by Bree Picower
As a White person doing this work, there is never a point of “arrival,” and I continue to reflect on my racial identity, navigating certain tensions and setting intentions. Part of the process of moving toward anti-racism is constant self-examination and a questioning of what work I should or should not be doing given my positionality as someone who ultimately benefits from the system of racism. I also notice this questioning of self as a pattern with the White teachers I work with as they begin the journey of becoming more racially conscious (e.g., “How can I teach about race as a White person with all Black students?”). I’ve come to believe that this self-consciousness is a part of the process of trying to be a responsible White person in racial justice work. Part of the culture of Whiteness is to believe that we have all the answers and that we have the right to do anything our hearts desire. Therefore, part of grappling with my own Whiteness is to destabilize this tendency by monitoring my reactions, my interactions, who I gravitate toward and why, how I engage with others, when to speak up, when to lean back, when to say yes, and when to say no, and so on.
In trying to navigate my own White identity in the field, I engage in this self-examination while also trying to be accountable to people of Color about what my role in this work should be. Because people of Color are not a monolith, there are a variety of ideas from different circles engaged in racial justice about the role of White people in anti-racist work. I have taken direction from Alicia Garza, one of the three Black women who founded the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, who explains that Black Lives Matter asks non-Black people to “not just stand in solidarity with [#BLM], but to investigate the ways in which anti-Black racism is perpetuated in [our] own communities.”33 My teaching and writing responds to this demand to uncover racism within my community of teacher education and to think about how it can instead be a lever of change.
Some race scholars of Color make it clear that because racism benefits and is perpetuated by Whites that White people need to step up and take on the work of ending it. This is part of the responsibility White people carry. Speaking to this issue, the founders of Black Lives Matter write, “We remain persistent in urging non-Black, anti-racist communities to organize themselves and their people in the fight for Black lives and liberation. The turbulent road to civil rights has long been paved with the support and resistance of allies and their significance in this struggle cannot be overstated.”34 Scholar Bettina Love calls attention to the difference between allies and “co-conspirators,” calling for White people to go beyond performative allyship of just appearing “woke,” to instead take risks that put themselves on the line for BIPOC and for racial justice.35
For me personally, the term ally has always fallen short because it assumes the struggle for racial justice is a horizontal one in which White people should do something about racism on behalf of people of Color. This is a slippery slope into saviorism, which reinforces a dangerous narrative of viewing myself as a “good” White person for engaging in “charitable” activities that might benefit individual people of Color without questioning how power is operating. Allyship relegates racial justice to the interpersonal level of the Four I’s, which is insufficient because it does not engage in dismantling institutional racism. Moving from ally to co-conspirator shifts the target of anti-racist action from individual people of Color to the unjust system, driving White people from charity to solidarity.
At the same time that people of Color are calling for White people to be co-conspirators, there is also rightful frustration that White anti-racist activists receive recognition and career advancement from talking about race more than people of Color do. White people who do racial justice work, such as Tim Wise and Robin DiAngelo, are often taken to task for the opportunities and careers they have gained talking about racism. Black sex educator and writer Ericka Hart posted on Twitter: “White people should NOT be capitalizing off of racial justice, as they are the very reason racial justice is needed. Any money white folks make from racial justice should be going to Black people ONLY. I’m looking at you Chelsea Handler, Tim Wise and DiAngelo.”36 This post garnered over 13,000 likes in a few days and prompted Sonya Renee Taylor, executive director and author of The Body Is Not an Apology, to upload a compelling video analysis to Instagram.37 She made an analogy to the fact that pharmaceutical companies not only created and profit from the opioid crisis but also created and profit from the drug that can stop an opioid overdose. Taylor pointed out that White people similarly created and profit from racism and therefore should not be profiting from dismantling it.
I am working to navigate the tensions in these messages. As writer Tre Johnson wrote in a brilliant op-ed for the Washington Post, entitled “When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Bookclubs”: “The confusing, perhaps contradictory advice on what white people should do probably feels maddening. To be told to step up, no step back, read, no listen, protest, don’t protest, check on black friends, leave us alone, ask for help or do the work—it probably feels contradictory at times. And yet, you’ll figure it out.”38 Figuring it out, as Johnson suggests, is part of the work of being a White person involved in racial justice and is nothing compared to what it means to navigate racism for BIPOC. As Johnson continues, “Black people have been similarly exhausted making the case for jobs, freedom, happiness, justice, equality and the like. It’s made us dizzy, but we’ve managed to find the means to walk straight.”
Over time, I have developed certain principles that I try to stand by to balance these different perspectives. Like lines in the sand, they occasionally get crossed, erased, and redrawn as new thinking emerges. These principles are specifically about my work on racism, as I also research other topics within the field of education such as broader issues of social justice, teacher activism, and elementary education.
