Overview
In this reflection, I describe and experience I had with a student who supported the “Blue Lives Matter” movement to argue for the importance of teaching about White Americans’ past and present violent acts against People of Color.
Reflection
A few weeks back, I came across a collection of dusty, three-ringed binders crowding a cedar chest in my parents’ home. As I flipped through the pages that filled them, each marked in my middle-school handwriting, a U.S. studies quiz titled “My Country” caught my eye. The first question asked, “The United States is a country of_____. “My answer was “immigrants.” There was no red check-mark. I got it right.
Authorship has always been my draw to teaching. In the years since I took that quiz, since I erased the fact that I could call this country “mine” because of colonization, the slaves who built it, and the social construction of Whiteness that never made me question I belonged, I’ve been lucky enough to have teachers who pressed me to consider the impact of the words I reproduce and produce. They showed me my mouth had the power to spin myths and unravel them. However, as I moved closer to the moments that I hoped to be able to join my students in this life-long learning process, the question of “how to do it?” was weighing in my head.
About a year ago, a white student whom I tutored asked me, “why do people get mad when people say ‘Blue Lives Matter’?” On his break, we hopped on the computer. I pulled up statistics about implicit bias and the disproportionate number of black males who are pulled over by the police. The next week, I came with court cases that demonstrated our legal system is operating under the notion that ‘Blue Lives Matter’ the most. And after, he turned to me and said, “I still think they’re overreacting.” It donned on me how difficult accepting new knowledge can be. As Toshalis (2015) notes, “Even when the context around learners compels them to accept something, if the knowledge presents enough conflict with learners’ preexisting understanding, the learner will likely resist.” (p. 65).
I tell this story because I believe that if I had received a red check-mark on that middle school test, I would have reacted like the student I tutored. I tell it because practicing critical literacy gave me the tools to accept the knowledge I sometimes wanted to keep out. I tell it because, as Janks (2014) notes, our schools regularly expect Students of Color to easily access and accept Euro-centric narratives about their country as “high-status school knowledge,” narratives that they know are not true (p. 7). When we privilege only some stories as “knowledge,” we limit the number of people who can hold it.
Grinage (2018) asks “If educators are unwilling to teach about racial violence and U.S. curriculum has largely buried this history, how do we teach students about racism?” (p. 5). It is a good question. I’m not surprised that a third-grader who spent the fourth Wednesday of November eating corn on the school floor with 40 of her white peers—half in paper pilgrim hats and half in paper headdresses—would grow into a seventh-grader who said “the United States is a country of immigrants.” I’m not surprised that a white boy who has seen “everyone’s equal under the law” on his police department’s lawn—month after month with no challenge—would resist conflicting statistics. We need room to accept. We need holes poked in what we know as the inherent and encompassing truth. And, we won’t get there by pretending the “ghosts [of racial violence] do not exist, refusing to acknowledge their presence instead of dealing with their ubiquity” (Grinage, 2018, p. 3).
I tried to give the student I tutored information that challenged the “dominant narratives of American exceptionalism and post-racialism” (Grinage, 2018, p. 5) without ever giving him a chance to see these concepts as breakable, as constructed. To do so would take listening to ghosts (Grinage, 2018) of the Black and Brown bodies that those who identify as White tarnish and continue to tarnish to form their identity. As Grinage (2018) notes, part of this process must include trauma novels that show the roots and results of this violence. These stories allow for what Brehman calls “reading from a resistant perspective” (as cited in Coffey, 2010, p. 6). It gives students opportunities to see our country’s myths from “the viewpoint of the world and not just the common Euro-centric ideology often found in standard texts” (Coffey, 2010, p.6). The motivation to author counter-texts, “narratives…from a non-mainstream perspective” (Coffey, 2010, p.6), comes first from acknowledging that other perspectives exist. Critical literacy is the foundation of conscious authorship. As language is always produced in and shaped by culture, it is the teacher’s job to support a classroom space filled with the tools that students need to create counter-texts.
In my experience being a white student in a predominately white school, I have seen how “depositing” (Freire, 1972) the concepts like Whiteness, White Supremacy, and White Imperialism into the white students’ vocabularies often ends with their resistance of them. They not only conflict too much with what the white students perceive as definite “history” but also their current realities which, to varying degrees, are shaped by the ideas that our country is treating people equally and that, even if it were true, that act would be enough to heal the violence white people perpetuated and continue to perpetuate against People of Color. Trauma narratives are necessary because they allow students to discover how white people made the ground uneven; they add the essential context of “how” to events in our past and present. Trauma narratives are necessary because they acknowledge that Students of Color should not have to accept the myths that their day-to-day experiences prove are untrue as “official knowledge.” They are necessary because oppression is part of the binary-laden language we speak. When students have the opportunity to experience how oppositions are constructed, how two concepts are defined as mutually exclusive by propagating the idea that one inherently “lacks” what the other has, they have the power to deconstruct these notions. They can see how conceptions of White, Western, and male superiority could not exist without creating myths about Black, Eastern, and female inferiority. The use of trauma narratives in the classroom do more than teach students about race; they allow them to discover how all language “bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” (Derrida, 1998, p. 108).
