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Understanding how school discipline policies can contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline is essential for educators and families. Harsh punishments, automatic out-of-class time and police involvement for discipline can push young people out of classrooms and into the criminal legal system. But educators, parents and caregivers can help to change this harmful system by advocating for and implementing practices that prioritize mental health and well-being.

We offer this new resource page that highlights LFJ articles and content to open dialogue, shift practices and foster change to benefit all young people.

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Learning for Justice | Education Resources

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Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, WNDB aims to create a world where every reader can find themselves in the pages of a book. To reach this goal, we've created programs to mentor diverse writers and illustrators, support diverse publishing professionals, and provide books to classrooms nationwide.

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Increasing Diversity in Children's Literature, so kids can see themselves and a world of possibility in the books they read

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"I believe in the power of Facing History."

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Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate.

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The Representation Project - Challenging Gender Stereotypes Through Film

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Using film and media as catalysts for cultural transformation, we inspire individuals and communities to challenge limiting gender stereotypes & shift norms

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In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in legal racism—the United States.

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Why the new SAT isn't as transparent as the CollegeBoard wants you to believe

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Why the new SAT isn't as transparent as the CollegeBoard wants you to believe

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Several hundred thousand high school students will take the second administration of the new SAT on May 7. Students who took the first offering on March 5 are still waiting for their scores, which will not be sent to them until later this month.

While the long wait may bother students, there are more significant issues regarding the public's access to critical SAT data. The College Board calls the new SAT "profoundly transparent," but it won't release so-called item-level data - information about how students nationwide fared on particular questions - to the public. In fact, it hasn't released such statistics since 2000. That makes it difficult for the public to scrutinize why certain demographic groups perform so much better on the SAT than others.

On average, we know that boys outscore girls by a few points on the verbal section (recently renamed reading and writing) and by more than 30 points on the math section. We also know that whites outscore blacks and Latinos on verbal (by 98 points and 80 points, respectively) and on math (by 106 points and 76 points, respectively). These gaps have been constant for decades. In recent years, Asian American students have been outscoring white students considerably on math and have reduced their verbal shortfall to a few points - the only gaps to have changed significantly in recent memory.

There are well-known external factors that contribute to these imbalances. Our culture discourages girls from excelling in math, and black and Latino children often attend weaker schools. But what if test design is also to blame?

Education Testing Services, which writes exams for the College Board, pretests all potential questions before finalizing a given SAT. It assumes that a "good" question is one that students who score well overall tend to answer correctly, and vice versa.

That's problematic because, as mentioned, girls score lower than boys on math, and black students score lower than white students. So if, on a particular math question, girls outscore boys or blacks outscore whites, it has almost no chance of making the final cut. This process therefore perpetuates disparities, virtually guaranteeing a test that's ultimately easier for some populations than others.

ETS does have a system for ensuring that, in its words, "examinees of comparable achievement levels respond similarly" to each question, called Differential Item Functioning. Basically, ETS separates students according to performance - those who scored in the 200s in one group, those who scored in the 400s in another. If, within those groups, boys do far better on a given question than girls, or white students surpass black students, then ETS eliminates it.

See the shortcoming? "Achievement level" is a euphemism for performance on the SAT; there's no external metric. In order to believe DIF results in a test that's fair to everyone, you have to believe the test is fair to everyone.

But evidence from the last time the College Board released item-level data gives me reason to doubt that's the case.

Below are two SAT math questions from the same October 2000 test - the most recent test for which item-level data are publicly available. The questions were equally difficult; each was answered correctly by only 45% of test takers. Only the first, however, produced dramatically inequitable results in terms of race and gender.

1) When a coin is tossed in an experiment, the result is either a head or a tail. A head is given a point value of 1 and a tail is given a point value of -1. If the sum of the point values after 50 tosses is 14, how many of the tosses must have resulted in heads?

(A) 14 (B) 18 (C) 32 (D) 36 (E) 39

2) The sum of five consecutive whole numbers is less than 25. One of the numbers is 6. Which of the following is the greatest of the consecutive numbers?

(A) 6 (B) 7 (C) 8 (D) 9 (E) 10

More than half of boys, 55%, answered the first question correctly (by choosing C), but only 37 % of girls did. Similarly, 47% of whites answered correctly, but only 24% of blacks did. That's what I call a question with two "large skews."

On question 2, 49% of boys and 41% of girls answered correctly (by choosing A). That's what I call a "medium skew." Meanwhile 45% of whites and 35% of blacks answered it correctly. Roughly 7,000 more girls and 4,000 more black students picked the correct answer compared to the coin-toss question. (Remember, the questions were of equal difficulty overall.)

In all, 13 of the 60 math questions on the October 2000 test had large skews favoring boys over girls, and 22 of 60 had large skews favoring whites over blacks.

It's not just item-level data that the College Board keeps from the public; it also rarely releases combined family income and race/ethnicity data.

I can't prove definitively that large-skew questions have appeared on the SAT in the years since the October 2000 test - because the data are not public. If ETS had eliminated them, however, we'd probably have seen at least a small change in girls' and black students' scores relative to boys' and white students' scores. We haven't.

In my experience, most folks who are not psychometricians (those constructing bubble tests) consider large-skew questions unfair; that's particularly true when they are shown other questions of similar overall difficulty that have smaller skews. Reasonable people can disagree on that point, or might object that a few large-skew questions on a long test don't really matter. If there were no large-skew questions, disparities wouldn't disappear entirely overnight. But why not release the data so we can have an open conversation?

And it's not just item-level data that the College Board keep from the public; it also rarely releases combined family income and race/ethnicity data that would allow researchers to make comparisons such as how high-income black students' average math scores compare to those of low-income white students.

One might assume that affluent students of all races/ethnicities score higher than all low-income students. But the last time the College Board released such data, in a 2001 report, that wasn't the case. On the math section, black students in the highest income group scored, on average, lower than white students in the lowest income group. Again, without transparency it's difficult to identify the cause of this troubling disparity so that we can address the problem.

(The ACT, the other national college admissions test and the SAT's competitor, has never publicly released either item-level data or combined income and race/ethnicity data; however, its overall group score gaps closely parallel those of the SAT, and it uses the same test construction methods.)

SAT scores matter: College admissions officers still weigh them heavily in making their decisions. Undoubtedly, there are many reasons behind persistent SAT achievement gaps, and the College Board insists that test design is not to blame. But what's the harm in transparency so we don't have to take the College Board at its word?

Jay Rosner is the executive director of The Princeton Review Foundation. He took the June 6 and Jan. 23 SATs.

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Why the new SAT isn't as transparent as the College Board wants you to believe

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Several hundred thousand high school students will take the second administration of the new SAT on May 7. Students who took the first offering on March 5 are still waiting for their scores, which will not be sent to them until later this month.

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A dangerous idea has threatened the American Dream from the beginning - the belief that some groups and individuals are inherently superior to others and more deserving of fundamental rights. Such biological determinism provided an excuse for some of America's most shameful history. And now it's back.

The documentary A DANGEROUS IDEA reveals how biologically determined politics has disenfranchised women and people of color, provided a rationale for state sanctioned crimes committed against America's most vulnerable citizens, and now gains new traction under the Trump administration.

Featuring interviews with social thinkers such as Van Jones and Robert Reich, as well as prominent scientists, A DANGEROUS IDEA is a radical reassessment of the meaning, use and misuse of gene science. Like no other film before it, this documentary brings to light how false scientific claims have rolled back long fought for gains in equality, and how powerful interests are poised once again to use the gene myth to unravel the American Dream.

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A DANGEROUS IDEA | Eugenics, Genetics and the American Dream

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A dangerous idea has threatened the American Dream from the beginning - the belief that some groups and individuals are inherently superior to others and more deserving of fundamental rights. Such biological determinism provided an excuse for some of America's most shameful history. And now it's back.

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Beyond Prejudice: The (Cultural) Psychology of Racism in Education by Glenn Adams

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Beyond Prejudice: The (Cultural) Psychology of Racism in Education by Glenn Adams

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Glenn Adams is Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Cultural Psychology Research Group, and Faculty Associate Director of the Kansas African Studies Center at the University of Kansas. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone before completing his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Stanford University. His graduate training included two years of field research in Ghana, which provided the empirical foundation for his research on cultural-psychological foundations of relationship. His current work builds on this foundation in an attempt to decolonize knowledge production in psychological science and to articulate models of human development that promote sustainable ways of being and social justice for broader humanity. An enduring interest is development of a globally relevant psychology. Drawing on the theoretical perspective of cultural psychology, one sense of "globally relevant psychology" is a more position-conscious science that not only transcends the cultural imperialism of mainstream psychology, but also illuminates the socio-historical foundations of mind. Drawing upon the theoretical perspective of liberation psychology, another sense of "globally relevant psychology" refers to a science that addresses the concerns of humanity in general-how to maintain a peaceful, secure and viable existence in the context of uncertainty, economic and political violence and material scarcity-rather than the more self-indulgent concerns of a highly particular subset of people in situations of unprecedented material abundance.
If you did a survey of Americans and asked them about the extent of racism in American society, then you would likely find that White respondents perceive far less racism than do people from the "Other" ethnic/racial groups that European settlers have historically dominated. Alternatively stated, White folks are more likely than peoples they have historically dominated to believe that American society and its mainstream institutions are colorblind or race-neutral. What accounts for this difference?

For one thing, research suggests that White folks believe in the colorblind neutrality of American society because they are motivated to deny the extent of racism. The idea that American society and mainstream institutions harbor elements of racism is threatening to the American ideology of "liberty and justice for all" that students recite daily when pledging allegiance to the flag. Many White folks (including myself) would rather not think that the institutions from which we disproportionately benefit are racist, so we interpret ambiguous events in a way that allows us to avoid such troubling thoughts.

However, even if people could put aside identity motivations and consider evidence in unbiased fashion, some of the group difference in perception of racism would remain because the ideas and practices that inform mainstream American institutions-especially those, like the education system, that bear the strong influence of White sensibilities-are themselves biased. An important idea in this regard is what philosopher Charles Mills has referred to as "epistemologies of ignorance".[1] Although we often think of ignorance as the absence of knowledge (and we imagine that the job of educators is to fill that absence), it may be more productive to think of ignorance as a kind of knowledge: specifically, ideas that promote inability to recognize things-like racism in U.S. society-that might otherwise be obvious.
Historical Knowledge as a Tool for Ignorance (or Liberation)
What are examples of knowledge that make possible the belief in the colorblind fairness of U.S. society? One broad category that Prof. Mills notes is understandings of history. In several investigations of the relationship between historical knowledge and awareness of racism, my collaborators and I have observed the following:

Knowledge environments vary across communities. Official accounts of history in mainstream American institutions tend to provide a sanitized or white-washed story that downplays or obscures the legacy of racist violence in American society. In contrast, education materials associated with communities that have experienced domination (e.g., African Americans, Latin@s, Indigenous Peoples) tend to be more open about the reality of past racism.

Variation in knowledge environments is not accidental. White Americans and people who are high in American identification dislike and "edit out" education materials that highlight the history of racist violence in American society.

Ignorance about past racism is associated with beliefs about the colorblind fairness of American society. As a result of variation in exposure to different knowledge environments, ignorance about past racism is greater among White Americans than among racially dominated others, and this difference in knowledge/ignorance accounts for differences in beliefs about the colorblind neutrality of American society.

... and therefore with variation in support for social justice policies. In turn, faith about the colorblind neutrality of American society promotes the sense that policies designed to counteract racist injustice are no longer necessary. [2]

Together, these studies reveal how the celebratory understandings of history that dominate mainstream American institutions promote ignorance about the racial violence that has defined American society. These studies also suggest how forms of knowledge in marginalized communities admit greater recognition for the defining role of racist violence in American history, promote greater awareness of the potential for racism in the present, and thereby lead people to express stronger support for policies designed to promote racial justice.
Beyond Prejudice: Dismantling Structures of Domination
Another important idea that promotes beliefs about the colorblind fairness of American society concerns the definition of racism. Mainstream institutions typically portray racism in terms of a "prejudice problematic":[3] that is, a matter of individual bigotry rather than a broader system of oppression. This portrayal not only resonates with White American experience (i.e., a "perpetrator perspective" on racism[4]), but also has a number of important consequences that reproduce faith in the colorblind fairness of American society. With respect to perception, the prejudice problematic leads people to understand racism as a relatively limited problem of individual bias rather than a broad problem of enduring systemic injustice. With respect to action, the prejudice problematic channels anti-racism efforts into changing individual hearts and minds while leaving intact the systemic oppression through which a privileged few benefit at the expense of an impoverished majority of humanity.

In contrast to the prejudice problematic, a cultural psychology approach locates the foundations of racism beyond individual bias in the structure of everyday worlds. This perspective suggests that the important place to look for racism in education is not the prejudices of people who operate the education system, but instead in the practices and ideas that define mainstream educational institutions regardless of individual prejudices. Rather than unbiased or "natural" standards, mainstream practices and ideas-including celebratory representations of history, emphases on multicultural tolerance (versus social justice), or ideas about intelligence and merit-not only bear the understandings and desires of people who wield power, but also direct subsequent action in ways that reproduce domination.

