by Bree Picower
BE EXPLICIT WHEN ADDRESSING STUDENT RESISTANCE
Despite all the strategies to prepare students for the explicit emphasis on racial justice throughout the RJPs, this focus in classes still sometimes comes as a surprise to some preservice teachers, particularly White ones. When this happens, faculty continue to be explicit about the importance of the racial justice focus. Tyrone Howard, professor and director of the Black Male Institute at UCLA, described a White student who, despite the explicit racial justice mission of the program, enrolled only because UCLA was her dream school. He remembered how she was initially very quiet when topics of inclusion, race, and colonialism came up in the first course sessions. The student went to his office hours and expressed her concern to him: “I didn’t know this class would be so much about race, or that the program would be so much about race.” He explained to her: “Part of what we think is important in this work is that context matters, and the context for Los Angeles is that it is one of the most racially diverse places on the planet, and we need you to understand that history of race and racism, racial justice, and racial exclusion.”
As expected, she responded with the “I just want to be a good teacher” script he had heard many times before. Howard continued to be explicit about the racial justice mission of the program: “I get that. But we think that part of being a good teacher is understanding the racial context. You cannot disentangle the two. So we had that initial conversation.” By helping students unpack why this explicit mission on race is needed, the RJPs disrupt the resistant Whiteness aimed at derailing their racial justice focus.
WHEN WHITENESS SHOWS UP, MAKE IT A PART OF THE CURRICULUM
Regardless of how Whiteness manifests in classes, it must be disrupted. Because of the lack of training or preparation to center race in teacher education, many faculty outside these programs don’t know how to respond. Tyrone Howard explains, “It’s the stuff that’s unscripted that puts most of us into these real awkward positions. Someone says something highly inappropriate, and everyone looks at the instructor. She or he doesn’t know what to say or how to respond, so they don’t respond. And then there’s silence.” Sometimes, the instructor does not know what to do, and other times, they don’t want to move away from their syllabus or what they had planned for the day. Howard continued, “I have colleagues who are very much linear, type A, and feel like ‘I’ve got to get to these five things today and I’m not going to allow the course to go off target into something that’s tied to race or any other matter because then I can’t get to my five things.”
In contrast, RJP faculty believe the conversations that emerge from disrupting Whiteness are the curriculum, not a detour from it. Howard explains that if he doesn’t get through the five things, “I’m completely okay with that because I think [dealing with issues of race] is much, much more critical to their development as teachers.” Similarly, Kennedy also values what happens when addressing Whiteness in class: “When there’s some kind of microaggression in the class and people are like, whoa, and everything sort of breaks down, then that becomes the fabric from which you can really have those conversations . . . as opposed to talking abstractly about some sort of theory or reading about it from a nonfiction perspective.”
Pour-Khorshid described what happened when Whiteness manifested itself, this time from a student of Color who stated a racist idea in class: “We stopped and we had to really unpack and we just wrestled with these ideas, and a lot of the students ended up going back to the text. . . . So I think in the end it was a really rich discussion.” The faculty recognize that these conversations are critical and model for students how to hold this space in their own classrooms. But addressing these teachable moments also presents a challenge when forced into the confine of courses that have prescribed content. Pour-Khorshid adds, “I will say it does take hella time and when you are expected to deliver a certain amount of content, packed into certain weeks . . . but I know they’ll never forget that moment.” In a traditional program, this concern around covering the official curriculum takes precedent over the detour, whereas in an RJP, addressing racial justice is also considered curriculum, so space is allowed for it.
ALLOW RACIAL CONFLICT TO ERUPT
When race is front and center in coursework, it is not uncommon for racial tension between students of Color and White students to flare. While these tensions may simmer in classes that don’t address race, in RJPs they are addressed head-on. RJP faculty address these racial conflicts by first allowing them to happen, then unpacking what is behind them, and finally creating the space to heal. Howard gave an example that represents a typical way in which these situations emerge. He remembered a class where racial tensions flared. “In particular, several students [of Color] said, ‘One of the things that White people need to do’ or something like that. I think that was a trigger for her [the White student] that they mentioned ‘White people’ as opposed to, say, ‘Whiteness.’ I think she took exception to that.” In response, the White student tried to separate herself from the White people they were talking about. She started listing all the ways she had served students of Color in the past. This only exacerbated the frustration of the students of Color, who knew this avoidance strategy of Whiteness all too well.
