by Bree Picower
Teachers, like all members of society, are socialized into the mainstream ideology that governs a society. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall defines ideology as “the mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation—which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.”14 Hall contends that ideology “grips the minds of the masses” to become a political force that ultimately maintains power and domination. Ideology becomes the mainstream, commonsense ideas that shape how people see the world and explains how the values and beliefs of teachers find their way into the curriculum they develop or teach. Teachers teach what they believe about how the world works, and what they believe has been influenced by broader societal forces that serve to justify current social orders.
In the United States, the social order is based on racist hierarchies. This is also referred to as White supremacy, or a white supremacist society. As defined by scholar and journalist Robert Jensen:
By “white supremacist,” I mean a society whose founding is based in an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites, an ideology that was used to justify crimes against indigenous people and Africans that created the nation. That ideology also has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white immigrant group, and is used to this day to rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution of wealth and well-being in this society. It is a society in which white people occupy most of the top positions in powerful institutions, with similar privileges available in limited ways to non-white people who fit themselves into white society.15
Within this system of White supremacy, Whiteness is the ideology and way of being in the world that is used to maintain it. Whiteness is not synonymous with White people; instead, it is the way in which people—generally White people—enact racism in ways that consciously and unconsciously maintain this broader system of White supremacy. While individual people of Color may also enact Whiteness, they do not benefit from the broader system of White supremacy in the ways that White people do. White supremacy is the what, White people are typically the who, and Whiteness is the how.
Whiteness relies on remaining masked in order to maintain the ideology of an equitable and democratic society. This concept is particularly important in the context of this book in which White teachers are not only unaware of a broader system of racism but also are unaware of their role in maintaining it. Whiteness theorists Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg contended that racial power dynamics are “so well hidden, so far removed from everyday consciousness, that even those who benefit from it are sometimes unaware if its existence.” They argue that “such erasure often leads individuals from dominant race, class and gender groups into an uncritical complicity with socio-political structural power asymmetries and cultural manifestations of inequality.”16 White teachers, unaware of how their own beliefs have been socialized around race, become complicit in maintaining racism.
For some White people, the system remains masked because they do not realize that they have a racial identity, believing that people of Color are the only people with a race. This tendency to see White racial identity as the absence of race makes it difficult to have productive conversations because they become discussions about “others.”17 In my experience doing racial justice work in teacher education for over twenty years, I’ve found that most White people have never had a conversation with other White people about what it is like being White. Having lived primarily among other Whites, many Whites see their culture as just “normal,” “American,” or generally “bland.” When asked to recognize themselves as White or part of a larger group, there is often a level of discomfort and defensiveness and a tendency to default to our ethnic, religious, or European identities instead.
For other White people, they believe that because they do not engage in explicitly racist acts that they are therefore outside of the system of racism. In the notes section, I recommend a number of resources that deconstruct this misconception of Whiteness and support White people in recognizing how we enact racism.18 In Me and White Supremacy, Layla F. Saad categorized a variety of ways that White people behaviorly enact Whiteness, including but not limited to: silence, saviorism, exceptionalism, privilege, fragility, superiority, centering, apathy, stereotyping, tone policing, cultural appropriation, tokenism, and White feminism. Dismantling Racism, a workbook created by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, also includes a list of how Whiteness is manifested, such as perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, and objectivity.19
Because White people tend to categorize only explicit hate crimes or racial slurs as racist, we often do not recognize how all of these other manifestations either consciously or unconsciously find their way into how we engage in the world. It is often because of these ways Whiteness is masked that seemingly caring White teachers perpetuate racism in their curriculum. In describing typical preservice teachers, author Sherry Marx points out that while White teachers may appear to be different from the stereotype of hood-wearing White supremacists, their “brand of racism” is just as dangerous.
In fact they were much the opposite; they were lovely young women devoted to spending their careers tolerantly and benevolently working with “all children.” However, one could argue that the ways in which they perpetuated racism were even more destructive than the hateful, violent rants of a White supremacist. After all, White teachers number in the millions in this country and the brand of racism they/we perpetuate is viewed as helpful, knowledgeable, and in the best interests of children.20
Such “lovely” White teachers have been socialized to believe in a world absent of the myriad manifestations of Whiteness, as structures of White supremacy have been hidden from them through their own education. Teachers were at one point students on the receiving end of curriculum that, as analyzed by many critical race scholars, has been found to be Eurocentric, providing flawed and innacurate information about people of Color, particularly Black people.21 Because of their own socialization and education, curriculum that perpetuates historic falsehoods align with teachers’ incomplete understandings of race. It follows that they would unquestioningly pass this along to their own students through the kind of viral racist curriculum examined in this book.
