Learning to See Clearly

When I first sat down to write this, I stared at a blank page for a long time. I had a few starts, but all of them felt convoluted and preachy, like I was explaining myself into a place where I could avoid taking responsibility for ever having gotten a moment wrong around issues of social justice, equity, or identity. Looking back on that first effort, though, the picture is more mundane than I had initially imagined: I simply couldn’t see clearly. It’s important to acknowledge that this not seeing is still a kind of avoidance of the truth, and although the lack of intention might make me less sinister, it does not make me any less responsible.

But responsible for what, exactly? 

I am white.  I was raised with the dangerously incomplete advice to be a good person, which I took as an injunction to do no harm, and to be kind to everyone. In the 1970s and ’80s, no white people I knew were talking about systemic racism, and so I thought I was doing my part to make the world a better place simply by doing no harm and being kind to everyone.  I’ll pause here to note two things in hindsight: first, that almost all the people I knew in the 1970s and ’80s were white; second, that even when I did make friends with folks who weren’t white, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to note the difference in our racialized identity. I’ll add to the list of things I didn’t (couldn’t) see: all that lack of perception was planned. Society is set up so that people with privilege can’t see it, and so I didn’t recognize the way things were set up in my favor. In fact, I’ll go one better: beyond not seeing, I was trained not to look, and so, like anything I don’t practice (such as ice skating, or balancing my checkbook), I didn’t develop the skill. Although I may not have been actively harming anyone, I was still failing to live up to Toni Morrison’s sage directive: “The function of freedom is to free someone else. 

I’m honestly scared to think how long my passive approach would have continued without an intervention. Thankfully, I played a game at the opening faculty meetings of a former school that helped open my eyes. It was a simple premise: the game imagined a society with three categories of people — I think it was circles, squares, and triangles — and each group was meant to trade with others to improve their position. Easy, right? Earnestly and (dare I say) innocently, I dove in. Games are disarming, because they’re structured and therefore relatively safe, and so it never occurred to me that the set-up might be rigged. It turned out that whichever group I was in — let’s say the triangles — had nothing that the squares or circles wanted, and so I couldn’t trade. The circles and the squares were following the rules, playing to win, and doing quite well. And the kicker was that they weren’t trying to do me harm, and so they could play the game and think of themselves as fair. It wasn’t their fault if I didn’t have the resources I needed to compete.

Even now I can remember how quickly I grew frustrated, and then infuriated, with the injustice of a game. Afterward, during the debriefing and processing discussion, I was horrified at the actual lesson. The game helped me — forced me — to see the world more clearly. And with that new vision, I saw myself, with all my good intentions and ignorance, in the complacent efforts of the squares and circles.  

That was almost 25 years ago, and I’ve been working ever since on improving my vision. So why did I struggle with writing this piece? At this point I need to acknowledge that I asked a friend for help: I wanted to “get it right,” after all. There are so many assumptions lumped into that request, not least that it’s OK for someone with privilege to solicit the help of someone with less privilege in order to succeed, particularly in a system that’s already more challenging for those with less privilege. I want to acknowledge here how kindly and humbly my friend Jenna delivered this feedback; I also want to recognize the impact of something Jenna wrote with Elizabeth Denevi that helped me find a way into this piece. In “‘Calling In’ Our White Male Colleagues,” they write, 

So much of what we experience [at our workshops] from white men doesn’t feel like it’s intended to improve our work; it feels like a challenge… or simply a reminder to stay in our place.

I had been raised to be a “good person,” and I’ve never wanted to impose limits, or to keep anyone “in their place.” However, what I’m learning — what I seem to keep needing to learn — is the danger of not examining my own place. What is my place? And the next logical question: Who established that place for me? And then, perhaps most importantly: What’s the cost of staying passively in that place, especially without examining it? Too often, when I hear some troubling news or read an article about an issue or event, I respond intellectually, and though in hindsight I can stand by the values I hold in such moments, I can’t accept not recognizing that for others, the situation is not an intellectual exercise — the danger is real and visceral. I need to see better, and in order to do that, I need to remember to look, and to look intentionally. 

But there’s a twist. Even in writing this, I forgot to ask an essential question in my first draft. I focused on white privilege and complaisance, but didn’t focus on gender. How could I possibly miss the impact of gender on my privilege? I certainly know about male privilege and gender inequities, but it somehow slipped my mind in the early writing. But since considering gender was literally in the question that prompted this essay, I have to think there’s something else going on, something (else) I’ve been trained not to see. 

This year, as school started, and I was working with classes on building community, I asked students to share a great moment in their education, so that we could name what we’re all after, and so work intentionally to bring it about in our own learning community. Next, we talked about bad moments, things we wanted to avoid, and someone mentioned that we never wanted to ask someone to speak for everyone who shares one component of their identity. It’s an important component of making the classroom space safe for everyone, of course. But in that moment, it floored me to realize that that has never happened to me, not even in a women’s literature course in college when I was one of three male-identified folks in a class of 30.

I’ve always been allowed to be myself, and to stand only for myself, and that’s 100% about privilege. It has enabled me far too often to forget that many people — especially women and people of color — have a very different experience. In this instance, it was upsetting to know that I could play attention to the question of race and privilege, but not see the intersectionality with gender — even when that was the point of the exercise. Of course, now it has come back into sharp focus.

Another example from the start of this school year: In my duties as part of my school’s residential faculty, I was called to talk to the local fire department. It was time for fire drills, and I had to show up and admit that the school wasn’t ready. Our security guy was out for the night, and I didn’t know the process, and so I had to let them know that we had wasted their time. They were incredibly gracious, even as I was admitting I was unprepared, my worth was never questioned, and I’ll never know whether that’s because I’m a middle-aged white guy, carrying around the privilege that goes with that identity. In the moment, though, I didn’t see it: I just showed up, feeling bad while at the same time confident that I was not going to be judged for it. From what I’ve heard (from my wife, and friends, and colleagues, and even students), many women know exactly when they’re being judged, or measured, in terms of the competence and even their physical worth (remember the discussions about Hillary’s outfits, and the lack of discussion about Bernie’s hair?).

So why don’t I see it? Maybe it’s because I’m not doubted: even when I’m showing up with nothing, I’m allowed and assumed to be a legitimate ambassador of the school.

Part of me feels like I’m reading too much into this episode, but when another part of me zooms out to see it in perspective, it helps me see how much I miss; and that part of me is looking for an explanation — and a solution. I suspect that solution will have something to do with doubt — or if not doubt, then at least skepticism: I need to make a habit of being skeptical of my own first impressions. Perhaps that can be a starting point.