To illuminate the implications of this perspective, consider a teacher who uses readily available mainstream artifacts (i.e., with an emphasis on tolerance and celebration of diversity) to produce a display for Black History Month. The teacher may genuinely intend for this display to promote antiracist action and social justice. However, to the extent that the products she deposits into the classroom resonate with the prejudice problematic (and remain silent about the enduring history of racist violence that characterizes U.S. society), they may reflect and promote a quite different purpose. Specifically, a cultural psychology perspective suggests that these products are likely to arise and persist because they are compatible with dominant beliefs and desires, afford ignorance about the extent of racism in U.S. society, and reduce support for urgent measures to address ongoing racism and injustice. Rather than changing hearts and minds to make people more tolerant or less prejudiced, a cultural psychology perspective suggests that a more effective strategy for antiracism education is to draw on marginalized forms of knowledge[5] both to dismantle the epistemologies of ignorance that afford inaction about racism and to develop conceptual tools that better afford antiracist action. Indeed, a cultural psychology analysis suggests that this strategy may be especially appropriate among people, like the teacher in this example, who genuinely strive to promote social justice, but who unwitting draw upon conceptual tools that are suboptimal (or even counterproductive) for that purpose.
References
Adams, G. (2012). Context in person, person in context: A cultural psychology approach to social-personality psychology. In K. Deaux and M. Snyder (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology (pp. 182-208). New York: Oxford University Press.

Adams, G., Biernat, M., Branscombe, N. R., Crandall, C. S., & Wrightsman, L. S. (2008). Beyond prejudice: Toward a sociocultural psychology of racism and oppression.. In G. Adams, M. Biernat, N. R. Branscombe, C. S. Crandall, & L. S. Wrightsman (Eds.), Commemorating Brown: The social psychology of racism and discrimination (pp. 215-246) . Washington, DC: APA Books.

Adams, G., Edkins, V.*, Lacka, D.**, Pickett, K.*, & Cheryan, S. (2008). Teaching about racism: Pernicious implications of the standard portrayal. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 30, 349-361.

Adams, G., Thomas Tormala, T., & O'Brien, L. T. (2006). The effect of self-affirmation on perceptions of racism. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 616-626.

Croizet, J.-С. (2008). The pernicious relationship between merit assessment and discrimination in education. In G. Adams, M. Biernat, N. R. Branscombe, С. S. Crandall, & L. S. Wrightman, Eds.), Commemorating Brown: The social psychology of racism and discrimination (pp. 153-172). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Croizet, J. C. (2010). The racism of intelligence: How mental testing practices have constituted an institutionalized form of group domination. In H. L. Gates. (Ed.), Handbook of African American citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeman, A.D. (1978). Legitimizing racial discrimination through antidiscrimination law: A critical review of Supreme Court doctrine, Minnesota Law Review, 62.

Kurtiş, T., Adams, G., & Yellow Bird, M. (2010). Generosity or genocide? Identity implications of silence in American Thanksgiving celebrations. Memory, 18(2), 208-224.

Mills, C.W. (2007) White Ignorance. In S. Sullivan and N. Tuana, eds. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (pp. 13-38 Albany, NY: SUNY Press .

Mukherjee, S., Molina, L. E. and Adams, G. (2013). "Reasonable suspicion" about tough immigration legislation: Enforcing laws or ethnocentric exclusion? Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 19(3), 320-331.

Nelson, J.C., Adams, G., & Salter, P.S. (2013). The Marley Hypothesis: Racism denial reflects ignorance of history. Psychological Science,24(2), 213-218.

O'Brien, L.T., Blodorn, A., Alsbrooks, A., Dube, R., Adams, G., & Nelson, J.C. (2009). Understanding White Americans' perceptions of racism in Hurricane Katrina-related events. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 12(4), 431-444.

Wetherell, M. & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press.

[3] See Wetherell & Potter (1992)

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Beyond Prejudice: The (Cultural) Psychology of Racism in Education by Glenn Adams - Equity Alliance

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Glenn Adams is Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Cultural Psychology Research Group, and Faculty Associate Director of the Kansas African Studies Center at the University of Kansas. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone before completing his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Stanford University.

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Teachers Throwing Out Grades (TTOG) is a global group of people dedicated to eliminating traditional grades and making learning a conversation that involves education's most important shareholders --...

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Workshops

In many ways, the racial injustice being highlighted at this time in history is not new. What IS new is the way racial justice is now being covered by the mainstream media and discussed in just about every forum. Students are looking to their teachers to help navigate and make sense of what they are seeing. In our workshops, we help educators develop the knowledge and skills to support students in this process - and to work with colleagues in developing inclusive, antiracist curricula and school communities.

Some of our newest workshops include:

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In many ways, the racial injustice being highlighted at this time in history is not new. What IS new is the way racial justice is now being covered by the mainstream media and discussed in just about every forum. Students are looking to their teachers to help navigate and make sense of what they are seeing.

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Eastern Educational Resource Collaborative’s (East Ed’s) mission is to serve as a resource fo schools, colleges, families and agencies.

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What If Being Called "Racist" Is the Beginning, Not the End, of the Conversation, by E Denevi

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What If Being Called "Racist" Is the Beginning, Not the End, of the Conversation, by E Denevi

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By Elizabeth Denevi

Editor's Note: The following is an edited version of a chapter from The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys, a collection of essays curated by Eddie Moore, Ali Michael, and Marguerite W. Penick-Parks (Corwin, 2017) It is posted here with permission of the author.

In the mid-1990s, as a young white teacher with a few years under my belt. I took a long-term substitute position because a teacher had quit and the school needed someone right away. The high school class had been meeting for a few weeks, and had just read a short story by William Faulkner. On my first day, I jumped right in. I opened the class by asking what the students' reactions were to the story so I could get a sense of where the students were in their analysis of the form.

There were three black boys in the class. One raised his hand and said, "I'm tired of reading books with the N-word in them. For my entire life in school, I've had to read this word over and over. It's not right, and I'm not going to discuss it anymore." He and the other two black students got up and left.

What would you do?

I doubled-down. I thought, "Ah, these boys don't understand why it's important that we look at 'authentic' texts in English class. We cannot scrub the text of the original language. We must consider the historical context and teach the work of literature as an artifact of its time, and certainly, Faulkner's time in the South." Blah, blah, blah. I brought in articles the next day for the students to read so that I could prove to them why it was important to talk about the N-word in English class.

I can sense your groan and/or gasp of breath. I feel it now as I write. I still get goosebumps when I tell the story, evoking the racial stress that still lives in my body.

What did those well-educated, young black boys do? They got up and left the class again. Good for them. They were demonstrating a healthy resistance to racism that I could neither see nor understand.

As for me, I kept right on going. Eventually, the students came back to the class, and we muddled through. I never discussed this incident with them. What I would give for a time machine so I could go back and try to see the incident again more clearly. Twenty years later, the details are fuzzy. But I have never forgotten those young men and what I learned from them.

The socio-cultural aspect of that classroom was invisible to me; I had no understanding of the "cumulative effect" of hearing these slurs in the classroom over and over. For me, it was an intellectual exercise. For these young men, it was an assault on their very being.

While I now know that the greatest predictor of academic success is the teacher's expectation, I had not established any kind of relationship with these young men; thus, my explicit/implicit bias and privilege were in play. I still shudder at the power I had, but of which I had no sense. How terrifying, right? And how common. I bet there are a lot of white educators out there who could tell a similar story. And that's what makes it all so systemic and illusory. White cultural bias and privilege was just the water I was swimming in at the time.

Here's my second example:

A few years later, I was sitting in a parent-teacher conference. A black mom sat across the table from me as we discussed her son. By this time, I had been through a master's program and had been asked to join a diversity committee. I considered myself a "good" white person, now "thinking" about racism (it was still an intellectual exercise for me). So I was particularly troubled by this young black boy who "was not living up to his potential." I felt that he could do more, but he was not. I expressed my oh-so condescending concern as, "Look at all I'm doing. Why won't your son meet me halfway?" - a sentiment I have felt and heard in schools more times than I can count.

This mom looked at me and said in a calm voice, "I think you're being racist toward my son."

And what did I do? I doubled-down again. I proceeded to explain to this mom all the ways that I certainly was not racist, how much I had worked with her son, given him extra time. I had not written him off as so many other teachers had done, telling me that I shouldn't waste my time with him. Couldn't she see how "good" I was? I defended myself, and my whiteness, just as I had been taught to do by centuries of white superiority and white silence on this topic.

Are you cringing again? Years later, I shudder when I recall this conversation. But I do so - and do so publicly - because it brings me to the central question of this article: What if being called "racist" was the beginning, not the end, of the conversation? What if, instead of offering a ranting defensive of my intentions, I had taken this mom at her word? What if I considered that she might know her son's experience better than I did? What if I had owned the outcome of my behavior and considered with her how my work with her son was perpetuating racial stereotypes and prejudice? Do you think that might have impacted her son's experience in my class? In the school? Do you think it would have made me a better teacher?

Here's what I wish I had known before I started teaching, and what I now try to communicate to all teachers. I want other white women educators to know:

that they are white;

that being white matters - because, as Parker Palmer notes, "We teach who we are";

that their students see race either implicitly or explicitly; and

that our failure to locate ourselves as white and to talk about what that standpoint/position means is doing more harm than good - for our students of color and our white students.

When I first learned that I was white - and I mean really white, not just the abstract concept that I was white with no awareness of my complicity in a system of unequal power - I was angry.*

And I was obnoxious about it. My husband often calls me the "white tornado," but a bulldozer metaphor works as well. I was going to solve the problem of racism once and for all - a mindset, of course, that also reflects the arrogance embedded in white privilege. The hardest piece for me was getting over being colorblind. I had been carefully taught not to see race or comment on it. It was a huge shift for me to even use the term "students of color" because for me to see and notice race meant, in my mind, that I was "racist." For me to have identified as really white felt tantamount to saying I was a KKK member. I had no examples of white people who had worked for social justice. I had no idea that, for as long as there was slavery in the U.S., there were white people working to end it. Nobody taught me about those people.

In time, I would learn. In particular, I have been profoundly impacted by the research of John Dovidio and his work to illuminate "aversive racism." He clearly explains why being colorblind is so pernicious:

When Whites attempt to be colorblind, they tend to be self-focused and more oriented toward monitoring their own performance than toward learning about the particular needs and concerns of the person of color with whom they are interacting. In interracial interactions, this will impair the ability of people (particularly less explicitly prejudiced individuals) to engage in intimacy-building behaviors (Dovidio, 2016).

Those "intimacy-building" behaviors are what lead to strong, connected relationships in schools and to academic success. When we are worried about what we might say or that we might be called "racist," we're not paying proper attention to our students of color or helping our white students understand the ways in which they are racialized. Thus, we are not grounding our teaching in who they are, what they know, and what they bring to the table. And when we're not doing that, we're not being excellent teachers.

Along the way, there have been additional critical points of learning:

Difference as Difference, not Deficit: The noticing of race is not racism. To understand that my students of color have a different experience is just that - different. Their experience is not a representation of deficit culture (see Luis Moll).

Diversity vs. Multiculturalism: While "diversity" is quantitative, meaning it speaks to differences that can be measured and counted, "multiculturalism" speaks to the quality of life that diversity leads in a school. These two terms are related and connected, but they are not synonyms. White teachers need to not only think about representation, but also consider classroom climate and culture.

Equality vs. Equity: "Equality" means giving all students the same thing. "Equity" mandates that we give each student what she or he needs to be successful at school. Equity pedagogy signals that the playing field is not equal, thus including elements of power and privilege in our analysis of what students need (my gratitude to Paul Gorski, writer, educator and founder of EdChange, for holding our feet to the fire on this topic).

Safety vs. Comfort: White folks will often complain that they feel "unsafe" during conversations related to race when what they are generally referring to is a feeling of discomfort. We have to be willing to wade into this topic with our white colleagues as this "complaint" usually goes unchallenged in white circles. (See Robin DiAngelo's research for an excellent analysis of "white fragility" around topics of race.)

Intent vs. Impact: While I cannot crawl inside your head and know your intentions, I can see, hear, and feel the outcome of your behavior. If we spent even half as much time owning and dealing with the outcomes of our behaviors as we do defending our intentions, we might actually create classrooms that are equitable.

I am deeply indebted to a whole host of white educators who have dedicated their careers to illuminating whiteness and the inequities created by racism. We have inherited a carefully crafted structure by which white people avoid, ignore, challenge, and collude in any way possible to avoid being seen as "racist" - better known as the "Scarlet R." This kind of "white talk," as writer and educator Alice McIntyre describes, keeps white teachers from learning why our awareness of our own white identity is so critical to being excellent teachers.

I'm also grateful to the educators of color with whom I've had the privilege to teach alongside of, learn from, and speak with.In particular, I'm grateful to Randolph Carter, an inspiring black male educator and father of two black boys, who first asked the question that serves as the title for this article.

And speaking of titles, at first, I struggled with the title of the book in which this essay first appeared. I wanted it to be "The Guide for White Women Who Teach." Yet, if the three contributing editors had not posed their preferred title, "The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys," I might not have remembered those black boys I mis-taught. If white women can learn how whiteness impacts their teaching, it will certainly benefit black boys. But most important, it will allow white women to be excellent teachers for all students. It will allow them to be educators who are wise to the fact that racial identity has, and will probably always, impact teaching and learning in profound ways.
Elizabeth Denevi is the cofounder of Teaching While White and the Associate Director for Mid-West Educational Collaborative, a nonprofit agency that works with schools nationally to increase equity, promote diversity pedagogy, and implement strategic processes for growth and development.
* This happened while I was reading four authors: Beverly Daniel Tatum, Janet Helms, Ruth Frankenberg, and Peggy McIntosh.

ACTIVITY:

To better get at what it really means to be white, take this challenge. For one week, try to include people's racial identity each time you use their name. For example, "I had lunch with Ali, my white friend, and we..." Watch how people react. I couldn't make it through seven days. By Day 4, white people (not people of color) were so challenging, I gave up. What would it mean to make it seven days? 30? A year?

References:

Elizabeth Denevi & Mariama Richards, "Diversity Directors as Leaders: Making the Case for Excellence," Independent School (2009).

Elizabeth Denevi & Nicholas Pastan, "Helping Whites Develop Anti-Racist Identities: Overcoming Their Resistance to Fighting Racism," Multicultural Education (2006).