Here are two of my principles that currently guide my action as a White person engaged in racial justice work. Because of the history of White anthropologists “studying” BIPOC and essentializing their culture, my first principle is that I instead keep my gaze on Whiteness. For example, rather than position children of Color as research subjects, I ask questions about the impact that the overrepresentation of White teachers has on students of Color. My concern is with the ways that White people harm students of Color, rather than to contribute to the piles of problematic research that perpetuates a deficit view of children of Color.
My second principle is that when asked to present or consult about racism, I aim to co-present with a colleague who is BIPOC whenever possible. If I present or consult alone, it is at the request of people of Color, and only after suggesting that I work with a cofacilitator. This isn’t a performative move for optics; the work is more powerful when done collectively. We bring different perspectives to the table and provide participants with more opportunities to relate to us so they can hear the different ways that racism operates. When writing about racism and how it impacts BIPOC, I aim to coauthor with people of Color. My single-authored works, like this book, are about Whiteness specifically or about other aspects of teaching such as social justice education or teacher activism.
With regard to compensation for racial justice consulting opportunities that I am presented with, I am working to come up with principles that feel right in light of some of the debates on White people’s roles within racial justice. Part of what provides me with the opportunity for these paid opportunities is the work that I have been doing in the field for twenty years. However, another part of what has enabled me to be where I am is race and class privilege. For example, I had the privilege of being able to take volunteer positions in high school working with children that provided me with the experience needed to get education-based jobs in college. Out of college, I was promoted over two coworkers of Color to direct an after-school program, despite the fact that I didn’t have the early childhood credits required of the position at the time. I didn’t realize then that this was because of racism, but now that I know it, how do I take res
ponsibility for the boosts these privileges gave my career to get me where I am now? While the country debates national reparations, I wonder, what do personal reparations look like?
One strategy is to donate portions of fees from paid racial justice work to organizations engaged in racial justice led by BIPOC. Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility and a White anti-racist scholar, explains this method of accountability: “A percentage of my income goes to racial justice organizations led by people of color. Two-thirds of net income raised from my public workshops go directly to local racial justice organizations led by people of color, so I am not making more than those local organizations I am donating to.”39
As part of grappling with this, I recognize that my institution, Montclair State University, supported me with a sabbatical that provided me with time and compensation to write this book. Following the lead of Carla Shalaby, author of the brilliant book Troublemakers, I have donated my advance (outside of overhead) and will donate 100 percent of royalties of this book to two grassroots, racial justice education organizations led by people of Color. The Education for Liberation Network, an organization I have been involved with for over a decade, is “a national coalition of teachers, community activists, researchers, youth, and parents who believe a good education should teach people—particularly low-income youth and youth of Color—how to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face.” The Abolitionist Teaching Network, started by Bettina Love, aims to “develop and support educators to fight injustice within their schools and communities.”40
While donations to these organizations may responsibly address my racial accountability, it lifts up questions in light of class privilege. As a full-time professor with benefits, I have the means to position my writing and consulting as supplemental to my salary. This arrangement problematically sets up a dynamic in which only White people with economic privilege can be seen as engaging “responsibly” in racial justice work. Under a racial capitalist system, there are no clean solutions. Just as there are multiple perspectives on White people’s roles in anti-racism work, I recognize that there will be a variety of reactions about these principles of engagement, but my aim is to make my intentions and tensions visible and to be as accountable as possible.
DESCRIPTION OF CHAPTERS
The introduction and chapter 1 of this book open with an examination of how curriculum functions to maintain dominant power structures through a reinvestment in Whiteness. Education has the potential to function as both a tool that reproduces inequality or a space of liberation and resistance. To be a space of freedom, teachers must create room for students to engage with the accurate historical record of colonization, enslavement, oppression, and inequality that has shaped the present context of our society. This allows students to grapple with hard truths and learn the complexity of oppression in order to dismantle it. In chapter 1, I examine how education functions instead to maintain racial hierarchies by hiding the realities of oppression through the telling of a falsified story of American progress. I do this by applying a framework I previously developed called Tools of Whiteness specifically to curriculum to demonstrate how teaching and content choices can serve to maintain White supremacy.
After understanding how this curriculum maintains racism, chapter 2 looks at how teachers’ racial ideology is linked to what they teach by using data collected from almost two decades of preparing and supporting educators to teach from a racial justice stance. In this chapter, I share four case studies of novice White teachers to demonstrate how their personal experiences and understandings about race find their way into their curriculum. I show the pathway from these teachers’ ideological roots to the curriculum they ultimately taught, mitigated by how they responded to anti-racist teacher education. By highlighting teachers’ reflections about race and analyzing the curricular projects they create, findings indicate that there is a powerful relationship between teachers’ ideological understandings and their capacity to reproduce or resist #CurriculumSoWhite.