 What is clear is that, being white and male, it’s easy to see neither element on any given day. And while it's a gift to be able to be only one's self, in my experience that can lead to the kind of blurry vision which results in forgetting that others don’t have that same luxury. Perhaps this is why so many white men resist engagement in workshops on race. As for me, I want to learn to see my own identity clearly, and I want to remember to ask the questions that help me see other experiences and perspectives. I want to remember to lean into the confusion and anger of the world — not to live in that anger, but to experience every situation so I can feel engaged and motivated. My privilege is clearly unearned and beyond my control, but what I do with it is not. Instead of merely having values, I need to learn to live them. I’m calling on myself to learn to look more actively at the way others live in the world, and so to see the world more fully, so that I can serve all my students well and know more clearly what I can do to work for real change.

Ayres Stiles-Hall teaches in Concord, Massachusetts.

White Men Respond — Additional Reading

·       White Men Respond, by TWW Staff

·       Understanding the Atmospheric Nature of White Supremacy and Patriarchy, by Nick Hiebert

·       Manning Up? An Open Letter, by Ryan Virden

·       Listening to Lucy: Why I’m Involved in Diversity Work, by Michael Brosnan

·       Planting the Seeds of Self-Reflection, by Maurice Werner

Manning Up? An Open Letter

Jenna and Elizabeth,

I wanted to start at the beginning.

But I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “man up.” I don’t remember the first time a man in my life taught me never to show weakness. Maybe it was my pops, who never took a sick day, who never acknowledged the way his mind, body, and spirit were pushed to the limits. Maybe it was one of my uncle’s stories about how tough my dad is. Maybe it was the way they, too, took pride in how they were calloused by life. Or was it numbed? Or maybe it was Reed, the teenage boy next door who chased me around my house with knives and told me stories about Freddy Krueger just to prove he could inflict fear at will. I don’t know where I first learned the lesson, but I’m sure I did.

I’m sure they aren’t the beginning. I’m sure they didn’t know they were teaching at all. I’m sure they had learned the same lessons from the men in their lives and were working to make sense of the empty space that should be occupied by what patriarchy and American masculinity erodes away.

More raw, more real, and more ugly is that I don’t remember the first time I taught those lessons to the younger men in my life. Maybe I taught them to my brothers, maybe my cousins, and most terrifyingly, maybe the students in my classroom. I’m complicit in the expansion of that emptiness. I know that.

That’s hard to say. It’s even harder to accept. It’s terrifying to stare at a gaping wound, but it’s paralyzing when you realize you have no clue how to begin closing the gash.

Patriarchy and American masculinity have wounded so many of us. Rather than understanding the entire spectrum of human emotions and being able to make sense of how they impact our lived reality, we are left ill-equipped. Ironically, we are exposed, vulnerable, and powerless, the very things we are being molded never to be.

This is the beginning. The pattern you describe in your blog post begins here, in this emptiness. In the terror of disconnection and the desperation of denial.

                                                                        * * *

It was fall of my freshman year in high school. I rode my bike to a local park to meet the girl I had a crush on and her friend. For some reason, they began talking about how ridiculous the whole “real men don’t cry” mantra was. I remember thinking I could win points by agreeing, so I did. Well, they weren’t going for me just telling them; they wanted to see it. I can still feel the tightness in my chest. They wanted tears. I remember being terrified. Not that I was going to cry, but rather that I wasn’t. I’ll never forget how real it felt when I told them: I can’t.

                                                                        * * *

My grandmother transitioned on the winter solstice of my sophomore year. I got in a fight at the Christmas concert. When I got home, I buried my head in my pillow and cried until I fell asleep. At her funeral, I remember feeling shame that the people around me could hear me crying. I remember someone behind me putting their hand on my back saying, “Shhhhhhh now.” I lowered my head into my hands and swallowed as many sobs as I possibly could.

                                                                        * * *

I sat on my girlfriend’s steps unsure what was about to happen. I just found out that a high school classmate and friend had transitioned. I could feel the lump in my throat. The familiar pressure on my chest, the pain mixed with determination to let nobody see. I was aware my girlfriend had not seen me cry before. I knew she wouldn’t judge, but I still didn’t want her to see it. I remember the sun lowering behind the trees on her boulevard. I remember wanting to be human. When she came out the door, I turned to look at her with tears swelling. She quietly sat next to me as I shared memories about my friend through tears.

  * * * 

I’m sharing these memories here because, hell yes, the resistance you described is familiar to me. In many ways it is me. Resistance is fundamental to American masculinity. We resist emotions. We resist the reality that we can’t resist. Resist, resist, resist, deny, deny, deny. Same song, different DJ. It’s one that resonates with us white men on at least two levels: race and gender. They feed each other. Give each other life. Dual parasites stealing our humanity. The disconnection threaded into patriarchy makes it easier for the violence of whiteness, and the disconnection of whiteness facilitates the violence of American masculinity.

You all also asked, what’s changed? If I’m honest, not enough. Just last week I was frustrated and leaned into the more toxic manifestations of my masculinity. But if anything has shifted it’s realizing my self-interest. I talk about this a lot in regard to race and racism, but it applies to American masculinity as well. It is in my best interest to unlearn patriarchy and the lessons on masculinity America wants me to internalize. Put as concretely as I possibly can, I enjoy the person I am when I can be soft. I like the father I can be to my daughter when I can be vulnerable. I like the partner I can be when I can communicate my feelings to my girlfriend. I like the communities envisioned by women leaders. I feel more whole, more human, more connected when I can acknowledge the more feminine aspects of my being. None of this is possible with patriarchy and American masculinity. None of this is possible with whiteness.

I wish I could offer a clean story of how I came to these realizations. I can’t. I think it’s different for each of us. Each one of us — and here I mean men — has our own intertwined, complicated mess we need to wrestle with. I wish there were one particular thing, one particular action, workshop, book, article, or question I could point to that shifted the focus for me, but there isn’t. It’s the everyday mess of being in community. It’s the accountability that comes from meaningful relationships. It’s being attentive to those times when the messiness that leaves no room for performance. And maybe that’s a good thing.

And now we are arriving at the beginning: connection and relationships. Vulnerability and accountability. When we resist these essential community elements we are searching for ourselves, or maybe some version of ourselves we sutured together in our imaginations. These distortions of ourselves are not capable of showing up the way we need to, not only for you but also for ourselves. Too many of us white me are terrified of our own incompleteness. However, those sutures can and do come undone. Ask the questions that facilitate the undoing and we will find our way back to ourselves.

Lord willing.

Ryan Virden is a cultural worker, educator, and writer from Northeast Minneapolis. He is dedicated to creating a healthier world through popular education and cultural practice. He is the founder and executive director of Lir Cultural Coaching and teaches at St. Thomas College in the peace and justice department. He lives in Minneapolis with his daughter and dogs. 

White Men Respond — Additional Reading

·       White Men Respond, by TWW Staff

·       Understanding the Atmospheric Nature of White Supremacy and Patriarchy, by Nick Hiebert

·       Learning to See Clearly, by Ayres Stiles-Hall

·       Listening to Lucy: Why I’m Involved in Diversity Work, by Michael Brosnan

·       Planting the Seeds of Self-Reflection, by Maurice Werner

Understanding the Atmospheric Nature of White Supremacy and Patriarchy

In an effort to engage more white men, the Teaching While White blog, “‘Calling In‘ Our White Male Colleagues,” asks white male teachers involved in antiracist work this key question: What keeps you engaged in the work?

