A Pernicious Silence: Confronting Race in the Elementary Classroom

Abstract

Glossing over issues of race in classroom or pretending that they don't exist does not accord with what even very young children know to be true. Ms. Polite and Ms. Saenger maintain that it is much healthier for everyone when race can be freely discussed, and they offer suggestions to help teachers overcome their discomfort. TEACHERS often speak about creating classroom communities. Indeed, constructive, developmentally appropriate communities of learning are essential if solid learning is to happen. And, of course, everyone needs to feel comfortable in order to take risks, and learning is built on risk-taking. But teachers may also unwittingly create communities of silence. Communities of cannot be moral communities. And most pernicious and pervasive in primary school classrooms is surrounding subject of race. Where there is not silence, there is often a complacent orthodoxy purporting that, since Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., changed world, everything is just fine. But children are quick to realize that everything isn't just fine. Beneath surface, they are learning rules about what can be acknowledged and what can be discussed. As Beverly Daniel Tatum has written, Children who have been silenced often enough learn not to talk about race publicly. Their questions don't go away, they just go unasked.1 As teachers, one African American and one European American, we offer some specific suggestions for helping fellow teachers become aware of this and begin to it. Honest acknowledgment of realities of children's experience serves to liberate them and allows school communities to become places where all kinds of learning can thrive. In March 2003 Kappan, Donna Marriott vividly relates her own experience in helping to liberate two children.2 Having made presentations on subject at teachers' conferences since 1998, we can attest to continuing importance of addressing this issue. Many studies have shown that even very young children are aware of powerful effects of race in our society or any society. They think about what it means for them to be of African, Asian, European, or Native American ancestry because they need to make sense of their world. They are bombarded with images of race from news and entertainment media, from their families, from their religious and secular communities, and from their classmates. When teachers avoid subject, pretending that it doesn't exist as an issue, or when they portray its existence as merely a fringe issue, they are sending a very strong message. Although this message may be unintentional, result can be stifling. But when teachers find ways to address effects of race in society, we have found that children feel liberated. They begin to trust that the elephant in room may be mentioned. And there is more space for them to focus on all kinds of learning. Ways to break silence are both general and very specific, but they require reflection, courage, and planning. An obvious place to begin is self-education. As Peggy McIntosh famously showed more than a decade ago in her list of privileges of being white, everyone who is white in societies where whites are in majority and in control enjoys myriad benefits that derive from that status alone. For example, if a white person needs to move, she can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in any area that she can afford. She can also be pretty sure that her new neighbors will be neutral or pleasant toward her. A white person can be late to a meeting without having lateness reflect on his race. And white people can consider many different options -- social, political, imaginative, or professional -- without asking whether people of their race would be accepted in those contexts. (Of course, these differences hold true only within a given society. Disparities between industrialized and developing societies just as urgently call for attention in classroom. …