Editor’s Note: The following article was written prior to the police shooting and killing two African American men, Alton B. Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philandro Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Those shooting deaths, both captured on video, set off another round of protests and vigils around the nation regarding police violence against African Americans in particular and racial injustice in general. During the protest in Dallas, Texas, a man shot and killed five police officers — Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens, and Michael Smith. By the time this issue reaches readers, the national conversation on race and racism, and on violence and guns more generally, will have evolved. But we hope that Robert Greene’s plea here for thoughtful conversation on race is taken to heart. The arc of history can only bend toward justice when each generation improves on the work of the past. And each generation can only improve on the work of the past with the help and guidance of engaged and knowledgeable educators and parents.
Some parents and educators think about issues of identity and cultural differences and wonder how long they can delay the conversation with their students because they don’t want to introduce concepts that might be too complex or challenging for young children. Others think about issues of identity and cultural differences and wonder how quickly they can begin the discussions with their students and children, because they want to equip children early with the tools and language they will need to navigate and thrive in a world that responds to their identities as much as to their abilities.
I’m of the latter mind.
As the father of two young African American boys, I know the challenges that await my sons, whether their actions warrant them or not. As parents, my wife and I know we need to talk about race — specifically and often — with our children and pray they don’t suffer the fate of Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin because they are black males in America.
For the sake of our society, we need schools and other families to have similar conversations.
W.E.B. Du Bois famously stated that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color-line. In the 21st century, he is still correct. Racial injustice is systemic, yet we remain too timid and unskilled to address directly the contemporary results of ongoing race-based oppression. As the pundits note, even President Obama — despite initiatives such as Race to the Top and My Brother’s Keeper — still struggles to lead with a clear, consistent, and coherent strategy to name this culture. Much of the data about race-based gaps in wealth, health, housing, or education are well known and decades old. However, we are hesitant to name these differences in a context of race and ascribe their intransigence even more to systemic racial injustice than personal failings. To solve these problems, we all need to surface conversations on race and develop deeper understandings of the impact that systemic racism has on all of us.
Yet we struggle to do so —as a society at large and a community of schools.
In the independent school landscape, we tend not to focus specifically, skillfully, and consistently on race. We don’t mind studying historical issues of race but tend to avoid the sustained and challenging conversations that look at contemporary systems, current issues, and individual experiences around race. My personal, parental, and professional hopes, however, are that we do focus on developing the skills and the language to tackle these conversations with the urgency and sensitivity they deserve.
Initiating and sustaining constructive conversations about race are more a function of our cultural competency skill than of our willingness. Much of what paralyzes us as independent school educators is an obsessive compulsion to avoid making mistakes that are not only decidedly human and often inevitable — as Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald describe in their brilliant book Blindspot — but have already been made by many of us previously. As Banaji and Greenwald make clear, we all carry prejudices and biases and act upon them in subtle or not so subtle ways. Add the persistence of segregated living patterns and the fundamental lack of coherent national conversations about race and it’s little wonder that racial bias is also present in our lives and schools. We owe it to ourselves, our students, and our society to develop the skills and embrace these conversations.
Thus, it doesn’t make sense to allow conversations about race to be suppressed because some people (might) feel uncomfortable — or because we don’t think we have the requisite skills to address race perfectly.
Edgar A. Guest, in his poem “See It Through,” which I learned while pledging Omega Psi Phi Fraternity years ago, expresses a similar sentiment:
If the worst is bound to happen,Spite of all that you may do,Running from it will not save you,See it through!
Running from conversations about race because we’d rather avoid than risk offending, or shifting the context to other identities because we find them easier to discuss, will not save any of us from the challenges and dangers of racial injustice. We have to develop our cultural competency skills — and talk. Once we open up the conversation, we begin to increase understanding, mitigate guilt and blame, and help people feel better about themselves and their work. Parents are more effective in their parenting. Educators are more effective in their teaching. And children are better off for both.
Learning the Skills
Author Debby Irving, in Waking Up White, wrote about the acute anxiety she felt discovering, years into adulthood, that being white had shaped just about every aspect of her life (as race tends to do for all families in America). Coming to understand how racial privilege shaped her life in ways that were previously invisible was more than a little unsettling and humbling for Irving. But what she learned is a central outcome — especially for whites — of examining race.
Author Janie Victoria Ward, in The Skin We’re In: Teaching Our Teens to Be Emotionally Strong, Socially Smart, and Spiritually Connected, describes the intentionality required to prepare black children to navigate school and life successfully. What she unpacked is a central obligation — especially for people of color — in preparing students to grow up in a race-focused society.
These are just two examples of important works that underscore the centrality of race in individual and cultural identity and the need to talk openly, intelligently, and respectfully about race. Irving and Ward make it clear that we need both a shared commitment to ongoing conversation and authentic courage. As I often told my algebra students about similar work: it’s not easy, but it is simple.
The rationale for developing and increasing our skill set to discuss issues of race — especially racial identity, racial systems, and racism — is simple: You cannot get better at any skill if you do not practice it and gain experience.
I often ask various audiences the following: Growing up, how often did you have conversations in your home about your racial identity?
What I’ve discovered in the responses is a consistent pattern: the whiter your audience, the less frequent the conversation. There are many reasons for this and this is not an indictment of any particular culture — yet we must focus on the impact of such silence, especially in schools. Avoiding the conversation squanders the opportunity to support the development of skills that we are coming to understand as fundamental to 21st century leadership success and contributes to the maintenance of systems of discrimination.
