by Bree Picower
While White students might be able to answer this question and move on, Black students are forced to experience the racial trauma of thinking about themselves through a White racist lens in order to achieve academically on a test that has implications for their future. In what ways does this take them out of the testing mindset and impact their psychological well-being and academic success? Thanks to public uproar and demands from the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Boston Teachers Union, the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance, and the New England Area Conference of the NAACP, this question was removed.41 This situation begs the question: How many other assignments like this have been created by the tool of White Gaze that have been left unaddressed?
For White children, this tool reinforces mainstream ideology about racial superiority. It socializes White children to see themselves as the ones in power and to develop paternalistic mindsets, strategies, and policies to interact with and ultimately control BIPOC. This 2019 example from a school outside Chicago demonstrates the potential outcome when White students internalize these messages. A White high school student took a picture of his Black classmate. He posted the photo on Craigslist with the headline, “Slave for Sale.” The White student described his peer as a “hardworkin thick n—— slave.”42 Someone might try to assign blame for this ignorance to the single student himself or even ask where someone could learn such behavior. By enticing students into the White Gaze through curriculum, schools should not be surprised when children internalize these messages and act accordingly.
While the White student in this example used the White Gaze tool to internalize racial superiority, this tool also results in children of Color trying to avoid their identities because of the violence perpetuated upon them. An article in The Guardian cited how children are responding to growing racial hate crimes in the UK. The piece reported an increase in students of Color attempting to change their appearances to look more White as a way to avoid this racist bullying. As one eleven-year-old Chinese girl lamented, “I hate the way I look so much, I think if I looked different everyone would stop being mean to me and I’d fit in.” A ten-year-old stated, “I’ve tried to make my face whiter before using makeup so that I can fit in.”43 Rather than being able to recognize the perpetrators of the bullying as racist, these children are heartbreakingly internalizing the pressure of the White Gaze tool by attempting to fit in to White standards of beauty.
CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: EMBEDDED STEREOTYPES
Similar to the White Gaze, White supremacy benefits when people of Color are dehumanized and stereotyped. Teachers can consciously or unconsciously enact Whiteness by using the Embedded Stereotype tool. This tool relies on a hidden curriculum to socialize students to develop racial stereotypes by camouflaging them in lessons on unrelated academic skills—for example, math or literacy. The teacher may be teaching a lesson that appears to be on a neutral skill, like addition or rhyming, but the content relies on mainstream or historical stereotypes. In other words, the lesson isn’t about the offending stereotype—the teaching of the stereotype is a secondary effect.
An egregious example of the Embedded Stereotype tool came from a reading series called Little Books from Reading Horizons, a curriculum purchased in 2015 for $1.2 million by the Minneapolis Public School District.44 One Little Book page is an illustration of an African girl running out of a hut in a simple orange dress. The title of this story is “Lazy Lucy.” The other page shows a dark-skinned, smiling runner, arms lifted in triumph. The text reads:
People in Kenya are very active in sports. They play rugby and soccer. They also like boxing. Most people are aware that Kenyans are able to run very fast. They can run for a long time. Kenyans have won many races. Some Kenyans run with bare feet! As you can tell, Kenya is a pretty great place.45
The district purchased this curriculum filled with essentializing stereotypes as part of its Acceleration 2020 initiative, specifically aimed at closing the “performance gap between white students and students of color.” In keeping with how this tool functions, the content about Kenyans being lazy or running fast wasn’t the goal of the lesson; literacy development using decoding skills was the intended lesson objective. Socializing students to develop stereotypical thinking that maintains racial hierarchies was the embedded curriculum of racism.
While the above examples are from literacy curriculum, the Embedded Stereotypes tool shows up frequently in mathematic lessons as well. The following examples demonstrate the tool in use when teachers integrate race into math problems.
Mathematics Example 1
The master needed 192 slaves to work on the plantation in the cotton fields. The fields could fill 75 bags of cotton. Only 96 slaves were able to pick cotton for that day. The missus needed them in the Big House to prepare for the Annual Picnic. How many more slaves are needed in the cotton fields?
Note: Follow the three reads protocol to identify what you understand, what you know, your plan and how to solve.
Picture (Show your work)46
Mathematics Example 2
If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week? 2 weeks?
Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?
Frederick had 6 baskets filled with cotton. If each basket held 5 pounds, how many pounds did he have all together? 47
Mathematics Example 3
In a slave ship, there can be 3,799 slaves. One day, the slaves took over the ship. 1,897 are dead. How many slaves are alive?
One slave got whipped five times a day. How many times did he get whipped in a month (31 days)? Another slave got whipped nine times a day. How many times did he get whipped in a month? How many times did the two slaves get whipped together in one month? 48
These three assignments are explicitly mathematics problems, but implicitly they reduce Black people to the role of slaves who are either working for master and missus or are being violently beaten, whipped, or killed. Some might argue that these teachers were trying to strengthen their curriculum by integrating social studies content into their mathematical lessons. However, their problematic racial ideology was revealed through their application of the tool of Embedded Stereotypes.
