Reading, Writing, and Racism

by Bree Picower

White Out

  No One Is to Blame

  Not That Bad

  All Things Being Equal

  White Gaze

  Embedded Stereotypes

  Racist Reproduction

  CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: WHITE OUT

  In order to maintain racial hierarchies with Whiteness at the top, curricula using this tool cement Whiteness as normal, innocent, and ever present. In order for schools to be places of liberation, teachers would have to tell the full picture about the history of whose land the US was founded on and with whose labor. This would require teachers to portray White people as the perpetrators of violence against BIPOC.

  Most curricular tools of Whiteness function to avoid teaching the history of the formation of the United States accurately. The White Out tool specifically achieves this by simply not including people of Color at all. When teachers choose this tool, they reinforce Whiteness in three different ways. First, by erasing the history of oppression that BIPOC have faced at the hands of White people, teachers affirm the post-racial idea that all people are on an even playing field. Second, by erasing the sheer existence of BIPOC from the learning experiences of all students, teachers send messages to children about who is deemed valuable or expendable, reinforcing racial hierarchies. Finally, by removing the accomplishments and resistance movements of BIPOC, especially in light of the oppression they faced, teachers block avenues for self-love or pride for students of Color.

  Bill Bigelow, teacher and editor of the social justice education journal Rethinking Schools, published an article about his experience with the curricular White Out tool and how he reframed it.3 He told his fifth-grade students about how some presidents had been enslavers, which sparked their curiosity about which presidents specifically. They began to research their question by looking through their dictionaries, social studies textbooks, kid-friendly websites, encyclopedias, and other sources—which, in keeping with the White Out tool, made no mention, or provided little or unclear information, of this aspect of presidential history. This omission of factual information demonstrates how this tool maintains the dominant narrative of the founding fathers as universally good. It also perpetuates the myth that the United States was founded in ways that represent freedom and equality for “all,” despite the very real ways that racial oppression was key to this story.

  Rather than allow this White Out tool to go unacknowledged, Bigelow encouraged his students to become “textbook detectives,” which taught them how to identify and critically analyze historical White Outs. As a culmination, he had the students write letters to the textbook companies sharing their research data and demanding that they rewrite their books. When asked why the textbook companies omit this information, Bigelow’s students responded: “They’re stupid”; “They don’t want us kids to know the truth”; “They think we’re too young to know”; and “They don’t know themselves.” While Bigelow was able to support his students to see through and understand why publishers might white this information out, many teachers haven’t been trained to be “textbook detectives” themselves, leaving this tool in play.

  As seen in this example, it is often the omissions in textbooks and children’s educational materials that are most heavily implicated in the White Out tool. In 2019, a New York City parent activist group, the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, issued a report called Diverse City, White Curriculum: The Exclusion of People of Color from English Language Arts in NYC Schools.4 Partnered with researchers from New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, the report examined 1,200 books across fifteen commonly used curricula and booklists, from 3-K and pre-K through eighth grade.5 By looking at the racial background of both title characters as well as curricular authors, they found that while only 15 percent of New York City public school students are White, the characters in the most commonly used books are 52 percent White and the book authors are 84 percent White. In fact, they found that elementary books featured more animal characters than Black, Asian, or Latinx characters combined.6 Megan Hester, director of the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative, explained in responding to the report: “Children’s books have traditionally played a role in socialization—teaching children how to think, how to act, and how to feel about themselves, others, and the world. Unfortunately, the erasure, dehumanization, marginalization, and whitewashing of people of Color have been a persistent part of that tradition.”7 When children are exposed to the White Out tool, they are being taught more than early literacy; they also are being presented with messages of both superiority and inferiority.

  Children’s and young adult literature play an important role in the development of young people’s understanding of the world. Children’s literature expert Rudine Sims Bishop developed the popular metaphor of windows and mirrors to describe representation in literature.8 Ideally, there should be a mix of books that can serve both as opportunities for children of all racial identities to see their experiences mirrored back to them and as windows to see the world beyond themselves. Without this mix, what does it mean, then, for White children to be hyper-visible to themselves and others and for children of Color to learn in a mirror-less world in which they do not exist? Bishop explains, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.”9 The White Out tool teaches this lesson through the omission of BIPOC from curricular materials.

  CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: NO ONE IS TO BLAME

  While the White Out tool omitted people of Color, the following tools do portray BIPOC, but in distorted and problematic ways. Similar to the White Out tool, teachers use the No One Is to Blame tool to avoid assigning responsibility to White people for historical atrocities. In this case, teachers build curricula that include BIPOC, but the stories are told with no victims and no perpetrators. This maintains the dominant ideology of White people as benevolent, good, and innocent and paints a picture of an even playing field. This omission of blame encourages students to see atrocious acts as naturally occurring—as just “human nature” in which oppression occurs randomly and without pattern. Teachers use this tool to reframe and justify historical acts by providing explanations that do not involve power, resulting in a false and sanitized version of history that protects the reputation of White people.