I think what keeps me engaged in the work of antiracism is the constant reminder to keep three things up front:  

1. that, as Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, and others have helped me to see, white supremacy in the United States is atmospheric — something I am breathing in all the time whether or not I choose to; (in my experience, patriarchy works this way, too);

2. that, since I am a white man, I have benefitted — and continue to benefit — from both white supremacy and patriarchy, whether or not I choose to; 

3. and that any belief that I am separate from my whiteness or my maleness, that I am an individual separate from (and, thus, different from) any of this — this atmosphere, these systems, and other white men — is a lie. 

As difficult, daunting, and sometimes-shame-inducing as the work of keeping these reminders present is, as challenging as the practice of persistent self-reflection can be, these reminders have felt profoundly freeing to me. 

They have been revelations for the kind of connection, community, and care they make possible in my life. And they have helped me to see the many ways in which white supremacy and patriarchy keep me from others, keep me from myself, and keep me from working for a more liberated world.

When I have been in antiracism trainings and felt the pull to separate from the group’s work (maybe it’s something as innocuous as thinking “I already know this” or something as subtly dismissive as saying “this has not been my experience”) what I really think I’m feeling is a discomfort with myself.  Or maybe even more simply: a discomfort with feeling.

The atmospheric nature of white supremacy and patriarchy in my life have encouraged me to be unpracticed at sitting with and being curious about that discomfort — or with feelings at all.

In my experience, both white supremacy and patriarchy depend heavily on the suppression of feeling — on the separation of feeling from action. And their persistence in my life — as well as my complicity in them — has also depended heavily on the ways in which I suppress feeling in myself and am unwilling to imagine it in others.

What I’ve come to understand is how much this suppression of feelings robs us of ourselves, of our capacity to see others more vividly, of the possibility to build deep multiracial coalitions!

The narrative of myself as a separate individual can feel so impossible and painful and costly to resist.

But really, I think: seeing the atmosphere is a liberating practice.

What the practice of antiracism work continues to give me — in addition to the possibility of more liberating and genuine community — is a more honest relationship to vulnerability, to sorrow, to guilt, to gentleness, to joy.

In my experience, these feelings are not the costs of a committed antiracist practice. They are its great substance and strength. 

And what they make possible in my life — over and over again — keeps me engaged in the work.

Nick Hiebert teaches in Concord, Massachusetts.

White Men Respond — Additional Reading

·       White Men Respond, by TWW Staff

·       Manning Up? An Open Letter, by Ryan Virden

·       Learning to See Clearly, by Ayres Stiles-Hall

·       Listening to Lucy: Why I’m Involved in Diversity Work, by Michael Brosnan

·       Planting the Seeds of Self-Reflection, by Maurice Werner

White Men Respond

In response to our August blog post by Elizabeth Denevi and Jenna Chandler-Ward, “‘Calling In’ Our White Male Colleagues,” we received a number of letters and essay responses. In the spirit of keeping the dialogue going on the role or white male educators in antibias education, we’re running a series of these responses this week — one each day. Others may follow in time.

We’ll start with a letter from Garrett Bucks, the founder of The Barnraisers Project, an organization that helps white people establish grassroots efforts to address racism and white supremacy in their communities. Bucks has also created an online newsletter, The White Pages, where he writes on matters of whiteness and antiracism — or as he puts it, “about white people and what it might actually take for us to become true partners in building a better world.” Before he established The Barnraisers Project, Bucks held both local and national leadership positions at Teach For America.

In response to Elizabeth and Jenna’s call for more engagement from white male colleagues, Bucks writes:

I just wanted to write to say how appreciative I am for this post (and to my friend Lori Cohen for sending it to me). Every aspect that you all explored is, unfortunately, really resonant to me. You all pulled out so many patterns that I’ve seen both in myself and other white cis guys.

One thing I’ve been trying to reflect on is the sheer volume of spaces throughout my adult life where I’ve entered with the implicit assumption that I had more to offer/teach than I had to learn. Now, typing that out feels really embarrassing and, for sure, had somebody else pointed it out to me even just a couple years ago I would have denied it, but that doesn’t make it less true. That single implicit belief (which I do think is really typical for cis white guys) informed everything from my assumption that I had a right to leadership roles in a women-majority profession (a pattern that you two point out in your piece) to all sorts of boorish interpersonal behavior (talking over, not listening, assuming expertise, etc.). 

Like all patterns of dominance, my path to developing different sustainable patterns isn’t perfect, nor is it linear, but, goodness, I’m grateful for all the folks in my life — including you two with your piece — who helped me first notice this and, importantly, start to imagine what needs to change if I actually want to be in truer learning community with folks across lines of race/gender.

Garrett Bucks’ letter struck us as a good introduction to this week’s readings. We hope the upcoming responses from white men help spark deeper conversations in your community about gender and whiteness in our collective efforts to create inclusive, equitable, and just schools and communities.

White Men Respond — Additional Reading

• Understanding the Atmospheric Nature of White Supremacy and Patriarchy, by Nick Hiebert

• Manning Up? An Open Letter, by Ryan Virden

• Learning to See Clearly, by Ayres Stiles-Hall

• Listening to Lucy: Why I’m Involved in Diversity Work, by Michael Brosnan

• Planting the Seeds of Self-Reflection, by Maurice Werner

Why Representation (and Talking About Race) Is Good for White Kids, Too

This back-to-school season, amid book bannings and legislation silencing conversations about race, it feels particularly important to revisit the question of why representation (and talking about race) is good for all children — including white kids.

Representation — demonstrating the broad and varied existence of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color — matters for a whole host of reasons that I will explore here. Having the capacity to talk about race matters, too.   

Those who say they are against representation and conversations about race often ground their reasoning in the false perception that such action will make white kids feel bad. My experience says otherwise. I’m a white mom raising white kids and we talk about race all the time. Here’s how my children feel about it:

• They tell me that these conversations make them feel good because the conversations help them be part of the solution to the horrible problem of racism.

• They are glad to have grown-ups in their lives who are willing to share the true and honest history and present-day circumstances of our nation, and who come up with ways that we can do better.

• They notice race everywhere, have questions, and are glad to have grown-ups in their lives who are comfortable talking about it.

• They know that no problem has ever been solved without discussion, and that if we never talk about race, we will never end racism.

Earlier this year, I was invited to participate in a Teaching While White podcast with Debby Irving, author of Waking Up White, and hosted by Teaching While White cofounder Jenna Chandler-Ward. The topic was “Parenting While White.” It’s a topic I’ve been long engaged with in my work at Social Justice Kids, an organization I founded in 2018, and the work I’ve been doing for 14-plus years to help parents and educators partner with the kids they love for a more just and equitable world. Debby Irving’s work has long influenced how I engage in my own practice of racial justice, and I’ve been a fan of Teaching While White ever since I heard the inaugural podcast episode in 2017.

