Can teaching about racism perpetuate racism?
Addressing a common criticism of "critical race theory" in schools
Our story today begins in the US state of Tennessee, where a parents’ organization, Moms for Liberty, has filed a complaint about the 2nd grade English Language Arts curriculum. The curriculum, called “Wit and Wisdom,” contains a section about “Civil Rights Heroes” and features books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ruby Bridges.
If you’ve been following the debate, it’s easy to fill in the partisan takes on this story without even reading it. The conservatives will say that wokeists are trying to indoctrinate children with divisive materials to make them hate white people and America. The progressives will say that these are just white racists trying to redact history to cover up their own sins and solidify the white supremacist status quo. At issue is whether the US is fundamentally built on racism, with a few brave activists fighting tooth and nail for every inch of racial progress, or fundamentally built on the ideal of equality, full of patriots and heroes who have formed a more perfect union in every generation.
But the complaint itself1 is interesting, because it features two letters from parents. The first letter is from the mother of a biracial child who, after experiencing this
”Civil Rights Heroes” unit, is ashamed of his white half:
We are a bi-racial family, Asian and White. This class has been very harmful to our son's identity and self-esteem. Our son never questioned his race or identity until this curriculum. Now, he tells us that he isn't American, he isn't white. He is Thai. He is ashamed of his white half.
The second letter is from the mother of a black child who, after experiencing this curriculum, came to believe that he was being discriminated against by an online grading algorithm:
My son, who is so bright and smart, would always like to check his grades as soon as he submitted his homework to see how he did. That day the question format wasn't "choose the correct answer," which always shows the result as soon as it is submitted. That day's "answer the following" format doesn't show the result immediately, as the teacher must check it manually.
My son was so upset not to see his grade as soon as he was accustomed to and my son turned his face to me and said "Mommy it is not fair...If the student is white, the grade will show up right away, but if the students are black or brown like me, the grade won't show up and it will only give us 'submitted.'"
In other words, the child didn’t realize that the response to this question type needed to be sent to a teacher, and instead attributed the delay to racism. The mother goes on to describe how shocked and upset she was and how comparing notes with another parent caused her to realize that the problem with the curriculum was real and affecting other children the same way.
Let’s just say at the outset: regardless of politics, as a teacher and a parent, there’s something deeply wrong with this outcome. Several children in the same school becoming ashamed and/or depressed because of their identity is a serious problem. I hope every reader can agree that something went wrong and that the school should take a hard look at how this curriculum was planned and delivered to ensure it doesn’t go wrong again.
Unfortunately, the case has become politicized, and what most people will see is some version of the partisan caricatures I painted above.
The Shopping Bag Incident
I promise this is relevant.
Recently I went to a supermarket here in Georgia - a branch of a French chain called Carrefour. Carrefour sells very nice branded reusable canvas shopping bags. Carrefour has also implemented a self-checkout lane. I haven’t seen one of these in Georgia before, but I’ve used some in the US, and I wanted to see how this one would work.
There was an attendant in front of the self-checkout lane directing customers to the kiosks. I approached her and indicated that I wanted a kiosk. She shook her head and said “no”. I was pretty shocked, and when I’m not ready for a conversation my Georgian usually falters, but I asked why, first in English, then in Georgian, but the attendant would not answer. She just indicated that I should go to a regular lane - and all of the regular lanes had long lines.
A lot went through my mind - maybe she assumes, because I’m foreign, that I can’t read Georgian and won’t be able to use the kiosk? Maybe she assumes, because I’m foreign, that I don’t have a Georgian bank card and won’t be able to use the kiosk? Maybe she just assumes, because I’m foreign, that if I run into a problem she won’t be able to help me, and it will gum up the works for everyone else?
Finally, I asked (in Georgian) to see the manager, and she pointed me towards the manager’s station. I went over and explained the situation: the attendant wouldn’t let me use the self-checkout lane, and wouldn’t explain why, and I assumed it must be because I was a foreigner. The manager sort of laughed at that and assured me that there was no discrimination. She accompanied me back to the attendant and they had a brief conversation. The manager then explained that it was because I was trying to buy one of those reusable canvas shopping bags. Apparently these cannot be purchased at the self-checkout lane because a cashier has to punch a hole in the bag to indicate that it has been paid for, I guess as an anti-theft measure.
