Reading, Writing, and Racism
Page 18
I am fortunate to have received a sabbatical from Montclair State University to work on this book and am grateful for the ongoing community and support from my dean, Tamara Lucas, and my colleagues, including Jessica Bacon, Maria Cioé Peña, Naome Dunnell and TJ, Chase and Chance, Carolina Gonzalez, Sumi Hagawari, Priya Lalvani, Kimi Santos, Rebecca Swann-Jackson, Blanca Vega, and Mayida Zaal and Imani.
The most exciting part of my job is watching as my teacher education students become inspirational teachers who bring a vision of racial and social justice alive in their classrooms. This joy of staying in community with alumni/ae has taken on new meaning when we begin working shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for justice—your dedication and purpose keeps me inspired and engaged Marylin Zuniga, Nelly Bess, Cariesha Black, Jasmine Johnson, Elisa Lee, Tatiana Pererya, Carla Nisbett, and Jackie Santos. I’m proud to watch you continue to grow in your justice stance: Michele Bernadino, Veronica Cueva, Becky Erdelyi, Amanda Faison, Lisa Fishman, Brenda Huacachino, Jackie Keenan, Gianna LaBanca, Nicole Larsen, Megan McBride, Elizabeth Mojica, Rouxana Pellicier, Jessica Rivera, Rebekah and Pablo de la Rosa, Cristiana Sardo, Debbie Schultz, Claire Thomas, Jorge Villacreses, Haley Yacos, and the entire 2020 cohort of the Newark Teacher Project, whom I love dearly.
As always, I am grateful first and foremost to Mom for your lifelong support. And to my family: David Dahn, Kristine Larsen and Django and Roxxy Gilligan, David and Natalija Marshall, Al McCutchen and Elliott, Najah and Anayah Rivera-McCutchen, Chris Powers, Anna Sop, Martika, Chaka, and Frankie.
NOTES
FOREWORD
1. kihana miraya ross, “Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness,” op-ed, New York Times, June 4, 2020.
INTRODUCTION: #CURRICULUMSOWHITE
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 31.
2. Django Paris, “There’s #OscarsSoWhite and Then There’s #CurriculumSoWhite How Curriculum in US Public Schools Remains Centered on White Middleclass Norms,” Twitter post, January 29, 2016, https://twitter.com/django_paris/status/693138673894854656.
3. David Whisenant, “School System Apologizes for ‘Inappropriate’ Homework Assignment,” WBTV, December 10, 2019, https://www.wbtv.com/2019/12/10/school-system-apologizes-inappropriate-homework-assignment.
4. Michael Harriot, “Could You List the ‘Positive Aspects’ of Slavery? A Teacher Asked 8th-Graders to Do So,” Root, April 20, 2018, https://www.theroot.com/could-you-list-the-positive-aspects-of-slavery-a-tea-1825430656.
5. Zahara Hill, “Bronx Teacher Steps on Backs of Black Students in Slavery ‘Lesson,’” Ebony, February 2, 2018, https://www.ebony.com/news/bronx-teacher-slavery-lesson.
6. E. Brown, “Texas Officials: Schools Should Teach That Slavery Was ‘Side Issue’ to Civil War,” July 5, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-later-schools-are-still-a-battlefield-for-interpreting-civil-war/2015/07/05/e8fbd57e-2001–11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html.
7. Michael Schaub, “Do New Texas Textbooks Whitewash Slavery and Segregation?,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2015, https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-do-new-texas-textbooks-whitewash-slavery-segregation-20150707-story.html.
8. Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933); Gloria Ladson-Billings, Critical Race Theory Perspectives on the Social Studies: The Profession, Policies, and Curriculum (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2003); James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 2008); Eve Tuck and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29, no. 1 (June 18, 2013): 72, http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/411; Dolores Calderon, “Uncovering Settler Grammars in Curriculum,” Educational Studies 50, no. 4 (July 4, 2014): 313–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2014.926904; Prentice T. Chandler, Doing Race in Social Studies: Critical Perspectives (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2015); Anthony L. Brown and Keffrelyn D. Brown, “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Excavating Race and the Enduring Racisms in U.S. Curriculum,” Teachers College Record 117, no. 14 (2015): 103–30; LaGarrett J. King, Perspectives of Black Histories in Schools (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2019).
9. Adrienne Green, “More Minority Students, Fewer Teachers of Color,” Atlantic, September 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/teacher-diversity-viz/406033.