Our “Parenting While White” podcast episode is one that I wish had been in existence before college, career, and kids of my own. I hope you’ll take a listen. If you’re a white parent who cares about raising antiracist kids, you won’t want to miss it as part of your back-to-school parenting prep. And while I think that most of us can agree that banning books and silencing conversations around race is a bad idea, I’m not sure that we well-meaning white parents realize how much we still need to learn and grow… and do.

During our “Parenting While White” episode, I shared a story that carries a lot of shame for me. It was a story about racist beliefs I held as a white child, the impact I had, and how the grown-ups in my life at the time did and did not respond.

I was a “good” kid. My parents always taught me to love and include everyone. So how was it that, when the one Black girl in my elementary school class told me that she was going out for the lead in the musical “Annie” that I could have thought, and voiced, “You can’t be Annie, because you’re Black”?

I wish I could go back in time and retract the words and the harm they caused. I wish that all of us, my grown-ups included, could go back and do better for her and for me. Clearly, there was so much learning that someone could have helped me with. I also imagine that there was healing that could have been facilitated for both of us. I don’t know what happened with and for my classmate; all I know is that no one helped me properly apologize, process, learn and do better.

While my parents told me that we should love and include everyone, we did not lead racially inclusive lives. My life, home, books, media, curriculum, neighborhood, teachers, church, and my parents’ friend groups were predominantly or entirely white. The lack of representation of people of color in my life, coupled with the fact that none of my grown-ups were equipped to talk with me about it, left me with my own inadequate interpretation, which led to my harmful words.

I had never seen the character of Annie played by anyone other than a white girl with red curly hair. The first time I saw a Black actor play Annie was in 2014. I was an adult with my first child by then. So… how could any of us shocked by my story?

As my dear friend Fernell Miller (founder of The Root of Us) said to me, “There is nothing revolutionary or shocking about your story. What’s shocking is that white people are shocked by it. That story happens every damn day. What’s revolutionary is that you’re talking about it, openly, with other white parents and educators. And you’re doing things differently with your kids. Keep doing all of that.”

As white parents  — and educators — what can we do to make sure that we are safeguarding our kids against absorbing and internalizing racist beliefs?

Representation matters for kids of color so that they can see the possibilities for themselves in the world. But representation matters for white kids, too, so they can see the possibilities for everyone, not just themselves. It starts with making sure that a diversity of social identities, including racial identities, is present everywhere kids are present — in schools and school curricula, in libraries, in media, in toys, in our communities, and in our friendship circles as the adults who love these kids.

Most kids in the United States today are growing up in de facto segregation. Schools and neighborhoods that are truly racially diverse are few and far between. When kids do not see a diversity of racial and social identities represented in their world on a daily basis, they will make sense of it for themselves, often in faulty and harmful ways — like I did.

A lack of representation leads all kids, white kids and kids of color, to hold limiting beliefs about the possibilities for Black and Brown children and adults. If we want our children to be better, they need to be exposed to better representation, and we grown-ups need to be able to talk to them about everything they are noticing, and missing, about race.

In my case, my teachers might have blamed my parents and my parents might have blamed my teachers, and both would be a little wrong and a little right. I was learning about race everywhere I went through representation, or the lack thereof, and the meaning I was making of what I saw or didn’t see. 

Are you a white parent or educator who wants to do better? Here are some recommendations:

1. Explore, with the kids you love, who is present and who is missing in the books and media that you and your kids consume. Prepare for this conversation by practicing the words for racial and other social identities, like Black, Brown, African American, white, indigenous, native, Asian, gay, bi, lesbian, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender fluid and skin tones including: peachy, olive, brown, black, sienna, and rosy. It might sound silly to practice these words, but our discomfort with these words can stop us from having these conversations. How many of our books and media have a predominantly white cast of characters? Brainstorm ways to do better (hint: talk less and listen more — kids have the best solutions!).

2. Explore, with the kids you love, who is present and who is missing in the toys at home and at school/daycare. What are the racial and social identities represented in the toys in your lives? How can you do better?

3. Reflect on how and how often you talk about race and social identities with your kids. Have you ever shushed your child when they asked about race (this is so common for us white grown-ups)? How can you do better? How can you help children know there is no shame, just curiosity, in asking?

4. Beyond the presence of books, toys, and conversations, how are you demonstrating being in alignment with what you say and do? How diverse is your adult friend group? Who you hang out with tells your kids a lot about who you value and who you believe belongs in your lives. Who are the people you spend time with? Who is invited to your home and whose homes are you invited into? When you have outings, who are you with? Is there a gap between who you say you care about and who you actually spend time with?

Ultimately, just saying and “believing” that “everyone belongs” is not enough when our lives, neighborhoods, books, toys, media, and friendship circles are conveying a very different message. Kids believe what they see over what we say. If we are honest about the racial representation we are modeling for our kids, we well-meaning white grown-ups will likely find that we have a lot of work to do.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” still resonate today:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

 As we head into fall, let’s consider our role in creating positive peace and presence of justice in schools and at home. Let’s plan and prepare, particularly those of us who are white, for a year of inclusion and healthy conversations about race. Let’s work on being humble, and receiving new-to-us information about race and racism, particularly when it allows us to see ourselves more clearly and fully, and make a change with and for the kids we love.

Thank you Jenna Chandler-Ward for having Debby Irving and me on your podcast, which prompted so many of these reflections! To readers who haven’t had a chance to hear our episode about “Parenting While White,” we invite you to listen HERE. 

Mollie M. Monahan, Ph.D., is the founder of Social Justice Kids. Her signature course, LOVE KIDS, is attracting more and more white parents and educators who want to co-create a more just and equitable world, with and for the KIDS they LOVE, but find themselves saying things like, “I don’t know where to start,” or “I know I have room to grow.” LOVE KIDS helps parents raise children who can recognize and name unfair racialized patterns in the world, and who are empowered by voice and action to do something about it. They are kids who see each other and stick up for each other, particularly in the context of intersecting social identities (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, gender identities and so much more). They give us hope for a more just and equitable world. More at https://socialjusticekids.com.

“Calling In” Our White Male Colleagues

A few years ago we, two white women, were leading an hour-long workshop at a conference. About 20 minutes in, we asked participants to turn and talk to a person sitting next to them. Instead of turning to his partner, a white man sitting in the front row walked over to us and said, “Folks are getting pretty restless. You may want to have us take a break.” We just nodded and went back to our planned agenda. But we were frustrated. Not only was this “let me help you understand how to run your workshop” comment annoying and unhelpful, it was also not the first time something like this had happened. We have been facilitating these kinds of groups for over two decades. Participant responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Yet at almost every presentation or workshop we do there is a white man who feels the need within the first 15-20 minutes to make a comment about our skills, style, or curriculum.