Okay. So I was a little embarrassed, but this made me doubt myself. Why did I assume the attendant wouldn’t let me in because I was foreign? Isn’t this ridiculous?
I will say - the experience of being an immigrant, for going on eleven years now, is that I am always aware that I stand out. I am always aware that people are watching me and judging me. I am always concerned about how they will react to my clothes, my hair style, my earring, or my accent. I am always on the lookout for being charged extra because someone thinks foreigners are rich, or just easy marks.
Sometimes this awareness fades to the back of my mind. Sometimes it’s right at the forefront - as it was this summer, after another foreigner with an earring was beaten and stabbed by Georgian nationalists. And 99% of the time, if I ask a native Georgian about it, they’ll tell me it’s all in my head, I’m imagining it, there’s no discrimination, and Georgians love and respect guests so much that they’re looking at me because they’re so happy to have foreigners in their country and that if anything goes wrong it must be because I went out of my way to look for problems and I should seek mental health assistance to treat my depressed outlook on the world. So, gaslighting, essentially.
And the facts of this shopping bag case might lead someone to assume the Georgians are right. After all, the attendant wasn’t discriminating against me for being foreign - right? It was just about the shopping bag.
Except it wasn’t. If the attendant had said - in Georgian - “you need to go to the cashier because you are buying a canvas shopping bag and a cashier needs to punch a hole in it”, there wouldn’t have been a problem. I could probably understand that sentence in Georgian, and even if I couldn’t get the whole thing, it at least would have sounded like a reason, rather than just “no, you can’t use this lane, and no, I won’t tell you why”. The attendant just assumed I wouldn’t be able to understand Georgian - not an uncommon occurrence - and decided that I wasn’t worth the effort to try to communicate with. In other words, she treated me differently because I was a foreigner.
But you could easily make the argument that this was just a simple communication breakdown, without animosity or discriminatory intent, and that by being primed to see discrimination everywhere, I therefore see discrimination everywhere. That foreigners who travel “with an open mind” - without the presumption of discrimination - don’t experience incidents like this as discrimination (or to use an even more fraught term, as microaggressions).
So the following two things might be simultaneously true:
Discrimination against foreigners does occur sometimes
Foreigners will feel subjectively better off if they assume good faith in particular instances, rather than jump to the conclusion that something was motivated by animosity
And yet, it’s also important to note that point 1 undermines point 2: the existence of provable cases of discrimination is what puts it in our minds that any particular case might be discrimination. This idea that immigrants or foreigners face discrimination didn’t just come from nowhere.
The Black child in Tennessee learned about discrimination by reading about actual cases of discrimination. And while Moms for Liberty might want us to believe that actual discrimination is in the past, in principle it is the child who is correct: discrimination does happen, and, specifically, algorithmic bias does exist. It’s just that this particular case wasn’t an example of it. Children sometimes overgeneralize - but understanding that you might sometimes face discrimination is not a mistake. So in my opinion, it’s not that children shouldn’t be taught about racism and bias - it’s that they should be taught about racism and bias more carefully, to minimize mistakes like this one. Children don’t have the 40 years of life experience and context that allowed me to process the Shopping Bag Incident, realize my mistake, and take the whole thing more or less in stride.
Educators Make Mistakes
The political issue here about discrimination is thorny, but the pedagogical issue is fairly clear-cut: sometimes educators do a poor job. Speaking as a teacher, I often come across curriculum materials that are of embarrassingly low quality. Rescuing the good from the bad is sometimes a heroic effort.
Independent of political ideology or intention, sometimes educators design teaching materials or learning experiences that fail to teach the intended content, or that give students misconceptions about the intended content. Sometimes educators fail to think through the implications of a particular lesson or unit, or fail to see things from the learners’ perspectives, or fail to address common mistakes.