Given the findings, chapter 3 argues that addressing teachers’ racial ideology provides hope in interrupting the proliferation of racist curricula seen in chapter 1. This chapter explores the very specific ways that White teachers must reframe their understandings about race in order to advance racial justice rather than reproduce racism. This chapter dives into preservice teachers’ reflections about their journeys toward anti-racist teaching and how they had to rethink their lifetime of socialization around institutional, interpersonal, ideological, and internalized racism.
In order for teacher education to support the kinds of racial reframing examined in chapter 3, schools of education need to restructure themselves to advance racial justice. To facilitate the kind of transformation to teachers’ racial ideology needed to interrupt curricular Tools of Whiteness, teacher education needs to make a commitment to advance racial justice. While this sounds great in theory, what does it actually look like in practice? To answer this question, chapters 4 and 5 delve into the structures and principles that guide five teacher education programs at institutes of higher education that all center racial justice. These chapters provide a window into possible program designs, highlighting how a focus on racial justice can be built into programs across the teacher education pipeline—from admission to induction.
The late educational policy professor Jean Anyon conceptualized “Radical Possibilities” as a way of addressing overwhelming socioeconomic inequality through social movements, recognizing that social change has historically been achieved only through collective struggle.41 Africana history professor Robin D. G. Kelley wrote about the concept of “Freedom Dreams” as a way to envision a new world coming out of the Black Radical Tradition involving “collective action, personal self-transformation and will.”42 Both concepts have been taken up by activists and movements in keeping an eye not just on the issues that need to be fought against but also the new configurations of what we are in the struggle for. Radical Possibilities and Freedom Dreams are key to this book’s larger project of moving away from schools as spaces that maintain systems of racism and instead offers us an opportunity to imagine together how education can be a place for liberatory change. By examining the who, what, why, and how of racial justice teacher education, this book provides radical possibilities for transforming schools into spaces for freedom dreaming.
CHAPTER 1
CURRICULAR TOOLS OF WHITENESS
Honey, if you want to clean the house, you have to see the dirt.
—LOUISE HAY
CURRICULAR TOOLS OF WHITENESS
In this chapter, I share examples of curriculum used in K–12 schools that publicly came to light because of the outrage and organizing of parents of Color who came across their children’s assignments and took to social media to share their righteous indignation. As a trigger warning, the examples of curriculum in this chapter are distressing. They range from potentially easy-to-miss examples to violent and traumatic assignments. The majority of the examples in my research are anti-Black in nature and deal with the teaching of enslavement in particular. My goal in sharing these examples is not to re-traumatize BIPOC or to make White people feel bad, but rather to bring to light the breadth and depth of how racism is perpetuated through everyday, real assignments in K–12 schools. This way we can name, disrupt, and change it. As motivational author Louise Hay once said, “Honey, if you want to clean the house, you have to see the dirt.” This chapter is the dirt.
I have been collecting social media posts of racist curricula for years and have organized these examples into a framework for understanding how these are more than random, singular examples of poor judgment by individual “bad apple” teachers. They also aren’t a reflection of the turn toward explicit racism under the forty-fifth US president. Rather, these examples function as what I have named Tools of Whiteness because they use a variety of strategies to socialize students to internalize existing racist ideologies, ensuring that racial hierarchies are maintaine
d through the education system.
In previous work, I lay out a framework of Tools of Whiteness, which reveals scripted responses used to maintain teachers’ investment in White supremacy.1 White supremacy requires certain ideologies to remain in place in order to maintain power. Just as tools allow a job to be done more effectively or efficiently, Tools of Whiteness facilitate the job of maintaining and supporting the thoughts, language, and ways of acting that uphold structures of White supremacy. In other words, Tools of Whiteness function to deny, evade, subvert, or avoid ways of analyzing racism as a form of oppression.
Given that 82 percent of US teachers are White, the very people who have benefitted from racism and have themselves been educated to hold racist ideas are the ones tasked with moving the next generation toward reproduction or resistance of racism.2 Rather than move toward racial justice, some teachers both consciously and unconsciously use curricular Tools of Whiteness to revise the historical record in ways that preserve the idea of Whiteness as good, superior, and ever present. When educators teach in this way, curriculum and instruction become projects in which ideologies of racism are reproduced in the minds of the next generation. While the individual educator using curricular Tools of Whiteness may not intend or be conscious of this role they are playing, the consequences remain the same. The following chart lays out the curricular Tools of Whiteness; the sections that follow provide classroom examples that demonstrate how each tool operates.
CURRICULAR TOOLS OF WHITENESS