So now we find ourselves wondering what could we have said to help this man (1) understand the impact of his unsolicited commentary and (2) keep him engaged in the antiracist work at hand?

These questions have been nagging us for a while, but seem increasingly important today — as matters of race and racism intensify in schools and society. In particular, we want to find ways to effectively engage more white male educators in the work. According to USA Today, men make up 25% of K-12 teachers and 54% of superintendents and principals (if you look at just grades 6-12, that number goes up to 67%). In our workshops, however, men make up about 10% of the participants.

While their low numbers are challenging enough, the white men who do show up tend to be disruptive or disengaged. They often respond to our questions defensively or ask questions that challenge our leadership. They are also more likely to give us unsolicited and unhelpful feedback similar to the situation above.

Their behavior follows a familiar pattern. When white folks — but especially white men — get uncomfortable with our content, whether consciously or unconsciously, they often start to focus on our process as opposed to thinking about their own behavior and practices. When we ask them to talk with the person sitting next to them about issues of whiteness, many white men suddenly need to go to the bathroom or they step aside to check their phones. In short, when we are asking for engagement with matters of race and racism, their discomfort often leads them to find ways to disengage, to avoid deep conversation.  

Sometimes this resistance shows up as non-verbal behavior. On Zoom, for instance, we had a white administrator who sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk with his hands behind his head as we asked participants to engage in a writing reflection. In an in-person event, we had a participant who kept leaving the room and then coming back 5-10 minutes later. At the end of the session, he explained that he had some “very important work” he had to attend to. Some white men will sit in the back of the room with arms crossed staring out the window. Other times, men will talk over us when we ask them to move on to another exercise or come back to the group. Or they will try to shift the dialogue: “I just wanna play devil’s advocate for a minute….” Some are just  flat-out unwilling to participate, saying, “I don’t recognize any of the behaviors you are describing.” Or they will say that antiracist work has no relevance to their job, or claim that it is exclusive of them as white men. As one white man put it,

A lot of how you present assumes a particular flavor of racism. I grew up in the UK, and we certainly have significant problems of racism there but the onus and the background have profoundly different roots — Indian, Pakistani, Caribbean but without the slavery background which hovers over all the black racism in the US. A lot of what you present doesn’t resonate, or at least doesn't pick up on my roots of awareness of racism... it feels slightly excluding, and I know that is not your intent, but that is nonetheless the feeling.

The consistency and familiarity of these responses lets us know that there is a pattern of resistance at work here. While white women certainly exhibit some of these same behaviors, it’s usually far less obvious and confrontational. They may hesitate to participate, but they don’t usually tell us they’re not going to participate. There seems to be something else happening for our white male participants. And while we are certainly open to feedback, and solicit it frequently, so much of what we experience with white men doesn't feel like it’s intended to improve our work; it feels like a challenge, a distraction, or simply a way to remind us to stay in our place.

Because we believe that the engagement of all white educators in antiracist work matters — and because we know many white men who are engaged with the work and are making an impact — we find ourselves wondering what we can do to encourage more white men to participate in antiracist workshops, and to do so with open hearts and minds. To that end, we are seeking input from our white male colleagues: Is anything we’ve described here familiar to you? Do you have your own examples of white men — yourself or others — resisting or interrupting antiracist workshops? And if you have demonstrated any of these behaviors, how did you shift from resistance to engagement? What changed for you?

Our goal is to bring more white men into practicing antiracism. We hope that by exploring these patterns via the lens of both race and gender, we can increase our effectiveness and challenge the resistance as it emerges. But we need your help. In the coming months, we will be sharing the responses from a number of our white male colleagues. We are excited to engage in this cross-gender dialogue — and encourage others to contribute. 

Returning to the first example we shared about the white man who gave us feedback on our facilitation skills, we want to let you know what happened after our session. We thought about what we could have said and realized how frustrated we were in the moment that we didn’t respond. As luck would have it, we saw our participant out in the lobby a couple of hours later. We decided to continue the conversation with him. We approached and asked, “Could we give you some feedback on the interaction we had?” He said sure, adding how much he had enjoyed the workshop. We offered, “So, what made you believe you needed to tell us about our facilitation skills at that moment?” He immediately knew what we were referring to and apologized, “Oh, wow, yeah, that was pretty arrogant of me.” We told him how other white men often do the same thing and what the impact is for us. He listened carefully and took full responsibility for his behavior. It actually seemed kind of familiar to him as well. He thanked us and we moved on.

Looking back, we see now that this conversation was a great example of how we can address these issues together when we take the opportunity to engage in difficult conversations.

So, to our white male colleagues, we look forward to hearing from you. What keeps you engaged in the work? Submissions can be sent to us here.

Essential Reading for Inclusive Schools: A Round Up of New Antiracist Books for Educators

Over the past few years, there has been a steady publication of impressive books on antiracism — both for educators and the general public. This year is no different. At the top of our list, of course, is Learning and Teaching While White, by Teaching While White founders Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi (available for preorder now and for purchase on July 26, 2022). Here’s a short list of other books that stand out for their connection to the work white educators are doing to build antiracist schools and classrooms — as part of the larger push to build a truly just and equitable society.

The intense backlash against efforts to build antiracist schools often tries to describe the work as “indoctrination” into the political left’s way of seeing things. But these books all make it clear that it’s not about indoctrination — and never has been. It’s about seeing the nation and its institutions clearly and honestly and engaging in conversations that will help us collectively create the kind of change we want — indeed, need — to see in the world.

The 1619 Project

Edited by Nicole Hannah Jones

The 1619 Project started in the pages of the New York Times Magazine in 2019 as a way to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first shipped loaded with enslaved Africans at the Jamestown colony and to correct the historical narrative on the founding and development of the United States. In late 2021, One World Press released a book version of The 1619 Project, with updated articles, new material, and a new introduction by the Project’s creator, Nicole Hannah-Jones.

For educators, the book is a vital resource as well as an encouragement to rethink how we tell the story of America, past and present, in schools. In her Preface, Hannah-Jones lays out the core argument of The 1619 Project, quoting, among others, Hassan Kwame Jeffries, a historian at Ohio State University and a member of the advisory board that produced the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Hard History” report. “Although we teach [students] that slavery happened…” Jeffries says, “in some cases we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact — on people and on the nation — inconsequential.” This is troubling, Jeffries continues, because it leaves America ill-equipped to understand racial inequality today, and that leads to intolerance, opposition to efforts to address racial injustice, and the enacting of laws and polices detrimental to Black communities and America writ large.

“In other words,” Hannah-Jones writes, “we all suffer from the poor history we’ve been taught.”

The 1619 Project aims to change how each generation sees the past. In this way we can improve how we live in the present and plan for the future — with the goal of equity and justice for all.

Contributors to the book include Ibram X. Kendi, Bryan Stevenson, Elizabeth Alexander, and other remarkable scholars and writers. Folded into the chapters are related poetry — starting with Claudia Rankine’s poem on the arrival of the White Lion in Jamestown in 1619 and ending with Sonia Sanchez on the murder of George Floyd. Also included are short stories and both historical and contemporary photography by and of Black Americans.

