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.
How to Read the News – The Common Pitfalls
Posted on Jun 27, 2011 08:55:18 AM
Teaching your child about the world is undoubtedly going to involve teaching him or her about the news. We’re bombarded with news every time we watch television, walk past a newspaper seller or turn on our computer, and that’s only going to get more significant as our communications networks develop. Our children are growing up in an increasingly connected world, one where an event happening now will be on our computer screens within the hour.
Not all news sources are completely accurate though. In some countries, the news you receive is heavily moderated by governments. In other countries, news sources are allowed and indeed encouraged to be partisan. Everywhere you look, there’s a spin on the news which turns fact into subjectivity and conjecture. Not all of this is deliberate, of course – some newspapers are simply incompetent, and some international events are muddled by clever PR and governmental cover-ups. But a lot of news channels and media outlets make decisions to blur the truth in order to further their own agenda, gently besmirch their opponents or simply sell more newspapers.
Media plurality is one of the most important things the internet has given us. We are capable of finding a dozen different viewpoints on a subject within a few moments of it happening. We can get a diverse range of comment and input from the comfort of our reclining loveseat. And we can use the internet to get a truly international take on world affairs.
All of this is possible. However, far too many people are glued to one news outlet. Whether it’s The Week, Fox News or CNN, we need to explore as many news channels as possible – and encourage or children to do likewise.
To use a current example, tensions in the Asia-Pacific region are rising because China has specifically warned the USA to butt out of an argument it’s having regarding some islands. The USA is doing a joint military exercise with South Korea using live ammunition in the area, which North Korea aren’t impressed with at all. The Philippines have deployed their prize warship to the area, and other neighboring countries are bickering about who has the rights to the oil-rich but uninhabited Spratly islands.
Exclusive watchers of Fox News or CNN might not be familiar with this significant story. It hasn’t had much coverage in the USA. It’s had a bit of coverage from the BBC and a handful of European press agencies, but this pales in comparison to the enormous amount of attention the story has received from the Asian press, specifically newsrooms in the Asia-Pacific region.
It’d be easy to say that the American press is censoring the news, drip feeding the brainwashed public a sanitized version of events so as not to reveal that the American establishment is scared of China’s development. But it would be equally easy to argue that the Chinese press is bigging-up the threat from America in order to paint them as baddies. The answer? All news sources are a little bit biased, so the more you use the better an understanding you’ll get of the story.
You can do this quite easily now using news aggregators. Google has quite a handy one. If there’s a story you’re intrigued by, just type in the relevant search terms and hit ‘news’. Google will trawl a load of news sites to get the best from each. This is the first line of defense against ignorance – making sure you get both ends of the stick if at all possible.
This is what you want to teach your children. That way they’ll be able to grow up with a genuine understanding of not just the world, but how to learn more about it. The world’s becoming a much smaller place, so physically distant events are growing more significant. Your children need to know how to sift through different types of news, how to spot for bias and how to think critically when they encounter sensationalist stories. This is how you raise your kids as strong-minded, analytical individuals, rather than dim-witted, TV-worshipping sheeple.