White Teachers / Diverse Classrooms

Creating Inclusive Schools, Building on Students' Diversity, and Providing True Educational Equity

Julie Landsman, Chance W. Lewis, Julie Landsman, Chance W. Lewis

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781579225988
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

The point of departure for this new edition, as it was for the first, is the unacceptable reality that, for students of color, school is often not a place to learn but a place of low expectations and failure. In urban schools with concentrations of poverty, often fewer than half the ninth graders leave with a high school diploma. This second edition has been considerably expanded with chapters that illuminate the Asian American, Native American, and Latina/o experience, including that of undocumented students, in our schools. These chapters offer insights into the concerns and issues students bring to the classroom. They also convey the importance for teachers, as they accept difference and develop cultural sensitivity, to see their students as individuals, and avoid generalizations. This need to go beneath the surface is reinforced by a chapter on adopted children, children of mixed race, and "hidden minorities".White and Black teachers, and teachers of different races and ethnicities, here provide the essential theoretical background, and share their experiences and the approaches they have developed, to create the conditions – in both urban and suburban settings – that enable minority students to succeed. This book encourages reflection and self-examination, and calls for recognizing and reinforcing students' ability to achieve. It also calls for high expectations for both teachers and students. It demonstrates what it means to recognize often-unconscious biases, confront institutional racism where it occurs, surmount stereotyping, adopt culturally relevant teaching, connect with parents and the community, and integrate diversity in all activities. This book is replete with examples from practice and telling insights that will engage teachers in practice or in service. It should have a place in every classroom in colleges of education and K-12 schools. Its empowering message applies to every teacher working in an educational setting that recognizes the empowerment that comes in celebrating diversity. Each chapter concludes with a set of questions for personal reflection or group discussion.

PART ONE
FOUNDATIONS OF OUR WORK: RECOGNIZING POWER, PRIVILEGE, AND PERSPECTIVES

1
BEING WHITE

Invisible Privileges of a New England Prep School Girl

Julie G. Landsman

Oprah Winfrey was once turned away from a fancy department store in Paris. All sorts of excuses were offered afterward. Yet the fact remained, if this had been Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, or Britney Spears, she would have been welcomed onto the premises, no matter the time of day or what was going on inside. Because she had dark skin, one of the richest Americans was excluded from this department store.

After she was named president of Brown University, Ruth Simmons went shopping at a major department store in New York. She was followed and questioned as she walked the aisles, dressed in her Ivy League tweed. There is little question that she would have been left alone if she had been a White woman. “Some things have not changed,” she said, in an interview on 60 Minutes after being named the first Black woman president of an Ivy League university.

Similar stories abound in every city, every town, and every suburb in the United States. These stories give the lie to the claim that “it is really all about class.” If it were “all about class,” Oprah Winfrey, Ruth Simmons, and countless other rich Black Americans would not be turned away, followed, or harassed. College professors, administrators, teachers, engineers, photographers, scientists, doctors, CEOs of corporations tell the same tale: “I was walking down the street in my suit and tie on my way to work” . . . “I was waiting for my wife to get off work in a suburb near where we live” . . . “I was driving down the street like everyone else and . . .” These statements come not from kids dressed in low riders and gold necklaces, not from T-shirted workers on a construction site at lunch hour, or from women on their way home from cleaning someone’s house. The stories that reverberate across America come from upper- and middle-class African Americans, often dressed conservatively in order to protect themselves from “unreasonable search” and scrutiny. In The Corner (1997), by David Simon and Edward Burns, a book that documents the lives of crack addicts and others living on a single street corner in Baltimore, there is a very telling statement about a Black man who is a drug addict, yet who was at one time a rich executive and stock holder in major corporations:

He could admit personal guilt; he knew what he’d done. Yet if that was all there was to it, why did the world treat him exactly the same when he was doing right, when he had all those jobs and all those stocks and mutual funds? Back then, all his money and standing didn’t matter to the sales clerks and security guards, who would follow him around the stores. The world was no different when he drove his Mercedes—bought and paid for with Beth Steel paychecks and tech-stock dividends—and suffered through dozens of police stops and registration checks. Nor did money count when he would get dressed up and bring a date down to the harbor restaurants. His worst, most humiliating memory, was of a cool summer night when he took a girl to City Lights in Harborplace and asked if it might be possible to sit outside on the balcony. No, sorry, he was told; then they were seated at a table by the kitchen while the balcony tables stayed empty for the next two hours. A small insult, of course—nothing that could level a person in a single blow, unless that person came from Fayette Street, where every moment tells you who you are and what you were meant to be. (p. 356)