This is why it is good and important to have a public review process. Even if we all agreed in principle that students should be taught an anti-racist unit in second grade, there are good ways to teach this concept and there are bad ways to teach this concept. I’ll reiterate that I don’t think any anti-racist - even the most strident woke progressive - would want schools to teach a unit that is harmful to Black and biracial students and their families, the way this unit apparently was.
But then it is important to note that the failure of one particular unit, as conceived and delivered, is not an indictment of the entire curriculum, or of the concept of teaching anti-racism. Recently there was a viral video of a teacher chanting “sohcahtoa” while wearing an imitation Native American headdress and making tomahawk motions. While I have no doubt that the students will remember “sohcahtoa” for their entire lives, this is not a teaching method I would endorse. But just because the teacher chose a poor method for delivering this content does not imply that the content itself is bad - sohcahtoa is an excellent mnemonic, and trigonometry is important for many students who will go on to STEM fields.
The “privilege walk” is another example of a lesson in anti-racism that started with good intentions, but sort of went wrong. I was researching material for a unit on privilege and found the “privilege walk” activity… and I decided not to use it, not to show it to my students, and not to even mention it in class. Basically, the privilege walk has the instructor read out privileges - like “my parents could always keep the lights on” or “I can easily find hair care products for my hair type” or whatever - and each student who has that privilege has to step forward.
Based on my judgment, I concluded that whatever educational value a “privilege walk” might have had was outweighed - vastly outweighed - by the damage I could imagine causing to the kids who ended up at the back. Why point out exactly who the “least privileged” kids are - using them as props, making them feel bad about themselves? This seemed like it could easily go wrong and psychologically scar a kid.
It’s easy to look at a “privilege walk” video on YouTube and say that the woke left is out of control, traumatizing kids for no reason, and needs to be stopped. To that, my response is: absolutely push back if a teacher is giving a harmful lesson, on any topic. Teachers should absolutely have, and use, better judgment than to subject children to an exercise like that. But again, this is an argument for research and collaboration among teachers to identify best practices in teaching, especially when dealing with sensitive personal issues such as identity. It is not an argument in favor of abandoning the entire topic.
Similarly, just because one anti-racist unit went wrong, we can’t assume that the concept of teaching anti-racism is inherently divisive or age-inappropriate. Let us therefore examine some of the arguments for and against teaching anti-racism in elementary school.
The Crying Child
When I was a kid, my father told me a story about going to school in the 1960s. This was during the peak of the civil rights movement - my dad is just a few years younger than Ruby Bridges, and desegregation was still ongoing in schools in some parts of the US, and there was widespread dissatisfaction among Whites with the idea of sharing their schools with Black kids. It was in the zeitgeist.
My grandmother was walking my father into school one day when they saw a little boy crying on the front steps of the school. She want over to him to comfort him, and wiped his tears away with her handkerchief. My father was shocked, because he’d never seen a White person touch a Black person before. He asked her about it later and she explained that skin color didn’t matter, and if you see someone in distress, you help them.
Leaving aside for the moment whether this is anti-racism or race-blindness, I just want to point out that I went to elementary school having been specifically told not to be racist, as did my father before me. In the 1960s, it was very clear that kids needed to be told this - if they weren’t, they’d grow up believing things like “White people and Black people aren’t supposed to have any contact with each other”. In the 1980s, my father clearly still thought this lesson - that it’s what’s on the inside that counts - was something I’d need to know, and to be told explicitly.
He wasn’t wrong. While I don’t recall encountering anti-black racism in my elementary school, there was a lot of ethnic prejudice and stereotyping. I particularly remember Polish jokes and anti-Polish slurs going around a lot. Kids would repeat these to each other, never having been taught that this might be offensive to Polish people. Much later I realized that I had actually had at least one Polish classmate, who definitely heard all this going around, and to my knowledge never said anything about it. I also had a Greek American classmate who was relentlessly bullied for being Greek.
Furthermore, my maternal grandmother is Puerto Rican (somehow I got around to mentioning both of my grandmothers in this article!). I remember being exposed to stereotypes about Puerto Ricans, and hearing anti-Puerto Rican slurs. I was taught that I was “Spanish”, rather than “Puerto Rican” - even though my relatives in Puerto Rico apparently have more Native than European ancestry - and indeed I was never personally subject to discrimination for being Puerto Rican since I told people I was “Spanish” and easily passed as white. I internalized anti-Puerto Rican stereotypes in ways I’m not really comfortable talking about, but there were times when I felt ashamed of my background, because of what society as a whole told me about it.