A companion children’s book, The 1619 Project on the Water, by Nicole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson (with illustrations by Nikkolas Smith) tells the story of a young student who receives a family tree assignment in school and, with the help of her grandmother, traces her ancestry to 1619 and earlier.

Nicole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for the New York Times Magazine.

Literacy Is Liberation: Working Toward Justice Through Culturally Relevant Teaching

By Kimberly N. Parker 

As we know, literacy is the foundation for all learning and must be accessible to all students. This fundamental truth is where Kimberly Parker begins to explore how culturally relevant teaching can help students work toward justice. Her goal is to make the classroom a place where students can safely talk about key issues, move to dismantle inequities, and collaborate with one another.

In Literacy Is Liberation (ASCD, 2022), Parker gives teachers the tools to build culturally relevant intentional literacy communities (CRILCs). Through CRILCs, teachers can better shape their literacy instruction by:

• reflecting on the connections between behaviors, beliefs, and racial identity;

• identifying the characteristics of culturally relevant literacy instruction and grounding their practice within a strengths-based framework;

• curating a culturally inclusive library of core texts, choice reading, and personal reading, and teaching inclusive texts with confidence;

• developing strategies to respond to roadblocks for students, administrators, and teachers; and

• building curricula that can foster critical conversations between students about difficult subjects — including race.

Through the practices in this book, teachers can create the more inclusive, representative, and equitable classroom environment that all students deserve.

Kimberly N. Parker, Ph.D., is currently the director of the Crimson Summer Academy at Harvard University and the 2020 recipient of the NCTE Outstanding Elementary Educator Award. She is also the current president of the Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts (BEAM).

The Identity-Conscious Educator: Building Habits and Skills for a More Inclusive School

By Liza A. Talusan

Liza A. Talusan, who wrote an essay for Teaching While White on the Model Minority Myth, recently published The Identity-Conscious Educator (Solution Tree, 2022). This book provides an excellent framework for building awareness and understanding of five identity categories — race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Teachers can use this framework to address identity topics in their personal and professional lives and develop the skills to engage in meaningful interactions with students and peers.

Talusan also offers research-based strategies and activities for having difficult conversations and creating more inclusive communities.

“Talusan weaves the conceptual and the practical in ways few authors have managed to do,” writes Paul C. Gorski, founder, Equity Literacy Institute. “Her conversational tone reminds readers they are her collaborators in the collective work she’s laid out.”

Liza A. Talusan, Ph.D., is an educator, speaker, leader, writer, life/leadership coach, and parent with over 25 years of experience in pre-K–20 education. Her focus — in her work and in this book — is on empowering individuals to create highly inclusive organizations, environments, communities and teams.

Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm

By Robin DiAngelo

Building on the groundwork laid out in the New York Times bestseller White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo’s newest book, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm (2021, Beacon Press) explores the ways in which a culture of niceness inadvertently promotes racism.

In White Fragility, DiAngelo explains how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized, and challenges the belief that racism is a simple matter of good versus bad people. DiAngelo, in fact, makes the point that white progressives cause the most daily harm to people of color. In Nice Racism, she explains how they do so. Drawing on her background as a sociologist and more than 25 years working as an antiracist educator, she picks up where White Fragility leaves off and moves the conversation forward.

Writing directly to white people, DiAngelo identifies how well-intentioned white people unknowingly perpetuate racial harm. These patterns include:

• rushing to prove that we are “not racist”

• downplaying white advantage

• romanticizing Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color (BIPOC)

• pretending white segregation “just happens”

• expecting BIPOC people to teach us about racism

• and feeling immobilized by shame

A review in The Guardian calls Nice Racism a powerful new book that “reveals why profound racism is often found in supposedly liberal spaces…. DiAngelo underscores that nice racism, as a concept, doesn’t just impede racial consciousness but can also foster hostility towards those prompting it.”

As a companion to DiAngelo’s new book, you can also listen to our “White Fragility” podcast with the author.

Robin DiAngelo is a writer and an Affiliate Associate Professor of Education at the University of Washington. Her area of research is in Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, tracing how whiteness is reproduced in everyday narratives.

Our Problem, Our Path: Collective Anti-Racism for White People

By Ali Michael and Eleonora Bartoli

The tagline for Our Problem, Our Path (Corwin Press, August 2022) sums up the ultimate aspirations of this important book: “A healthy multiracial society could be ours.”

As authors Ali Michael and Eleonora Bartoli make clear, building a healthy multiracial society is possible. But it can’t be done without millions of white people seeing racism as their problem and choosing to walk an antiracist path. The authors invite white people — especially educators — to join them on an antiracist journey to learn to talk about race with one another in ways that lead to real change. Drawing on decades of personal and professional experiences engaging in antiracism, the authors:

• emphasize the need for white people to have honest, meaningful relationships not only with People of Color and Native people, but also with other white people, in order to change systems shaped by racism;

• provide strategies for parents and teachers to support white children to become contributing members of a healthy multiracial society;

• introduce trauma-informed tools from psychology that enable readers to understand and overcome their own resistance and fear around taking antiracist action; and

• demonstrate how white people can take antiracist action today, exactly where they are and as they are.

Grounded in an understanding of antiracism as a daily, lifelong practice, Our Problem, Our Path encourages white people to help one another find the trailhead and start moving along the path toward a more just, equitable and loving multiracial society for all.

Ali Michael, Ph.D. is the Director of the Race Institute for K-12 Educators. She works with schools and organizations across the country to help make research on race, whiteness, and education more accessible and relevant to educators. Michael has also written for Teaching While White. Her other books include Raising Race Questions: Whiteness, Inquiry and Education (Teachers College Press, 2015), and the bestselling Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys (Corwin Press, 2017).

Eleonora Bartoli, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist, specializing in trauma, resilience-building, and multicultural/social justice counseling. Throughout her career, Bartoli has held leadership positions in professional organizations at both the state and national levels. She has also presented at conferences and is the author of a number of publications focused on multicultural counseling competence, white racial socialization, and the integration of social justice principles in evidence-based counseling practices.

Teaching Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls

By Multiple Authors

Ali Michael is also a contributor to another recent book, Teaching Beautiful Brilliant Black Girls (Sage Publishing, 2021). This book is a collective call-to-action for educational justice and fairness for all Black girls — focusing on transforming how Black Girls are understood, respected, and taught. Editors and authors intentionally present the harrowing experiences Black girls endure and calls on educators to disrupt and transform their learning spaces in order to ensure that Black girls thrive in our schools and communities.

Other authors in this important collection include Omobolade Delano-Oriaran, Marguerite W. Penick, Shermariah J. Arki, Orinthia Swindell, and Eddie Moore, Jr.

Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today (Second Edition)

By Jacqueline Battalora

Birth of a White Nation, Second Edition (Routledge, 2021) examines the social construction of race through the invention of white people. Surveying colonial North American law and history, the book interrogates the origins of racial inequality and injustice in American society, and details how the invention still impacts the present day.

This second edition documents the proliferation of ideas imposed and claimed throughout history that have conspired to give content, form, and social meaning to one’s racial classification. This new edition addresses the historic and ongoing production and reproduction of whiteness as a distinct and dominant social category. It also offers a framework for countering racial inequality and promoting greater awareness of antiracist policies and practices.

Birth of a White Nation aim is to help teachers and students make sense of the dramatic racial inequities of our time and to forge an antiracist path forward.

Jacqueline Battalora is an attorney and Professor of Sociology at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. In addition to this book, Battalora is an editor of the journal Understanding & Dismantling Privilege and she frequently develops and delivers lectures and training that advance the understanding of the construction of race and its impact today.

Open Windows, Open Minds: Developing Antiracist, Pro-Human Students

By Afrika Afeni Mills

Open Windows, Open Minds: Developing Antiracist, Pro-Human Students (Corwin, 2022) builds on Rudine Sims Bishop and Emily Style’s concept of Windows and Mirrors to explore why learning to appreciate the experiences and perspectives of others is essential for white students. It also offers an approach to teaching and learning that will equip white students as informed, empathetic, inclusive global citizens who genuinely value diversity and will actively engage in dismantling systemic inequities, as well as what white antiracist practitioners wish they had known when they were K-12 students.

Afrika Afeni Mills is a Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and an education consultant. She works with colleagues, teachers, coaches, and administrators to transform instructional practices. Mills has been featured on podcasts, blogs, delivered keynote addresses, and facilitated sessions at conferences both virtually and across the United States. She also wrote Teaching While White’s most-read blog post, “A Letter to White Teachers of My Black Children” “and cowrote “Evolving Our Narrative About Race in Schools” with Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi.

Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators

Edited by Annamarie Francois and Karen Hunter Quartz

As the editors note in their Introduction, Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators (Harvard Education Press, 2021) brings to life “the challenging work of preparing and sustaining educators to disrupt educational inequality in urban communities.” The collection of essays here arises out of the 30 years of experience at Center X, which was established on the campus of UCLA following the 1992 Rodney King verdict. Center X is a community of educators working to transform public schooling to create a more just, equitable, and humane society. The thirty contributing authors to Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators focus on the work of teachers and school leaders to enact the principles of social justice — racial equity, cultural inclusivity, and identity acceptance — in their daily practice.

The book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on preparing educators to transform teaching and learning. The second examines ways educators can sustain and deepen their practice. The third looks at compelling examples of public schools that have been transformed by this work.

In explaining the work of Center X and the goal of their book, editors Francois and Quartz quote Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, “We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.”

At the heart this work, in each generation, are our teachers.

Annamarie Francois is the executive director of Center X and a faculty member in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

Karen Hunter Quartz directs the Center for Community Schooling and is a faculty member in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

New Book by the Teaching While White Founders

Learning and Teaching While White: Antiracist Strategies for Schools and Communities

By Elizabeth Denevi and Jenna Chandler-Ward

It’s a thrill for us to announced the upcoming publication of Learning and Teaching While White, by Teaching While White founders Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi.

As the authors make clear in their work, white educators have relied too long on people of color to make the needed changes to our racist school system. Racial equity in schools will not come to fruition until white educators recognize their role in supporting racist policies and practices, and then take responsibility for dismantling them.

Learning and Teaching While White is designed with such ends in mind. The book is a well-written and accessible guide to help white educators, leaders, students, and parents develop an explicit, skills-based antiracist practice. Through their own experiences working with school communities, and employing the strategies and tools they have developed over the years, Denevi and Chandler-Ward share the ways in which white educators can gain greater consciousness of their own racial identity; analyze the role of whiteness in their schools and school systems; rethink pedagogical approaches and curricular topics; and address the role of white parents in the pursuit of racial literacy and equity. By engaging in this work, white educators can help lead schools and communities to racial equity and justice.

In the book’s Foreword, Howard Stevenson, the Constance E. Clayton Professor of Urban Education and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative, says Learning and Teaching While White offers clarity about role of educators in driving needed racial change. “The authors advocate for courage,” Stevenson writes. “They want white people to come to a reckoning. This reckoning involves trying to engage, not avoid the obvious tensions, factions, and examples of racial dishonesty, avoidance, denial, and privilege….”

Stevenson adds:

“What I find refreshing in this work is that Chandler-Ward and Denevi provide roadmaps, definitions, self-reflections, and years of classroom and school experiences to help the reader struggle and rise from that struggle. They provide lampposts when the journey toward social justice gets dark through their own stories of racial challenges from Black and Brown students….

“Drs. Chandler-Ward and Denevi provide this honesty, accountability, and hope by defining the confusing terms, conditions, and history of how racism embraces the cloak of Whiteness and shows up in the classroom lessons. They help teachers realize that without attention to antiracism approaches, they will find their current practices far removed from the earlier reasons of social justice that called, dare I say, ‘drove’ them into this much maligned profession. Through the stories, practical guidance, real-life classroom exercises the readers must solve, they offer so many opportunities for teachers to grow and be agentic instead of passive when a social injustice shows up.

“I look forward to the excitement at building a corps of White teachers who are unafraid to speak the truth to power against forces that would rather bury their racial heads into the ground.”

About the book, Eddie Moore, Jr., founder of the long-running White Privilege Conference writes, “What readers find when they open Learning and Teaching While White is a path to becoming a racially aware white educator. This is not just a book; it is a critical, personal exploration of self and system that the authors carefully scaffold to enhance the skill of white educators, both as teachers and as humans.”

Learning and Teaching While White is available for preorder now. On July 26, 2022, it will be for sale wherever you buy books.

Responding to Buffalo: Ending White Silence in the Face of Racial Violence

Ten people were killed and two more injured in a white terrorist attack/hate crime in Buffalo yesterday. This is the deadliest mass shooting in 2022 and the terrorist is an 18-year-old white male. Eighteen! The N-word was written on his assault rifle. He was not “mentally ill” or a “lone wolf.” Innumerable white adults either implicitly or explicitly encouraged and supported his thinking and decisions — even his actions. 

When Kyle Rittenhouse, the 18-year-old who shot and killed two people during the unrest last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was lauded as a hero by many, and the majority of white adults said nothing, that sent students a message. When states legislate that the discussion of race and racism in schools is unlawful, and the majority of white adults say nothing, that sends a message. When books are banned and certain histories are omitted from public school curricula, and the majority of white adults say nothing, that sends a message. 

White silence is deadly. 

The relentless racial violence has made many people weary — and that is exactly what white supremacy is relying on. It is trying to wear us down so that we feel helpless, overwhelmed, and give up. We cannot. We need to show up for our colleagues and students of color and be vocal. Silence is complicity and is gaslighting our students — all of whom are waiting to hear from us, who need to hear from us. 