Recently, I have been listening to Scene on Radio’s “Seeing White” podcast. Each episode traces the notion of “Whiteness” to stories from the United States’ past and present, as a means of explaining where it came, what it means, and for whom it works. I am considering how to incorporate these supplemental texts into my curriculum, perhaps as jigsaw activities that allow students to teach each other about histories our schools regularly hide. I am grappling with how to introduce these concepts to white students while also recognizing that Students of Color have a far more advanced understanding of them. In other words, I question how I expose white students to this necessary knowledge without centering the pedagogy around what white students need to know. It is a discussion I hope to have with my co-teachers as I go through the student teaching process.
References:
Coffey, H. (2010). Critical Literacy. Learn NC. Retrieved from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4437?style=print.
Derrida, J. (1988). Structure, sign and play in the discourse of human sciences. In D. Lodge (Ed) Modern criticism and theory: A Reader. (pp. 107-123). London: Longman.
Grinage, J. (2018, February). Socializing with the ghosts of our racial past: Embracing traumatic teaching and learning in literacy education. Journal of Education & Literacy Education, Scholars Speak Out.
Janks, H. (2014). Doing critical literacy. New York: Taylor & Francis
Toshalis, E. (2015). Make me!: Understanding and engaging student resistance in school [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com.
Comments
Quynh Van
Posted on September 22, 2019 at 4:16 pmReply
Hi Ashley,
Wonderful post this week; my mind is still percolating. I’m not sure how to connect all my thoughts, so I’m just going to list them.
– I related to when you stated, “I’m not surprised that a third-grader who spent the fourth Wednesday of November eating corn on the school floor with 40 of her white peers—half in paper pilgrim hats and half in paper headdresses—would grow into a seventh-grader who said ‘the United States is a country of immigrants.’ I’m not surprised that a white boy who has seen ‘everyone’s equal under the law’ on his police department’s lawn—month after month with no challenge—would resist conflicting statistics.” It makes me think of how I often struggle with understanding that people are often the product the of their environment, and not knowing how that understanding or compassion should or should not play into situations when how they’ve been raised leads to my own oppression. Because I feel it’s so important to look at everyone’s narrative, I end up empathizing with almost everyone, even those who have hurt me. I often forget that just because you understand how someone has arrived to where they are, it doesn’t mean they should be condoned or be permitted to continue.
-Thank you for recommending the podcast “Seeing White.” I’ve listened to few stories this weekend and plan to listen to more. It also had me thinking of how most of the texts we are currently using in the program to supplement our education is mainly journal articles or books, and I can’t help but wish a higher variety of mediums were being used.
-Last, when you recounted how your answer was “immigrants” and it was deemed correct, it made me think of what if it had been marked wrong? What would it have meant for a young Ashley to be told by an authoritarian figure that you probably trusted that your answer was wrong? How would that have shaped you? I wonder if we’d be undermining our own expertise as teachers if we explicitly tell students to not always accept our answers and assessments as “right,” “correct,” or “true”? Now that I think of it, I think I’d rather sacrifice perceptions of my expertise if it means pushing my students to think critically and ask questions, even if it’s directed towards me.
Hi Ashley,
Wonderful post this week; my mind is still percolating. I’m not sure how to connect all my thoughts, so I’m just going to list them.
– I related to when you stated, “I’m not surprised that a third-grader who spent the fourth Wednesday of November eating corn on the school floor with 40 of her white peers—half in paper pilgrim hats and half in paper headdresses—would grow into a seventh-grader who said ‘the United States is a country of immigrants.’ I’m not surprised that a white boy who has seen ‘everyone’s equal under the law’ on his police department’s lawn—month after month with no challenge—would resist conflicting statistics.” It makes me think of how I often struggle with understanding that people are often the product the of their environment, and not knowing how that understanding or compassion should or should not play into situations when how they’ve been raised leads to my own oppression. Because I feel it’s so important to look at everyone’s narrative, I end up empathizing with almost everyone, even those who have hurt me. I often forget that just because you understand how someone has arrived to where they are, it doesn’t mean they should be condoned or be permitted to continue.
-Thank you for recommending the podcast “Seeing White.” I’ve listened to few stories this weekend and plan to listen to more. It also had me thinking of how most of the texts we are currently using in the program to supplement our education is mainly journal articles or books, and I can’t help but wish a higher variety of mediums were being used.
-Last, when you recounted how your answer was “immigrants” and it was deemed correct, it made me think of what if it had been marked wrong? What would it have meant for a young Ashley to be told by an authoritarian figure that you probably trusted that your answer was wrong? How would that have shaped you? I wonder if we’d be undermining our own expertise as teachers if we explicitly tell students to not always accept our answers and assessments as “right,” “correct,” or “true”? Now that I think of it, I think I’d rather sacrifice perceptions of my expertise if it means pushing my students to think critically and ask questions, even if it’s directed towards me.