I got over it - and I’m sure the Thai-American kid will get over his shame at his White ancestry - but the point is, children will absorb social narratives about their identities, in ways that can sometimes be harmful. This is something that we need to reckon with, one way or another, whether it comes from misguided teachers or misguided peers.
I think it would be naïve to assume that kids in modern elementary schools aren’t encountering something like what I grew up with, or what my dad grew up with. We haven’t defeated ethnic, racial, or religious stereotypes. Kids hear them and then repeat them, not knowing the harm. We can make efforts to teach them the harm - to teach them to recognize racism or prejudice or offensive jokes or discriminatory attitudes, and not to repeat these things. We can teach them to stick up for the targets of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. We can teach them to take pride in their identities and heritage, while also celebrating diversity. But I don’t think we can just hope they don’t witness any racism until we as adults are comfortable talking to them about it.
Moving away from personal anecdote, here’s what the American Psychological Association says about when kids begin to pick up racial stereotypes:
Previous research has shown that 3-month-old babies prefer faces from certain racial groups, 9-month-olds use race to categorize faces, and 3-year-old children in the U.S. associate some racial groups with negative traits. By age 4, children in the U.S. associate whites with wealth and higher status, and race-based discrimination is already widespread when children start elementary school.
This twitter thread is filled with stories of children experiencing racism at ages 5, 6, and 7 - essentially, as early as most people can reliably remember things:
So I would argue, first and foremost, that the reason to teach kids about racism in elementary school is because kids will experience and/or practice racism in elementary school. It’s a phenomenon in children’s lives that needs to be addressed by responsible adults. If adults run away from it or pretend it’s not there, children will navigate the issue on their own terms.
Stereotype Threat and Self-fulfilling Prophecy
We’ve already addressed the problem of children feeling subjectively uncomfortable, sad, ashamed, guilty, or depressed about their identity due to poorly-executed attempts to address racism. But there is also the issue of whether these problems lead to objective, measurable impacts - is this something kids will just get over, or can the way we teach kids about race have lasting, harmful consequences?
“Stereotype threat” is a phenomenon in which awareness of negative stereotypes negatively impacts performance. In other words, if you tell girls that “girls are bad at math”, they will perform worse at math. This is a complex and controversial phenomenon - of course - but as the Wikipedia article notes, many meta-analyses confirm that stereotype threat is real and that it can be addressed through concrete interventions.
This suggests that you might not want to teach kids about stereotypes because you risk reinforcing those stereotypes. And on a deeper level, if race is a social construct, then isn’t the way to end racism to simply stop re-constructing it? To stop teaching kids about racist ideas, racial grievances, and the worst racist episodes in history? To emphasize unity, rather than division? I mean, sure, the APA notes that kids learn racism essentially from the cradle, but we don’t have to feed that tendency with specific horror stories when kids are seven years old, right?
I’m all for creating a curriculum that emphasizes unity and healing rather than division and grievance. But as I said, I think it’s naïve to assume that kids won’t come across these stereotypes on their own. The evidence pretty clearly shows they will. I think we have a duty to prepare kids for dealing with stereotypes - without reinforcing them, or promoting racial determinism or racial essentialism, of course. And as I mentioned above, there are empirical studies which have identified effective interventions for countering stereotype threat. These sorts of interventions could play a role in an effective anti-racist curriculum.
Depolarizing the Issue
I think if you try to step away from the polarized, political environment, there are a lot of areas where people who favor a race-blind approach and people who favor an explicit anti-racist approach can come together and find mutually-suitable ways to approach the issue of race. Even though I personally tend towards the anti-racist approach, I think race-blindness advocates can offer useful critiques and cautions - critical feedback to help improve the way we approach the topic of race.
Because ultimately, I don’t think the mothers whose letters made it into the complaint in Tennessee want their children’s struggles to be used as political ammunition. It’s unfortunate that these parents’ genuine, valid concerns got swept into an “anti-woke” narrative which is primarily concerned with defending white racial privilege.
