Teaching Race

How to Help Students Unmask and Challenge Racism

Stephen D. Brookfield

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119374428
• eBook ISBN: 9781119374398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

A real-world how-to manual for talking about race in the classroom

Educators and activists frequently call for the need to address the lingering presence of racism in higher education. Yet few books offer specific suggestions and advice on how to introduce race to students who believe we live in a post-racial world where racism is no longer a real issue. In Teaching Race the authors offer practical tools and techniques for teaching and discussing racial issues at predominately White institutions of higher education. As current events highlight the dynamics surrounding race and racism on campus and the world beyond, this book provides teachers with essential training to facilitate productive discussion and raise racial awareness in the classroom. A variety of teaching and learning experts provide insights, tips, and guidance on running classroom discussions on race. They present effective approaches and activities to bring reluctant students into a consideration of race and explore how White teachers can model racial awareness, thereby inviting students into the process of examining their own white identity.

Racism, whether evident in overt displays or subconscious bias, has repercussions that reverberate far beyond the campus grounds. As the cultural climate increasingly calls out for more research, education, and dialogue on race and racism, this book helps teachers spotlight issues related to race in a way that leads to effective classroom and campus conversation. The book provides guidance on how to:

• Create the conditions that facilitate respectful racial dialogue by building trust and effectively negotiating conflict
• Uncover each student's own subconscious bias and the intersectionality that exists even in the most homogenous-appearing classrooms
• Help students embrace discomfort, and adapt discussion methods to accommodate issues of race and positionality
• Avoid common traps, mistakes, and misconceptions encountered in anti-racist teaching

Predominantly White institutions face a number of challenges in dealing with race issues, including a lack of precedence, an absence of modeling by campus leaders, and little clear guidance on how teachers can identify and challenge racism on campus. Teaching Race is packed with activities, suggestions and exercises to provide practical real-world help for teachers trying to introduce race in class

1
The Dynamics of Teaching Race

Stephen D. Brookfield

The authors in this book hold these truths to be self‐evident:

• We live in a time of rampant racism fueled and legitimized by racist political leaders.
• If unchallenged, racism will continue to extend its hegemony and exclude large groups of people from full participation in political, social, and economic life.
• Racism damages everyone: victims who suffer from abuse, violence, and assault, and perpetrators who live in fear of the “other.”
• The roots of racism lie in the ideology of white supremacy; hence a fundamental pedagogic task is to help people unmask this ideology.
• Racism is learned; therefore, a key task for teachers is to help people recognize how they internalize racist ideas and beliefs and how these play themselves out in everyday life.
• Racism is structural, not individual. It is embedded in systems and institutional practices. A major project, therefore, is to help students think structurally and systemically about racism and to go beyond seeing it as a matter of individual choice or personal prejudice.
• The point of teaching race is to prepare students to take action to combat racism.

All of us have spent many years trying to understand the pedagogy of teaching race. There is well over a century’s worth of experience represented in this book and our intent is to share the lessons we’ve learned while pursuing this most difficult of teaching tasks. We don’t spend lot of time lamenting the existence of racism or analyzing its history; after all, plenty of other authors have done those things superbly. We choose instead to use this book’s space to focus on documenting activities, exercises, techniques, tools, strategies, and approaches that we find helpful to us in uncovering and challenging white supremacy. This is a book focused on practical ways to help students take antiracist action in their worlds.

Defining Terms

Three terms are used repeatedly throughout this book: racism, white supremacy, and microaggression. So as to create a common base for understanding I want to begin by defining each of these as clearly as possible. In general conversation these terms are thrown around somewhat indiscriminately, so it’s essential that when they’re used in the following pages the meaning is as consistent as possible.

Racism

Racism is a system of beliefs and practices that are embedded in the institutions we move through as individuals and routinized in the conventions of everyday lives. These beliefs and practices legitimize the power of whites and justify their viewing all other racial groups as inherently inferior. Organizational structures, social policies, and institutional habits embody racism by combining to exclude people of color from access to full participation in social, political, and economic life. In the educational sphere, racism is glaringly evident in admissions policies, disciplinary guidelines, curricula, hiring practices, attrition rates for faculty and students of color, and the composition of boards of trustees. The point of racism is to preserve the power of one dominant racial group.

When racism is threatened it responds with a combination of overt force (police brutality, political imprisonment, state‐sanctioned murder) and covert manipulation (symbolic festivals celebrating diversity, public holidays, prominent so‐called success stories of black, brown, and indigenous exceptionalism). Racism is expert at reconfiguring itself by appearing to have ceded important territory while in reality maintaining its power. Hence, college application brochures feature a rainbow of different student racial identities, institutions create diversity offices headed up by the only person of color in the senior leadership team, reading lists are widened to include authors of color, and admissions offices and departments recruit students, staff, and faculty of color. In reality, these changes are often superficial. Faculty of color fail to get tenure, diversity officers have a high rate of turnover, attrition rates are disproportionately high for students of color, and new, racially based curricula are regarded as exotic and temporary diversions from an agreed‐upon mainstream.

Finally, racism is both socially constructed and learned. No one is born with innate stereotypes, prejudices, and biases about other racial groups. These are acquired through the minutiae of daily interactions via jokes, asides, and parental injunctions; from media messages; in peer group conversations; and from institutional policies and practices. Because of de facto housing segregation, most people grow up in racially homogenous areas with little sustained interaction with other races. In the absence of experiences that counter dominant racial messages and challenge “official” or “stock” stories of race (Bell, 2010), people develop ever‐deepening beliefs about various racial groups. Any limited interactions with those from a different race are mediated via these learned narratives so as to confirm the idea of white supremacy.