Elizabeth Denevi, "White on White: Exploring White Racial Identity, Privilege, and Racism," Independent School (2004).

E. Denevi, "Whiteness: Helping White Students and Educators Understand Their Role in a Multicultural Society," Independent School (2001).

Robin DiAngelo. "White Fragility," International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol. 3 (3) (2011).

John Dovidio, et. al. "Included but Invisible? Subtle Bias, Common Identity, and the Darker Side of 'We,'" Social Issues and Policy Review. Vol. 10, Issue 1 (2016).

Ruth Frankenberg. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1993).

Paul Gorski. Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty. New York: Teachers College Press (2013).

Janet Helms. A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life. Content Communications (1992).

Peggy McIntosh. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies. Wellesley, MA: Center for Research on Women (1998).

Alice McIntyre. Making Meaning of Whiteness. Albany: State University of New York Press (1997).

Luis Moll, et al, Ed. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms. New York: Routledge (2005).

Parker Palmer. The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers (1998).

Howard Stevenson. Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools. New York: Teachers College Press (2013).

Beverly Daniel Tatum. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Basic Books (1997).

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What If Being Called a "Racist" Is the Beginning, Not the End, of the Conversation? Learning What It Really Means to Be a White Teacher

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By Elizabeth Denevi Editor's Note: The following is an edited version of a chapter from The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black Boys , a collection of essays curated by Eddie Moore, Ali Michael, and Marguerite W. Penick-Parks (Corwin, 2017) It is posted here with perm

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Science pushes back against the century-old notion that X equals girl and Y equals boy, and wonders: are we who we think we are?

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This text and the language in the corresponding map was updated in consultation with a world gender expert* in October, 2023. NOTE to teachers and students: Some school or corporate domains block custom Google Maps so you may need to log in under a different or personal email address to see the map.
Throughout recorded history and since time immemorial, thriving cultures have recognized, revered, and integrated more than two genders. Terms such as transgender, gay, or bisexual are Western constructs that often assume three things: that there are only two sexes (male/female), as many as three sexualities (gay/straight/bisexual), and only two genders (man/woman).

Even after the end of the modern era and as the colonial period wanes, hundreds of distinct Indigenous societies around the globe still retain their own long-established traditions for third, fourth, fifth, or more genders. The subject of Two Spirits , Fred Martinez, for example, was not a boy who wanted to be a girl, but both a boy and a girl-an identity his Navajo culture recognized and revered as Meanwhile, Hina of Kumu Hina is part of a native Hawaiian culture that has traditionally revered and respected , those who embody both male and female spirit. It's not uncommon for third gender people to perform critical spiritual and religious functions in their communities.

Among many Indigenous societies, two prominent features often distinguish the lives and social roles of third gender persons from those of cisgender persons or contemporary transgender persons in non-Indigenous societies. The first is that many Indigenous terms for third gender people contain both the word for "man" and "woman" in their construction, and that third gender people are seen as embodying both of those genders in diverse ways. The second is that the history of many third genders is in the community role of religious specialists, which also takes diverse forms, depending on the beliefs of diverse cultures. While not all third gender persons are defined in these terms, across our species, this phenomenon of the third gender religious specialist, healer, or spiritual worker has been part of our collective identity and human experience since time immemorial. Since the beginning of the 21st century, we've seen tremendous expansion of the role that transgender, gender diverse, and third gender people have in society, following the tenuous establishment of civil rights for gay and lesbian people in many nations and increased access to gender-affirming care in the transgender community. Many Indigenous transgender people who also identify as third gender are familiar to large audiences via their participation in popular media or social media activism. Third gender people, like the Japanese-Samoan, fa'afafine artist Yuki Kihara , now participate in major global cultural events and function not just as representatives of their gender-based community, but of their nation. Kihara had both a solo exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and represented New Zealand at the 2021 Venice Biennale. [For more: "LGBTQIA+ Pride and Two-Spirit People" in Smithsonian Voices.]

In the 21st century, many third gender people choose to take advantage of gender-affirming care, and identify, in addition to being third gender, as transgender. As access to gender-affirming care parallels healthcare access, and both third gender and Indigenous persons are often marginalized economically, it is not as readily available to many Indigenous transgender people, and within Indigenous cultures, medical transition is often seen as separate or secondary to social transition.

Within Western societies, despite centuries of suppression, there are still traces of a past when third or fourth or more genders were recognized within many cultures and societies. In rare cases, they presently exist. An example of this would be the of Albania, women who give up their social role as women to live as men. Likewise, within Jewish culture and law, as many as eight genders have been historically recognized, and in diverse ways. Take a tour with this world map, and learn how many cultures see gender diversity.
*Note: The 2023 update for this text and the map was made in consultation with Badly Licked Bear, Some school or corporate domains block custom Google Maps so you may need to log in under a different or personal e-mail address to see the map. an educator, writer, artist, and mutual aid worker. They are a storyteller who teaches storytelling by storytelling and they tell circle-shaped stories. Their work is rooted in shifting identity, Looney Tunes, BDSM, deep observation, and their lived experience as an Indigiqueer transfemme.
Explore the map

More Sources and Further Reading:

Britannica: Six Cultures That Recognize More Than Two Genders

Library of Congress Research Guide: Native American and Indigenous People LGBTQIA+ Studies

LA Times: " The muxe, Mexico's 'third gender,' are part of a worldwide LGBTQ+ movement "

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On nearly every continent, and for all of recorded history, thriving cultures have recognized, revered, and integrated more than two genders.

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The Racial Empowerment Collaborative (REC) is a research, program development, and training center that brings together community leaders, researchers, authority figures, families, and youth to study and promote racial literacy and health in schools and neighborhoods.

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A History of Racial Injustice Daily Calendar

Learn more about our nation's history of racial injustice by reading our online calendar, which features a different historical event each day.

Visit calendar website

Visit EJI's Legacy Sites in Montgomery

Support

EJI is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the U.S., challenging racial and economic injustice, and protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society. We've earned a perfect score from Charity Navigator.

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EJI works to end mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial inequality.

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Do Early Educators’ Implicit Biases Regarding Sex and RaceRelate to Behavior Expectations and Recommendations of Preschool Expulsions and Suspensions?

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Do Early Educators’ Implicit Biases Regarding Sex and RaceRelate to Behavior Expectations and Recommendations of Preschool Expulsions and Suspensions?

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Pre-Kindergartners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Pre-kindergarten Programs

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Pre-Kindergartners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Pre-kindergarten Programs

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Pre-K students are expelled at a rate more than three times that of children in grades K-12, according to a primary study by Yale Child Study Center researcher Walter S. Gilliam. The lowest rates of expulsion were reported by teachers who had an ongoing, regular relationship with a behavioral consultant. In classrooms where the teacher had no access to a behavioral consultant, students were expelled about twice as frequently. The study reports on expulsion rates by program setting gender, race/ethnicity and state.

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Pre-Kindergartners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Pre-kindergarten Programs - Foundation For Child Development

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Pre-K students are expelled at a rate more than three times that of children in grades K-12, according to a primary study by Yale Child Study Center researcher Walter S. Gilliam. The lowest rates of expulsion were reported by teachers who had an ongoing, regular relationship with a behavioral consultant.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it's an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of "whiteness" come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels ne

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David R. Williams: How racism makes us sick

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Why does race matter so profoundly for health? David R. Williams developed a scale to measure the impact of discrimination on well-being, going beyond traditional measures like income and education to reveal how factors like implicit bias, residential segregation and negative stereotypes create and sustain inequality.

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Who Am I? (Lesson plan for 6th Grade Social Studies)

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Who Am I? (Lesson plan for 6th Grade Social Studies)

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Students will be able to define the word identity

Students will be able to identify various factors that shape their identity

This lesson is part of the unit Identity & Community: An Introduction to 6th Grade Social Studies

"Who am I?" is a question we all ask at some time in our lives. It is an especially critical question for adolescents. As we search for answers we begin to define ourselves. How is our identity formed? To what extent are we defined by our talents and interests? by our membership in a particular ethnic group? by our social and economic class? by our religion by the nation in which we live? How do we label ourselves and how are we labeled by others? How are our identities influenced by how we think others see us? How do our identities inform our values, ideas, and actions? In what ways might we assume different identities in different contexts? How do we manage multiple identities? Answers to these questions help us understand history, ourselves, and each other.

As students study world history, they will explore how individuals and groups over time and across continents have answered questions about identity. They will learn that many of the same factors that influence their identities-factors such as religion, gender, and geography-also shaped the identities of the ancient Greeks, the Mayans, and the Chinese. Thus, this lesson establishes an important social studies theme that will resonate throughout the year.

At the same time, beginning the year by having students examine and share their own identities is a way to build relationships in your class. When sixth grade students begin a new school year, often with unfamiliar classmates and teachers, it is particularly important for them to have the opportunity to get to know their new community and to become known by others. The activities suggested in this lesson begin this process of relationship building.

Reading: "My Name" by Sandra Cisneros
Warm-up
When students begin a new school year they may hold contradictory feelings. On one hand, they may think they know a lot about their classmates just by looking at them. They may have formed judgments about who will (or will not) be their friends based on the clothes people wear or how they speak. On the other hand, students may feel they are in the company of strangers; they may feel that nobody really knows them and that they don't really know their classmates. To help students push beyond judging their peers based on simple stereotypes, you can have them participate in a "How well do we know each other?" activity.

First, distribute an index card to each student. Ask students to write one little-known fact about themselves on this card. It should be something that people could not know just by looking at them. Their names should not appear on the cards. Then collect the cards.

Read a card and ask the class to guess who the fact describes. You might read several cards at the beginning of each class period throughout this unit. Through this activity students often learn that they have something in common with a classmate or they learn something interesting about someone that might otherwise have taken all year to discover.
Main activity
In the next several lessons, students will focus on the concept of identity. Write the word identity on the board and ask for volunteers to share their thoughts on what it means. Or
you can share this definition with students: Identity is the answer to the question, "Who am I?" The fact students wrote on their index cards in the warm-up activity represents one part of students' answer to this question.

Next, distribute copies of "My Name," a chapter from Sandra Cisneros's book The House on Mango Street. In this excerpt a young girl, Esperanza, reflects on her name. In the process she reveals information about her identity-how she perceives herself, what she values, where her family is from, and so on. Ask student volunteers to read a paragraph of this excerpt to the class. As the text is read aloud, students can underline any words or phrases that give them information about how Esperanza would answer the question, "Who am I?"

In small groups, have students create an identity chart for Esperanza. The diagram on the next page is an example of an identity chart. Students can begin with the words orphrases they underlined in the passage that represent how Esperanza defines her identity.

You can also provide groups with some questions to guide them:

Who is in Esperanza's family?

Where is her family from?

What languages does she speak?

What does she hope for her future?

What does she think about her name? What does this reveal about her personality?

Alternatively, you can create Esperanza's identity chart as a whole class activity.
Curriculum connection: Students can create identity charts for historical figures as well as for civilizations and nation-states. For example, have students create identity charts for Athens and Sparta or for Montezuma or Siddhartha.
The purpose of reading "My Name" is to help students think about the various factors that shape our identities. However, the text also introduces other interesting themes such as the concepts of stereotypes and prejudice. Later in this unit, students will have the opportunity to address questions such as, "How do we perceive and judge others?" and "How does it feel to be labeled?" For now, you can frame questions about the way Esperanza describes Mexicans, Chinese, and women in terms of what this says about her own beliefs and experiences.
Follow-through
Now students can create identity charts for themselves. Before beginning this activity, ask students to brainstorm a list of categories people use to help define themselves such as gender, age, physical characteristics, and hobbies as well as ties to a particular religion, ethnic group, neighborhood, and nation. Explain to students that they will be sharing their identity charts with the class so they should be cautious about including information that they want to remain private. In the next few lessons, students will have the opportunity to think more deeply about their own identities. As they gain a deeper understanding of identity, they will add to their identity charts. Their identity charts willalso serve as useful prewriting tools for future assignments such as students' biopoems.
Teaching note: In preparation for this class, you may want to create your own identity chart. Not only will this model the assignment for students but it also provides a way for students to get to know you. Throughout this unit there are opportunities for you to work alongside the students to reinforce the idea that you are a member of their classroom community too. Homework

1. Students can complete their identity charts for homework. You could also ask students to write a brief journal entry about their identity charts. Here is a prompt to help structure students' reflections:
Look over your identity chart. What aspects of your identity are most important to you? Select one characteristic from your identity chart and write about why it is an important part of defining who you are.

2. Following Esperanza's example, students could write a personal essay about their own name. Students could share their essays in class the next day as a way to begin to introduce themselves to each other.

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Students will be able to define the word identity Students will be able to identify various factors that shape their identity This lesson is part of the unit Identity & Community: An Introduction to 6th Grade Social Studies "Who am I?" is a question we all ask at some time in our lives.

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Independent School Diversity network - ISDN

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1. Ability - Mental and/or physical 2. Age 3. Ethnicity 4. Gender 5. Race 6. Religion 7. Sexual Orientation 8. Socio-Economic Status/Class

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Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

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Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

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Introduction What Is Social Justice? Communal Agreements Icebreaker: Respect Activity Activities: Introducing Identity: "My Fullest Name" Understanding Privilege and Systems of Power: "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" Gender and Sexuality Workshop: Creating Gender-Free Nouns Race and Ethnicity: Diversity Profile Intersection Identity and Privilege: Crossing the Line Recap and Closing Activity Closing and Recommended Resources
Introduction

This toolkit is meant for anyone who feels there is a lack of productive discourse around issues of diversity and the role of identity in social relationships, both on a micro (individual) and macro (communal) level. Perhaps you are a teacher, youth group facilitator, student affairs personnel or manage a team that works with an underserved population. Training of this kind can provide historical context about the politics of identity and the dynamics of power and privilege or help build greater self-awareness.