I think that these parents - most parents - simply want their children to learn about tolerance, acceptance, inclusivity, and identity in ways that are not hurtful or harmful. I think that they want their children to learn about the more painful episodes in American history at developmentally appropriate times and in a context which allows them to process those painful episodes without internalizing racial essentialism, guilt, or grievance.
I think we have to take parents’ concerns seriously precisely because we need to decouple “my kids learned the wrong lesson from school” - which is probably a local issue - from “my kids are being indoctrinated” - which is a national narrative cynically promoted by politicians for political purposes.
And obviously there are bad faith actors. Obviously there are racists who cherry-pick cases like this out of the millions of kids in the US in order to discredit anti-racists. But we shouldn’t assume that every parent who complains about CRT is one of them - nor should we assume that every teacher who tries to teach anti-racism is doing a good job.
And on the flip side, based on the letters from the parents in Tennessee, the parents did the right thing - addressed the school principal with their concerns, calmly and in writing - and the school did not address these concerns adequately. That’s the fault of the school, but one school being unresponsive to parent concerns is not, in itself, an indictment of anti-racism in general.
Model The Behavior You Want
Earlier I deferred addressing whether my grandmother’s lesson to my dad was race-blind or anti-racist. I think it’s both. It’s race-blind because she taught my father to ignore race and be kind to someone because of their fundamental humanity, regardless of skin color. It’s anti-racist because she openly defied racist norms and directly refuted racist ideas.
An important concept in education is that you need to model the behavior you want, not the behavior you don’t want. You need to give more examples of desirable behavior than examples of undesirable behavior. Usually this is pretty simple: English teachers give more examples of correctly spelled words than incorrectly spelled words - knowing, intuitively, that we don’t want to reinforce misspellings too much. Math teachers give more examples of correctly solved problems than incorrectly solved problems - again, reinforcing the correct technique and not the incorrect technique. Sure, teachers can anticipate common errors and show them to students, but most of what they model will be correct technique, and this is as it should be.
The same principle applies in teaching behavior. An anti-racist lesson which focuses mostly on lots of examples of undesirable behavior is a bad lesson. Teachers would do better to model, teach, and highlight positive examples of things that students should do. This not only prevents students from feeling bad about themselves, it gives them positive steps they can take in their lives, so they can feel good about making a positive contribution to their communities.
In practice, modeling anti-racism and modeling race-blindness would look similar. They would both involve teaching students to help members of their community who are in need, to speak to each other respectfully, to treat each other kindly, and to relate to each other as humans rather than as representatives of a particular race or identity. It’s going to look something like what my grandmother modeled for my father, and therefore be in some sense both race-blind and anti-racist.
I don’t think we can afford to be race-blind in designing a curriculum; race-blindness is what gets us the “sohcahtoa” lesson with the math teacher chanting a horrifically offensive caricature of Native Americans. We need to be culturally aware when selecting materials and designing teaching strategies. We also need to present positive role models which represent a variety of identities in order to send the message to children that all of them belong in our society and that achievement is available to all of them.
But in terms of delivering a curriculum - especially with younger students - most of the delivery should consist of teaching students positive, desirable behaviors, and these positive behaviors - I believe - will mostly pass muster even with the most strident race-blindness advocates.
I’m not saying teachers should hide the complexity of racism or the dark side of American history from students. What I am saying, rather, is that when students are demonstrably, empirically taking the wrong lessons away from a unit, the unit needs to be reconsidered. Teaching the exact same topics, but instead with an emphasis on what students can do to build the society we want to live in, would be one simple way to fix this particular unit. A unit called “Civil Rights Heroes” should focus on what was heroic about MLK and Ruby Bridges - not on the villains who hated them.
Because ultimately, schools were desegregated. Maybe not as much as we’d like - there are still neighborhood schools that are segregated de facto due to the racial composition of the neighborhood, which in turn is due to redlining - but nonetheless it is now unremarkable for Black and White children to attend school together. There are any number of people who helped make that happen, who can serve as positive role models for future activists.