10. Rebecca Goldring, Lucinda Gray, and Amy Bitterman, Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary and Secondary School Teachers in the United States: Results from the 2011–12 Schools and Staffing Survey First Look (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2013), eric.ed.gov/?id=ED544178.
11. ACT, Inc., The Condition of Future Educators 2015 (2016), https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Future-Educators-2015.pdf.
12. H. Richard Milner and Tyrone C. Howard, “Counter-Narrative as Method: Race, Policy and Research for Teacher Education,” Race Ethnicity and Education 16, no. 4 (September 26, 2013): 536–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2013.817772.
13. To further knowledge and understanding of how racism functions in American society, these are some good places to start: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), by Michelle Alexander; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), by Carol Anderson; Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), by bell hooks; An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), by Ibram X. Kendi; My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), by Resmaa Menakem; Race: The Power of an Illusion, a 2003 film by California Newsreel, https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/; So You Want to Talk About Race (New York: Seal Press, 2019), by Ijeoma Oluo; An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), by Paul Ortiz; and Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), by Bryan Stevenson. To further your understanding about how racism operates specifically in education, these are important texts: Teaching/Learning Anti-Racism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), by Louise Derman-Sparks and Carol Brunson Phillips; Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), by Eve Ewing; We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), by Bettina Love; Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom (New York: Routledge, 2019), by Jamila Lyiscott; Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School (New York: New Press, 2008), by Mica Pollack; Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), by David Stovall; and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (New York: BasicBooks, 1997), by Beverly Daniel Tatum.
14. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (June 1986): 18, https://doi.org/10.1177/019685998601000203, 26.
15. Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege (San Francisco: City Lights, 2005), 4.
16. Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg, Changing Multiculturalism (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997), 83.
17. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Gloria Ladson-Billings, Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 81; Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
19. Andrea Ayvazian et al., Dismantling Racism: 2016 Workbook (DismantlingRacism.org, 2018), https://resourcegeneration.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2016-dRworks-workbook.pdf. This workbook is designed to be used with the Dismantling Racism workshop and provides descriptions, along with “antidotes” for each of these aspects of White supremacist culture. It also provides a rich collection of anti-racism training activities.
20. Sherry Marx and Julie Pennington, “Pedagogies of Critical Race Theory: Experimentations with White Preservice Teachers,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16 (January 1, 2003): 101, https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839022000036381.
21. Critical race scholars in the field of education include Gloria Ladson-Billings, William F. Tate, Marvin Lynn, Daniel Solorzano, David Stovall, and Tara J. Yosso.
22. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
23. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning.
24. Like all terms used to describe social categories, language shifts and changes over time. These articles explain some of the issues surrounding such terms as people of Color and BIPOC. Constance Grady, “The Meaning of BIPOC, as Explained by Linguists,” Vox, June 30, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/30/21300294/bipoc-what-does-it-mean-critical-race-linguistics-jonathan-rosa-deandra-miles-hercules; Sandra E. Garcia, “BIPOC: What Does It Mean?,” New York Times, June 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html.
25. Anne Bonds and Joshua Inwood, “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism,” Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 6 (December 10, 2016): 715–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515613166.
26. For a short, user-friendly overview of the Four I’s, see Eliana Pipes, “Legos and the 4 I’s of Oppression,” July 29, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WWyVRo4Uas.
27. James A. Banks, An Introduction to Multicultural Education (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999).
28. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, “The Archaeology of the Self,” NYU Metro Center, December 7, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwC_3cLRJO8.
29. Edwin Mayorga and Bree Picower, “Active Solidarity: Centering the Demands and Vision of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Teacher Education,” Urban Education 53, no. 2 (December 20, 2017): 212–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085917747117.
30. Laura Bult, “Alabama Middle School Causes Outrage for Handing Out Math Quiz with Blatant Gang References,” New York Daily News, June 1, 2016, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/alabama-middle-school-teacher-put-leave-gang-math-test-article-1.2656876.
31. I write in more detail about the specifics of my personal journey in my first book, Practice What You Teach. Bree Picower, Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets (New York: Routledge, 2012).
32. John R. Rickford and Russell J. Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (New York: Wiley, 2000); Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa G. Hilliard, Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).
33. Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Resist, June 16, 2015, https://resist.org/news/herstory-blacklivesmatter-movement.
34. Sweeney Kovar, “Macklemore—White Privilege II (Ft. Jamila Woods),” Indie Shuffle, January 24, 2016, https://www.indieshuffle.com/macklemore-white-privilege-ii-ft-jamila-woods.