Eddie Glaude, Jr., Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, posted a tweet today: “We face a choice as to what kind of country this will be. If you sit quietly, you have made your choice. If you worry that we are going too far, you have made your choice. Either we fight for a just America or you side with the evils of our time. No middle ground!”

Here are some resources to fortify us for these difficult conversations that we as white teachers and parents must have in order to bring us to higher ground. A special note of gratitude to our colleagues Christine Saxman and Shelly Tochluk who have kept an unflinching eye on white supremacist organizations and brought so much of it to light for us.

Podcasts:

Hate Groups Recruiting White Students

Parenting While White Part 1: Talking to White Kids About Race

Blogs & Articles:

Caring for Students in the Wake of Traumatic News Events

Talking with Students About Shocking or Disturbing News

Resisting the Pushback Against the Work for Racial Equity and Justice

Inoculating Our Students Against White Nationalism

“The Great Replacement”: An Explainer from the ADL

Others:

Responding to White Supremacists Organizations 

Confronting White Nationalism in Schools Toolkit

Interrupting White Nationalist Recruitment

White Rage, Anti-CRT, and a Path Forward

The world witnessed the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. Soon after, Black Lives Matter demonstrations calling for racial justice echoed around the globe. These events were followed by a sharp increase in racial awareness trainings. Books addressing race remained at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for more than a year. Employers, schools, municipalities, and communities responded by promising to advance racial justice. There was talk that we were entering a period of racial reckoning. 

Early in 2021, however, less than a year after Mr. Floyd was killed, Republican lawmakers began to introduce legislation in hopes that any progress toward a racial reckoning would be short lived. In particular, they have done so by attacking critical race theory (CTR) — a long-standing theory within legal scholarship that examines the role race plays in past and present public policy, law, and criminal justice — as if it were some new form of un-American indoctrination. It's clear that those attacking critical race theory don’t understand the actual theory and can’t reference any of its main claims. But that hasn’t stopped a number of Republican-led state legislatures from utilizing the label to pass so called “anti-CRT” legislation that restricts public school teachers from addressing certain topics, including race and gender. 

In truth, these legislative gag orders have nothing to do with the theory. Critical race theory is not part of the curriculum in K-12 education. It is rarely taught in a college classroom, except at better law schools. So what explains the explosive use and misuse of the label?

In the current political climate, CRT has been made a flashpoint serving as a bucket to hold a variety of conservative grievances. These include concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings and the teaching of U.S. history utilizing The 1619 Project, Trail of Tears, Juneteenth, and the burning of Black Wall Street, among any number of other moments that reveal the nation’s legacy of white supremacy and racial violence. DEI training and race-conscious curricula are designed to help us make sense of the racial inequities shaping the world in which people live and die today. They are designed to help us improve our laws, practices, and policies. But political conservatives see this push for racial justice as a threat to their power, so they are using the tactic of fear — making the specious claim that anti-racist initiatives create racial division and make white people feel guilty and, thus, must be banned. 

Tennessee was one of the first to pass such a ban. Tennessee’s law, under the prohibited concepts provision, prohibits any instruction through which “[a]n individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” The effort under way to pass laws that prohibit the teaching of race, gender, and a variety of other topics in K-12 public and charter schools (as well as public universities in some states) has been significant. As of spring 2022, gag laws have passed in nine states. More than a dozen others have proposals in process. 

How is it that we have moved from what seemed like a racial reckoning in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd to a silencing of educators on issues of race, gender, and LGBTQI identities?

White Rage

Historian, Carol Anderson in her book, White Rage, explains that structural racism has fostered anger and backlash from white people. Her research lays out historical junctures where Black people have gained social power — such as the Reconstruction era that followed the abolishment of slavery, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court rulingin support of integrated education, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in voting — only to have each met by significant backlash in the form of white rage. White rage is legislation, court decisions, and policies that have manifested as Jim Crow. It has driven a variety of strategies — including taxpayer vouchers designed to avoid integrating schools and increase the privatization of education. White rage was evident in Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy to win the White House. It underpinned the Reagan-Bush-and-Clinton-era War on Drugs that disenfranchised significant numbers of Black people. According to Anderson, every inch of Black advancement has been met by some variation on white rage. 

The pattern of white rage identified by Anderson helps to contextualize the present moment. What is so threatening about DEI training and the teaching of The 1619 Project? Most of us understand that these trainings are positive. DEI trainings help to capture the racial experiences of whiteness while The 1619 Project and other efforts to teach of fuller and more honest version of American history helps us understand that the inequality we observe in society today is a reflection of the long history of systemic racial bias and exclusion against people of color. The DEI trainings and curricular changes are not a threat to children. Rather, they offer a better way forward for all. However, for the conservative politicians driving the backlash, promoting racial awareness and knowledge pose a threat to the status quo, which is to say the continuation of white supremacy as normal. 

Path Forward – Commitment, Creativity & Interest Convergence

I am an educator. I am in this line of business because I am committed to the pursuit of truth. I am fortunate enough to live in a state, Illinois, in which it is unlikely that the anti-truth, gag order legislation proposed will become law. But even if it does, I have other avenues I can pursue. I can teach through my church, I can teach within community organizations, I can teach in my living room or yours.      

At this current critical juncture, I try to garner inspiration from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when activists organized in every way possible to address racism and racial injustice. In fact, I think it is time for a new Freedom Summer — channeling the 1964 Freedom Summer in which key organizations and more than a thousand  volunteers worked together to register Black voters and otherwise support the Black community in Mississippi. We can call ours Freedom to Learn Summer 2022 — one in which we collectively commit to countering the latest version of white rage. For those of us in education, this work includes defending the freedom of teachers to teach and children to learn truthful history and the freedom to be trained in DEI. Through every venue possible, we need to find ways to exercise and celebrate these freedoms.     

Indeed, as we push forward for social justice, there is much to learn from the past. Virtually every major advancement in rights for Black people have come from the convergence of interests. For example, many court decisions, rather than reflecting an arc toward justice, reflect something far less virtuous. Dereck Bell in Silent Covenants reveals that motivation for the Brown v. Board of Education decision was not a moral shift on the part of the U.S. Supreme Court toward equality. Rather, the decision reflects national interests of the time. The U.S. was competing in the Cold War against the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of Black and Brown populations around the globe. Desegregating schools was calculated to help in this effort. 

As we plan actions to advance racial justice, the ways in which our honest history and racial competency benefits us all should never be far from sight. While many of us have worked to change hearts and minds, history teaches us that change with the potential for radical social justice only comes about when interests converge. History also teaches us that, to move our society forward, we must find a way to move through and past white rage. 

 Jacqueline Battalora, Ph.D., J.D., M.T.S., is the author of Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today. A former Chicago police officer, she is now a lawyer and a professor of Sociology at Saint Xavier University, Chicago. Battalora is also working to organize a nationwide Freedom to Learn Summer 2022. More at jbattalora.com.