Educating Kids About Race
Posted on Jul 2, 2011 02:12:00 AM
Educating kids about race in our culture can be a sensitive issue. Tackling it head on is scary for many parents, as well as educators. We may have our first African American president, but if anybody thinks we’re living in a post-racial society now they’re sadly mistaken.
Getting Over The Discomfort
How you go about educating kids about race, especially in the United States, depends heavily on your own race and gender. I’m a white female and coming from the most historically privileged part of society always made me feel a bit self-conscious talking about race in the classroom when I taught high school. But I pushed past my initial discomfort—which I would bet that many white folks share—and got over it.
Why’s it so Important Anyway?
Understanding the history of racism in the United States is incredibly important for kids to learn. Racism and ignorance about race are inherited; it passes from parent to child as surely as DNA does. My experience with teaching high school in a nearly all white Midwestern rural high school taught me a couple of things about kids and race. The ignorance of race, or even outright overt racism expressed by kids who don’t live in close proximity to minorities is nearly always a reflection of what they’ve picked up from parents or close family members.
Many of these kids don’t know the history of racism and structural racism and how minority rights to education, housing and access to the privileges of the majority have been systematically repressed. Without understanding this context it is completely logical for these kids to blame minority groups for their social and economic disadvantages. Though many of my students were economically disadvantaged, perhaps as much as any minority group, they instinctively tended to always identify with rich whites as opposed to poor blacks or Latinos. Maybe that’s another function of white privilege.
How To Do It
Although my teaching experience is limited to English, Spanish and Social Studies—all of which feature rich opportunities to educate kids about race—every academic discipline taught in school contains opportunities to educate about race. When I taught English to tenth graders, we always wrote persuasive papers. After they had finished the persuasive papers I had them craft them into speeches. They all had to tweak their papers into a four to six minute persuasive speech and deliver them to the class from my lectern. But in between the paper and the speech we watched “The Great Debaters” in class. This film, starring Denzel Washington, depicts the efforts of an all-black Texas college debate team to compete and win against white colleges during the Jim Crow days.
This film taught them a lot about how to persuade an audience. It fit perfectly into the context of them crafting a persuasive speech out of their persuasive paper. But it also gave me the opportunity to teach them about the history of ugly racism in the United States. There is a grim scene during the film that depicts a gruesome lynching of a young African American man. After this scene I showed them an image of a similar lynching and asked the class if they knew when and where it happened. Nobody did. They all guessed somewhere in the Deep South. They all guessed the 1890’s. This lynching of two young black men happened in 1930, less than twenty miles from their high school. This may seem overly dramatic but it made an impression. It was a teachable moment. And I guarantee they will never forget it.
Bio: Danielle is a former high school English teacher from Indiana in the United States. Though no longer teaching in the classroom, she continues to advocate for academic and physical rigor in education and online training. She also writes for www.professionalintern.com.