35. Bettina L. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019).
36. “White people should NOT be capitalizing . . .,” Ericka Hart, @iHartEricka, September 18, 2019, Twitter, https://twitter.com/ihartericka/status/1174447440344375296.
37. Sonya Renee Taylor, “Should White Folks Get Paid to Do Anti-Racism Work?,” Instagram, September 20, 2019, https://www.instagram.com/tv/B2oiB4zgVIs.
38. Tre Johnson, “When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/white-antiracist-allyship-book-clubs/2020/06/11/9edcc766-abf5-11ea-94d2-d7bc43b26bf9_story.html.
39. Marisa Meltzer, “‘I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry,’” Washington Post, September 11, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/09/11/feature/how-activist-rachel-cargle-built-a-business-by-calling-out-racial-injustices-within-feminism.
40. For more information about these organizations and to get involved, go to https://www.edliberation.org and https://abolitionistteachingnetwork.org.
41. Jean Anyon, Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement (New York: Routledge, 2014).
42. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 7.
CHAPTER 1: CURRICULAR TOOLS OF WHITENESS
1. Bree Picower, Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets (New York: Routledge, 2012).
2. John B. King, Amy Mcintosh, and Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, The State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Workforce (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, 2016), http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf.
3. Bill Bigelow, “Presidents and the Enslaved: Helping Students Find the Truth,” Zinn Education Project, 2009, https://www.zinnedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/presidents_and_slaves.pdf.
4. Jacqueline Aboulafia et al., Diverse City, White Curriculum: The Exclusion of People of Color from English Language Arts in NYC Schools (New York: NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, January 2020), www.nyccej.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Diverse-City-White-Curriculum.pdf.
5. NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, Chronically Absent: The Exclusion of People of Color from NYC Elementary School Curricula (New York: NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, February 2019), http://www.nyccej.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/reportCEJ-Chronically-Absent-FINAL.pdf, p. 5. As part of their organizing to bring attention to this report, CEJ protested in front of the local board of education and engaged in a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #CurriculumSoWhite. “3–K” describes early childhood education for three-year-olds.
6. Aboulafia et al., Diverse City, White Curriculum.
7. Megan Hester, “Why Is Public School Curriculum Still Whites Only?,” Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, December 11, 2018, https://research.steinhardt.nyu.edu/site/metroblog/2018/12/11/why-is-public-school-curriculum-still-whites-only.
8. Rudine Sims Bishop, “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors,” Perspectives 6, no. 3 (Summer 1990), https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf.
9. Bishop, “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.”
10. After contacting five publishers to obtain copyrights to reprint the examples of racist curriculum described in this chapter, only McGraw-Hill provided permission for this one image. However, the additional images are available to view at breepicower.com.
11. Manny Fernandez and Christine Hauser, “Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Co
mpany a Lesson on Accuracy,” New York Times, October 5, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html.
12. Fernandez and Hauser, “Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy.”
13. Roni Dean-Burren, Facebook post, October 1, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/roni.deanburren/videos/10208248919206996/?d=n.
14. Ashifa Kassam, “Canada Children’s Book Recalled amid Accusations of Whitewashing History,” Guardian, October 4, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/04/canada-childrens-book-recalled-whitewashing-history.
15. Canadian Press, “Workbook Accused of Whitewashing First Nations’ History Recalled,” Toronto Sun, October 3, 2017, https://torontosun.com/2017/10/03/workbook-accused-of-whitewashing-first-nations-history-to-be-changed/wcm/4f8dd643-d2e4–4741-bc2d-eadbe17401d0.
16. Eve Tuck and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29, no. 1 (June 18, 2013): 72, http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/411.
17. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity,” 74.
18. Laura Whooley, “Last Friday, my 4th graders were studying for our social studies test and came across text that we felt was inaccurate. . . .” Facebook photo post, November 26, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100895530152367&set=pcb.10100895530551567&type=3&theater.
19. Jenifer Frank, “Lies My Bookshelf Told Me: Slavery in Children’s Literature,” Teaching Tolerance 62 (Summer 2019), https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/summer-2019/lies-my-bookshelf-told-me-slavery-in-childrens-literature.
20. Mary Bowerman, “Scholastic Pulls Controversial George Washington Slave Book,” USA Today, January 18, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2016/01/18/scholastic-george-washington-slavery-book/78956160.