Howard continued: “The student who was Latinx was trying to convey to her that even though she may have done some work with communities of Color, by no stretch of the imagination did that give her reprieve from being one of the ‘White people.’ So it got kind of heated and I had to intervene. I let it go for a while, and then I felt like, okay, maybe it needs some cooling off.” As a skilled racial justice practitioner, Howard knew when to let the tension build, how to release it, and, most importantly, how to turn it into a teachable moment. He explains how he handles these situations. “We will not try to just acknowledge [Whiteness] and then move on real quickly. There’s a conversation. Part of what I try to generate is a multitude of perspectives to understand why people feel the way that they feel. It gets emotional. It gets heated. It can be very tense. I think those conversations are good. I think they’re important.”
Howard clarifies how these situations ultimately serve to support the White students as future anti-racist educators: “Because I think they as teachers need to understand, they need to feel the emotion and the pain and the anger that some of our students of Color feel when these bouts of Whiteness manifest themselves.” By feeling their peers’ anger, the White students more deeply witness the depth and pain of racism, which in turn better prepares them to understand their future students’ struggles.
In Camangian’s class, a similar eruption happened. Because his program actively recruits activist students of Color, they are unapologetic about letting White students know when their Whiteness is showing. Camangian recalled a class where a student of Color responded to a White student’s comment dismissing racism because she claimed that as a woman, she was also oppressed. The student of Color announced, “That’s this White shit. You just did all this privilege. You don’t even fucking know it. You have lots to learn—fuck your gender studies.”
Camangian says, “White women try to find that point of solidarity in these arguments saying things like, ‘You’re not the only one who’s oppressed,’ and they’ll like go to these places and say, ‘I grew up poor,’ and all this stuff.” Like Howard, Camangian sees the benefit of letting the tensions manifest, but he also understands the costs and his responsibility in rebuilding the community. “It is hard to heal from or to recover from. You have to have that plan. And then, I’ll do a circle.” Here Camangian is referring to a restorative circle used as part of a practice of restorative justice for the purpose of holding students accountable, repairing harm, and moving forward as a community.4 As part of this process, he asks the students to reflect: “What was that like for you? What’s your point of view? How do you feel about moving forward? Everybody gets their say and it’ll feel better, but it’s still hard to recover from.”
Camangia
n understands the way that White students avoid race by clinging to other marginalized identities. He uses the racial conflict in class as a strategy for disrupting this by creating space for the voices of students of Color to speak out. By strategically allowing racial conflict, the faculty in RJPs allow the racial tensions that emerge in cross-racial education to serve as another text for disrupting Whiteness.
In reflection, Camangian explained that for the White students, “I think it was one of the first times where White privilege, White supremacy, or White positionality was named in real time for them by critical students of Color who have a scathing analysis. They say it the way they feel it.” The labor of the students of Color also taught White students how to move toward anti-racism by stepping out of complacency and sharing the work of disrupting Whiteness. For some of the White students who he describes as more on the fence, “they would sit there and they would process it. They will try to understand and observe how that impacted the more resistant White folks, and they were called upon by the folks of Color to help share the responsibility—emotional labor, if you will—to work with the White folks who were pushing back.”
Camangian reported that several of the White students were able to pick up this charge and engaged in calling-in conversations with resistant White students. As a result, they also developed meaningful cross-racial relationships. Calling in is a strategy of having accountability conversations that help people understand and shift how they may be reinforcing problematic systems of power in their behaviors. Calling in emerged as a response to call-out or cancel culture, in which offending individuals are shamed publicly and excluded from a continued presence in a community. While the push from their peers in these call-in conversations was integral to some of the White teachers positioning themselves as co-conspirators, it leaves the question of how RJPs can accomplish this without the emotional labor of students of Color.
ENSURE THERE IS NOWHERE FOR WHITENESS TO HIDE
Returning to how RJPs center race, this section focuses on how the programs ensure that students’ Whiteness is interrupted. Often, students might say the right thing in class but then enact racist practices in their student teaching placement, or vice versa. To ensure that a student’s growth toward racial justice isn’t performative but rather is a true ideological reframing, RJPs are determined to ensure that all program team members share a commitment to racial justice so there is nowhere for Whiteness to hide. As Tanya Maloney described, “Any one moment could be a moment that needs to be disrupted, and so no one person can be there for everything. There are more places where Whiteness gets disrupted that might not exist in a program where everyone isn’t making such a concerted effort toward thinking about these issues.” By ensuring that all program team members share this same focus, Maloney explained how students are surrounded by people with a shared understanding about race. “The same people that are going in to do observations are thinking about race, the people that are designing and teaching the coursework are thinking about race. The mentor teachers in the classroom are developing their understandings of race. There is nowhere to hide.” In this way, students must truly transform their understandings and behaviors because it is unlikely that they can keep up an anti-racist charade within all areas of the program.