This conversation actually helps schools improve the culture and the quality of the education they offer by allowing individual students to develop skills that will serve them well in their cultural, personal, and professional lives.
What I have observed and learned as an educator, parent, and consultant is when white children are not engaged in frequent conversations about their racial identity when growing up, they often do not develop the tools, language, or skills to hold those conversations with a reasonable degree of facility as adults. When their social and professional contexts change and conversations about race become increasingly relevant, they often stumble through these environments and often are not effective contributors to the discourse. And increasingly, in professional environments, they are held accountable for their lack of facility.
Fundamentally, this is unfair. Let’s be clear, however; it is not the accountability that is unfair, it is the lack of preparation. When we want children to make good decisions with money, we educate them about financial systems and managing money. When we want them to make good decisions about friends, we educate them about building and nurturing trust and friendships. Yet we tend not to engage them with equal deliberation about dynamics of race.
Students of color, whose families tend to, and often have to, discuss race and racial identity earlier and frequently, also need to understand their racial identity both apart from and in the context of current and historical racial systems. We could also argue that multiracial students should have at least twice as many conversations about racial identity because theirs reflects more dimensions than their mono-racial peers. We need to equip our young people (no matter their race) with knowledge of their racial identity — because it is fundamental to understanding who they are in the world and their ability to make accurate assessments of the world in which they exist.
Aim to Understand
For those who have never been asked to think deeply about race or examine their own racial history or their racial identity in the contemporary culture, it can be difficult to get these conversations started. (This is one reason we need culturally competent and well-trained parents and educators.) But as Debby Irving highlights, once you open your eyes to racial identity and racial systems, you cannot return to ignoring them.
Some — perhaps many — of our white students understand parts of their own family’s immigrant experience. What we discuss far less, however, is the identity evolution of those European migrants who frequently arrived in America with strong national identities but often “became white, even in the span of a few generations. Sometimes subconscious, sometimes strategic, the encoding of white racial identity permanently shifted the narrative and cultural dynamic for many of our independent school families. Their inherent sense of their own diversity became subsumed and rendered invisible in the stultifying silence of unspoken racial identity and unexamined white racial privilege.
Ultimately, we will all have to think about the cultural and organizational systems perpetuated by either white supremacy or white privilege because race and racism still function as the proverbial canary in the coal mine of social experience.
Nearly every debilitating social and cultural dynamic is routinely exacerbated by the racial identity of its victim and the racial hierarchy deeply entwined in the cultural and organizational systems in which they operate. Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and Ian Haney Lopez (Dog Whistle Politics) cite painstaking research and numerous examples highlighting the damning indictment that both coded and uncoded racial appeals make from our basest instincts in seemingly innocuous and facially neutral policies and systems. What they make clear is this: if we don’t talk about it, we will never understand it — and we’ll never change it.
If we don’t understand these concepts, we will never position ourselves to interrupt and arrest systemic injustice. These concepts are perhaps best understood as cultural and organizational systems surrounding and impacting us. It is the systemic context that actually shapes the experiences of populations, far more so than individual agency or the examples of exceptionalism that many clamor about when the topic of institutional racism arises. When we think about the history and evolution of race and racism and racial systems in this country, we see that these are not battles conducted one person at a time. Instead, they are waged in large groups along social fronts. The age of Obama doesn’t make us postracial any more than the age of Hillary Clinton (the first female presidential nominee from a major party) makes us postgender.
As a person of color, I know that understanding racial identity is not something that I was born possessing and is not something that only white students and adults need to do. And there is also something about my racial identity as an African American that has forced me — in ways not common to all of my colleagues — to own and respond from my racial/group perspective with an unrelenting, sometimes exhausting, frequency. However, my parents and my community helped me at an early age to understand there is rich history, nobility, and honor in my racial heritage, and I have to talk about it or few others will. As writer and activist Audre Lorde said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
Shift from Values to Skills
We know race is a social construct, not a biological one. As such, it’s part of the group/cultural stage of identity formation and is among the elements that reflect relative power in social, cultural, and organizational systems. It is the systemic nature of racial embedding that is the most challenging for us, particularly the youngest among us, to recognize, unpack, and redesign.
Engendering experiences of understanding, respect, and inclusion is not simply a commitment of personal values; instead, it is more a result of consistently applying personal and collective skills. That is what is so professionally engaging and compelling about my work. As a consultant, I know the shift from values to skills does several things in the effort to form a more perfect union and school community. First, it gives us a framework to avoid mistaking identity for skill and confusing caring for competency. Second, it increases the level of access that we all have to this effort. With good instruction and good practice, we can all increase our skills. (Think back to the last new thing you learned and the successful unfolding of that process for confirmation.) Third, the shift holds all of us accountable and disallows any of us from opting out, believing the work and responsibility belongs somewhere else to someone else.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”In that spirit of the Rio Games, let’s race to sustaining the brilliance and potential of the students and families in your care. Let’s race to holding conversations in your homes and communities about racial identity, racial differences, and racial systems beyond the value propositions of togetherness and harmony. As Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”
Let’s race to confronting racial systems and not just examining racial differences and relations. Let’s race to building and sustaining an independent school community that embraces this compelling and important work. Let’s race to making this next year more significant than the last because this is a point in history that we can’t afford to lose.
When all races run this “race” with skill and perseverance and belief, we will finish… at the top.