The following activities are intended for groups of 10 to 60 people. For larger groups, you can break into multiple sessions with additional facilitators to ensure the conversations and activities remain focused. The diversity toolkit outlined here may be used as a guideline and can be modified to better fit your group's unique needs.

A note on facilitators: Facilitators should be well versed in the topics and themes we will be discussing, but they do not need to be experts. This workshop is organized as a popular education activity where the majority of the outcomes are learned from the experiences and knowledge of the individuals participating rather than a teacher/student relationship.

Facilitator Sensitivity

Facilitators will be experiencing and addressing the feelings that come with confronting participants' notions of identity, privilege, race and sexuality. Some participants may be required to attend this workshop (through work or school, etc.), so facilitators should be clear that participants are there because these are issues that affect everyone and that there will not be personal judgment of anyone's feelings about a particular issue. Facilitators should remind participants that:

Facilitators should emphasize that what is shared during the workshop is private and confidential. Participants can talk about how the workshop affected them personally and what they learned generally, but they should respect the privacy of the personal information of the other participants.

What Is Social Justice? Setting a Stage for Discussion

Before beginning, it's important that everyone have a basic understanding of two core concepts related to privilege and identity. This will allow everyone to start the conversations on the same page and ensure that the participants have a foundation upon which to build future knowledge.

The first core concept is culture, which is:

The second core concept is identity, which is:

Everyone Has Many Identities

Age, gender, religious or spiritual affiliation, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status are all identities. Some identities are things people can see easily (like race or assumed gender), while other identities are internalized and are not always easy to see (like a disability, socioeconomic status or education level). There are two types of identities that need to be defined in order to spark a discussion on social justice. The first type deals with identities that are part of a majority status - or "agent" - while the second includes identities that are part of the minority status - or "target."

Agent: Members of dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition who knowingly or unknowingly exploit and reap unfair advantage over members of the target groups.

Target: Members of social identity groups who are discriminated against, marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, exploited by an oppressor and oppressor's system of institutions without identity apart from the target group, and compartmentalized in defined roles.

After participants understand the difference between agent and target groups, the facilitator can begin a discussion on oppression. The key features of oppression are:

But remember:

When the facilitator talks about these concepts with the group, it is helpful to start with an understanding that everyone experienced being a target or agent at some point in their lives. This helps create a dialogue of understanding. This is not to say that some target statuses are more salient (for example, people can see I am a woman, or a Black woman, before they even speak with me) and others may be easier to conceal (for example, if I am lesbian). But each creates a burden on the individual and each has its own set of challenges to overcome.

Communal Agreements

Before initiating any activity, it is critical that the group builds communal agreements. Rather than naming these "rules" that are then placed upon the group, we will call these "agreements" because these are the guidelines built by the group that all members agree to follow during the course of the workshop. Once an agreement has been put forward, the facilitator should then ask for a definition of what that agreement means to ensure that there is a communal language. Below are several suggested agreements.

Icebreaker: Respect Activity

Source: Critical Multicultural Pavilion

Ask participants to find someone in the room they don't know and make an introduction. Talk for five to 10 minutes about respect. What does it mean to you to "show respect?" How do you show respect to others? After the allotted time, ask all participants to sit and open the discussion. How did people define respect? What were some of the core concepts discussed?

Common responses will likely include:

All responses are worthy of reflection in terms of their cultural and hegemonic influences. Ask participants where their ideas of respect come from and whom they are meant to protect. If the group raises any of the common responses above, challenge them to answer the following questions:

The point of the discussion is to reflect critically on assumptions and socializations regarding respect. The point is not to agree and to learn from each other's differences.

This activity helps to establish a basis of respect within the group, helping the participants take the first steps toward creating and maintaining a constructive discussion of social justice and equity. At the very least, participants meet someone new and exchange ideas with that person. The group also gets its first look at the similarities and differences between participants, potentially in ways that reflect privilege and power.

Activity One: Introduction Identity

Definition
Everyone has a personal and social identity. Personal identities include an individual's name, unique characteristics, history, personality and other traits that make one different from others. Social identity includes affinities one has with other people, values and norms that one accepts, and the ways one has learned to behave in social settings.

Objective
The following activity is particularly useful when working with participants who don't know one another very well. The goal of this activity is to warm up participants to sharing about themselves and start revealing a bit about each participant's background.

Materials
Markers and 8-by-10-inch sheets of paper folded horizontally.

Instructions
Write out your fullest name and tell your story. On the back of the piece of paper write the top three identities you feel closest to. The facilitator encourages participants to go around the circle to share any meanings, significance, culture, significant ancestors and the top three identities they hold dearest. Everyone will have a chance to share and be heard by the group.

Suggested questions if participants need help getting started:

Facilitators should encourage students to be creative. Make it clear that it is acceptable to write poetry, list adjectives that describe them, include humor, etc.

If your group is large, break into diverse small groups of five or six to make sure everyone has an opportunity to share their story. Ask for volunteers to get the group started and tell participants they can share their stories from memory, or read them.
Facilitator Notes

Discussion
When everyone has shared, ask participants how it felt to share their stories. Why is this activity important? What did you learn?

Activity Two: Understanding Privilege and Systems of Power

Activity
"Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Objective
The objective of this activity is to confront entrenched systems of power and privilege, and identify common situations when privilege is not acknowledged, to the detriment of the disadvantaged and oppressed.

Discussion
What is privilege? We all have privileges. What are yours? Were you surprised by any of the privileges you found in your invisible knapsack?

Activity Three: Gender and Sexuality

Group Definition
Have the group describe what they believe to be the definition of the terms "gender" and "sexuality."

Objective
The objective of this activity is to reconsider male-gendered nouns that we consider "generic." Generating gender-free nouns and pronouns will help participants incorporate more inclusive language in their daily speech and writing.

Instructions
Break participants into small groups and give them a printout of the chart below. Instruct participants to convert the suffixes of the nouns into gender-free, inclusive terms by changing the noun root word or substituting a non-gender-specific root word from another language. Tell participants that since male endings are so pervasive, it is OK to invent new words by replacing the endings of existing words with something non-gendered.

Discussion Questions
The facilitator should ask the following questions of the group while also encouraging them to share personal experiences that speak to their point. What are characteristics of what society believes a [woman/man/girl/boy] should be? What are the norms for appearance/behavior? What happens when someone falls outside of this norm? How do the words we use influence the way we think about certain professions?

Activity Four: Race and Ethnicity

Definition
Race is a social construction that has real consequences and effects. Race is colloquially used to refer to a person's skin color, religion or area of origin (e.g., Black, Jewish or African). Technically, however, race is based on national origin, sociocultural groups and self-identification. The U.S. government, including the Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, does not attempt to identify race according to biology, anthropology or genetics. Religious belief is not considered a race, but can be a factor in identifying one's sociocultural group. (For a full explanation of how each racial category is defined, refer to the U.S. Census About Race page). In a historical context, race has played a large part in how our society has evolved, and it shapes the way we see others and how we experience our lives. (For more on race from a historical perspective, read " A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America," by Ronald Takaki.)

Objective
The objective of this activity is to help participants take stock of the multicultural diversity in their lives. It should help participants get a clear image of how diverse or homogenous their surroundings are and identify ways to improve their exposure to multiculturalism on a daily basis.

Instructions
Fill in the appropriate boxes:

Activity Five: Intersectional Identity and Privilege

Activity
Crossing The Line

Objective
The purpose of this activity is to explore the diversity among the members of our community. How a person identifies can affect many facets of his or her life. We will use this activity to get to know one another on a deeper level. What are our values, backgrounds, and visible and invisible labels? This activity requires everyone to step outside of his or her comfort zone. Participants being vulnerable can help the group learn more about the identities they do not share.

Instructions
Have all participants line up in a straight line facing the facilitator. If the room is too small to have each participant standing shoulder to shoulder, an alternative is to have the group stand in a circle and step into the circle. The facilitator should explain that they will read a statement. If the statement describes you, then silently step across the line. Everyone should quietly notice who stepped across the line and who did not. After a moment, the facilitator will thank those who stepped forward and will then have everyone step back in line.

Discussion
Activity Six: Recap and Closing Activity

This toolkit was designed to address human issues that everyone faces and help participants recognize how they can better understand and work toward solving, or at least improving, these issues. Participants were often forced to confront socialized and entrenched notions of privilege, identity and social justice. Anything that was difficult to confront during the training will be even more difficult to confront in practice, but if these were easily solvable issues, they wouldn't be issues for long. Participants should feel better equipped with newfound knowledge and empathy, and prepared to apply the lessons they learned in their own lives and communities.

Objective
To practice giving positive feedback and to have participants leave the workshop feeling energized.

Instructions
Have participants mingle randomly in a large group and then instruct them to stop and share with the person in front of them one way in which that person "shined" during the workshop. Repeat several times so that each person gets feedback and support from different people in the group. If there are an odd number of participants, the facilitator should address the odd person out each time.

Completing this training is not the end, but merely the beginning. Hopefully, this toolkit has helped to create new understanding among your participants. Individuals should have learned about their own identity and of those around them, as well as the implications of socially constructed labels and stereotypes of an individual's experience. Those interested in this type of work may be interested in a career in social work, facilitation, advocacy or sociology. At the end of the training, facilitators should be prepared to provide additional resources for participants who want to learn more about issues of identity, power and privilege. Below we cite several resources to help you get started.

Recommended Resources

Resources for Additional Activities

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Citation for this content: The MSW@USC, the online Master of Social Work program at the University of Southern California.

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Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

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This training is meant for anyone who feels there is a lack of productive discourse around issues of diversity and the role of identity in social relationships, both on a micro (individual) and macro (communal) level.

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GoNoodle | Movement and Mindfulness for Kids

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GoNoodle | Movement and Mindfulness for Kids

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ClassDojo and Stanford's PERTS Research Center teamed up to create the the first season of The Mojo Show. The five-episode video series (along with a few incredible activities) highlight the power of having a growth mindset, and how any student can learn this skill!

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ClassDojo and Stanford's PERTS Research Center teamed up to create the the first season of The Mojo Show. The five-episode video series (along with a few incredible activities) highlight the power of having a growth mindset, and how any student can learn this skill!

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Reality Pedagogy: Christopher Emdin at TEDxTeachersCollege

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Reality Pedagogy: Christopher Emdin at TEDxTeachersCollege

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Reality Pedagogy: Christopher Emdin at TEDxTeachersCollege

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White Teachers Have Pretty Low Opinions Of Their Black Students

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White Teachers Have Pretty Low Opinions Of Their Black Students

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White teachers tend to have a lot more faith in the abilities of students who look like them, according to a new study.

The study from Johns Hopkins and American University researchers found when white and black teachers were asked about the same student, white teachers had comparatively negative predictions for their students of color.

The research was published in the journal Economics of Education Review. Conclusions are based on a data set from a 2002 longitudinal study that followed over 8,000 10th-grade students. Included in the data set was a survey where reading and math teachers were asked about the long-term capabilities of the same student. Researchers stratified survey answers by the race and gender of teachers and students.

The results are disheartening.

When asked to rank the likelihood that their students would graduate, white teachers (and other non-black educators) were 12 percentage points more likely than black teachers to say their black students wouldn't finish high school. On the other hand, black teachers had similar estimations of both their black and white students. Non-black educators were also significantly less likely to predict that their black students would complete college.

White teachers had particularly harsh predictions for black boys. Non-black teachers thought their black male students were 5 percent less likely to graduate high school than their black female students.

The study is the first step in a larger research project to determine how teacher expectations impact student outcomes, said Johns Hopkins University economist Nicholas Papageorge, who co-authored the study. This study does not yet show causation between teacher expectations and outcomes, but it does indicate a systemic bias. He called the results "shocking and alarming."

"What I would like to do is make teachers aware of biases," Papageorge said on the question of whether teachers should undergo cultural competency training. "Racism is alive and well. I'm sure when people look at a black young man they have certain views, and they might not realize they have these views, and that's really dangerous."

The study raises questions about whether the low expectations white educators set for black students sometimes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy -- especially when the nation's teaching force is currently overwhelmingly white and female.

" If I'm a teacher and decide that a student isn't any good, I may be communicating that to the student," Papageorge said in a press release. "A teacher telling a student they're not smart will weigh heavily on how that student feels about their future and perhaps the effort they put into doing well in school."
Rebecca Klein covers the challenges faced in school discipline, school segregation, and the achievement gap in K-12 education. In particular, she is drilling down into the programs and innovations that are trying to solve these problems. Tips? Email Rebecca.Klein@huffingtonpost.com.

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White Teachers Have Pretty Low Opinions Of Their Black Students

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White teachers tend to have a lot more faith in the abilities of students who look like them, according to a new study. The study from Johns Hopkins and American University researchers found when white and black teachers were asked about the same student, white teachers had comparatively negative predictions for their students of color.

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Teachers' Low Expectations for Students of Color Found to Affect Students' Success

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Teachers' Low Expectations for Students of Color Found to Affect Students' Success

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A new study adds to the growing body of research saying that teachers' expectations of students matter, and that they tend to underestimate the academic abilities of students of color.

The study, authored by Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, an assistant professor of international education at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, was published in the journal Social Science Research. Cherng analyzed data from about 10,000 high school sophomores and their teachers, from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002.

After controlling for factors like standardized test scores and homework completion, Cherng found that both math and English teachers were more likely to perceive their class as too difficult for students of color compared to white students.Teachers were most likely to say their class was too difficult for black students-18 percent of math teachers and 13 percent of English teachers said that was the case. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of math teachers and 6 percent of English teachers said their class was too difficult for white students.

