, and no book can address every issue, but Reading, Writing, and Racism comes close. Use this book as your guide, as your compass toward transforming not only teacher education but the lives of students of color to see themselves in powerful ways that restore, love, justice, and humanity.
BETTINA L. LOVE
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
INTRODUCTION
#CURRICULUMSOWHITE
How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white man’s thought; that every great deed the world ever did was a white man’s deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man’s dream.1
—W. E. B. DU BOIS, 1920
There’s #OscarsSoWhite and then there’s #CurriculumSoWhite. How curriculum in US public schools remains centered on White middleclass norms.2
—DJANGO PARIS, @DJANGO_PARIS, 2016
“How many slaves would be needed to equal at least 4 White people?”3
This was a homework question posed to middle school students in Kannapolis in 2019 following a lesson on the Three-Fifths Compromise. In 2018, an eighth-grade teacher at a Texas charter school asked her students to list “positive and negative aspects of slavery” as part of a unit called “The Lives of Slaves: A Balanced View.”4 Not to be outdone, a White public school teacher in the Bronx singled out her middle school Black students during a social studies lesson and had them lie on the classroom floor. She then put her foot on one child’s back and announced, “See how it feels to be a slave?”5
These are just three examples of racist curriculum that have gone viral on social media. While these were the acts of individual educators, the problem is a systemic one, as widely used textbooks actively remove historical racism from the curriculum. For example, a McGraw-Hill textbook referred to enslaved Africans as “migrant workers,”6 and Texas-approved textbooks removed Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and the role of slavery in the Civil War from its pages.7 While some would see these examples as simply the result of “bad apple” teachers or outdated textbooks, in Reading, Writing, and Racism, I analyze such examples through a framework to understand how they are situated in historical racism and work to maintain current racial hierarchies. Popular culture may refer to reading, writing, and arithmetic as the “Three Rs” of education, but this book argues that racism is as inherent and basic to schooling as the Three Rs.
VIRAL RACIST CURRICULUM
Countless scholars, such as Carter G. Woodson, Gloria Ladson-Billings, James Loewen, Eve Tuck and Rúben Gaztambide-Fernández, Dolores Calderon, Prentice T. Chandler, Anthony Brown and Keffrelyn Brown, and LaGarrett King, have engaged thorough critiques of how racism and Eurocentrism have manifested themselves in a wide range of curricular resources.8 This book follows that tradition, focusing specifically on examples of racist curriculum that have gone viral over social media in the last decade, represented by the hashtag #CurriculumSoWhite. This hashtag started in 2015 as a riff off of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, created by diversity and inclusion specialist April Reign, which called attention to the lack of nominees of Color at the Academy Awards. Taken up by race and education scholars such as Django Paris and organizations such as the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, #CurriculumSoWhite calls attention to the ways in which Whiteness is present in schooling.
I have made the choice to focus on these viral examples because they are telling for many reasons. These singular examples reflect the toxicity of the entire body of school curricula. People outside of education rarely have a window into what happens behind classroom doors, so when these examples appear online for all to see, they call into question what other racial injustices are going on in schools. Additionally, the nature of the way the examples go viral follows a pattern that has implications for change. Typically, a parent or student recognizes that this one instance of schoolwork is problematic and posts it on Facebook or Twitter. For families, this homework assignment or textbook page might be one of the only tangible artifacts they have that illustrates how race is showing up in their children’s education. These posts often focus only on the one particular lesson or the perpetrating teacher.
The analysis of #CurriculumSoWhite in this book situates these viral examples within their broader place in historical and structural racism. While the examples in the book focus on those that go viral, the analysis applies to all forms of racist curriculum. These racist curricular examples are not a new phenomenon attributable to changes in US political structure, as racism has always been implicated in curriculum and schooling. As expressed in the opening quote from W. E. B. Du Bois in 1920, “through emphasis and omission,” children have long been educated through a Eurocentric lens. Rather than presenting the viral racist examples above as results of the poor judgment or implicit bias of individual teachers or curriculum developers, this book situates such examples of racist pedagogy, be they through emphasis, omission, or outright lies, in a broader context of historical and institutional racism and its role in US schooling.
What teachers choose to teach often represents their ways of thinking about race and how they have been socialized to understand difference through their families, the media, and the broader dominant culture. The book examines the relationship between individual teachers’ racial beliefs and the curriculum they choose. These instructional decisions are influenced by and also reinforce racial hierarchies at a societal level. By lifting up teacher racial understandings and the impact they have on teachers’ curricula, Reading, Writing, and Racism illuminates how racist beliefs are maintained over generations. Rather than using education as a vehicle to create a more equitable and just society, teachers whose understandings of race are unexamined instead, either purposefully or unconsciously, use their curriculum to indoctrinate the next generation with the same racist beliefs.
All teachers have the capacity to reproduce racism in their curriculum, so, interrogating understandings of race and racism are important acts for teachers of all races. Within my research on viral racist curriculum, however, it is clear that the majority of the perpetrators of these acts are White teachers. Therefore, the analysis of this book, and the strategies for change, focus on those using racist curriculum. While this is, arguably, centering Whiteness, it is a choice I made based on the statistics on White teachers in the field.9 The teaching force of the United States is over 80 percent White, and almost half of US schools do not have a single teacher of Color on staff, even tho
ugh students of Color now outnumber their White counterparts.10 This is unlikely to shift dramatically, as it was shown that of ACT-tested graduates in 2014 who said they planned on pursuing an education major, 72 percent were White.11 Adding to this dilemma is that new teachers are being prepared by teacher education faculty (including adjunct faculty) who are about 78 percent White.12
These statistics warrant teacher education to specifically address the ways in which White teachers and teacher educators carry their racial beliefs into the classroom. While it is necessary for teachers of all races to develop racial consciousness, the sheer numbers of White people in the field of teaching, coupled with their frequent lack of experience thinking about and addressing race, makes it essential to understand the ways in which White racial identity influences how they enact—and how they can reframe—their understandings of race. As a White professor who teaches and researches issues of race, I chose to focus this book on examining how White people enact racism so that we can learn how to dismantle it.
WHITE SOCIALIZATION
So how is it that White teachers who have graduated from accredited teacher education programs, been vetted by thoughtful search committees, and been hired to educate young people come into the classroom poised to perpetuate egregiously racist acts through their curriculum? In this section, I will provide an overview of some of the theoretical concepts that undergird this question. However, understanding how race and racism operate is complex and is the subject of many other books that I recommend reading in full for more detailed knowledge.13 There is a deep and long tradition of scholars of Color, particularly Black scholars, who have written about race that informed my work, as cited throughout this book. If Reading, Writing, and Racism happens to be opening the door to your journey in understanding race, these endnotes serve as some of your next steps.