The Urgency: Understanding White Privilege

When, as Whites, we talk about the unearned privileges of white skin, we are simply trying to make the reality of our experience understood in itself. We try to name it as a racial privilege, not something that can be denied, or minimized as only affecting those of a certain class. It is important to tease out what this White privilege means before we can understand the complexities of its combination with other experiences of class or ethnicity. Only then can we work to bring true equality to all Americans. At this moment, the key to understanding a basic inequity and injustice in the United States is to acknowledge that the problem resides not in Oprah, Ruth Simmons, or the well-dressed Black man shown to the worst seat in a restaurant full of empty choice tables. The problem resides in the men and women at the doors, or those in the boardrooms, management offices, school districts, and other decision-making locations, blocking the way, or following customers in their stores, or denying places and classes, entrance and access, to men and women based solely on their Blackness or their Brownness. As a result, the privilege resides in the fact that White people can move about, can experience life, can apply to college, for loans, for jobs without being denied entrance or freedom based on their skin color—and never for a moment have to think about it.

White Resistance

It is when I ask for an acceptance of the aforementioned presence of White privilege that I encounter the most resistance. Many would like to couch the discussion of race in a litany of stories such as those I described to introduce this chapter and stop there. After all, we can easily shake our heads and feel sympathy, sorrow, or disapproval for the victims of race discrimination. And all the time, we know we would never do this: we would never deny a person a table, a choice seat, or a chance to shop if we were in charge. We can feel comfortable when the discussion rests on the misfortunes of others and does not come back to our own place in the story, having to do with our experience, responsibility, complicity, and advantages as Whites in America.

When I conduct two-day workshops for teachers, I often save the discussion of White privilege until the last hours, hoping I have built up trust and ease among the members of the group, so that they will feel free to discuss their misperceptions; their mistakes; and, ultimately, their experiences of privilege. Teachers are often willing to examine curriculum in their classrooms honestly; they are even willing to talk about relationships and biases regarding students and parents but only if this occurs in a nonthreatening atmosphere. Yet, many of these same teachers balk when it comes to examining their own advantages as White people in the world.

However, such self-scrutiny is exactly what White teachers must engage in if we are to make change in our classrooms and in institutions. This reflection is the way we will experience the significant deep transformation in the education of students in our classrooms that can lead to equal opportunity in our country. More than 90 percent of the teaching force in America is White. It is incumbent upon us to explore this area of White privilege in depth to truly counter racism in education and to provide equity for all students.

Defining White Privilege

In the opening paragraphs of his book The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. DuBois articulates a basic difference between the experience of Whites and Blacks when he describes the “double consciousness” that Black Americans must possess to survive.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (p. 3)

Some ninety years later, Barack Obama (1996), in his book Dreams from My Father, describes a time when these two warring selves came together on a visit to Africa:

And all of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before your eyes, the round faces of babies and the chipped, worn faces of the old; beautiful faces that made me understand the transformation that Asante and other black Americans claimed to have undergone after their first visit to freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal. (p. 284)

From these two passages one gets a view of the overarching privilege Whites have in this country: that of single racial consciousness, single sight. We can walk through America being who we are without an awareness of a second racial self: the self as viewed by others. If we fail, we fail as who we are, unique and flawed individuals. If we succeed, we succeed because we have accomplished what we have through hard work, as individuals with our complicated histories and qualities.

Instead of seeing double consciousness as a problem for Blacks, we must see single consciousness as a privilege of Whites in America. When we understand this single consciousness, we must work to make sure that all Americans have the chance to live as Obama (1996, p. 284) describes: “So you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing a betrayal.” Although it may be true that other groups also experience a version of double consciousness, this chapter focuses on that privilege of single consciousness we have as people with white skin in order to understand and accept the reality of racism.

Acknowledging this reality, we need more concrete descriptions of how it plays out in everyday living and, ultimately, in the context of education. Additionally, to acknowledge this privilege as a reality is a strong beginning, a necessary step toward the self-reflection and examination so many of us avoid or shy away from. Peggy McIntosh, in her groundbreaking paper “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies,” captures in very specific terms what it means to be White in the United States. She insists that we change our perspective radically, from a listing of deficits and problems of people of color to a listing of the concrete privileges and advantages Whites have based simply on the color of their skin.