As an example of this nowhere to hide concept, I recall a day in our RJP when mentor teachers were on campus with faculty for professional development, and a mentor teacher received a text of a photo taken by a paraprofessional in her classroom. The photo was of a racially problematic and confusing math word problem being taught by one of our White preservice teachers. This preservice teacher was already on our radar because of some offhanded, questionable statements she had made to a group of Black mentor teachers. The quality of her assignments had also prompted us to create an improvement plan with her that served as a contract for areas in which she needed to show progress in order to remain in the program.
Because of our shared commitment to racial justice, and because the program had developed our close-knit relationships, the mentor teacher immediately showed the photo to the RJP team. The director, field supervisor, mentor, and I quickly developed a plan of action to address the situation. All of us shared a commitment to fostering the learning and teaching of racial justice and understood the severity of the situation. As the White person on the team, I made the first call to the student to learn more about her intention with the word problem. When her response came from a place of defensiveness and anger, rather than humility and openness, it became clear that further actions were needed.
As we typically do, we scheduled what Jennifer Robinson, our executive director of the Center of Pedagogy, refers to as a 360 support meeting in which all the team members who engage with the student came together to develop a plan and to then meet with her. Our first attempts were to support her continued development and to better understand what her intentions were behind the word problem in question. However, her response to our request to meet was to enumerate her complaints about her mentor, the paraprofessional, professors, and the director of the program. Outside of myself, all of these individuals are women of Color. As we continued to ask her to reflect on this pattern of displacement rather than reflection, her engagement devolved into defensive, rambling emails filled with expletives. These behaviors are now associated with a popular culture identity referred to as “Karen,” which has become shorthand for White women who weaponize their resentment toward and entitlement over people of Color.5 Her fragile response to being asked to reflect on a single word problem made it clear to us that she could not be held accountable for her own behavior, to women of Color, or to the children she would be responsible for teaching; therefore, she could not continue in our program. Had the program team not had a shared commitment to racial justice, students like this one could easily slip through the cracks and end up in the classroom harming children who are BIPOC through curricular Tools of Whiteness. But because of the 360 support, there was no place for her Whiteness to hide.
BE STRATEGIC ABOUT RACIAL IDENTITY
An important aspect of 360 support is that it is not race evasive. It is important to consider the race of the student and faculty involved and to be strategic about who should provide the intervention. Often when issues arise with students of Color, it is important to ensure that a program team member of Color is the lead support so that the student can better focus on the message and not the messenger. For White students, it is often important that a White faculty member take the lead because White students experiencing White fragility can act out against faculty of Color. This strategic and overt consideration about faculty racial identity is talked about more openly in RJPs than in traditional programs, where faculty racial identity either goes unnamed or is used in tokenizing ways.
In this example from Christina Villarreal, she shared how her team members had an explicit discussion about their racial identities in strategizing how to engage a resistant White student. In this situation, Villarreal sat down with the field supervisor, a White woman who Villarreal describes as “deeply committed to racial justice.” The supervisor told Villarreal about how the student was presenting her defiance. Villarreal and the supervisor agreed that the student’s behavior was unacceptable, but the field supervisor wasn’t sure how hard she should push the student. Villarreal told her, “‘To be honest, as a White woman to another White woman, I expect you to go harder than I can, as a woman of Color.’ She was like, ‘Great, I just wanted a green light. So I’m going to push her on her racial analysis and how she’s been teaching.’” Villarreal stressed the importance of this kind of racially strategic collaboration, explaining that the supervisor “has also struggled and oftentimes feels in a silo, so when we were able to join forces and collaborate, I think we felt, it isn’t always just on us.”
Villarreal also pointed out the challenge of getting White people to engage the way this field supervisor did. “I’ve noticed that oftentimes the mentors and the advisors of Color are
more direct in coming to me. I feel like when it’s like White mentors and White advisors, I tend to have to take that step toward ‘Hey how’s it going with that student,’ whereas the women of Color have come to me.”
Unlike these White mentors, it is deeply important that White program team members doing this work understand their responsibility to do the heavy lifting and pushing when it comes to disrupting Whiteness. Kennedy recognizes his role as a White person in his program this way: “There was just a sense, especially if it was a White candidate, of ‘Bill, you need to go talk to him or you need to go talk to her,’ because some of that work has to be shared across faculty racially, so that folks of Color are not doing that work all the time.” This strategic use of racial identity is yet another way that RJPs provide 360 support in ways that affirm and push all students in their development toward racial justice.
HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY
Despite the best efforts in offering 360 support, sometimes it becomes clear that a candidate is not a fit for the classroom. A responsibility RJPs take seriously is gatekeeping who will end up standing in front of young people—especially in front of students of Color. Ultimately, it is up to us to make the call as to whether our preservice teachers have the dispositions and skills to build caring relationships and provide culturally sustaining instruction or if they are going to be the ones who end up on Facebook enacting #CurriculumSoWhite.