by Bree Picower
By teaching students that enslaved people were too ignorant to be “terribly unhappy” and that there were “kind and generous owners,” teachers are actively perpetuating the inaccurate idea that racism is Not That Bad for most people.
In a 2014 study, history education researchers John H. Bickford and Cynthia W. Rich examined over forty children’s books about slavery and highlighted a plethora of ways that the narratives, like the examples above, distort its inhumanity. They highlight tactics used in literature such as heroification, omission, and exceptionalism—often resulting in happy endings of American progress.22 As they explain, “To be blunt, a Holocaust story likely cannot be told without someone making someone die. A story about American slavery cannot likely be told without some violence, family separation, and little hope for freedom. . . . In short, such brutalities cannot be eliminated from the story while maintaining historicity.”23
Teachers may be selecting books that tell a happy story in an attempt to be developmentally appropriate and to avoid traumatizing students. However, historian Blair Imani contends that if children who are BIPOC are old enough to experience racism, then it should therefore follow that White children are old enough to learn about it. As long as students who are BIPOC remain targets of racism, attempts to whitewash history do not protect children of Color; rather, they protect Whiteness. White supremacy requires this lack of historicity in order to falsely maintain the dominant narrative of Whiteness as good and innocent. Ohio State University historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries explained in a report on the way teachers misrepresent slavery: “Although we teach them that slavery happened, we fail to provide the detail or historical context they need to make sense of its origin, evolution, demise and legacy. . . . And in some cases, we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential.”24 By creating or using premade curricula that convinces students that slavery was Not That Bad, teachers protect White innocence at the expense of Black resistance.
By claiming that historical racism is Not That Bad, teachers also imply that past oppression should have no consequence on the current status quo—in turn telling students that everything is now equal. This messaging has been shown to have negative consequences for students experiencing inequality. When students are socialized to believe that things are fair but then experience discrimination, they can’t look to the system for blame—instead, they fault themselves. A 2017 study by Erin B. Godfrey, Carlos E. Santos, and Esther Burson found that “traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years.”25 The findings from this study indicate that the use of tools such as Not That Bad that paint a false narrative of equality undermine the well-being of marginalized youth.
CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL
In order to maintain racial hierarchies, Whiteness requires us to buy into the false narrative that all things are equal. To admit that historical oppression has consequences on today’s racial inequality would require conversations and actions such as affirmative action, reparations, and other equalizing measures that those who benefit from current arrangements aggressively resist. The tool of All Things Being Equal skews reality by collapsing the complexity of history in order to present, as Fox News would say, a “fair and balanced” perspective. When using this tool, teachers dismiss context, power, motivation, or outcomes by pretending that apples and oranges are the same fruit.
In the classroom, this tool looks similar to teaching through multiple perspectives, a popular strategy in multicultural education that encourages students to see situations from several sides. However, in contrast, when teachers use this tool, they are attempting to create a false equivalency and a seemingly neutral, even playing field, as if all sides have equal weight and circumstances. When subjected to this tool, students come to think that all opinions are equally valid, allowing for anyone to claim “fake news” if they disagree with a particular perspective. Two teacher-created worksheets from 2018 demonstrate the All Things Being Equal tool.
The first example was posted online by Roberto Livar, the father of Manú, an eighth grader in San Antonio, Texas.26 It was a worksheet titled “Slavery: A Balanced View” with a blank chart in which students were expected to list examples of both negative and positive aspects of slavery. In his post, Mr. Livar asked, “What the hell is this revisionist history lesson trying to achieve here!?!?”27 The second worksheet was posted on Facebook by Trameka Brown-Berry, a mother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.28 The worksheet asked students to “Give 3 ‘good’ reasons for slavery and 3 bad reasons. Make notes and then put them in complete sentences on a separate sheet to prepare for making an argument.” There were blank spaces under the directions marked “Good” and “Bad.” Next to the photo of the assignment, she asked, “Does anyone else find my 4th grader’s homework offensive?” Over two thousand respondents found it to be so.29
Both of these 2018 examples focused on the study of enslavement, the topic that is most heavily represented in curricular Tools of Whiteness, and both asked students to identify good/positive aspects of slavery. By using the tool All Sides Being Equal, these teachers created curricula that set up the false idea that one of the biggest atrocities in history can be casually debated as if both sides were equal. In addition to the moral reprehensibility of this tool, it also denies any emotional anguish that it might create for students, particularly Black students, to argue for the “goodness” of enslavement.