White Supremacy

Behind the structure of racism lies a set of ideas that legitimizes its existence. This is the ideology of white supremacy. White supremacy is a worldview sedimented in institutional practices to ensure that white people stay in control of the systems and structures that control our society. By white supremacy I don’t mean the groups of white nationalists, KKK, and Aryan Nation members who openly espouse racial genocide, exclusion, separation, or repatriation. I mean instead the idea that whites, because of their superior intellect and reasoning power, should be in control of decision‐making for society as a whole. White supremacy perpetuates the notion that whites should naturally hold the most powerful positions in business, the judiciary, the legislature, the military, and the media because they can think better than nonwhites. Whites are held to be able to use reason more effectively and think more logically, and therefore be more objective in their decision‐making processes. This reflects the enduring power of European Enlightenment thought and its privileging of reason and objective analysis, seen particularly in positivism and scientism.

White supremacy views people of color, by way of contrast, as moved by passion and raw emotion, easily inflamed and therefore not to be trusted with decision‐making authority. White supremacy views emotion in mostly negative ways, as an unreliable interference with coolly objective decision‐making. In the case of people of color, emotion is viewed as something that is quickly converted into aggression and inflamed mob violence. So the ideology of white supremacy places whiteness as the preferred norm in society, white people as the natural authorities in any situation, and white knowledge (and white forms of knowledge production) as the most valid of humankind. White supremacy is frequently denied by its perpetrators (such as me) even as it’s being disseminated. The authors in this book view white supremacy as the philosophical foundation of racism and believe that progress in the area of racial justice depends on dismantling this powerful and all‐pervasive ideology.

Microaggressions

Microaggressions are the everyday behaviors that enact the ideology of white supremacy and keep racist systems in place. They are small acts of exclusion perpetrated by whites against people of color. Yet enactors of aggressions have no conscious, overt intent. When called on these aggressions, whites will typically reply that people of color are being too sensitive, imagining slights that aren’t intended and seeing racism when it’s not there. In claiming a lack of racist intent whites are actually being honest. There is no deliberate or conscious wish to diminish, insult, or exclude anyone. The perpetrators are just going about their normal daily business and doing what comes naturally.

Because I’ve grown up as a white man in a racist world I usually don’t notice my unwitting microaggressions: After all, they’re not decisions I’m consciously making. A white supremacist view of the world creates a structured blindness to one’s enactment of racism where whites like myself are concerned. So when I overlook students of color, remember mostly the names of white male students, or direct my comments in meetings I’m chairing mostly to whites, I’m usually unaware these things are happening until someone challenges me. Typically, when whites are called on for committing microaggressions in multiracial groups, other whites rush in to save the perpetrator, saying he or she just had a moment of forgetfulness, was tired, made an unintended mistake, or had a brain fart. Those calling out a microaggression are often accused of taking political correctness too far and of seeing things that aren’t really there.

Three Key Dynamics of Race‐based Teaching

A complex mix of emotional reactions confronts teachers trying to introduce the examination of race into their classrooms. Some students display hostility and anger; others seem bored, weary, and uninterested, while still more are fearful. Even students who have deliberately volunteered to study the topic fear saying or doing the wrong thing. As I was writing this chapter I asked two different groups – one composed of students in a leadership course I was teaching and one comprising colleagues in a professional workshop I was running – to list the reasons lying behind any reluctance they felt in addressing the topic of race. Here are the rank‐ordered responses, going from most to least frequent:

• I’ll say the wrong thing and be called a racist.
• This will be a messy, distressing, and uncomfortable discussion.
• I don’t have any experience to draw on that’s relevant.
• I don’t trust the teacher or leader to know what she or he is doing.
• This never goes well and always ends in tears.
• I’m fed up with the implication that I have privilege and act in a racist way.
• This is just one more example of politically correct brainwashing.

How do we navigate through these different reasons for pushing back against an engagement with racial issues? The contributors in this book suggest three approaches: scaffolding, modeling, and community building.

Scaffolding

Eighteen‐year‐olds who have grown up in racially homogenous neighborhoods and high schools show up at college completely unprepared to dive into racially charged curricula. They will think about race in broad, dualistic terms – “whites do this, blacks do that” – and will be challenged by any kind of contextual complexity. They will want to know the so‐called right, nonracist way to behave and the behaviors they should avoid. Many white students will be firmly caught in the color‐blind paradigm and sincerely believe themselves to be good‐hearted people who focus on the content of people’s character and not on skin color.

So students who have never thought much about this topic (who will mostly be white) should be eased into it, if possible, in ways that feel invitational. In this book, Lisa R. Merriweather, Talmadge C. Guy, and Elaine Manglitz describe how they research students’ backgrounds, preconceptions, and experiences (partly through their Race Literacy Quiz), and how they choose instructional strategies based on that inquiry (Chapter 7). Susan Hadley talks about how she switched her approach to teaching about the constru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• 1 The Dynamics of Teaching Race
• 2 Guidelines for Whites Teaching About Whiteness
• 3 Teaching Whiteness in Predominantly White Classrooms
• 4 Creating a Brave Space Classroom Through Writing
• 5 Teaching Intersectionality Through “I Am From…”
• 6 Building Trust and Negotiating Conflict When Teaching Race
• 7 Creating the Conditions for Racial Dialogues
• 8 Developing Working Alliances with Students
• 9 Forming Classroom Communities to Help Students Embrace Discomfort
• 10 Adapting Discussion Methods to Teach Race
• 11 Teaching Against Color Blindness
• 12 Helping Students Uncover Positionality
• 13 Using Digital Storytelling to Unearth Racism and Galvanize Action
• 14 Examining Mistakes to Advance Antiracist Teaching
• 15 Avoiding Traps and Misconceptions in Teaching Race
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement