Reading, Writing, and Racism

by Bree Picower

  This set her on a journey of creating a unit similar to Grace’s in which her students gathered data to determine who is represented in the superhero world. Her unit started with asking her students to name their favorite superheroes. After identifying their favorites in terms of race, gender, and able-bodiedness, the children then sorted and graphed the hundreds of superhero toys and playing cards that Diana brought from home. The results were devastating. The students’ data analysis found that out of the 350 figures, 308 “looked like boys,” 335 were White, and 349 were able-bodied.

  Students felt that their findings were “not right and not fair!” The children were then asked to discuss who was not represented and to ask questions of power such as “Why do they all look alike?” and “Who do you think decides what superheroes look like?” This naming of power is what sets Diana’s unit apart from Grace’s similar approach. Whereas Grace stopped at the point where students noticed disproportionality, Diana taught them to go one step further and ask why and to name an oppressor.

  It was through this line of questioning that Diana introduced students to an age-appropriate way of understanding the concept of hegemony, the idea that one group can consolidate power and dominance not just by force but also by manipulating mainstream ideology in such a way that makes the imbalance of power seem right, natural, and necessary.4 She introduced them to a superhero villain she named the Mad Hater who hates identities other than his own. “The Mad Hater’s superpower is that he can control people’s minds and convince them that all superheroes have to look like him—White able-bodied men.” Through the Mad Hater, Diana was able to teach how power and racism operate—in some ways exposing the Tools of Whiteness to her young students.

  Remarkably, in an earlier reflection on an anti-racism training that was part of our program, Diana was struck by a quote shared by a facilitator of the workshop: “One of the first things I wrote in my notebook as we started the session was, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.’” This idea kept nagging at her: “I kept coming back to that idea all day, especially from the lens of my Whiteness. . . . I found myself coming back to that idea that it takes a lot of strategic intentional work to get people to buy into the idea that the evil of racism doesn’t exist.” Although she didn’t consciously make this association, there is a connection between Diana’s revised thinking about race in the “devil” that she brought directly into her curriculum in the form of the Mad Hater. In the earlier case of Dawn, we saw her hegemonic, racist ideology creep into her curriculum in the same way that we see Diana’s transformed thinking manifest in the lessons she teaches her children. In both cases, ideology is present in each curriculum, but the way in which they are willing to transform their thinking shifts their curriculum dramatically.

  Once Diana introduced the Mad Hater, she led the students to question who the Mad Haters were in real life. Students identified comic book authors, movie directors, toy companies, and more. Just as Diana integrated new knowledge into action, she encouraged her students to do the same by asking them, “Okay, what would we say to superhero creators if we could to let them know this is making us mad and it’s not fair?” She had the students brainstorm some ideas and pick ones they wanted to follow up with. She concluded, “I hope what they get from it is, don’t just stop with the data. Do something with it.” Her own habit of putting learning into action is evident in her curriculum.

  Another new awareness Diana integrated into her ideology was the importance of community. “I think we are conditioned to be individualistic in our work and society. The Undoing Racism workshop helped me to recognize that fact as part of White culture conditioning.” Diana shared her new perspective: “What I have learned through [my curriculum unit] is the benefit, the necessity, and my reliance on others to do the best work possible. Collaboration isn’t cheating in this work—it’s a powerful and necessary tool of resistance.” Because Diana learned this valuable lesson about collectivity, it is not surprising that she wanted her students to learn it too. Her belief became integrated into her curriculum. A key part of her unit was to teach students to realize that it takes collective efforts to defeat racism by introducing the Social Justice League, which she described in the following way to her students:

  The Social Justice League is a superhero cohort whose mission it is to confront and disrupt social injustice, and its arch nemesis, the MAD HATER, a villain who uses mind control to convince the world that all superheroes should look like him. Students will be introduced to THE SEEKER to examine the concept of representation. Parallel to data collection and examination, students will investigate the ways that representation is tied to larger issues of racism, sexism, and privilege. ACCESS will introduce students to issues surrounding ableism. LIBERTY and THE GATEKEEPER will help students explore the ways in which laws and resources can help undergird or dismantle systems.

  Just as was evident in her own transformed White-centered value of individualism versus collectivism, Diana taught her students the value of seeing the assets of all people, helping them recognize that it will take collective action to transform injustice.

  SHIFTING THE DEFAULT SETTING TO ANTI-RACISM

  Diana had a profound reflection in thinking about what it means to be White in America. She delineated levels of White awareness: “To sit there and think that racism doesn’t exist is delusional. To acknowledge that racism exists but deny your complicity in it is self-serving. To acknowledge it exists but refuse to talk about it is a ‘conspiracy of courtesy.’ To acknowledge it exists, feel bad about it, but not think you can do anything about it is laziness.” Diana realized that all of these ways of viewing racism in fact contribute to the perpetuation of racism. “What I found profound was this added layer to the idea that to sit there and 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.”

  As Diana contends, unless White people are actively committed to anti-racism, we will remain on the default setting of racism. This means that simply being a nice person is not enough; White people have to move from passivity to active anti-racism. Psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum describes this move through the following analogy:

  I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt . . . Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around . . . But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt—unless they are actively antiracist—they will find themselves carried along with the others.5

  Given that the vast majority of teachers are White and may not have had the opportunity to examine their Whiteness, many of them are moving passively on the conveyer belt. While only some may be actively contributing to #CurriculumSoWhite, many are doing nothing to interrupt it. In order to move in the opposite direction, or to turn off the default setting, teachers—and especially White teachers—must examine their racial ideology and become active anti-racists. In all four of the cases presented in this chapter, there is a clear association between the way the teachers think about race and what they hope their students will come to understand through their curriculum. This demonstrates how important it is for teacher education to explicitly address and transform racial ideology as a part of curriculum design. The chapters that follow provide more insight into how to transform preservice teachers’ ideological understandings of race within teacher education in order to shift the default setting off racism.

 
CHAPTER 3

  REFRAMING UNDERSTANDINGS OF RACE WITHIN TEACHER EDUCATION

  Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  THE RACIAL HOSTILITY OF US SCHOOLS

  In chapter 1, I looked at a disturbing pattern of how teachers’ ideological beliefs about race find their way into their curriculum. Left out of this analysis are all the other ways these racist beliefs play out in the context of schooling, from discipline to environment to family relationships. Even as I write this chapter, two examples of teachers’ racism went viral in the last few days. The first took place in Maine on October 9, 2019, where a White assistant principal called a nine-year-old biracial boy the N-word while disciplining him.1 The second occurred in Pennsylvania two days later when a White teacher and a Black parent were involved in a fender bender in the parking lot during student drop-off.2 The parent posted a video of the teacher’s rant on Facebook in which she yelled at the father, “You’re probably on welfare.” The father responded that she was only saying that because he is young and Black, to which she responded, “That’s right, [it’s] because you’re Black! Always looking to milk the system. And you see me, a White woman, so you think I got money. Go back to your welfare or your Section 8 house! Do you see the big truck I have? Look at the piece of shit you have.” She went on to call him the N-word.

  The epidemic of racism in schools is a boiling pot that spills over into every aspect of education. We have teachers in Idaho dressing up at Halloween as stereotypes of Mexicans behind a cutout of the border wall with a sign that says “Make America Great Again.”3 We have a teacher in Texas telling immigrant students, “Even though you are a citizen, Trump is working on a law where he can deport you, too, because of your mom’s status.”4 There is a PTA in Brooklyn using photos of White performers in blackface for a fundraiser, and a teacher in Oregon berating a biracial nine-year-old, telling her she’s lucky that “I’m not making you pick cotton or clean my house.”5 There is a teacher in Florida running a White supremacist podcast where she spouts theories about racial superiority in IQ’s, while other teachers in California taunt Black students by posing for smiling pictures with an actual noose while making simulated neckhanging gestures.6 There are teachers who called the police to have a ten-year-old Black boy arrested for “assault” during a game of dodgeball and to have a six-year-old Black girl arrested for an everyday six-year-old’s tantrum.7 The attack on children of Color in schools is incessant, terrorizing, and all-encompassing.

  So while this book focuses predominately on curriculum, it is clear that teachers’ racial beliefs create a hostile racial climate in all areas of education, transforming schools into sites of suffering for Black people and other people of Color.8 Transforming teachers’ racial ideology is therefore an essential strategy for not only addressing curricular Tools of Whiteness, but also for disrupting racism writ large. This chapter examines how the institution of teacher education can support this transformation. If we can support new teachers in understanding the full system of racism, we can encourage them to choose to dismantle it, rather than reproduce it, by setting aside Tools of Whiteness. There would be no need for a teacher to use such tools if their understanding of the world no longer aligned with the ideology of White supremacy.

  RACIAL REFRAMES AND THE FOUR I’S OF OPPRESSION AND ADVANTAGE

  Returning to the framework of the Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage presented in the introduction, racism operates at four levels: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized. Teachers must recognize how this system operates at all four of these levels by learning particular racial literacies within each of the four domains. The Four I’s framework is widely used in racial justice communities as an educational tool to understand how different types of racism support a larger structure. For example, a wonderful organization called the Center for Racial Justice in Education (CRJE) based out of New York and Dallas use it in their work with teachers and parents. A highlight of their workshop Talking about Race in Schools involves teachers role-playing different scenarios that could occur in classrooms and using the Four I’s to identify how each scenario operates on multiple levels. In her book Black Appetite. White Food, education scholar Jamila Lyiscott outlines a compelling adaption of the Four I’s framework called the Fugitive Literacies Framework. Lyiscott uses the Four I’s to help educators recognize and categorize White privilege specifically, but then employs the Fugitive Literacies Framework to support them to author alternative ideologies, policies, behaviors, and thoughts that center racial inclusivity and equity.9

  Rather than focus on the perpetuation of racism within the Four I’s, I am using the framework here to identify how new thinking is required within each of these domains to develop critical racial consciousness. In this chapter, I use the Four I’s framework to identify and categorize various racial reframes that White teachers must make in order to lay down Tools of Whiteness and work toward racial justice.

  In his work on the troubling way the public views teachers, educational policy scholar Kevin Kumashiro relies on George Lakoff’s concept of frames as ways of seeing the world. Similar to ideology, frames are invisible, unconscious ways of thinking that become normalized or considered common sense. The way we frame social phenomena such as race ends up shaping all Four I’s, such as the policies we create, the interactions we engage in, and our own conceptions of self. In contrast, Lakoff explains, “Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense.”10 Kumashiro notes, “What we take to be ‘common sense’ is not something that just is; it is something that is developed and learned and perpetuated over time.”11 In my work with preservice teachers, my goal is to support them to recognize their common sense understandings within the Four I’s so that they can reframe the way they conceptualize race.

  In this chapter, I share a subset of findings from my research on preservice teachers and their conceptions of race.12 This chapter focuses specifically on the racial reframes of White preservice teachers. These racial reframes align with the Four I’s and demonstrate how these preservice teachers grappled with this reframing process. Their quotes represent snapshots in time and come from reflections they wrote about readings, workshops, and activities focused on race. Developing racial consciousness is an ongoing, challenging process, and these quotes demonstrate moments of struggle and disequilibrium as they moved from common sense thinking to a new awareness. I am not presenting these quotes as models of rightness—rather, they serve to demonstrate some of the authentic, messy, and emotional reframes that can be made when White people are exposed to a new way of understanding race.

  IDEOLOGICAL RACIAL REFRAMES

  The ideological domain of the Four I’s framework consists of ideas of superiority and inferiority that are used to justify the other three domains. Ideological racism is often harder to identify because it has become so ingrained in the way our society is structured that these ideas about race rarely need to be said aloud. To reframe ideological racism, these unspoken, common-sense understandings need to be identified and deconstructed by learning the true history of how racism was constructed to justify settler colonialism and enslavement. Only by learning this history can people accurately identify how racism explains current patterns of inequality.

  IDEOLOGICAL REFRAME: COMPREHENDING THAT HISTORICAL RACISM SHAPED CURRENT INEQUALITY

  The ideological reframe that seemed to have the biggest impact for the White preservice teachers I have worked with is understanding the role of history. As discussed in chapter 1, most White teachers were recipients of #CurriculumSoWhite when they were students, so it is little wonder that teachers’ ideological understandings align with the “lies my teacher told me.”13 Without understanding the integral role that race played in the formation of the United States, there is really no way to comprehend the way racism stretches to every facet of life. In order to reframe ideological u
nderstandings of race, it is imperative that teachers receive substantial education about historical racism. As one preservice teacher contended: “I do not think that my own understanding of racism could have evolved without the clarity of [a] historical perspective.”

  Many White teachers have not been exposed to the history of race and racism. Once they get past denial, they often react with anger and resentment that they hadn’t been taught it. Even in 2019, many of my students have only heard that Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue.” Simultaneously, cities across the United States are trying to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day and are being met with White rage along the way.14 But without learning the historical record about the atrocities Columbus wrought and how he set the stage for settler colonialism, why would White people advocate for this change? Students who learned that Columbus was a hero could only be confused about what exactly needs to be fixed. Understanding history is the key element to reframing our understanding and joining others in advocating to set the record straight. You cannot set the record straight if you never learned that it is crooked.