McIntosh distinguishes between “earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically.” She says:

Some privileges, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society and should be considered as the entitlement of everyone. Others, like the privilege not to listen to less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups. Still others, like finding one’s staple foods everywhere, may be a function of being a member of a numerical majority in the population. Others have to do with not having to labor under pervasive negative stereotyping and mythology. (p. 13)

In a description of one major advantage on her list, we hear both DuBois and Obama’s reflective voices:

The positive “privilege” of belonging, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, fosters development and should not be seen as privilege for a few. It is, let us say, an entitlement none of us would have to earn; ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for some. The negative “privilege” which gave me cultural permission not to take darker-skinned Others seriously can be seen as arbitrarily conferred dominance and should not be desirable for anyone. (p. 14)

From here McIntosh goes on to list fifty specific privileges we experience as Whites. This list is of those things she experiences as an insider based solely on her skin color. Those with darker skin are made to feel outsiders in their own homeland, and especially in relation to the powerful, the decision makers. For us as Whites, to accept this list is to accept our own experience as having certain advantages—in getting jobs, in getting a good education, in experiencing daily ease, in getting help with financial matters, and in simply living our daily lives, solely as a result of having white skin. Here are a few of the fifty items from McIntosh’s list:

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern other’s attitudes toward their race.

I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races. (pp. 5–9)

I have taken these seven items as illustrations of McIntosh’s way of helping us think in explicit terms of what advantages we have as Whites. She makes visible what has been invisible to many of us. Our schools surround us with such privileges and rear us in the assumption that such privileges are available to all Americans. We are rarely, if ever, asked to think of our skin color as relevant to our plans, our future, our daily experience. This obliviousness is in itself a privilege, our “single consciousness” again.

The Price Whites Pay

Thandeka (2000) eloquently describes the cost to us as White people living this life in her book Learning to Be White. When she traces White people’s sense of alienation, she finds we have something she calls White shame. Time after time, in her interviews with Whites who worked for racial equality and justice, she watches as her interviewee breaks down in tears, describing some moment in childhood when that person hurt someone who was not White because he or she had been taught to do so by his or her parents.

In the face of adult silence to racial abuse, the child learns to silence and then deny its own resonant feelings toward racially proscribed others, not because it chooses to become white, but because it wishes to remain within the community that is quite literally its life. The child thus learns, “layer by layer,” to stay away from the nonwhite zones of its own desires.

The internal nonwhite zone is the killing fields of desire, the place where impulses to community with persons beyond the pale are slaughtered. The child develops an antipathy toward its own forbidden feelings and to the persons who are the objects of these forbidden desires: the racial others. This developing white attitude in the child is a “means of being ‘ready’ and ‘set’” to act in a certain way. (p. 24)

I felt this shame often as a young girl. We had moved to Texas from Connecticut so my father could become chief test pilot for Chance Vaught Aircraft. At the age of four, one warm noontime in Dallas, I used the word nigger in front of Leah, the woman who worked for my mother as a nurse and kitchen helper. My father had taught me that word in a rhyme that began “eeny meeny miney mo.” Leah sat me down across from her and told me, looking me directly in the eye, that she was hurt by “that word,” that she hoped I would not use it again. I felt awful. I had never experienced my own behavior as a way to hurt anyone so deeply. When I told my father what Leah said, he shrugged his shoulders, talked about how oversensitive she was, and told me not to worry about it. And yet I knew what hurt I was capable of causing someone I liked and respected. And it was in this moment of shame that I also learned the fallibility of my own, all-powerful father. This frightened me as well. Ever since that day I have experienced a split within myself in my connection to my father, a man I respected and also feared, and even in connection to my mother, who acquiesced in his views.

For much of my life my father used the word nigger, as well as other epithets to describe Italian Americans, Chinese Americans, and Latinos. Thandeka (2000, p. 127) describes this as part of my White race identity development: “The white self-image that emerges from this process will include the emotional fallout from the self-annihilating process that created it: the breakup of one’s own sense of coherency, efficacy and agency as a personal center of activity.”

Thandeka eventually ties in aspects of class and upbringing with the development of race identity. My father struggled all his life with his identity as a poor man from Missouri who made it into the upper-class life of wealthy Whites in Connecticut. He found himself mixing with tho...