See also: Study: Black Students More Likely to Graduate if They Have One Black Teacher

There was a 6 percentage-point gap between both math and English teachers' expectations for white and Latino students, and a 4 percentage-point gap between English teacher expectations for white and Asian-American students. There was just a 2 percentage-point gap between math teachers' expectations for white and Asian-American students, which Cherng attributed to the "model minority" myth, in which Asians are expected to excel at school, especially in math. (A previous study Cherng did looked at how stereotypes of Asian-American students as top-performers could lower their own expectations.)

And those low expectations had an impact: "Based on my analysis, teachers' underestimating their students' abilities actually causes students to have lower academic expectations of themselves, meaning that they expected they would complete less school," Cherng says in a statement.

Black students, especially, had lower expectations of themselves.

The study also examined students' GPAs and found that teachers' low expectations were linked with lower GPAs. However, that relationship was weaker (but still existed) for black students.

"It is possible that black students anticipate that their teachers think less of them and work harder in class to prove them wrong, hence the less negative effect on their GPAs. Challenging teacher underestimations may be unique to black students, who have a long history of resisting discrimination within schools," Cherng continued. "Regardless, teacher underestimations are harmful to black youth."

A John Hopkins University study last year found that white teachers-who comprise 82 percent of the profession-are less likely to expect academic success with black students, especially black boys. And a 2010 Georgia Southern University study found that 342 students reported that they had experienced a type of microaggression, such as a teacher assuming a black student was poor or acting surprised when a student of color was articulate, at least once during high school. (For more on how microaggressions can hurt students' learning, see this 2015 Education Week story.)

Cherng recommends that teacher-preparation programs or professional development should address these biases. My colleague Brenda Iasevoli recently wrote about a professional development program that teaches teachers how to discuss issues of race and equity in the classroom. Another recent study found that when prospective teachers have a semester of immersive practice in a diverse classroom, they feel more confident teaching students of different backgrounds.

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Teachers' Low Expectations for Students of Color Found to Affect Students' Success

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A new study adds to the growing body of research saying that teachers' expectations of students matter, and that they tend to underestimate the academic abilities of students of color. The study, authored by Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, an assistant professor of international education at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, was published in the journal Social Science Research.

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Teachers report weaker relationships with students of color, children of immigrants

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Teachers report weaker relationships with students of color, children of immigrants

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September 26, 2017 , New York University

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The relationship between teachers and students is a critical factor for academic success. However, a new study by NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development finds that teachers report weaker relationships with children of immigrants and adolescents of color.

"Teachers' relationships are hugely important for all students, but particularly so for groups that are marginalized. Yet, the students who could most benefit from relationships with their teachers are the ones that have the least access to strong teacher- student relationships," said Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, assistant professor of international education at NYU Steinhardt and author of the study, published online in the American Journal of Education.

Since 2014, public school classrooms have reflected a demographic shift in the United States, with the overall number of Latino, African-American, and Asian students surpassing the number of White students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Students of color now make up the majority of students, but inequities between students of different backgrounds have continued to plague the education system.

Existing research highlights the importance of teacher-student relationships on academic indicators such as test scores, classroom engagement, and interest in learning. Teachers not only play a pivotal role in developing students' knowledge and skills, but can also serve as role models.

But research also presents a mixed view of student-teacher relationships with students of color and immigrant youth. Though these groups of youth may be especially reliant upon their teachers, many also report discriminatory experiences or few interactions with staff.

In the current study, Cherng studied two aspects of teacher-student relationships: whether teachers form equally strong relationships with students from different backgrounds and whether these relationships shape students' academic expectations for themselves.

Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, a nationally representative sample of high school students and their teachers, Cherng analyzed teacher surveys for English and math high school teachers. Relationships were measured three ways: how familiar a teacher reported being with a student, whether the teacher perceived a student to be passive or withdrawn, and engagement in conversation with students outside the classroom. These surveys were linked with academic and demographic data for their students.

For the analysis examining teacher-student personal relationships and later academic outcomes, a measure of student academic expectations was used, which gauged whether a student expected to go to and complete college.

Cherng found that not all groups of students enjoy strong teacher-student relationships; patterns of relationships varied by subject taught, race/ethnicity, and whether students were immigrants, children of immigrants, or third-generation and beyond. For instance, English teachers reported weaker relationships with Asian American students and math teachers with their Latino students compared to third-generation White students.

"Different patterns in student-teacher relationships among English and math teachers suggest that distinct stereotypes may shape relationships," Cherng said.

In contrast to these patterns of disadvantage, English teachers reported stronger relationships with third-generation Black students compared to third-generation White students. This may reflect teachers' concerted efforts to close the achievement gap between White and Black students.

The study also highlights the important role of strong teacher-student relationships in fostering student academic expectations: early teacher-student relationships impact later student academic expectations. In other words, teacher-student relationships can inspire students to have high academic ambitions.

"This study demonstrates that teacher-student relationships are a valuable source of social capital in that they help shape students' academic expectations. However, these relationships are not a resource that is equally available to all students," Cherng said. "In contrast to the idea that racial discrimination is an intentional disparagement, the findings may reflect a subtler form of racial discrimination: teachers may be unfamiliar with the lives of all of their students, and this lack of knowledge may hinder relationships."

Cherng notes that the study supports the necessity of rigorous teacher training in cultural awareness in order to overcome biases and improve relationships between teachers and students.

Provided by: New York University

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Teachers report weaker relationships with students of color, children of immigrants

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September 26, 2017 , New York University The relationship between teachers and students is a critical factor for academic success. However, a new study by NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development finds that teachers report weaker relationships with children of immigrants and adolescents of color.

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Connections Quarterly Summer 2019 - Gender

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Charting a Path to Gender Inclusive Schools, by Joel Baum * Lessons from a Gender Studies Classroom, by Gail Krotky and Students * Supporting Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students, by Jay Briar * Literature in Review, by Richard Barbieri * A Parent Responds, by Anonymous * Parent Tips, by Julie Stevens * Teacher Tips, by Lauren Brownlee

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Grit and Growth Mindset: Deficit Thinking?

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Grit and Growth Mindset: Deficit Thinking?

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AMLE - Association for Middle Level Education

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As with most things in education, context can be everything. A skill taught in isolation from meaningful context, for example, is rarely learned, and often becomes grist for blaming the student for his lack of learning rather than analyzing the teacher's instructional design. Read a mediocre piece of student writing after five pieces of poor writing in a row, and the mediocre piece will glow brightly in comparison. Now take a look at the last decade's intense interest in developing student grit and a growth mindset. What seems so positive an enterprise changes its hue in a different context, even to the point of doing harm.

To be clear, the intent of grit and growth mindset-"stick-to-itiveness," tenacity, self-discipline, resilience-are all positive attributes for students to develop, unless applied, of course, to the pursuit of destructive habits or criminal tasks. Over emphasis on students' degrees of grit and growth mindset as the keys to their academic success, however, can perpetuate harmful stereotypes, racism, and classism. Before we call for faculty-wide grit and growth mindset programs, we are wise to take a moment, dive deeply, and examine the cultural narratives we perpetuate with students and each other when putting so much focus on these two ideologies.

Very Brief Background

For most educators, it was Carol Dweck, Paul Tough, and Angela Duckworth, catalyzed by the emotional intelligence and self-regulation research from Daniel Goleman, who gave grit and growth mindset traction in the modern classroom. Of course, these themes have been around for centuries with Aesop, Horatio Alger, Homer, and Mabel C. Bragg, who wrote the first popular version of The Little Engine that Could. Recently, however, there is new research vitality in these areas, which boosts their credibility, and we've been fixated on these attributes through a political lens in our national debates, particularly as we discuss immigration, housing loans, medical coverage, and tax codes.

In her Brainology post for the National Association for Independent Schools (2008), Stanford professor and psychologist, Carol Dweck, described the essence of her growth mindset research:

"Many students believe that intelligence is fixed, that each person has a certain amount and that's that. We call this a fixed mindset, and ... students with this mindset worry about how much of this fixed intelligence they possess. A fixed mindset makes challenges threatening for students (because they believe that their fixed ability may not be up to the task) and it makes mistakes and failures demoralizing (because they believe that such setbacks reflect badly on their level of fixed intelligence)."

Fixed intelligence students choose to do things that make them look smart, she said, but growth mindset students do things that help them learn, and this dramatically changes their academic trajectories. Dweck added that growth mindset students see, "confronting challenges, profiting from mistakes, and persevering in the face of setbacks," as ways to become smarter, and that it is within their control to achieve higher levels of performance. One of the distinguishing practices that helps teachers discern between the two is whether to ask, "Show of hands: Who got that one right?" when surveying the class after reviewing a homework problem, or to ask instead, "Who had an interesting challenge and was able to resolve it? Let's hear that story."

Just as importantly, according to Dweck, was the way these two groups perceived effort:

"Those with a growth mindset had a very straightforward ... idea of effort-the idea that the harder you work, the more your ability will grow and that even geniuses have had to work hard for their accomplishments. In contrast, the students with the fixed mindset believed that if you worked hard it meant that you didn't have ability, and that things would just come naturally to you if you did. This means that every time something is hard for them and requires effort, it's ... a threat[.] ... Those with growth mindsets reported that, after a setback in school, they would simply study more or study differently the next time. But those with fixed mindsets were more likely to say that they would feel dumb, study less the next time, and seriously consider cheating."

Duckworth and Tough's, "grit," ideology refers to a person's capacity to work toward long term goals and not give in to short term distractions and temptations, thereby building academic and personal stamina, especially when things are challenging for students. Duckworth and Tough declared that grit was the key to student success and should receive overt instruction.

These are very simplistic descriptions of both ideologies, of course; interested educators should read further on both. The focus of this writing, however, is to make educators aware of the rising racist and classist concerns associated with both approaches, which can be uncomfortable.

Cautions

In a recent study from researchers at Michigan State University and Case Western Reserve University (Burgoyne, et al, 2018), two meta-analyses indicated that growth mindset practices didn't have the positive academic impact that schools and commercial programs employing those practices claimed they had. The study used grade-point averages, course grades, course exams, and standardized test scores, such as the SAT, as their indicators of growth mindset's impact on academic achievement, and the strong correlations just weren't there. They did say, however, that when there was an impact, it was stronger with children and adolescents than with adults, and that students who had high risks of failing benefited the most from growth mindset interventions. The authors of the study noted, too, that all researchers in the studies did not control carefully for growth mindset specifically, so more research was needed.

The research presented in Duckworth and Tough's books on grit has also received significant critique, finding it lacking proper research protocols (see Kohn, Thomas, Socol, among others), making their conclusions suspect. These concerns themselves are enough to warrant a closer look, but they are not the most compelling reason to question grit and growth mindset, as there is much more in play here.

Respected professor and writer, Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) posted the Burgoyne report last month on a blog called, "Debunked!" I responded to the blog, indicating that posting the piece under the title, "Debunked!" was misleading since it wasn't fully debunked in the research study, and that there were some positives with growth mindset worth incorporating with other elements that help teachers create hope, not blame. Thomas disagreed with me, posting his thoughtful response (see References for the URL).

Here is where he convicts me every time and has done so for more than a decade: Thomas points to the deficit thinking that is inescapable with grit and growth mindset-The idea that students who do not demonstrate white, well-resourced definitions of perseverance with curriculum that may or may not be meaningful to them, in a larger system that is often operated with intentional and unintentional bias against their success, and to act upon those perseverance ideals daily are somehow less disciplined than others, diminished in a way, and that teachers must "fix" what's wrong in them, (i.e., personal character and maturity) and not fix their environments and the controlling narratives of those in power that perpetuate this constant diminished state.

Author and educator Richard Cash agrees, referring to deficit thinking as the, "spoken and unspoken assumptions about a student's lack of self-regulation, ability, or aptitude. The most devastating impact of deficit thinking is when differences-particularly socio-cultural differences-are perceived as inferior, dysfunctional, or deviant ... Typically, schools are designed to 'fix' students who are achieving poorly or misbehaving. However, by blaming students, we exonerate ourselves as the possible cause-using the symptom to overlook the source" (June 2018).

Thomas ties it to his critique of grit/growth mindset: "Both growth mindset and grit ... mistake growth mindset/grit as the dominant or even exclusive quality causing success in student learning (ignoring the power of systemic influences) and then create an environment in which some students (too often black, brown, and poor) are defined in deficit terms-that they lack growth mindset/grit." He adds, "[S]tudents are better served by equity practices couched in efforts to alleviate the systemic forces that shape how they live and learn regardless of their character."

In a separate post, he argues that it is particularly harmful, yet typically American, thinking to assume that students' success and failure is driven solely by individual character and behavior, when actually, so much of any one individual's success or failure is driven by social forces, environment of birth, and systemic biases. He recommends Sendhil Mullainathan's Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much to clarify this point, as do I-It's a thoughtful read.

Thomas and others claim that growth mindset/grit programs, "disproportionately target racial minorities and impoverished students, reinforcing that most of the struggles within these groups academically are attributable to deficits in those students ... linked to race and social class ... [which] perpetuate race and class stereotypes, and as a result, work against inclusive pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy" (Thomas, 2018).

Thomas promotes author and educator Paul Gorski's assertion that, "Equity literate educators ... reject deficit views that focus on fixing marginalized students rather than fixing the conditions that marginalize students, and understand the structural barriers that cheat some people out of the opportunities enjoyed by other people."

At the Equity Literacy Institute, Gorski is clear: "We must avoid being lulled by popular 'diversity' approaches and frameworks that pose no threat to inequity-that sometimes are popular because they are no real threat to inequity." (December 9, 2017) Among Gorski's equity principles in that post are these statements:

"'Equity' approaches that fail to directly confront inequity play a significant role in sustaining inequity. Educational outcome disparities are not the result of deficiencies in marginalized communities' cultures, mindsets, or grittiness, but rather of inequities. Equity initiatives focus, not on fixing marginalized people, but on fixing the conditions that marginalize people."