Another horrific example of the Embedded Stereotype tool comes from a Burns Middle School teacher in Alabama, who passed out a quiz that included these questions:
Leroy has 2 ounces of cocaine. If he sells an 8 ball to Antonio for $320 and 2 grams to Juan for $85 per gram, what is the street value of the rest of his hold?
Pedro got 6 years for murder. He also got $10,000 for the hit. If his common law wife spends $100 of his hit money per month, how much money will be left when he gets out?
Tyrone knocked up 4 girls in the gang. There are 20 girls in his gang. What is the exact percentage of girls Tyrone knocked up?
Marvin steals Juan’s skateboard. As Marvin skates away at 15 mph, Juan loads his 357 Magnum. If it takes Juan 20 seconds to load his piece, how far away will Marvin be when he gets whacked?49
This quiz, floating around online as a piece of “satire” for over a decade, had already caused teachers in California, Texas, and New Mexico to be disciplined.50 In the Alabama case, the teacher told the students that it was not meant as a joke and they had to complete it and turn it in.51 Perhaps some teachers are using this tool in an attempt to be “down” or culturally relevant, but because their understandings of race are rife with deficit thinking, the result is reproducing deeply problematic stereotypes. In writing about this specific assignment, mathematics scholars Julius Davis and Christopher C. Jett explain, “These kinds of examples . . . contribute to stereotypical, deficit constructions of Black people and reflect what Blackness often means in the White imagination.”52
While the stereotypes in the prior examples are explicitly stated, the following examples illustrate how the Embedded Stereotype tool can also covertly promote the socializati
on of implicit bias. Observed in children as young as six years old, implicit bias is the unconscious, involuntary racist attitude that individuals have about groups outside of their personal experience.53 When teachers use curricula that embed false, negative assumptions about different groups, this socializes students to develop implicit bias and negative associations from an early age. The materials teachers create using this tool do not explicitly focus on racist content; rather, they cunningly reinforce racism through a more hidden curriculum.54
An example of this tool is a worksheet posted online by Aqkhira S-Aungkh, who found it in a K–1 vocabulary workbook published in 2009 by Carson Dellosa. 55 The assignment had four children with no facial expressions with a traced emotion word underneath each child. The instructions were to trace the word and then to draw the child’s face to match the feeling. Of the four children, two were White and two were Black. The White girl, wearing a party hat, is “happy,” and the White boy, wearing a first-place ribbon, is “proud.” In contrast, the Black boy, who has a popped balloon, is “sad,” and the Black girl, whose dog ate her homework, is “angry.” This worksheet, aimed at teaching five-year-olds how to name their feelings, taught an additional hidden lesson in assigning racialized emotions that reinforce existing stereotypes such as that of the angry Black woman and that of White men as the most advanced.
Aqkhira S-Aungkh captioned the photo, “It’s the subtle, subliminal messages that we have to watch out for. Those images that seep into our children’s sub conscience and derail their confidence. Not on my watch! Not my brilliant babies!”56 Here S-Aungkh recognizes and uncovers the tool of Embedded Stereotypes. The post was picked up by a number of media outlets, prompting the publisher to apologize: “It has been brought to our attention that our Homework Helpers Vocabulary Development Workbook features an occurrence of implied racism.”57 While the embedded racism was addressed in this example, in many assignments, it goes unnoticed and is therefore easily internalized by students.
Another example, while not a piece of classroom curriculum, is an instructional poster called “Be Cool, Follow the Rules,” put out in 2014 by the American Red Cross as part of a safe swimming campaign.58 It portrays a number of diverse children engaged in poolside activities labeled as either “cool” or “not cool.” The two characters engaged in “cool” activities are White, while four out of the five characters engaging in dangerous or violent activities identified with “not cool” arrows are children of Color. Because the “cool” children are White and the “not cool” children are people of Color, this tool of Embedded Stereotypes is sending racialized messages of validation and inferiority. Fortunately, people noticed this embedded racism and pushed back. Swimmer Margaret Sawyer saw the poster at a few local pools, complained about the racist portrayal, and posted it online. In an article in the Washington Post about the poster, Ebony Rosemond, who heads an organization called Black Kids Swim, connected the poster to both historical and current lack of swimming resources for Black children and stated, “The current state of affairs is unfortunate, and images like the one created and circulated by the Red Cross make things worse.” Rosemond continued, “In connection with the lack of images showing African Americans excelling in swimming, the poster doesn’t make you feel welcome—it suggests to a Black child that you’re not welcome here.”59
The viral backlash prompted the American Red Cross to apologize and remove the poster. While a kindergartener is likely unaware of the racist legacy of segregated swimming pools, the American Red Cross poster still teaches them the lesson that pools are not cool for Black children. As with other instances of the Embedded Stereotype tool, these visuals educate generations that might not know the history behind these images to still hold the same stereotypical beliefs as generations before. The workbook and the poster exemplify implicitly Embedded Stereotypes—the lessons are explicitly on safety and feelings, but the images reinforce racialized assignments of value and emotions. In concert, the wide range of assignments in this tool work powerfully to inculcate students into learning mainstream stereotypes while camouflaging them within lessons on unrelated academic skills.
CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: RACIST REPRODUCTION
Over the last decade, no other tool has been responsible for more examples of viral curriculum than the Racist Reproduction tool. In my research, I came across over twenty viral examples in which teachers forced Black children to role-play slaves in reenactments of different aspects of enslavement. While the other tools work to shape students’ ideology so that they think in ways that keep racial hierarchies in place, teachers using the Racist Reproduction tool provide actual practice in reenacting historical racism through role-plays, skits, games, and simulations.
One example is from 2018 in Westchester, New York, in which a White fifth-grade teacher stood in front of her class and asked her students, “Who is Black?” She then made the Black children who raised their hands line up outside in the hallway. She “pretended to place them in shackles” and then brought them back inside the classroom, where she lined them up against the wall. Playing the role of slave auctioneer, she instructed the White students to bid on them.60
The Racist Reproduction tool is particularly insidious because it gives teachers the opportunity to appear to be educating students about racism, which is a good thing, while in actuality they re-create racial hierarchies in ways that traumatize Black children. In other words, they are enacting racism in the name of anti-racism. The prevalence of this tool is astounding—the headlines below are from 2019 alone:
“Teacher on Leave and Under Investigation; Parents Claim Teacher Held ‘Mock Slave Auction’” (Watertown, NY)
“5th Grade Teacher Tells White Students to Bid on Black Classmates in Mock Slave Auction” (Bronxville, NY)
“Wisconsin Teacher Reportedly Asks 7th Graders to Create ‘Slave Games’” (Shorewood, WI)
“‘Monopoly-Like’ Slavery Game Played by Fourth-Grade NC Class Outrages African-American Grandmother” (Wilmington, NC)
“For Black History Month, This Loudoun County Elementary School Played a Runaway Slave ‘Game’ in Gym Class” (Brambleton, VA)
“Indiana Middle School Cancels ‘Slave Ship’ Role-Play Lesson After Parents Raise Concerns” (Russiaville, IN)
“South Carolina Mom Outraged After Kids Told to Pick Cotton, Sing Slave Song as ‘Game’” (Rock Hill, SC) 61
The sheer number of times this Racist Reproduction happens begs the question: What is it about enslavement that makes this the topic teachers are most committed to reenacting? Historian Carol Anderson, in her seminal book White Rage, demonstrates that for every advancement made by African Americans in the United States, White people have relentlessly pushed back against these hard-fought gains.62 Because slavery has been legally abolished, perhaps White teachers are enacting this White rage by using their limited classroom power to force students into explicitly anti-Black oppression under the pretense of learning.
While the use of this tool is prevalent, so, too, is the backlash by those who see the racist implications of these activities. It is no surprise that the majority of the headlines charted above center the outrage of Black families. Mother Nicole Dayes described a mock slave auction that her ten-year-old son’s teacher in Watertown engaged in:
He and another African American child were put up in the middle of the class and told they were now slaves. The teacher then started the “bidding.” . . . After the winning bid was placed, my son was then told how slaves would take the slave owners’ last name and what he was to call the slave owner by. Then my son and the other “slave” were instructed to call the Caucasian child by “master” and the child’s last name.63
In South Carolina, parents were outraged when fifth graders were brought on a field trip to a cotton field. With no explanation of slavery or the significance of forced labor, they were instructed to play a “game” in which they had to race to pick cotton while singing the following song lyrics: “I like it when you
fill the sack. I like it when you don’t talk back. Make money for me.”64 By turning slavery into a game, the Racist Reproduction tool works in concert with the Not That Bad tool by obscuring the atrocities of enslavement.
In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report on the inadequacy of how slavery is taught in schools.65 The report was highly critical of the use of these kinds of simulations, arguing that they “‘can harm vulnerable children’ and that the trauma of such lessons is compounded for black students.” While the teachers in these examples may have been teaching about historical events, they ultimately set their students up to experience the very same conditions they were teaching about—racial hierarchies with Black students on the bottom and White students on the top. Through the Racist Reproduction tool, teachers commit educational malpractice, using their position of power to enact traumatic events that carry very real health and psychological consequences for Black students.
CURRICULUM VIOLENCE
Each of the examples in this chapter function as curriculum violence, a term coined by Erhabor Ighodaro, which he defines as the “deliberate manipulation of academic programming in a manner that ignores or compromises the intellectual and psychological well-being of learners.”66 This form of violence perpetuated by educators includes both the omission as well as the falsification of the history, culture, and representation of people of Color.67 The result of this curricular violence is the socialization of racist beliefs in students and the traumatization of children of Color.