To successfully complete these assignments, students were expected to fill out attributes on both sides. Fortunately, the children whose parents posted the assignments rejected this indoctrination and called out the teachers for trying to turn them into slavery apologists. Manú, the student in the first example, refused to provide good reasons for slavery, writing “N/A” in that column. In the “negative” column, he responded with bullet points: “forced strenuous labor, rape, forced religion, forced sex between slaves, stolen culture, no payment, occasional torture, hardly were fed, if not being physically abused, they were verbally abused.” He explained his response to receiving this assignment: “When I first read it, I thought it was B.S.” Manú went on to explain that the teacher told them to respond using the textbook as well as “the stuff that we could think of off the top of our head.”30 What exactly did this teacher imagine was in their students’ heads?
In the second example, fourth-grader Jerome answered: “Good? I feel there is no good reason for slavery. That’s why I did not write it. BAD: Biting them. Splitting them up from family members, making them do your chores and work when it’s your job to do that, and punishing them, and I am proud to be black because we are strong and brave.” While it is incredibly heartening to see these young people clap back at their teachers, it is not the responsibility of students of Color to hold educators accountable for their racist curriculum.
We saw the All Sides Being Equal tool of creating false equivalents used by the forty-fifth president of the United States after the Unite the Right rally on April 11, 2017, during which White supremacists, Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and other members of the alt-right marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville, shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” The next day, a member of this group plowed his car into counter-protesters, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of a young White woman named Heather Heyer. Donald Trump commented on the incident, and instead of expressing condemnation for the murder, he claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides.” When a reporter asked if he was equating the moral plane of the counter-protestors with that of the White supremacists, he responded:
Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides—I think there’s blame on both sides. But you had a lot of people in that group [alt-right] that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know,
I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group [the counter-protestors] didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story.31
Trump equated two “wrongdoings”: (1) protesting without a permit and (2) first-degree murder. This tactic skews the reality of the “two sides of the story” while wrongly leaving blame up for debate. The tool of equating two unequal events allows him to keep significant points out of the conversation and chalk up people’s outrage to a difference of opinion, or “fake news.”
The All Things Being Equal tool is appealing for many teachers because they often feel pressured to present an unbiased perspective, which they equate with not taking a stance or not assigning blame. As a teacher educator, my students often raise the concern of teacher objectivity, having been socialized to believe that classrooms should be apolitical places of knowledge transmission. Without fail, this concern always comes up in a class I lead on complicating the narrative of Christopher Columbus in elementary classrooms. Using Rethinking Schools’ classic trial activity from Rethinking Columbus, participants explore who is guilty for the crimes against the Taino Indians by examining primary documents.32 While the role-play asks students to consider multiple perspectives, the activity concludes by assigning blame—the key piece missing in the All Things Being Equal tool.
After the activity, we engage in a discussion of how the teachers will now teach Columbus to their students. Preservice teachers are often hesitant to stray from the traditional “Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue” version. They fear the backlash from imaginary parents who, when pressed, they realize they have pictured as White. They see moving from the official version as potential “indoctrination” but don’t recognize that teaching the “Niña, Pinta, and Santa María” version is biased as well—that it is teaching the glory of imperialism. Somehow, they don’t fear a corresponding potential backlash from Indigenous parents, demonstrating the power that even non-present, imaginary Whiteness has on teachers’ decision-making. The problem with the All Things Being Equal tool is not the examination of multiple perspectives or viewpoints, it’s the false pretense that both sides are coming to the table from the same place.
Not surprisingly, this tool is generally reserved for when people of Color are targets of oppression. When White people are the primary perceived victims of atrocities, such as in the September 11th attacks, students are typically taught that evildoers perpetrated the violence. As Trameka Brown-Berry, the mother of fourth-grader Jerome, commented about the assignment asking her child to identify “three good reasons for slavery”: “You wouldn’t ask someone to list three good reasons for rape or three good reasons for the Holocaust.”33 So why is it deemed acceptable to ask students to use this line of reasoning when thinking of slavery or colonization? Again, the insidious reach of Whiteness is at play.
CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: WHITE GAZE
Another way that Whiteness is maintained is by masking itself and attempting to collapse everyone into seeing the world through a particular perspective—the perspective of White people. Teachers achieve this through the use of a tool that Toni Morrison referred to as the White Gaze.34 The White Gaze is set up to view people of Color, particularly Black people, through the lens of Whiteness, and it ultimately “traps black people in white imaginations.”35 With this tool, teachers use curricula that are written either explicitly or implicitly from a White perspective, asking all students to develop White sensibilities. This White Gaze tool teaches students to think like those in power, in turn preparing students to empathize with oppressors rather than those marginalized by power. This tool also trains students to problem solve to maintain inequality rather than teaching them how to dismantle it. Take the following two instances, which, in keeping with previous examples, distort the interwoven history of settler colonialism and enslavement.
The first example was an assignment that I initially saw on a fellow academic’s Facebook page. It read:
Poster Assignment
You are a wealthy Southern plantation owner who had several slaves escape and head to the North. This is severely hurting your profits. Make a poster advertising for slave catchers to go find your runaway slaves. Be persuasive, make your poster stand out, and be sure to put in an incentive.