Gorski reminds us that, "Compared with schools with low percentages of students experiencing poverty, schools with high percentages of students experiencing poverty are more likely to have: less access to school nurses and college counselors;

more limited access to computers and the Internet;

inadequate learning facilities such as science labs;

more teacher vacancies and substitute teachers;

more teachers unlicensed in their subject areas;

less rigorous and student-centered curricula;

inoperative or dirty student bathrooms;

less access to preventive healthcare;

serious teacher turnover problems;

higher student-to-teacher ratios;

insufficient classroom materials;

less access to stable housing;

fewer extracurricular programs;

fewer experienced teachers;

lower teacher salaries;

larger class sizes; and

less funding.

He adds pointedly, "So, explain to me how we can meaningfully respond to the impacts of these conditions by completely ignoring these injustices while 'fixing' the mindsets, cultures, or grittiness of students or families experiencing poverty."

"Allostatic Load" refers to the, "cost of chronic exposure to elevated or fluctuating endocrine or neural responses resulting from chronic or repeated challenges that the individual experiences as stressful." ( www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/allostatic-load) Many teachers are unaware of the negative effects that such allostatic loads, i.e. ceaseless stressors such as the ones listed in Gorski's list above, inflict on our bodies and minds, especially in individuals who live in poverty, are challenged by an alcoholic parent, or who people of color bearing the hourly burden of proving worth, full rights under the law, educating whites about their perspectives, are legitimate/trusted shoppers, and are of benign intent.

In his blog, however, educator/writer, Ira Socol, writes, "[H]igh allostatic load factors do not mean that a child comes to school 'disadvantaged.' Rather, their advantages are simply not respected nor exploited by the school. The damaged children described by the "young Peter's" narration are all brilliant, all incredible observers of their worlds, and are all incredibly capable." (2013) Talking about grit specifically, he adds, "[W]hat Tough and his friends want these kids to possess is willing compliance, not "grit" nor "character."

Author, Alfie Kohn, affirms Cash, Thomas, and Socol in his critique of growth mindset:

"The message of [focusing on the mindsets of individuals] has always been to adjust yourself to conditions as you find them because those conditions are immutable; all you can do is decide on the spirit in which to approach them.... Social psychologists use the term "fundamental attribution error" to mean paying so much attention to personality and attitudes that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are... Why, for example, do relatively few young women choose to study or work in the fields of math and science? Is it because of entrenched sexism and "the way the science career structure works"? Well, to someone sold on Dweck's formula, the answer is no: It's "all a matter of mindset." We need only "shift widespread perceptions over to the 'growth mindset'"-that is, to the perceptions of girls and women who are just trapped by their own faulty thinking. This is similar to the perspective that encourages us to blame a "culture of poverty" in the inner city rather than examine economic and political barriers-a very appealing explanation to those who benefit from those barriers and would rather fault their victims for failing to pull themselves up by their mindset." (2015)

In a separate critique of grit, Kohn notes research weaknesses and skewed priorities in Duckworth's work, wondering here about the merits of her goals:

"Duckworth reported that [National Spelling Bee contestants] performed better in that competition if they were higher in grit, 'whereas spellers higher in openness to experience-defined as preferring using their imagination, playing with ideas, and otherwise enjoying a complex mental life-perform[ed] worse.' She also found that the most effective preparation strategy was, 'solitary deliberate practice activities' rather than, say, reading books. ... If enjoying a complex mental life (or reading for pleasure) interferes with performance in a one-shot contest to see who can spell more obscure words correctly-and if sufficient grittiness to spend time alone memorizing lists of words helps to achieve that goal-this is regarded as an argument in favor of grit. Presumably it also argues against having a complex mental life or engaging in leisure reading.

"Driving the study of student performance conducted by Duckworth was ... [her] belief that underachievement isn't explained by structural factors-social, economic, or even educational. Rather, [she] insisted it should be attributed to the students themselves and their, 'failure to exercise self-discipline.'"

Poignantly, Kohn poses, "The most impressive educational activists are those who struggle to replace a system geared to memorizing facts and taking tests with one dedicated to exploring ideas.... By contrast, those enamored of grit look at the same status quo and ask: How can we get kids to put up with it?"

What Does All This Mean for Conscientious Educators of Middle School Students?

This is not a call to abandon all efforts to help students develop those positive tenets of grit and growth mindset programs, such as self-discipline, voice, responsibility for one's choices, personal tenacity, initiative, authenticity, and self-efficacy. Heck, this description alone is probably 90% of a middle school teacher's daily job description.

Instead, this is a call to recognize that we are very different people depending on our circumstances, and that those circumstances, some of which are not actually in our control, yet are renewed each year by unintentional and intentional bias in those with power and influence, significantly affect our capacity to act upon the advice and teaching provided. If we were a member of a suspect class in our community and impoverished or even slightly so, wondering how to pay the medical bills, get food on the table, get our brother, Micky, off meth, get Mom out of her depression, and pay the rent, we might not remember to get those 100 index cards for Monday's class or have the capacity to start the four week project on the day it is assigned. And no, we might not be as willing to take creative risks in learning or take one train, two buses, and a complex transfer to get across town for the study group on Thursday. And then to be blamed for our lack of gumption?

It's also a call to recognize that students who are challenged by poverty or being people of color in biased communities don't lack grit or tenacity. They have plenty of it; that's how they survive. We lose all credibility by harping on it as the root to a student's problems. What these students lack are the resources, time, and support needed to maneuver, extend energy, and find hope in the instructional demands placed on them. Socol writes,

"[A]ll the children living and learning in relative affluence are afforded slack by the accidents of their birth: "Slack" is the term identified by Mullainathan and Shafir as the space created by abundance that allows any person access to more of her/his cognitive and emotional resources ... this is what kids need. Slack ... the moments when necessity is not the sole driver. 'The cost [of 'scarcity'-the primary element in 'grit theory'] is an undue focus on the necessity at hand, which leads to a lack of curiosity about wider issues, and an inability to imagine longer-term consequences. The effect of this scarcity-generated 'loss of bandwidth' has catastrophic results ... ' The Guardian writes in a book review on the topic." (2014)

And in this audit of our own thinking, perhaps we can do as Thomas suggests, "[S]et aside the assumption that low student achievement is primarily caused by a lack of effort and engagement as well as that high student achievement is a consequence of mostly effort and engagement," and that we resist the idea that, " ... life for black/brown and poor people is going to be hard so we need to make them extra 'gritty' to survive and excel."

To these ideas, I add these specific responses:

Get to really know students and their neighborhoods. Yes, visit homes, attend community events, get informed, and watch more than one news channel or source for more information on challenges to their communities. Let's not make it the student's responsibility to teach us. And, with whatever system works for us, let's remember their personal and family milestones, as they share them with us: birthdays, Quinceañera, bar/bat mitzvahs, Tae-Kwan-do competition, band/Lego/robotic/forensic competition, new graphic comic designed, big sister enlisted in the navy, brother finally out of jail, dog/cat recently died, did four pull-ups in gym class, tried out for the school play.

Accept and honor the full individual the student really is, not categorize him in terms of the degree to which he satisfies our description of successful older students from our own cultures. Let's choose to see difference from us and our culture as strength, not something less than preferred, and let these individuals know they make good company. Be genuinely interested in their cultures and hobbies as you can, and find ways to invite that collected knowledge into weekly learning. Students will engage if they feel they are contributing. How might our interactions with students and lesson designs be turning students into passive recipients rather than active creators? Instead of being about sense-making and the delivery of knowledge to students, let's make sure our lessons transition students' learning into personal processing and meaning-making as well.

At every turn, give students proof that hope is warranted. Are there word choices, policies, practices, and attitudes from us that come across to students as adversarial ("Gotcha!"), or do we come across in all things as advocates for them as individuals? There are common sense things that engender such hope: Allowing re-do's on both formative and summative assessments for full credit, encouraging divergent thinking and problem-solving with no academic penalty when they don't turn out as planned (only analysis of went awry, then starting over with our full support), discipline done in private, recoverability after cheating or plagiarizing, modeling and facilitating constructive responses to failures and mistakes, zero sarcasm directed at students or situations, complete erasure of earlier indicators of incompetency from later and more current reports of competency (no more averaging of grades), no holding grudges, cognitive coaching instead of judging, teacher follow-through on promises made, student reflective analysis of choices (He made this decision, and it had this result; is that what he wanted to achieve?), daily, visible proof that we will not humiliate the student nor will we let him humiliate himself, and visible proof weekly that progress is being made ("You once here, but look where you are now!).

Let's also do an equity, class, and racial audit of our attitudes towards students from cultures different from our own to see them as fully dimensionalized individuals, worth knowing. And let's do the same audit with all audio-visuals in our presentations and classrooms: Students of different colors, religions, cultures, sexual orientations, and socio-economic status portrayed doing thoughtful, competent things, representing the very best of humanity. If it's in sight, it's in mind.

Actively investigate and dismantle those inequities that our students face daily, "Changing the conditions," as Gorski says above, "that marginalize people." We can start with equal access laws in our community that limit some students from getting an education or working due to pregnancy or immigration status. Limit or remove learning experiences that require students to purchase materials. We can work on equal pay laws for teenage girls and women in the community, as well as fund girls' sports to the same level we do boys' sports. We can make sure every single student has the necessary technology and in and out of school access to a reliable Internet Service Provider, if it's required by the schools. We can provide child care for all parent meetings. We can provide students interested in taking advanced courses with additional tutoring supports to make a successful go of them, and we can formally teach reading to middle schoolers who may have not been able to learn to read when they were younger. Finally, we can confront and end the bias in colleagues, students, and parents about career and tech ed courses that aren't necessarily associated with university-bound students but are just as intellectual demanding and personally maturing and meaningful as more traditional courses, if not more so.

We can avoid automatically blaming our students' inattention in class or lack of academic performance on their personal character flaws as associated in our minds with people of that color, culture, religion, or socio-economic status. We can stop judging students of a certain color, religion, culture, or socio-economic status as less likely to be capable or interested in academic work, simply due to perceived stereotypes of people with that skin color, culture, religion or socio-economic status. One of the greatest gifts we give students is to honor what they bring to learning's table as valuable, not dismiss their circumstance as irrelevant, or to respond punitively when their responses to extended learning demands are different than how those without so many challenges respond to those same demands.

We can provide real skill training to all students in middle school on executive function skills and personal self-efficacy. It's the nature of the age, not the class or race, to need these learning experiences at exactly this age. This means we dismantle all practices related to grades and grading to teach self-discipline, timeliness, task analysis, and impulsivity/distractibility control

Finally, let's train all teachers in cognitive coaching and descriptive feedback, which both emphasize reflection on decisions, their impact, setting goals, not invoking ego through judgment, active engagement in learning, self-monitoring, being flexible, taking responsibility, and revision from new perspective. You know, that hope stuff.

While growth mindset and grit have many thoughtful advocates we all respect deeply, looking at each ideology's research, principles, and practices with a critical eye is warranted. Considering the critic's concerns with each one regarding race, inequity, and classism is reasonable. With so much dividing us these days politically, culturally, and economically, we can come together here and pull the camera back on these topics to reveal their larger context and have informed discussions. With such perspective, the call to get it right becomes even more urgent.

References

Cash, R.M. (2018). Reframing deficit thinking: How to change perceptions for the better. Retrieved from https://freespiritpublishingblog.com/2018/06/18/
reframing-deficit-thinking-how-to-change-perceptions-for-the-better/

Dweck, C.S. (2008). Brainology. Retrieved from https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/
winter-2008/brainology/

Gorski, P.C. & Swalwell, K. (2015). Equity literacy for all. Educational Leadership, 72(6), 34-40.

Gorski, P.C. (2018, May 16). If you are still on the "grit" or "mindset of poverty" bandwagon, consider this. Facebook post, retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/pgorski/posts/10160292488845534

Kohn, A. (2014). GRIT: A skeptical look at the latest educational fad," adapted from The myth of the spoiled child, Independent School, Retrieved from https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/grit/

Kohn, A. (2015). The perils of "growth mindset" education: Why we're trying to fix our kids when we should be fixing the system, Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2015/08
/16/the_education_fad_thats_hurting_our_kids_what_you_need
_to_know_about_growth_mindset_theory_a

nd_the_harmful_lessons_it_imparts/

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Picador.

Sisk, V.F., Burgoyne, A.P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B.N. (2018). "To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses." Psychological Science, 29(4), 549-571. doi: 10.1177/0956797617739704

Socol, I. (2014) Grit, Part 2 - Is "slack" what kids need?" Retrieved from http://speedchange.blogspot.com
/2014/01/grit-part-2-is-slack-what-kids-need.html

Socol, I. (2013). Paul Tough v. Peter Høeg - or - The advantages and limits of 'research.' Retrieved from http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2013/12/
paul-tough-v-peter-heg-or-advantages.html

Thomas, P. L. (2018, May 26). More on rejecting growth mindset, grit. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@plthomasedd/
more-on-rejecting-growth-mindset-grit-52e5eb47374e

Thomas, P.L. (2017, September 17). Rejecting growth mindset and grit at three levels. Retrieved from https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2017/09/21/
rejecting-growth-mindset-and-grit-at-three-levels/

Thomas, P. L. (2016, May 11). Rejecting "grit" while embracing effort, engagement. Retrieved from https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/
rejecting-grit-while-embracing-effort-engagement/

Rick Wormeli is a long-time teacher, consultant and author living in Herndon, Virginia. His book, The Collected Writings (So Far) of Rick Wormeli: Crazy, Good Stuff I Learned about Teaching Along the Way, is available from www.amle.org/store. His new book is Fair Isn't Always Equal: Second Edition (Stenhouse Publishers).
rick@rickwormeli.onmicrosoft.com
@rickwormeli2
www.rickwormeli.com Published inAMLE Magazine, August 2018.

