Reading, Writing, and Racism

by Bree Picower

  While the viral nature of current examples might make it appear that curriculum violence is something new, there is a long legacy of teachers using education as a way to transmit White supremacy. In 1933, Carter G. Woodson explained, “To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that the struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. . . . This crusade [against propaganda in school] is much more important than the anti-lynching movement because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”68 Here, Woodson connects curriculum to physical violence, demonstrating how both serve an explicit purpose of maintaining power and control.

  In contrast to the immediate terror of murder, however, such “schoolroom lynching” serves instead as a form of slow violence, which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”69 Rob Nixon explains that this kind of slow violence “is typically not viewed as violence at all . . . a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive.”70

  EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICE

  Like traditional notions of violence, slow violence has a tangible impact on health. A 2019 national report from American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) explained how Black children suffer significantly from racism and named racism as a social determinant of health that “has a profound impact on the health status of children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families.” Referring to racism as a “socially transmitted disease passed down through generations,” the AAP acknowledged that children who are the targets of racism have the most significant health impacts.71

  One way that the health field measures the impact of trauma is through the Adverse Childhood Experiences score, or ACE score. An ACE score refers to the multiple factors of stress, abuse, and neglect that children can face that impact their later health outcomes. Examples include psychological, physical, and sexual abuse; exposure in the home to substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide; incarceration or violence; physical and emotional neglect; parental separation and divorce; exposure to violence outside of the home; living in unsafe neighborhoods; homelessness; bullying; discrimination based on race or ethnicity; and experience of income insecurity.72

  According to the AAP report, when an individual is exposed to discrimination, or even anticipates discrimination, they experience stress responses including “feelings of intense fear, terror, and helplessness.”73 As a result, hormones such as cortisol flood the body, which can lead to inflammation, ultimately making the body more open to chronic diseases.74 Health officials warn that: “When activated repeatedly or over a prolonged period of time (especially in the absence of protective factors), toxic levels of stress hormones can interrupt normal physical and mental development and can even change the brain’s architecture.”75 The more ACE factors children experience, the more likely they are to be linked to some of the negative outcomes associated with high ACE scores, such as depression, suicide, poor physical health, obesity, lower educational attainment, unemployment, and poverty.76

  Children’s ACE scores are not race neutral. According to a 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), 61 percent of Black children and 51 percent of Latinx children have experienced at least one ACE factor compared with 40 percent of White children and 23 percent of Asian children.77 The trauma connected with health determinants is often associated with what children carry into schools from their outside lives.78 However, these already elevated ACE scores that Black and Latinx students experience outside of school are compounded when they experience additional stressors, such as racism, inside schools.

  Through curricular Tools of Whiteness, it is teachers and their curriculum that become the active source of trauma for children of Color. When students experience stress reactions to the racism exposed through #CurriculumSoWhite, it can be inferred that it will also impact “how the brain and body respond to stress, resulting in short- and long-term health impacts on achievement and mental and physical health.”79 Given that Black and Latinx children already experience more ACE factors than White children do because of an interconnected web of health determinants, curricular Tools of Whiteness re-traumatize them in classrooms that should ideally be set up to support them. Taken as a whole, then, curricular Tools of Whiteness are more than problematic assignments; rather, they are issues of serious health concerns, particularly for Black students who already have the highest ACE scores and are subjected to the most frequent racism through #CurriculumSoWhite. Teachers using Tools of Whiteness add to the ACE scores of children of Color through the racial trauma they induce by exposing their students to this kind of educational malpractice.

  RESPONSE CYCLE: THE WRONG I

  The life cycle of #CurriculumSoWhite appears to follow a pattern—at least as the media that reports on it would have us believe. First, a racist assignment is given to a student. The student, typically a student of Color, shares the offending assignment with a family member who recognizes the racist nature of the activity. They post it on social media, eliciting a viral response from an outraged online community. In a defensive move, the school or school district suspends, disciplines, or removes the teacher and offers a public apology. Things settle down. Until it happens again.

  Figure 2. Typical response cycle to #CurriculumSoWhite

  As I was writing this chapter, this same response cycle was once again in the news. Following the typical pattern, a teacher in Freeport, New York, gave her eighth graders an assignment to create captions for black-and-white photographs from after the Civil War of Black sharecroppers working in a field. Instead of focusing on the import of these rarely seen primary documents from the era, the teacher instructed students to “make it funny,” adding, “Don’t bore me.”80 A student told her grandmother about the assignment, who posted it on her Facebook page where it went viral. The image of the completed worksheet showed how students resisted the racism of this assignment, filling it out with phrases such as “I HATE THIS,” “#BlackGirlMagic,” and “Us Black people need to GET OUT!”