Things to remember:
Who is your audience?
What will they receive if they return with slaves?
Where will they need to travel?
When do they have to return? Is there a time limit?
Why should they do this job? Will you pay them? How much?
While I don’t have information about this assignment, since it was posted without identifying information, the following diary-writing exercise was assigned in an elementary school in Edmunds, Washington. This assignment went viral after the mother of Blaine Gallagher, a Native American student of the Klamath Tribe, saw her eleven-year-old’s homework. While assigned in 2018, it came from a supplemental curriculum originally published in 1971.36
Diary Situation 2
Since your ships’ first landing in the New World, you have had constant contact with various Indian tribes. The first Indians were generally friendly. They often were very helpful. They came to your aid during that first winter. Without them, you probably would not have survived. You have welcomed them into your homes and have often shared your meals, your good times, and your sorrows.
Now tragedy has struck. Last Friday a well-organized Indian attack was launched across your colony. Several dozen colonists—men, women, and children—were slaughtered with their own guns. Many of these colonists were killed at their dinner table as they shared their meal with their “friends.” This attack came as a total surprise and shock.
Write a diary account of the attack.
1. Explain exactly what happened as you viewed it.
2. Express your conflicting feelings toward the Indians.
3. Include in your account some of your past experiences with the Indians and your plans for how you will deal with them in the future.
4. Strive for verisimilitude. This word means “the quality of seeming real.” To make your descriptions real, use descriptive words which create pictures in your reader’s mind.
These two assignments exemplify the White Gaze tool. The teachers who used the tool forced students to take on a role—the first as a wealthy Southern plantation owner and the second as a colonist in the New World. While neither explicitly tells the student they should imagine themselves as White, a White identity is assumed in both these roles. Both assignments view Black and Indigenous people as the “White man’s burden,” requiring students to problem solve in order to “deal” with enslaved Africans who are ruining their “profit” by running away from slavery or to handle Native people who are launching a “shocking” attack for no apparent reason. This requires students to learn how to maintain oppression by either scheming to protect profits by catching troublemaking slaves or dealing with those violent Indians who have hurt their feelings. Both distort the brutality of enslavement and colonization, positioning White people as the victims under those systems.
A similar White Gaze assignment was posted to Facebook in December 2019 from a fifth-grade social studies class in Missouri.
You own a plantation or farm and therefore need more workers. You begin to get involved in the slave trade industry and have slaves work on your farm. Your product to trade is slaves. Set your price for a slave____. These could be worth a lot. You can trade for any items you’d like.
According to the school, this assignment was part of an activity that had “attempted to address market practices.” The district justified the assignment, claiming, “Students were learning about having goods, needing goods and obtaining goods and how that influenced early settlement in America.”37 The activity was a role-play in which students were assigned a variety of roles, including slave owner. A biracial student, who was given this role, showed his completed worksheet to his mother, Angie Walker, who po
sted it online. Also an elementary teacher, Ms. Walker expressed, “For me, for my biracial son to come home, and to see ‘$5 for two slaves,’ I was shocked.” Her son told her that the assignment was meant to be “a game” to see which student could amass the most wealth through free trade. “First of all, the slave trade industry is never a game,” Walker denounced. “The teacher could have gotten the lesson across perfectly fine without using slavery. It could have been a teachable moment, and things like this in 2019 should not be occurring. We can all learn from this and do better.” Ms. Walker calls attention to the emotional impact the White Gaze tool has on Black students, as well as the disturbing use of the Not That Bad tool that turns slavery into a casual game.
This dehumanizing tool forces children of Color to develop the White Gaze by going outside themselves to see their own people as problems and to empathize with, identify with, and think like the very people responsible for their oppression. Assignments shaped by the White Gaze force children who are BIPOC to see themselves through the violent and deficit lens of Whiteness. As Blaine, the only Native student in the class that received the diary assignment, said, “It was upsetting. I didn’t want to read it because it told me about slaughtering by my own people.”38
Fortunately, Blaine was able to identify the problem with being asked to see his people through the eyes of his oppressors, but not all students are able to avoid this racial internalization. In such cases, the White Gaze tool puts a psychological burden on students who are BIPOC, potentially jeopardizing their academic success when confronted with such assignments. Take for example a question on a Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam based on Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad. During this high-stakes exam, tenth graders from across the state were confronted with a passage that required them to identify with the perspective of a character named Ethel, a racist White Southern woman, in order to correctly answer the question.39 The vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association reported how disturbed students were by the question: “They really felt like they were being asked to basically write creative racist thoughts and put them into words for this character. . . . This seemed like a disturbing thing to ask students—especially students of color—to do.”40