Reading, Writing, and Racism

by Bree Picower

  Not surprisingly, Dawn used curricular Tools of Whiteness to create curriculum that downplayed the realities of racism. In describing her goals for a mandated lesson for Martin Luther King Day, Dawn used the curricular Tools of Whiteness of No One Is To Blame along with All Things Being Equal. She recalled: “When I was talking about Martin Luther King, it was very uncomfortable. Like the kids were like, ‘Oh, White people are all bad.’ And I was like, ‘Nooo! We’re not all bad!’ . . . I was thinking we shouldn’t be getting into this and I was getting nervous. . . . I don’t want them going home and saying we are bad people.” When Dawn attempted to teach about Martin Luther King, she was confronted with what he was actually fighting against: racism. She experienced trepidation that she might be tarnishing the reputation of White people, which was clearly an area “she shouldn’t be getting into.”

  In trying to figure out how to keep teaching history without making White people feel bad, she reveals the concerns that justified her use of tools such as Not That Bad: “I mean, you have to know about history, but I don’t want all the kids to know that since we are White that we all hurt Black people.” Here she reveals her true teaching objective: Protect White people and do not reveal them as the perpetrators of racism. In order to align her curriculum to this objective, she started to question the resources she had available to her. “So a lot of the books, it’s about White and White and White did this to the Blacks, so I am trying to figure out ways to stop that so much, and to say the Whites did good for the Blacks and the Blacks did good for the Whites. Not that Whites did bad, Whites did bad, Whites did bad.” Rather than teach the history of “Whites did bad,” Dawn relied on her racial ideology to look for ways to revise the historical records, instead teaching that everyone “did good.” Dawn used the tool of Not That Bad to protect her White students from potentially feeling down about themselves if they were to learn about historical racism. This perception fit with her childhood sense of being personally attacked when issues of anti-Black racism were raised, and she was nervous that her students would feel similarly.

  By using multiple curricular Tools of Whiteness, Dawn is situated to transmit her ahistorical White apologist understandings of race to her elementary students by denying them the actual history of racism. Her racial ideology is aligned with tools such as Not That Bad in her attempt to teach how “Whites did good for the Blacks.” She ultimately socializes her White students to maintain White supremacy by protecting White innocence and instilling a lack of understanding of how racism operates. When teachers such as Dawn are presented with the problematic textbooks seen in the last chapter, their racial ideology aligns with the racist literacies in the curriculum. This creates a seamless route for the transmission of racist ideologies as teachers unquestioningly use these textbooks, such as the one that claims enslaved Africans were just “workers” who came to America as part of patterns of immigration. By using the textbooks she is handed, Dawn can teach her first graders that “Whites did good for the Blacks” by providing “international job opportunities,” never having to worry if “Whites did bad.”

  CASE 2: OPEN-MINDEDNESS

  The second case participant, Grace, is a teacher who grew up in a segregated White town and was socialized to have a race-evasive ideology.2 She reflects: “I wasn’t taught to look at skin color; I was taught that we were all the same. I like to believe that I was raised open-mindedly, but now I wonder if I was raised naively. Perhaps never understanding true diversity or celebrating cultural differences was a bad thing.” While she framed her upbringing as not noticing race, she simultaneously revealed that she had been holding racial stereotypes that were uncovered when she discussed the city she would be teaching in: “I thought of Newark as an impoverished neighborhood based on sex, drugs, and violence. Newark, in my eyes, was ‘the ghetto,’ ‘the hood,’ and it was a big city I lived in fear of.”

  However, unlike Dawn, she began to demonstrate openmindedness in being willing to examine the source of those stereotypes: “As I began to think about my understanding of Newark and from where I have drawn these conclusions, I began to realize I only knew what other people have told me. I saw Newark through the eyes of everyone around me.” Grace recognized that she had been taught these ideas, revealing that she might be open to revising them.

  Grace’s orientation to her teaching community did indeed shift dramatically. Her midyear reflection expressed gratitude and excitement to begin teaching in a diverse urban community, and she thrived on the exposure to new people and cultures. Although she had race-evasive roots, her open response to her new context supported her in making curricular choices that demonstrated the emerging value she placed on diversity. She expressed excitement about her new setting, saying, “[Through this program] I’ve been exposed to different cultures, ethnicities, families, and environments that I was never really exposed to before. I am aware of the various cultures, ethnicities, and races that surround me, and I could not be happier with where I have ended up or more excited to begin this journey in getting to meet many different people from a million different walks of life. I like to believe that I have seen enough to understand that being different is inevitable, yet it’s a beautiful thing.” Grace’s race-evasive ideology shifted into one that was open to diversity.

  In keeping with the argument of this chapter that a teacher’s thinking is directly related to their adoption and creation of curriculum, Grace’s new openness to diversity manifested itself in what she chose to teach. Three years into her teaching, she created and taught a unit in which she actively moved away from the White Out tool. She started the unit by having her first graders define and identify diversity in a few children’s books that had various amounts of representation. The children noticed that White people, boys, and able-bodied people were overrepresented in their picture books and that people who were Black, Brown, disabled, babies, and elderly were often missing. The students then went through all the books in the classroom library and gathered data about who was represented or missing in terms of race, gender, and ability. They noted that “our library is not diverse” and that “there’s too much of the same kind of people.” Using grade-level mathematics, the students graphed their findings and reflected on how unrepresentative their library was and how they felt about that. Because they decided it was unfair, Grace led them in an activity to write a letter to the PTA for more inclusive books.

  Grace was open to examining her preconceived race-evasive socialization and learned to value diversity. In turn, this ideology found its way directly into her curriculum, through which her students could develop the same understandings about diversity and representation that came out of her own shifted thinking. Unlike her upbringing, her students were taught to value diversity and to develop a critical lens in terms of representation—which pivoted them away from reinvesting in a belief in a White norm. Through this shift in Grace’s thinking, her curriculum does not reinvest in Whiteness; instead, it breaks the cycle by providing her students a more open way of seeing the world.

  What seemed to mitigate the differences between Dawn’s and Grace’s resulting curricula were their responses to their teacher education program’s anti-racist initiatives. Rather than respond with Dawn’s defensiveness, Grace was open to new ideas. Throughout her experience in the program, she learned to develop a political analysis that forced her to question her socialization and the ideas she held. She reflected: “I think it’s safe to say I had a very naive perception of education, teaching, and Newark and hadn’t really established a firm perspective of my own. The most valuable piece of advice I’ve learned from this class is to challenge others’ ideas, opinions, and perspectives and create my own.”

  Grace’s receptiveness allowed her to start to recognize the multiple perspectives inherent in diversity. “This class has helped me better understand that there are multiple sides to every story and that there may not necessarily be a right or wrong answer, but I owe it to myself to listen to all sides and chall
enge all sides before creating an opinion of my own.” Grace’s case demonstrates the role that having an open-minded stance can play in shifting racial ideology and, as a result, in creating a more critical multicultural curriculum.

  CASE 3: QUESTIONING

  While Dawn’s response to racial justice curriculum was defensiveness and Grace’s was openness, the subject of the third case, Cara, responded with questioning. A questioning stance moves past the openness of celebrating diversity to an exploration of how diversity can be experienced as oppression that impacts various groups of people in different ways. In this vein, questioning includes a willingness to engage, challenge, and disrupt power dynamics. Like Grace, Cara grew up in a privileged setting. She explained, “I grew up in a rich White town. My mom woke me up daily and made me breakfast. We sat on the front porch together while I waited for my bus.” Despite this privileged background that was different from that of her students, she did not rely on a deficit lens to understand her school community. Instead, she started questioning and began to actively monitor, interrogate, and transform her thinking. She reflected on her stance: “It was only within the last few years that I have been studying and examining White privilege, societal and structural racism, and deficit thinking. I constantly am reassessing and rethinking [emphasis added] my actions, choices, and words relating to these topics. I started to challenge my own thinking and think about my own privilege and how I interact with the world.” Cara was able to question her upbringing and shift away from the way she was socialized.

  Cara went beyond the “respect for diversity” seen in Grace and moved to thinking about power by consistently reassessing her own positionality as a White woman working in a community of Color. She often worried about being a “stereotypical White teacher” or enacting White privilege in problematic ways. She worried, “As a White woman . . . my biggest fear was that the students would perceive me as a person who doesn’t understand them or someone who doesn’t have high expectations for them—or even worse, someone they can’t relate to.” She worked to negate this fear by connecting with her students as individuals and becoming a part of the school community.

  In 2016, during Cara’s student teaching year in Newark, New Jersey, the local news aired a story that thirty public schools in the city had high levels of lead in their water supplies. This was two years prior to the nationally recognized 2018 Newark water crisis, when it was revealed that the entire city’s water supply had higher lead content than that of Flint, Michigan. At the time, the focus was exclusively on these thirty identified schools, and Cara’s school was not one of them. However, the news still impacted her significantly. She pondered: “Perhaps I didn’t think that something like this could possibly happen at a place where I am teaching. . . . I never had to worry about my well-being in any aspect. Now I am in a school where these are not the realities.” Because she knew her school was deemed safe, she allowed the children to drink from the water fountains, yet she brought in a water bottle for herself. She started to deeply question her own response to the situation. “I am focused on my thought process. I’m asking myself, why? Things were so much easier before I learned about privilege and racism.”

  Cara was able to identify the way that learning about racism wasn’t simply a topic or content; instead, it became a lens that changed the way she viewed the world. “Sometimes I feel like my awareness is really powerful and I am making little changes here and there. But I cannot find the answers as to why the water at [school] was not good enough for me to drink, but it was fine for the kids . . . They trust me; what do I do?” Cara’s new lens prompted her to question herself, her privilege, and her response. It would follow that this new way of thinking would work its way into her teaching.