  The next day, the teacher offered an apology, recognizing that she must “work hard to rebuild trust from my students, colleagues, and the community.” The superintendent issued a public statement claiming, “Our investigation has determined that this lesson was poorly conceived and executed . . . Aside from the fact that this is a poor lesson, it is an insensitive trivialization of a deeply painful era for African Americans in this country, and it is unacceptable.” While this accountability and apology are important, this typical response cycle is incapable of interrupting the ongoing onslaught of #CurriculumSoWhite. Part of the reason goes back to the Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage: this response isolates only one of the I’s and operates solely on the interpersonal level by assigning blame to an individual “racist” teacher, treating them like a bad apple that, if isolated and dealt with, will make the problem go away.

  The truth is that a more complicated response is required. While there does need to be a change in the racial understandings of individual teachers, it cannot be done in a piecemeal, case-by-case manner after the offending curriculum has done its damage. In order to effectively mitigate curricular Tools of Whiteness, all Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage—interpersonal, ideological, institutional, and internalized—must be addressed. Understanding how the Four I’s are implicated in the problem also points us toward a solution. There must be an institutional attempt to transform the interpersonal and internalized ideology of educators.

  Teacher education is one such institution that has the capacity to disrupt the racial ideology of large numbers of teachers before they enter the field poised to cause damage. The following chapter digs deeper into how focusing teacher education on racial literacy can transform the deeply held racial beliefs of White teachers and how that impacts their curricular choices. By understanding the relationship between teachers’ ideology and curriculum, the respo
nse cycle can move from the interpersonal level to working at the institutional level to admit, transform, and graduate teachers who recognize Whiteness and actively seek to interrupt it.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE ICEBERG: RACIAL IDEOLOGY AND CURRICULUM

  To not commit yourself actively to an anti-racist lifestyle is, in fact, a default to racism. A default setting is the way a system is designed to function automatically without interference from users. The system relies on complacency to exist. Our country is literally on a default setting to racism.

  —DIANA, TEACHER

  Understanding how curricular Tools of Whiteness operate is critical, but the tools cannot be divorced from the educators who employ them. What teachers choose to teach represents their individual ways of thinking about race, which have been influenced by broader racial ideologies. As they enact this ideology through curricular Tools of Whiteness, teachers transfer these individual forms of racism in ways that have institutional impact on students. Given that Reading, Writing, and Racism draws attention to how teachers’ racial ideology affects what they choose to teach, this chapter examines what teachers believe about race and how this shows up in their curriculum.

  Most of the teachers creating or enacting racialized curricular violence are not tiki torch–carrying White nationalists.1 Rather, many of them may very well be doing what they believe is best for their students, but because they have not had the opportunity to examine their own ideas about race, they make problematic choices when deciding what to teach.

  When teachers, particularly White teachers, have the opportunity to examine their racial ideology, the way in which they respond to the inquiry shapes their choice to either use Tools of Whiteness or pivot toward racial justice. It is in the response to examination of their ideology that change is possible. If teachers are resistant, they will likely use the tools to protect their socialized beliefs about racial hierarchies, passing their ideology on to students. However, if they are willing to be open to examining their beliefs, to question how this influences what they do in the classroom, and to transform their practice, there is hope for change. For future teachers, the capacity to take these steps of self-reflection are how an anti-racist curriculum can be built. This chapter shows the pathway from teachers’ ideological roots to the curriculum they ultimately teach, mitigated by how they respond to exposure to anti-racist teacher education.

  CASE STUDIES

  In this chapter, I will introduce four White teachers, using pseudonyms for all. They are each former students of mine spanning across my career of preparing educators. As my students, they were in courses that aimed to prepare them for urban teaching, to help them understand their own racial identity, to develop an analysis of institutional racism, to teach them the foundations of curriculum design, and to support them in designing and implementing a social justice interdisciplinary unit. In writing their cases, I reviewed papers they wrote, including racial autobiographies about the role that race has played throughout their lives, written reflections on critical professional development that they participated in throughout their programs, and reflective papers in which they were specifically asked to consider their journey in terms of new understandings about race.

  My goal for each of the cases is to demonstrate how curriculum is simply the tip of the iceberg; it is what is made visible about teachers’ understandings of race. Lying beneath the surface is the foundational structure of their racial ideology. It is these underlying beliefs that are revealed through the way race is addressed through their curriculum. This chapter therefore examines the relationship between these teachers’ ideologies and the curricula they design and teach. The ultimate purpose of this analysis is to argue that teacher education must attend to transforming foundational beliefs rather than tinkering with curriculum, which is what typically happens through methods and curriculum design courses. The cases are organized and presented by how the individual teachers responded to teacher education coursework designed to challenge racist ideology. Each case represents one of four responses along a continuum: protectionism, open-mindedness, questioning, and transformation.

  CASE 1: WHITE PROTECTIONISM

  To demonstrate how the case studies illustrate the relationship between racial ideology and curriculum, I begin with Dawn, who was a young White first-grade teacher working toward her master’s degree when she was my student. When Dawn was a five-year-old child, a hate crime occurred in her hometown that gained national notoriety. Three Black men stopped into a restaurant after their car broke down in her predominately Italian American neighborhood. A group of ten White teenagers then beat them and pursued them through the neighborhood. They chased one of the Black men onto a local freeway, where he was struck by a car and killed. Rather than empathizing with the victims of this hate crime, Dawn’s family was outraged by the Black protesters mobilizing after the event who she felt “invaded” what she described as a quiet, idyllic neighborhood. They saw the protestors as the source of conflict rather than the violence of the White teenagers. She described the time: “I remember my mom being scared. Like saying that Black people were going to come back and get us. . . . I had never seen this many Black people in my whole life. And I thought they were coming to get us.” As a White Italian American girl, she was socialized into developing a fear of Black people that has stayed with her throughout her life. She admitted that as an adult, “when I’m walking around the neighborhood, or driving around the neighborhood, and I see a Black man, I’m automatically terrified.”

  As a result, this fear translated into strong anti-Black understandings about race and a denial of racism. In responding to a question about how to address racism, she proclaimed, “Get over it! Like get over it! . . . You know, move on! So what, you’re Black; so what, I’m White. If I get better grades in school—maybe I worked harder. You know, if I get a job, maybe I deserved it! Why does it always have to be like [whiny voice], ‘Well, they’re the minority, let’s give it to them.’ I’m done with that, it’s time to start a new life.”

  Dawn’s racial ideology, developed as a child, is akin to the idea of reverse racism, in which White people are framed as the victims of racism and people of Color are perceived as receiving unfair and undeserved privileges. Similar to how the curricular Tools of Whiteness of No One Is to Blame and All Things Being Equal function, she does not acknowledge the negative impact that institutional or historical racism currently has on people of Color, especially Black people. She subscribes to the idea of the American meritocracy: We all exist on an equal playing field and hard work pays off. What Dawn feels is disrupting this meritocracy is that racism was overcorrected: it was something that existed, it was solved, and now White people are the actual victims because people of Color are benefiting unfairly from unnecessary restorative measures such as affirmative action. She explained, “My brother was rejected from the university because a minority, with a 900 SAT score, was needed to fill a seat. My family believes if you work hard, you deserve the reward. You do not deserve the reward on the basis of the color of your skin.” Here she revealed her strong resentment toward BIPOC, as she believed they are undeservingly stealing what presumably belongs to her and her family.

  One of the course readings, Gary Howard’s We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know, introduced her to the concept of White privilege. She expressed intense anger in response: “Every time he said the word privilege . . . that just drove me crazy. . . . I’m White, so that means I have to pay full tuition. I don’t get it! I mean, when we go to college, we have to check off what race you are, and I hate to say it but if you are African American or Hispanic—you get looked at first. . . . I mean, this really pisses me off.” Dawn saw this attempt at reconciling historical racism as a direct attack on White people: “We don’t have privilege anymore—they do. And they keep going back to saying, ‘Well—we had a bad life in the past.’ You weren’t around then, ya know!” Dawn’s response demonstrates her lack of openness to examining her socialized und
erstandings of people of Color stealing from her family and community. Rather than reflecting on historical racism or White privilege, she doubles down on defending and protecting her inherent beliefs.

  Many White individuals hold similar opinions about reverse racism. Because Dawn carries institutional power as an educator, there is no way to separate these racist ideas from how she conceives of history, and, therefore, her conception of social studies curriculum. Because Dawn believes that Black people are no longer negatively impacted by racism, she uses curricular Tools of Whiteness that align with this ideology when planning what to teach. In her attempt to teach her students that racism is over, she misuses a historical example of six-year-old African American Ruby Bridges, who was one of the first children to integrate an all-White elementary school in the 1960s. The Story of Ruby Bridges, introduced to Dawn in our course, is a popular children’s book used in elementary schools to teach about the civil rights movement. Dawn claimed: “Like there were laws made and Ruby Bridges came along and she changed everything, and you know there was that teacher that said, ‘Let’s make a change,’ and there were so many things that people did to help people to make things better.” Rather than seeing this story as a legacy of racism, Dawn interpreted it as having solved racism; therefore, to her, strategies such as affirmative action or reparations were deemed unnecessary. “Now we are all going into the classroom, we are going to make things a little more better because we are becoming educated in what to do in the classroom, so I don’t really think we have to say the words ‘I’m sorry.’” This claim implies that now that things are “more better,” anti-racist work is unnecessary. While in this example she was talking about reparations, the leap to curriculum is not far behind.