  Figure 1 is adapted from a textbook that uses the No One Is to Blame tool.11 It is a snapshot taken by Coby Burren, a freshman in a Texas high school, from a McGraw-Hill textbook used in his geography class.12 Under a map labeled “Patterns of Immigration,” the caption reads “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” Coby sent the photo to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, who posted it on Facebook, where it went viral. In her Facebook post, Dean-Burren draws attention to how Africans transported to America against their will are framed as “immigrant workers” rather than as enslaved people. She points out that the textbook indicates that English and European people came as indentured servants to work for little or no pay but makes no similar mention for enslaved Africans, referring to them instead as “workers” or “immigrants.”13

  Figure 1. Textbook example of Atlantic slave trade with no slave traders. Source: Teks World Geography Student Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2015).10

  The publishers erase the violence of enslavement and how slave traders hunted and stole family members before exporting them from Africa to America, where they were sold as property to Europeans. By using the No One Is to Blame tool, the textbook authors not only misrepresent the forced migration of enslaved Africans as voluntary, but also they frame it so passively as to remove any oppressors. Who brought these “workers” to the agricultural plantations? How? Why? None of that is mentioned in this framing. This glaring omission of the role of European
s in the trans-Atlantic slave trade reinforces the framing of White people as innocent and good in the American story of progress. This curricular Tool of Whiteness glosses over this historical atrocity, leaving not only no victims, but also no perpetrators.

  In a similar use of the No One Is to Blame tool, a Canadian textbook has a section called “Moving Out” that stated: “When the European settlers arrived, they needed land to live on.14 The First Nations people agreed to move to different areas to make room for the new settlements.”15 The book continues: “The First Nations people moved to reserves, where they could live undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of the settlers.” This textbook uses the No One Is to Blame tool to frame colonization as an “agreement” between settlers and Indigenous people, masking the reality of settler colonialism, “which is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing.”16 Instead of naming and grappling with settler colonialism, the textbook authors fictionalize a mutually beneficial arrangement in which settlers received land and First Nations people conceivably continued their way of life peacefully and undisturbed.

  As demonstrated throughout this chapter, all of the examples of curricular Tools of Whiteness that I came across in my research, including the two examples above, distort the shared history and experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, and European people. This is not a coincidence, as Indigenous studies and education scholars Eve Tuck and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández explain:

  In North America, settler colonialism operates through a triad of relationships, between the (white [but not always]) settlers, the Indigenous inhabitants, and chattel slaves who are removed from their homelands to work stolen land. . . . For settlers to live on and profit from land, they must eliminate Indigenous peoples, and extinguish their historical, epistemological, philosophical, moral and political claims to land. Land, in being settled, becomes property. Settlers must also import chattel slaves, who must be kept landless, and who also become property, to be used, abused, and managed.17

  These two textbook examples are implicated in this broader settler colonial project, maintaining White innocence in the story of how land and labor were acquired through “agreements” and “immigration” rather than genocide and enslavement. With no oppressor depicted, students internalize the dominant ideology of the natural order of our highly stratified society. One of my former students, Linda, demonstrated this idea of a natural order of domination when, in claiming why we should not teach about racism in schools, she said, “I think that there is always a group that is going to dominate another group of people. You know, whether it’s Whites over African Americans or Indians over whoever.” Linda framed domination as an aspect of human nature and was able to disconnect Whites from the oppressor position by offering other possibilities of dominant groups (although she could not actually name any other than “whoever”).

  Linda’s way of thinking about oppression was likely made possible by her former teachers and their curriculum that also used the No One Is to Blame tool to obscure historical arrangements. As an educator, Linda is now able to continue this broader historical project of maintaining White innocence through curricula like the ones above. Adding insult to injury is the fact that these examples of curricular Tools of Whiteness are literally textbook examples. They passed through multiple editors, writers, review boards, editorial boards, and so on before being printing and distributed. Individual teachers such as Linda do not have to create or question anything; they are handed the curricular Tools of Whiteness that align with their own ideology that they then seamlessly pass on to their students.

  Similar to the way that teacher Bill Bigelow taught his students to recognize and analyze instances of White Out, teacher Laura Whooley posted on Facebook to share a similar example of how to educate children to speak back regarding the No One Is to Blame tool.18 Her students were using a McGraw-Hill companion textbook when they came across the following sentence: “As more farmers grew tobacco, they needed more enslaved Africans to do the work.” Rather than read this sentence and move on, Ms. Whooley and her students homed in on the word “needed.” She used this teachable moment to support her students in understanding the dynamics of greed, money, and power in the arrangement of chattel slavery, how framing matters, and how to take action. She had her students write letters to McGraw-Hill sharing their analysis and concerns.