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Grit and Growth Mindset: Deficit Thinking?

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As with most things in education, context can be everything. A skill taught in isolation from meaningful context, for example, is rarely learned, and often becomes grist for blaming the student for his lack of learning rather than analyzing the teacher's instructional design.

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It's a moment most educators will recognize: A student has said something biased or promoted a stereotype. There's a ripple through the classroom, but the speaker hasn't noticed. Students look to you expectantly, and you know the statement can't go unaddressed.

Most teachers look for opportunities to build a human rights culture and to counter hatred, bigotry, fear-mongering and intolerance. One way to do this, when students make a mistake, is to call them in rather than calling them out. Doing so prepares them for civic engagement by encouraging a sense of hope and possibility.

Guiding Instead of Dragging

In conversations and debates about social justice issues, insisting someone take responsibility when they say or do something hurtful-regardless of their intent-is a common way to protect vulnerable communities and individuals. It's often necessary, but not every correction allows both parties to move forward. Calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender. In calling out, a person or group uses tactics like humiliation, shunning, scapegoating or gossip to dominate others.

In our society, call-outs have become a way of life. They are generally done publicly, either in person or online. Extreme calling out is when a person or a group expresses their disagreement cruelly, sometimes grandstanding. Fearing they may be considered politically backward if they don't prove their "wokeness" on trending social justice issues, witnesses to the conflict may pile on while bystanders silently withdraw.

Calling in is a technique that does allow all parties to move forward. It's a concept created by human-rights practitioners to challenge the toxicity of call-out culture. Calling in is speaking up without tearing down. A call-in can happen publicly or privately, but its key feature is that it's done with love. Instead of shaming someone who's made a mistake, we can patiently ask questions to explore what was going on and why the speaker chose their harmful language.

Call-ins are agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize our requirements for growth, to admit our mistakes and to commit to doing better. Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and it can stop it from happening again.

Calling in is not for everyone or every circumstance. It's not fair, for example, to insist that people hurt by cruel or careless language or actions be responsible for the personal growth of those who have injured them; calling in should not demand involuntary emotional labor.

Calling in is also not a useful response to those who intentionally violate standards of civil conversation. When powerful people use bigotry, fear and lies to attack others, calling out can be a valuable tool, either for the individuals they seek to oppress or for bystanders who choose to interrupt the encounter. When people knowingly use stereotypes or dehumanizing metaphors to describe human beings, their actions victimize targets and potentially set them up for violence. Calling out may be the best response to those who refuse to accept responsibility for the harm they encourage or who pretend they are only innocently using their right to free speech.

But, if call-ins can occur without demanding undue emotional labor or allowing space for hateful behavior, this approach offers a way forward that increases the potential for learning-particularly in activist and academic spaces. This practice works especially well when allies call one another in or when leaders, such as teachers, use it to model speaking up without losing the opportunity for learning. By teaching our students how to call one another in, we're providing them the tools and skills they need to gather up those who share their privileges, to offer patience and grace when they can, and to facilitate growth-so others won't have to.

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It's a moment most educators will recognize: A student has said something biased or promoted a stereotype. There's a ripple through the classroom, but the speaker hasn't noticed. Students look to you expectantly, and you know the statement can't go unaddressed.

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How Does Race Affect a Student's Math Education?

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How Does Race Affect a Student's Math Education?

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How Does Race Affect a Student’s Math Education?

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A new paper examines the ways “whiteness” reproduces racial advantages and disadvantages.

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MLK Day and the Danger of a "Single Story"

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MLK Day and the Danger of a "Single Story"

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Teachers all over the country are preparing to talk about Dr. King with their students. How many of us are asking ourselves if we are about to fall into the trap of telling a "single story"?

In her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie describes what often happens when Westerners talk about Africa - we tell the story of poverty and extreme suffering. In doing so, we miss critical understandings of the place and people, and we step into the minefield of continuing stereotypes and age-old misconceptions. Adichie recommends that we, in the words of another Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, commit to telling a "balance of stories." She proposes that it is only through this balanced telling that we will begin to truly appreciate the complexity, humanity, and depth of the lived experience on the continent.

​​We are coming up on the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., and teachers all over the country, from preschool to 12th grade, are preparing to talk about Dr. King with their students. How many of us are asking ourselves if we are about to fall into the trap of telling a single story, that is, the story of Dr. King's life, disconnected from the hundreds of thousands of people who influenced him, fought alongside him, and continue to fight for the shared dream to end oppression and realize justice? What kinds of misconceptions, stereotypes, and untruths arise out of the telling of this single story?

​Too often, when we teach about Dr. King, we perpetuate the "Hero" myth, the myth that an individual can bring about huge, monumental, positive change, all alone. Why is this a dangerous myth to tell?

First, it is simply not true.

​If it weren't for people like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis, James Reeb, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, Claudette Colvin (to name a few) and groups such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality) , Dr. King would not have had the platform, the support, the mobilization, or the means to get his message across, let alone bring about the changes in the legal system that came out of the Civil Rights movement.

​When we don't tell the multiple stories that influence the movement, we erase so many people who contributed and fought for justice. And our students don't appreciate that big changes come from many people working together, of varying races, ages, and backgrounds. Our students don't gain an appreciation for the complexity, humanity, and depth of the story of the Civil Rights movement then and the continuation of racial and social justice movements today.

​As a white kindergarten teacher, I have fallen into this trap myself.

​Every January, I used to read to my students a couple of books about Dr. King, books that had powerful messages about non-violence as a strategy for change, about the evils of racism and the need to end it.

But I was never sure how to tell this story to my young students, and the experience of talking about racism was so uncomfortable for me, that, when a student would say something to which I didn't know how to respond - such as wanting to know more about the assassination, or wanting to know which of the students in the room wouldn't have been allowed to be in our classroom during segregation - I would cut our conversation short, stress that times have changed and we can all be together now, and move on to a subject that I felt more competent to handle.
​
As a result, my young students did not leave my classroom with a deep understanding of how to work against racism, or the strategies Dr. King used, or how the fight for social justice is ongoing, let alone with a deep understanding of what racism is. I was not proud of my teaching, and I felt an urgency to change it, especially because I am the mother of two biracial daughters (black/white) and I knew I owed it to them, as well as to my students, to figure this out.

I spent years studying how to do a better job.

​I read anti-bias educators, such as Louise Derman-Sparks, who suggests teaching about race and skin color before teaching about racism, so as to clear up any misconceptions and biases that can develop in young children.

I read white anti-racists such as Tim Wise, who illuminates the privilege around "choosing" to engage in conversations about race for whites, as opposed to the experience of race and racism for people of color, who are often not given the choice, but are constantly navigating and dealing with race and racism in our society. I read Shelly Tochluk's Witnessing Whiteness, which breaks down the history of whiteness in America, and its ties to ideas around "goodness" and humanity, and its absolute subordination of blackness.

I read James Baldwin's "The Cross of Redemption," a collection of previously unpublished essays, which further helped me understand the difficulty I was having, as a white American, in talking about race because of the "invisibility" of whiteness - a racial identity that, at its core, is about skin color privilege and exclusionary practices.

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Howard Stevenson, and Michelle Alexander, who illuminate the racial disparities that exist today (in the prison system, health care, education, housing, etc.) and who stress the importance of changing the narrative around race in our country by telling the truth about how racism continues to influence so many aspects of our system.

Lastly, in that burst of learning, I read Taylor Branch's extensive three-part series on America in the time of Dr. King, and learned about so many people and organizations that worked alongside King in his fight.

when we perpetuate the "single story" we do harm

​I am not suggesting that every teacher in every school in America read the books I read before leading a discussion or preparing a lesson about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. But I do think there should be required reading about white supremacy prior to teaching about racism and the Civil Rights Movement, especially for white teachers.

Let's face it, many white teachers engage in the topic of racial discrimination only once a year for MLK Day (if that) and our understanding of race and racism is often limited and immature. The invisibility of our own race as white people (white supremacy), and the prevailing idea that not talking about race is more egalitarian (being "colorblind") have limited our understanding and comfort talking about race.

But we have a choice. If what we want is for our students to gain a deep understanding of the themes of the movement, such as the importance of standing up against injustice, non-violence as a direct action for change, and the ongoing struggle for justice, then we owe it to our students to expose them to the Civil Rights Movement in all it's complexity.
​
The stakes are high. If we continue to treat Dr. King as a single story, uninfluenced and unaffected by all the people who also fought - and fight - for change, we do more than limit our students' understanding of the movement for justice of which Dr. King was a part. We do something much worse. We make it harder for our children to see and be "changemakers" themselves.

Madeleine Rogin

Madeleine has been an educator of young children for over 15 years. and currently teaches kindergarten at Prospect Sierra School in El Cerrito, CA. She received national recognition for developing the Peaceful Changemaker Curriculum for young children.

EmbraceRace is a multiracial community of people supporting each other to help nurture kids who are thoughtful, informed, and brave about race. Live, online, free Community Conversations happen every 4th Tuesday of the month. Stay informed about upcoming conversations when you sign up for our monthly newsletter. And don't forget to like us on Facebook!

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MLK Day and the Danger of a Single Story | EmbraceRace

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Teachers all over the country are preparing to talk about Dr. King with their students. How many of us are asking ourselves if we are about to fall into the trap of telling a "single story"?

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Are you planning to do a Land Acknowledgement?

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Are you planning to do a Land Acknowledgement?

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This post on Land Acknowledgements is long over-due. I promised to do it last year, but one thing after another meant I put it off. This morning (Saturday, March 9, 2019) I did a twitter thread about land acknowledgements, and am pasting that thread here. There's more to say, but I hope this is helpful.

7) Listen to Hayden King's 12) I've got links to lists of books by Native writers, here: I'd love to see ppl who do Land Acknowledgements in California say "hey everybody, 13) And, I'd love to see people in California who are doing Land Acknowledgements say "hey everybody, let's look critically at the mission projects teachers are doing..." Start by reading 19) Some of you might have taken a DNA test and in your head and heart, think that validates your family story, but it doesn't. To understand why it doesn't, read Kim Tallbear's work. Start with her article, 20) Most of the mainstream media does a terrible job reporting on Native issues. They can flail about as they've done for hundreds of years, or they can take a look at the 21) There are 22) Do you listen to podcasts as you drive, walk, or exercise? Subscribe to And 23) And give a listen to 24) One issue you could address in your land acknowledgement is mascots. There are far more than you may know. Zoom in on this
1) More and more I am seeing people in the US talk about doing a Land Acknowledgement at their meeting, conference, or event.
2) If you're wondering what a Land Acknowledgement is, it is opening remarks that say the land that the event is on is (or was) the homeland of a specific Native Nation. It is meant to create awareness.
3) At first glance, cool, right? Progressive-minded, right? They have a lot of appeal, for sure. But... that is where they can go wrong.
4) I've seen scripts that people write that a presenter/speaker can use. The use of it is well-meaning, but we all know about good intentions, right?
5) If you do one because you think you should, but that's as far as you go with it in your own thinking or what you impart to others, you're just doing it as a box-checked sort of thing that is no good.
6) If you're not mindful of what you are doing, then, you are turning a land acknowledgement into a token. It becomes an empty gesture to "honor" Native people. It becomes this century's mascot.
He makes many excellent points. Listen and share it! He's Anishinaabe.
8) If you're going to do one, you gotta do some research! If, for example, you are in Oklahoma, you might want to acknowledge one of the 39 tribal nations there today, but you know (right?) that many of them are there because of the Indian Removal Act.
9) How might you incorporate that history into your acknowledgement?'I regret it' about his reflections on a land acknowledgement he helped draft at his university.
10) Find out what the nation(s) you are naming in your acknowledgement are doing, today. Tell your audience about it. Tell them how they can support that nation's work. See? That means you have to do some research so your Land Acknowledgement is meaningful.
11) Annoying fact: lot of people think children's literature is not worthy of the same kind of study that English departments give to bks for the adult market. But you know that people want their kids to read! In your Land Acknowledgement, recommend a book by a Native writer!

14) And, wouldn't it be terrific if Land Acknowledgements in California and Alaska and Georgia included "let's think about the impact the gold rush had on Indigenous people..."
15) In other words: do some work before doing a Land Acknowledgement. Make it meaningful. Give your audience a task.
16) And when you speak those words... don't do it in a somber tone. You're not in church! When you're teaching, you don't speak in a reverent, prayer like way. Don't do it for a Land Acknowledgement, either.
17) By this point in this thread, some of you are wondering what to do. How, you might wonder, can you 'get it right' (or close to right)? Best Books ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS is not a good book." Because it isn't.
Teaching the Truth about California Missions. 18) Most of you have a lifetime of unlearning to do. Some of you have a family story about a Native ancestor and you think that puts you in a place to say this or that about an issue, but if you don't know more than just "Native ancestor", you're probably relying on stereotypes.

'There is no DNA test to prove you're Native American' (link: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129554-400-there-is-no-dna-test-to-prove-youre-native-american/) Get her book, too. And follow her on Twitter. resources developed by the Native American Journalists Association. resources available from the American Indian Library Association, too: All My Relations: (link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/all-my-relations-podcast/id1454424563?mt=2) Media Indigena. Henceforward. interactive map. Note on Oct 30: the interactive map is offline for revisions.

25) And if you want to incorporate something about why mascots are unacceptable, start by reading 26) Get a copy of Daniel Heath Justice's Stephanie Fryberg's research.
WHY INDIGENOUS LITERATURES MATTER. It doesn't matter what YOU teach... we all read, buy, and share books... Daniel's book will help you a lot.