Current racist curriculum should therefore be examined not by the educators’ individual intention but by the way it functions to maintain the permanence of racism both in and out of school.22 In his book Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi explains that we often think that racism is a result of ignorance. He posits, however, that White historical self-interest leads to racist policies, which then leads to the construction of racist ideas to justify the policies, which then results in ignorance and hate, keeping the cycle in place.23 Using this flow of power, teachers who teach racist curriculum are not simply acting out of implicit bias or racial ignorance as is often assumed. Rather, they are complicit in keeping a broader racist system in place. They do this through the construction of a racist curriculum that functions to justify racism by reproducing and instilling racist ideas in the next generation, keeping White supremacy in place.
As will be seen in chapter 1, the viral artifacts of #CurriculumSoWhite that turned up in my research were almost exclusively racist toward Black and Indigenous people. Therefore, I will often use the term Black, Indigenous, and people of Color, commonly abbreviated as BIPOC, throughout this book. BIPOC is a term that has emerged to highlight that while racism impacts all people of Color, it is critical to distinguish the ways in which it often most violently and aggressively targets Black and Indigenous people.24
The overabundance of racist curriculum toward these two groups in particular reveals the legacy of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness in the United States. As scholars Anne Bonds and Joshua
Inwood explain, “A settler colonial perspective illuminates the interconnections between colonization and anti-black and anti-indigenous racisms and understands them as an ongoing structure rather than a series of historic events.”25 While the origins of Indigenous displacement and chattel slavery are historical, the ripples of this history do not disappear. Instead, traces of these arrangements are made evident through #CurriculumSoWhite. Again, these examples of racist curriculum must be seen as broader than the individual racism of one teacher. Instead, they represent the larger project of maintaining the social conditions of settler colonialism, Whiteness, and White supremacy by reproducing these historical legacies and cementing anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racial ideologies in the imaginations of new generations of learners.
FOUR I’S OF OPPRESSION
What makes #CurriculumSoWhite particularly insidious in maintaining racism is that when used by educators, the curriculum operates at the intersection of four levels of oppression. A popular framework that grassroots and social justice organizations use these days for teaching about inequality is called the Four I’s of Oppression. This framework asserts that all forms of oppression operate on four overlapping levels: ideological, institutional, interpersonal/individual, and internalized. My colleague Tanya Maloney and I use the Four I’s as the organizing framework of the program we co-direct, the Newark Teacher Project. NTP is an example of a teacher education program that centers racial justice through a humanizing framework. (More characteristics about racial justice teacher education programs will be shared in chapters 4 and 5.)
After we presented the framework during a racial literacy professional development workshop, a Black participant commented that it should not only be framed around oppression, but also around how superiority operates at all four levels so as to focus on the perpetrators of oppression and not just on the targets. As such, we started referring to it as the Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage. For all the ways that the Four I’s negatively impact those marginalized by oppression, there is an equal and opposite privilege assigned to those advantaged by that identity marker. To understand how inequality operates and can be dismantled, we must focus on the mechanisms and impact of both oppression and advantage.
Oftentimes, we can parse out a single level on which oppression/advantage happens. For example, believing that White people are inherently smarter or more deserving is ideological racial advantage; disproportionate access to quality education based on race is institutional racial advantage; telling a racist joke is interpersonal/individual racial oppression; and holding feelings that Eurocentric beauty standards such as paler skin and straight hair are more desirable is internalized racial oppression and advantage.26
However, unlike these single-level examples, #CurriculumSoWhite operates across all four levels. I’ll play this out with a story of a former student, Dawn, who I will share more about in chapter 2. Dawn grew up in an Italian American community and was socialized to believe that her family was successful because they worked hard. To Dawn, people of Color who weren’t as successful or who hadn’t achieved the American Dream were simply lazy. The ideology of the American Dream shaped how Dawn thought about racism.
This ideological understanding formed the way she thought about racism—believing it was a thing of the past and that people of Color, particularly Black people, were complaining about something that no longer existed. As a teacher and as a White person carrying this racist ideology, Dawn had access to institutional power—for example, she had the capacity to refer students of Color to special education or White students to gifted and talented programs. She also had institutional power over what she chose to teach, and she chose to teach an inaccurate version of history using #CurriculumSoWhite. Her ideological beliefs shaped her curricular choices, as we will see in chapter 2. While she worked as an individual to develop what she would teach, her curriculum upheld institutional and ideological oppression by telling an inaccurate history of how racism has been “solved.” At the internalized level, this curriculum inculcates her students into also believing that racism is over. Her White students could therefore internalize that anti-racism is unnecessary, and her students of Color might internalize that they and their families are responsible for any oppression they may experience. Through her institutional power over curriculum, Dawn as an individual passed on her ideology that her students then internalized. When employed by teachers, #CurriculumSoWhite is especially nefarious because rather than operating at just the teacher’s individual level, it maintains Whiteness on all four levels.