  Fourth-grader Caroline wrote, “When it says ‘needed’ I think that is not really correct. When the wealthy people bought enslaved Africans, they didn’t really need it. They wanted it. You see, the white people could’ve done all the work themselves, but they wanted slaves to do it.” Caroline continued with her recommendation to the publisher: “You should replace needed with wanted. It’s more realistic. And because when the 3rd graders come to 4th grade and see THAT, they are gonna think it’s totally fine to enslave people because they NEED it.” Caroline not only understood the power dynamic at play, she also named the role that the textbook plays in indoctrinating children to believe racial oppression.

  Another student, Laurel, compellingly added, “1. No one needs slaves in this world. 2. Plantation owners could have done the work themselves instead of sitting on their lazy butts. 3. If they need slaves, I need a pet panda.” By calling to attention one simple verb—needed—in a companion textbook, Ms. Whooley interrupted the transmission of the idea that the enslavement of Africans was a logical and necessary solution to European economic desires. By teaching her students that in fact, someone was to blame, she provided a significant example of the power teachers have to transform, rather than reproduce, racist ideology.

  CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: NOT THAT BAD

  When teachers use the Not That Bad tool, they aim to downplay the horrific nature of past oppressions by promoting a sanitized picture of history, thereby maintaining White innocence. By convincing students that events like slavery or colonization were Not That Bad, teachers propagate a false narrative of what it means to live under oppressive circumstances, masking children’s ability to understand current inequality. Minimizing the reality of how White people inflicted racial violence on Black people under the institution of slavery enables White people to claim that Black people and other people of Color are playing the race card by obscuring the reality of how racism operates to maintain the suffering of BIPOC.

  In 2015, children’s literature authors using this tool released two different books that both tell happy stories of enslaved cooks. A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins, published by Schwartz & Wade, and A Birthday Cake for George Washington by Ramin Ganeshram, published by Scholastic, both depicted happy Black cooks joyfully making sweets for their enslavers. An illustration from A Birthday Cake for George Washington portrays six smiling, animated, intergenerational African Americans prepping, cooking, and serving a huge feast. A toddler is gleefully lifting a rag in one hand while swinging an overflowing bucket of bubbly mop water, so thrilled to be cleaning the floor for the upcoming festivities to which he would receive no invitation. A little girl, smiling eyes widened with anticipation, arms eagerly held up, takes in the delicious smell of the baking dessert wafting from the kitchen, a cake from which she would be offered no slice. The book centers on an enslaved chef named Hercules who attempts to make the birthday cake, but misadventure ensues when he finds there is no sugar in the house.

  While slavery is depicted more subtly in A Fine Dessert, an enslaved mother and daughter still are seen smiling as they prepare a blackberry dish. After they serve the dessert to “the master and his family,” they hide in a closet, kneeling in the dark to furtively lick the bowl. Rather than explain to the reader why the little girl has to work and hide, the text states “Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Mmmmm. What a fine dessert!” By representing the small joys Black people created for themselves absent the abuse, brutality, and cruelty of White enslavers, these books sell the story that the institution of slavery was Not That Bad.r />
  The public reaction to the Not That Bad tool depicted in these books called atention to what was left out of the actual reality of slavery. Online backlash from parents and progressive education organizations was swift when the hashtag #SlaveryWithASmile started trending and think pieces circulated online about these books.19 A coalition of #BlackLivesMatter activists, school librarians, and social justice groups circulated a petition that went viral demanding that Scholastic and the Children’s Book Council “Stop promoting Racist, ‘Happy Slave’ Book to Children.” Two prominent trade journals cautioned against the Scholastic book: the School Library Journal called it “highly problematic” and Kirkus Reviews expressed that it had “an incomplete, even dishonest treatment of slavery.” After facing the online backlash, the author of A Fine Dessert apologized and donated her profits to the We Need Diverse Books campaign. Scholastic recalled A Birthday Cake for George Washington, explaining, “We believe that, without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves and therefore should be withdrawn.”20

  The Not That Bad tool is present in textbooks as well. In 2018, parent Eileen Curtright tweeted a photo from her daughter’s Prentice Hall textbook that claimed:

  But the “peculiar institution,” as Southerners came to call it, like all human institutions should not be oversimplified. While there were cruel masters who maimed or even killed their slaves (although killing and maiming were against the law in every state), there were also kind and generous owners. The institution was as complex as the people involved. Though most slaves were whipped at some point in their lives, a few never felt the lash. Nor did all slaves work in the fields, some were house servants or skilled artisans. Many may not have even been terribly unhappy with their lot, for they knew no other.21