Repolarizing the Issue
Speaking for myself, as a progressive, aspiring anti-racist teacher: I believe that it is both possible and necessary to teach students about racism so that they can learn from the mistakes of the past and build a better society. However, we must do a good job of it! If we don’t, we actually do risk perpetuating the racism we are trying to fight.
Progressives should know better than anyone that intention isn’t an excuse for harm - it’s how our actions impact others that determine our moral obligations. The teachers and curriculum designers behind the “Civil Rights Heroes” unit may have had the best of intentions, but if the result was to harm Black and biracial children, they are going to need to reconsider their approach.
What’s more, by doubling down on its mistake, the school here fed into a right-wing narrative that teaching about racism is inherently traumatic and divisive - rather than a reparable mistake in an isolated case - and that progressive educators are pushing these bad lessons on their children in defiance of parents’ wishes. I don’t believe for a second that “Moms for Liberty” is fully a good-faith actor, but the left messed up here, twice over. We need to do better.
I can’t help but point out how Republicans were able to use the moral panic around CRT to win the governor’s seat in Virginia this year. Normally I reject arguments like this, because the right wing is very adept at turning regular things that the left wing does - like holding a coffee cup or buying a roasting pan - into weird culture war wedge issues, and it doesn’t seem fair to therefore demand perfection from the left in all things. But if students around the US - including students of color - are having experiences similar to the students in this complaint, it’s no wonder parents’ groups are up in arms.
But now I’m at risk of ignoring my own advice - of making this article focus too much on the negative. So I’ll end by pointing out that in the UK, hundreds of schools have signed up to an anti-racist curriculum:
Titled the Diverse Curriculum – the Black Contribution, it provides pupils aged five to 14 with nine weeks of lessons on subjects including the Windrush generation, activism, British identity, and diversity in the arts and science.
Orlene Badu of Hackney Education, who led the development of the project, said calls for change intensified during lockdown when children were studying from home and parents suddenly realised how un-diverse the curriculum was.
The former primary school headteacher said a subsequent survey found that many pupils felt uncomfortable that representations of the black community in history lessons were dominated by narratives of oppression and powerlessness.
“A curriculum that references you does engender a stronger sense of belonging and commitment, which would hopefully lead to improved educational outcomes and lived experiences,” Badu said.
That third paragraph shows a similar sentiment to what the parents in Tennessee expressed. And I suspect that a curriculum that focuses on lessons on activism, identity, and diversity, rather than oppression and powerlessness, would indeed be a positive contribution to teaching students not to be racist.
Done poorly, I think anti-racist teaching can inadvertently reinforce racism. That’s why it’s important to do it well.
You can read the full complaint here:
Not sure if believe an of the organized anti-CRT stuff. I think there's a massive effort to push it as an issue, and it worked well in Virginia:.
Here's an example of anti-CRT groups being organized earlier this year: https://link.medium.com/U0rw0ZAuDlb
A family member of mine worked in school administration in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were always organized efforts to bring complaints about curriculum to local school boards. The "public review process" nationwide is overwhelming controlled by far-right figures, the majority of whom absolutely believe anti-racism curriculum is divisive.
I don't think that much positive can come from the public review process of school boards nationwide. It (a review process) might work in Minneapolis or San Francisco if you are hoping for a progressive outcome. The outcome in Texas or Idaho would like be purposefully divisive.
Attacking curriculum has been used for decades. Pat Buchanan mocked the "bead wears at the Department of Education teaching masturbation."
I agree with your "model the behavior you want" conclusion. But while you certainly don't minimize the complexity of delivering anti-racist education, I think that your optimism obfuscates it somewhat. You write that "sometimes educators do a poor job". Yes, sometimes educators do a poor job teaching basic math, or critical reading skills. However, when it comes to delivering a CRT-cognizant anti-racist curriculum with sufficient complexity and nuance, I think the more appropriate assessment would be: "it's exceedingly rare to find a teacher, let alone an adult, who has the capacity to deliver said curriculum". Personally, I haven't met anyone up to the task. So I'm with you in spirit, but I struggle to foresee it in our reality.