TEACHER EDUCATION AS A SPACE TO TRANSFORM RACIAL IDEOLOGY
Given the enormity of the scope of Whiteness, where then are the moments of intervention to transform teachers’ understandings of race in the hopes that they do not maintain systems of racism through the transmission of racist ideas? Whose role and responsibility is it to interrupt #CurriculumSoWhite? I argue that teachers create curriculum that flows from their ideology—in other words, educators teach what they believe. It would follow then that sites for disruption are the spaces in which they learn to teach, as these can also become the places in which they rethink their beliefs.
Teacher education provides a place in which aspiring educators learn the art and science of teaching. As an institution, it has the potential to disrupt #CurriculumSoWhite by taking seriously the relationship between what teachers think and what they teach. Some programs do make an attempt to train teachers in multicultural or culturally relevant curriculum, but this is often done in a way that assumes that all aspiring teachers might be open to such approaches.27 In truth, preservice teachers must excavate what education scholar Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz refers to as the “archeology of the self.”28 Without in-depth self-examination and reflection on how issues of race, class, and identity play out in preservice teachers’ understandings of others, efforts to prepare anti-racist teachers can end up as the equivalent to slapping a coat of paint on the wall when the foundation is rotten. Unless teachers’ underlying ideology is disrupted from dominant racial paradigms, this coat of paint and the resulting curriculum ends up being superficial at best (for example, George Washington Carver discovered peanuts! Rosa Parks sat down!) and outrageously racist at worst.29
Take this example, which will be revisited in chapter 1: A 2016 eighth-grade mathematics test given at Burns Middle School in Mobile, Alabama. Assigned by the math teacher, one question on the test read: “Tyrone knocked up 4 girls in the gang. There are 20 girls in his gang. What is the exact percentage of the girls Tyrone knocked up?” Another question informed students that “Dwayne pimps 3 ho’s” and asked students to figure out “how many tricks each of the hookers must turn in a day to support Dwayne’s crack habit.”30 Some might erroneously interpret that the teacher thought she was using a culturally relevant perspective, yet these questions reveal that her core beliefs about her students are steeped in racist stereotypes. Until teacher education is ready to dig deeper to address the beliefs of teachers like this one, attempts at curricular reforms will not interrupt racist curriculum.
TENSIONS AND INTENTIONS AS A WHITE SCHOLAR WRITING ABOUT RACE
Having grown up as a White person with racial and economic privilege, I was not immune from being socialized to have mainstream understandings of race as a young person.31 However, I was fortunate to have had a variety of professional experiences and relationships that helped me start the lifelong process of examining and reframing my understandings about race. My journey is one of a trajectory of working in educational settings run for and by Black people. From working in afterschool programs in New York City, Michigan, and San Francisco; to teaching at Prescott Elementary, a predominately Black school in Oakland, California, that was the center of the “Ebonics debate” in the late 1990s; to eventually studying Whiteness in education as a scholar, I have been in settings in which Black people have generously taken the time to invest in my development within educational settings that center racial justice.32
Through
these experiences, I was given the opportunity to learn valuable lessons that helped reshape the way I saw the world, the first of which was that White people don’t have the answers. To address racial justice, it is necessary to listen and learn from people oppressed by racial injustice. Having volunteered in high school in centers that were “serving” Black children but were run by White adults, I soon gained an appreciation of the importance of Black leadership. In all of these settings, race was explicitly on the table. Having opportunities to develop meaningful and reciprocal relationships with my Black coworkers turned friends, hearing and learning from their perspectives on issues of race, developing the ability to participate in racially charged discussions, and working in environments run by and for Black people all played a significant role in shaping my racial analysis. I am grateful to be able to continue to be part of a multiracial community of critically conscious scholars, in which we lovingly support and develop our vision and actions for educational racial justice. I share this brief summary of my journey, not to paint a portrait of myself as a “White exception” but to show that particular experiences have the potential to disrupt certain ideologies of Whiteness.
My last year teaching at Prescott Elementary, my mentor teacher, Carrie Secret, pulled me aside and told me that although she loved me, she didn’t need me to be there. She let me know that it was my responsibility to take what I had learned at Prescott and to go work with White people—basically, to go get my cousins. As a classroom teacher, and as a person, I had learned that when Ms. Secret talks, you listen. Now, having been a teacher educator for almost twenty years, my work centers upon supporting teachers, particularly White teachers, to have similar opportunities to reframe their understandings about race prior to going into the classroom.
