In light of the recent events in Charlottesville, educators are approaching the new school year with a greater sense of urgency about needing to teach about race and the nation’s history of white supremacy. They’re also talking about the challenge this poses when 80 percent of teachers in K-12 public schools are white and the majority of students in those schools aren’t.
Are white teachers ready to have critical conversations about race with all students—conversations that are honest, transparent, and acknowledge the experiences of people of color while calling out white supremacy? Are the majority of white teachers ready, willing, and able to speak truth to power?
My experiences as a black man gave me the comfort level to integrate race into lessons in the classroom when I became a teacher. The lack of such conversations during my own K-12 education gave me an awareness that I was in the classroom to give students what I did not get as a student: an opportunity to receive clarity and empowerment on how racism works and how to exist in spite of it.
Last school year, I was having a teacher’s lounge discussion on sports with a white middle school history teacher when the topic of Colin Kaepernick came up. We discussed the potential of Kaepernick remaining unsigned, which is what has happened. Every Friday was current events day in his class and I asked him how he’d go about discussing Kaepernick with his students.
He said he hoped no one would bring it up because he wasn’t equipped to have such a conversation objectively. “I should be able to talk about this, I am a history teacher,” he told me. “But I just don’t know how to talk about race without getting defensive or sounding like a racist.”
“I should be able to talk about this, I am a history teacher. But I just don’t know how to talk about race without getting defensive or sounding like a racist.”
My response was to urge that he initiate race conversations with a question and listen to what his students had to say. A few weeks later, my colleague came to me and said that since our talk, he turned his current event Fridays into forum Fridays, where students led the discussion on various topics including race.
He told me that while he disagreed with some things said, he worked on being less defensive. I don’t know if he’ll continue this approach in the new school year. However, that experience leads me to believe that if priority is placed on preparing white teachers to lead these conversations, productive results will occur.
As a former teacher and parent of a black school-aged child, I hope school districts will prepare white teachers to have conversations about race.
While I do not believe America’s white teachers are racist, some at the very least have implicit biases and prejudices against students of color they may not have even realized. And many white teachers are unaware of their own privilege. They don’t realize how the confluence of race, class, and gender issues has created an informal caste system for people of color that our laws cannot wholly eliminate. Teachers ignorant of white supremacy and its impact on the black people in America are not ready to teach students on race in America.
But white teachers must not shy away from having these conversations and place the burden on black teachers.
White teachers must not shy away from having these conversations and place the burden on black teachers.
What is encouraging is when white teachers realize their own biases and the need to be trained to have these serious and sensitive discussions with their students. School districts must be honest about their capacity to effectively teach and discuss race. Some teachers will approach this endeavor with the care it requires. Others will overestimate their ability to carry out the task, or perhaps abandon it altogether.
Our public schools need to hire more teachers of color to have these conversations. But given the current teacher demographics, white teachers must be given the tools to discuss Ferguson, Charlottesville, and the next city to be in the news. Racism isn’t going away—unless we empower all students to dismantle the unjust systems that prevent America from living out the true meaning of its creed.
Rann Miller directs the 21st Century Community Learning Center, a federally-funded after-school program located in southern New Jersey. He spent 6 years teaching in charter schools in Camden, New Jersey. He is the creator, writer and editor of the Official Urban Education Mixtape Blog. Follow him on Twitter: @UrbanEdDJ.