  She decided to use her curriculum to teach about the lead in the water. Just as she was learning to question the world around her, the unit she developed also centered around providing students the opportunity to engage in similar inquiry. She explained, “To counterbalance my initial response, I created curriculum for myself and my students to take collective action on the topic. I wanted to do something to challenge, stir up, and break through some of the preexisting ideas and feelings around social justice in the classroom.”

  She decided to create a research project fueled by studentgenerated questions about the water crisis. Students brainstormed questions then researched everything they had identified that they wanted to learn. Students were provided accessible resources and spent time researching using laptops, newspaper, visuals, and videos while taking copious notes. Once the students gathered all their information about each question, they were able to choose how they would present their findings to other classes. The students recognized that most of the materials they were reading were written for adults, so they decided to make their own kid-friendly brochures and posters to share with others at their school.

  Cara explained: “During these lessons, I have given the students the space to talk about it, get some facts, and feel that their well-being is a priority. Since I grew up in a place where I never needed to worry about issues such as environmental racism, I ended up learning right along with my students.” Her own questioning found its way into her curriculum as she taught her students to also question injustice that personally affected their community. The way in which her foundational thinking shifted within her teacher education program was revealed in how and what she ultimately decided to teach.

  CASE 4: TRANSFORMATION

  The cases of Grace and Cara demonstrate that when teacher candidates are able to change their thinking by learning about race and racism, these ideological shifts transfer into their curriculum. The final teacher case is Diana, who also exhibits how reframes in thinking can transform curriculum. For Diana, these transformations were immediate—as soon as she learned something new, she integrated it into her thinking and therefore her teaching.

  Diana is a White woman of Portuguese and Italian heritage who is a mother of two boys. Slightly older than the other teachers featured here, she already had teaching experience working with adult learners. Like many White people of immigrant backgrounds, Diana initially struggled with identifying herself as White. “I would say if you’d asked me going into this program, ‘What are you?’ I don’t think I would say White, because my whole life growing up, I wasn’t necessarily a person of Color, but I didn’t feel like . . . even when I look at the boxes, White isn’t the one I gravitate toward.”

  However, unlike Dawn’s resistance, the minute Diana started learning about race and racism in the program, her thinking about how she identified racially immediately shifted. “I’ve always struggled with this, but yes, I’m White, because I’ve experienced the privileges of Whiteness. . . . So for me, that was a big shift. It was saying, okay, I’m going to move away from that [denying Whiteness], because that isn’t helpful, to, yes, I’m White. Yes, I experience privilege. What do I do from here?”

  Unlike Dawn’s anger in learning about White privilege, Diana quickly accepted the concept, changed the way she self-identified, and sought a corresponding action to go with this new knowledge. “If I acknowledge that there’s White privilege, and then I’m acknowledging that I’m White, I’m also acknowledging that I’m a part of the problem, that I have some guilt to bear—not guilt, I don’t know, responsibility to bear.” In naming that she had a responsibility, she looked for ways to act responsibly.

  Diane’s action orientation also showed up in the way she started to think about the existing curriculum. When asked to reflect on the way she was taught social studies, she realized that, “It was easy for me to make connections to the history and social studies curricula as a child because they told the story of my ancestors.” As she began to recognize that the curriculum would not reflect her students’ history at the predominately Black elementary school where she was student teaching, she reflected, “It is in the consideration of these things that I find myself changing and developing as an educator. I have to say that from
one of our earliest readings on Deculturalization and the Indigenous people, the ways I thought changed—and therefore the ways I teach are changing.”3 Here, Diana applied her new awareness of the prevalence of a Eurocentric curriculum to what it would mean for her practice. She was consistent in this process of integrating new information into a transformed action plan.

  Like Cara, Diana did not interpret the justice-oriented content of the program as facts that needed memorization. Instead it became a new way of seeing the world—a transformed racial ideology. Diana began to think differently, act differently, and teach differently as a result of this new lens around race and racism. This new way of thinking was not relegated to coursework; rather it impacted her everywhere, even seemingly mundane interactions in her own home.

  One evening, her sons wanted her to play superheroes with them and she agreed, as long as she could play with one of the girl superhero figurines. Sifting through the toys, it took a long time for her boys to find a girl superhero. When Diana then asked to play with a Black girl superhero, they realized there were none in their giant pile of toys. She revealed, “I was being a mom, tired, playing with her kids and just noticing something, and being like, ‘Wow. What does that mean? What if my kids weren’t White boys? What if I had a girl? What if I had a child of Color? Or a child who had a disability, right? What if any of those things? How would she feel? How would he feel?’” Diana’s observation of the lack of diversity in her sons’ toy pile set off a series of questions based on her new awareness of racial injustice. This aha moment in her living room led to the idea of the unit she wanted to teach her third graders, because, she thought, “If I’m this age and I’m just recognizing it, I think it’d be interesting to help students recognize that and what does that mean.”