28) Make sure you read the articles there, and take a look at the teacher's guide, too! Here's the link that will take you right to theIn August, I was at the
That's it for now...
---Back to add one more tweet---

This is a great resource for doing land acknowledgements. map. Read the disclaimer that pops up when you go to the map. ---Update on Oct 30, 2019---
Indian Ed for All conference, held on the Pala homelands in California. There were several excellent presentations but my reason for doing this update today is because some of the most powerful remarks came from Dr. Joely Proudfit. She's the chair of the American Indian Studies at Cal State San Marcos, and the director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center. She said a few things about Land Acknowledgements that prompt me to add what I'm saying next.
When the acknowledgement is a "thank you" it suggests that you (the speaker) are replying to someone. Is it a specific person in a tribal nation? Or, is it Native peoples in the abstract as in no-longer-here? If it is the former, name that person. If it is the latter, reconsider saying it because it comes off as prayer-like.
When you say you're a guest on a specific nation's homeland, it implies that you were invited. Were you, in fact, invited to be there by someone of that nation?

Some people say "uninvited guest" but doesn't the word "guest" embody invited?

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Are you planning to do a Land Acknowledgement?

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This post on Land Acknowledgements is long over-due. I promised to do it last year, but one thing after another meant I put it off. This morning (Saturday, March 9, 2019) I did a twitter thread about land acknowledgements, and am pasting that thread here. There's more to say, but I hope this is helpful.

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Racial Literacy - How to Resolve Racially Stressful Situations - Stevenson

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

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Howard C. Stevenson: How to resolve racially stressful situations

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If we hope to heal the racial tensions that threaten to tear the fabric of society apart, we're going to need the skills to openly express ourselves in racially stressful situations. Through racial literacy -- the ability to read, recast and resolve these situations -- psychologist Howard C.

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Resources Given my role, I often meet fellow educators who are looking for professional development opportunities or resources around topics related to

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She cited the case of Emma DeGraffenreid, an African-American woman who sued GM, claiming that she had faced employment discrimination based on race and gender. The judge, finding that African-Americans and women had both been hired by the company, dismissed her case. But, as Crenshaw pointed out, the African-Americans were men, and the women where white; neither represented the case of a woman of color. "This is what I'd call an intersectional failure," she said.

One of the major challenges to intersectionality is what Crenshaw called "schematic thinking." "If the facts don't fit the frame, we discard the facts," she said. She summoned the classic riddle about a father and son who are injured in an accident and raced to the hospital, only to hear the surgeon decry, "I can't operate, this is my son."

"The first time I heard this," Crenshaw confessed, "It took me a beat to realize the surgeon was his mother. We take instruction from the people we can see in the role, and it can be a steep climb for people who don't fit the image."

Making sure the right stories are being told and passed along is one way to combat these schemas. Crenshaw mentioned Rosa Parks, who famously inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott. There's more to the story, said Crenshaw: Parks was not a tired woman who just refused to surrender her seat on the bus; she was also an experienced civil rights activist.

"The stories we tell, the images we lift up, the ways we think of social justice issues have everything to do with where we are in this country," Crenshaw concluded, "and new possibilities happen by revisiting the past and bringing it forward."

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HBO News - Kimberle Crenshaw Intersectionality

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She cited the case of Emma DeGraffenreid, an African-American woman who sued GM, claiming that she had faced employment discrimination based on race and gender. The judge, finding that African-Americans and women had both been hired by the company, dismissed her case.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality

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Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both.

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Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms

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Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms

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Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do 

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Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do 

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Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

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Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

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In my Morning Edition story today, I look at expectations - specifically, how teacher expectations can affect the performance of the children they teach.

The first psychologist to systematically study this was a Harvard professor named Robert Rosenthal, who in 1964 did a wonderful experiment at an elementary school south of San Francisco.

The idea was to figure out what would happen if teachers were told that certain kids in their class were destined to succeed, so Rosenthal took a normal IQ test and dressed it up as a different test.

"It was a standardized IQ test, Flanagan's Test of General Ability," he says. "But the cover we put on it, we had printed on every test booklet, said 'Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.' "

Rosenthal told the teachers that this very special test from Harvard had the very special ability to predict which kids were about to be very special - that is, which kids were about to experience a dramatic growth in their IQ.

After the kids took the test, he then chose from every class several children totally at random. There was nothing at all to distinguish these kids from the other kids, but he told their teachers that the test predicted the kids were on the verge of an intense intellectual bloom.

As he followed the children over the next two years, Rosenthal discovered that the teachers' expectations of these kids really did affect the students. "If teachers had been led to expect greater gains in IQ, then increasingly, those kids gained more IQ," he says.

But just how do expectations influence IQ?

As Rosenthal did more research, he found that expectations affect teachers' moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more.

Researcher Robert Pianta offered these suggestions for teachers who want to change their behavior toward problem students:

"It's not magic, it's not mental telepathy," Rosenthal says. "It's very likely these thousands of different ways of treating people in small ways every day."

So since expectations can change the performance of kids, how do we get teachers to have the right expectations? Is it possible to change bad expectations? That was the question that brought me to the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, where I met Robert Pianta.

Pianta, dean of the Curry School, has studied teachers for years, and one of the first things he told me when we sat down together was that it is truly hard for teachers to control their expectations.

"It's really tough for anybody to police their own beliefs," he said. "But think about being in a classroom with 25 kids. The demands on their thinking are so great."

Still, people have tried. The traditional way, Pianta says, has been to sit teachers down and try to change their expectations through talking to them.

"For the most part, we've tried to convince them that the beliefs they have are wrong," he says. "And we've done most of that convincing using information."

But Pianta has a different idea of how to go about changing teachers' expectations. He says it's not effective to try to change their thoughts; the key is to train teachers in an entirely new set of behaviors.

For years, Pianta and his colleagues at the Curry School have been collecting videotapes of teachers teaching. By analyzing these videos in minute ways, they've developed a good idea of which teaching behaviors are most effective. They can also see, Pianta tells me, how teacher expectations affect both their behaviors and classroom dynamics.

Pianta gives one very specific example: the belief that boys are disruptive and need to be managed.

"Say I'm a teacher and I ask a question in class, and a boy jumps up, sort of vociferously ... 'I know the answer! I know the answer! I know the answer!' " Pianta says.

"If I believe boys are disruptive and my job is control the classroom, then I'm going to respond with, 'Johnny! You're out of line here! We need you to sit down right now.' "

This, Pianta says, will likely make the boy frustrated and emotionally disengaged. He will then be likely to escalate his behavior, which will simply confirm the teacher's beliefs about him, and the teacher and kid are stuck in an unproductive loop.

But if the teacher doesn't carry those beliefs into the classroom, then the teacher is unlikely to see that behavior as threatening.

Instead it's: " 'Johnny, tell me more about what you think is going on ... But also, I want you to sit down quietly now as you tell that to me,' " Pianta says.

"Those two responses," he says, "are dictated almost entirely by two different interpretations of the same behavior that are driven by two different sets of beliefs."

To see if teachers' beliefs would be changed by giving them a new set of teaching behaviors, Pianta and his colleagues recently did a study.

They took a group of teachers, assessed their beliefs about children, then gave a portion of them a standard pedagogy course, which included information about appropriate beliefs and expectations. Another portion got intense behavioral training, which taught them a whole new set of skills based on those appropriate beliefs and expectations.

For this training, the teachers videotaped their classes over a period of months and worked with personal coaches who watched those videos, then gave them recommendations about different behaviors to try.

After that intensive training, Pianta and his colleagues analyzed the beliefs of the teachers again. What he found was that the beliefs of the trained teachers had shifted way more than the beliefs of teachers given a standard informational course.

This is why Pianta thinks that to change beliefs, the best thing to do is change behaviors.

"It's far more powerful to work from the outside in than the inside out if you want to change expectations," he says.

In other words, if you want to change a mind, simply talking to it might not be enough.

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Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

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Teachers' expectations about their students' abilities affect classroom interactions in myriad ways that can impact student performance. Students expected to succeed, for example, get more time to answer questions and more specific feedback. But training aimed at changing teaching behavior can also help change expectations.

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I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.

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I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.

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Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

Feature

My college class asks what it means to be white in America - but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.

Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

In the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. "What's redlining?" someone would ask. "George Washington freed his slaves?" someone else would inquire. But as I listened to Donald Trump's inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect the treatment of the undocumented with the treatment of Irish, Italian and Asian people over the centuries?

In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to "any alien, being a free white person," develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from "free white person"? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation at the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black people's freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921? How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?

I wanted my students to gain an awareness of a growing body of work by sociologists, theorists, historians and literary scholars in a field known as "whiteness studies," the cornerstones of which include Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness," Matthew Frye Jacobson's "Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race," Richard Dyer's "White" and more recently Nell Irvin Painter's "The History of White People." Roediger, a historian, had explained the development of the field, one that my class would engage with, saying, "The 1980s and early '90s saw the publication of major works on white identity's intricacies and costs by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, alongside new works by white writers and activists asking similar questions historically. Given the seeming novelty of such white writing and the urgency of understanding white support for Ronald Reagan, 'critical whiteness studies' gained media attention and a small foothold in universities." This area of study aimed to make visible a history of whiteness that through its association with "normalcy" and "universality" masked its omnipresent institutional power.

My class eventually became Constructions of Whiteness, and over the two years that I have taught it, many of my students (who have included just about every race, gender identity and sexual orientation) interviewed white people on campus or in their families about their understanding of American history and how it relates to whiteness. Some students simply wanted to know how others around them would define their own whiteness. Others were troubled by their own family members' racism and wanted to understand how and why certain prejudices formed. Still others wanted to show the impact of white expectations on their lives.

Perhaps this is why one day in New Haven, staring into the semicircle of oak trees in my backyard, I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself - a middle-aged black woman - walking up to strangers and doing so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Ind., did when his female colleague told him during a diversity-training session that he benefited from "white male privilege"? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. ( She was placed on paid administrative leave, and a reprimand was placed permanently in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert and just forgot my camera crew? The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don't normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.

Weeks later, it occurred to me that I tend to be surrounded by white men I don't know when I'm traveling, caught in places that are essentially nowhere: in between, en route, up in the air. As I crisscrossed the United States, Europe and Africa giving talks about my work, I found myself considering these white men who passed hours with me in airport lounges, at gates, on planes. They seemed to me to make up the largest percentage of business travelers in the liminal spaces where we waited. That I was among them in airport lounges and in first-class cabins spoke in part to my own relative economic privilege, but the price of my ticket, of course, does not translate into social capital. I was always aware that my value in our culture's eyes is determined by my skin color first and foremost. Maybe these other male travelers could answer my questions about white privilege. I felt certain that as a black woman, there had to be something I didn't understand.

Just recently, a friend who didn't get a job he applied for told me that as a white male, he was absorbing the problems of the world. He meant he was being punished for the sins of his forefathers. He wanted me to know he understood it was his burden to bear. I wanted to tell him that he needed to take a long view of the history of the workplace, given the imbalances that generations of hiring practices before him had created. But would that really make my friend feel any better? Did he understand that today, 65 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the American population? White men have held almost all the power in this country for 400 years.
[The grief that white Americans can't share.]
I knew that my friend was trying to communicate his struggle to find a way to understand the complicated American structure that holds us both. I wanted to ask him if his expectation was a sign of his privilege but decided, given the loss of his job opportunity, that my role as a friend probably demanded other responses.

After a series of casual conversations with my white male travelers, would I come to understand white privilege any differently? They couldn't know what it's like to be me, though who I am is in part a response to who they are, and I didn't really believe I understood them, even as they determined so much of what was possible in my life and in the lives of others. But because I have only lived as me, a person who regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect and abuse, I fell into this wondering silently. Always, I hesitated.

I hesitated when I stood in line for a flight across the country, and a white man stepped in front of me. He was with another white man. "Excuse me," I said. "I am in this line." He stepped behind me but not before saying to his flight mate, "You never know who they're letting into first class these days."

Was his statement a defensive move meant to cover his rudeness and embarrassment, or were we sharing a joke? Perhaps he, too, had heard the recent anecdote in which a black woman recalled a white woman's stepping in front of her at her gate. When the black woman told her she was in line, the white woman responded that it was the line for first class. Was the man's comment a sly reference? But he wasn't laughing, not even a little, not even a smile. Deadpan.

Later, when I discussed this moment with my therapist, she told me that she thought the man's statement was in response to his flight mate, not me. I didn't matter to him, she said; that's why he could step in front of me in the first place. His embarrassment, if it was embarrassment, had everything to do with how he was seen by the person who did matter: his white male companion. I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his imagination, she said. Should this be a comfort? Was my total invisibility preferable to a targeted insult?

During the flight, each time he removed or replaced something in his case overhead, he looked over at me. Each time, I looked up from my book to meet his gaze and smiled - I like to think I'm not humorless. I tried to imagine what my presence was doing to him. On some level, I thought, I must have dirtied up his narrative of white privilege securing white spaces. In my class, I had taught "Whiteness as Property," an article published in The Harvard Law Review in 1993, in which the author, Cheryl Harris, argues that "the set of assumptions, privileges and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect." These are the assumptions of privilege and exclusion that have led many white Americans to call the police on black people trying to enter their own homes or vehicles. Racial profiling becomes another sanctioned method of segregating space. Harris goes on to explain how much white people rely on these benefits, so much so that their expectations inform the interpretations of our laws. "Stand your ground" laws, for example, mean whites can claim that fear made them kill an unarmed black person. Or voter-registration laws in certain states can function as de facto Jim Crow laws. "American law," Harris writes, "has recognized a property interest in whiteness."

On the plane, I wanted to enact a new narrative that included the whiteness of the man who had stepped in front of me. I felt his whiteness should be a component of what we both understood about him, even as his whiteness would not be the entirety of who he is. His unconscious understanding of whiteness meant the space I inhabited should have been only his. The old script would have left his whiteness unacknowledged in my consideration of his slight. But a rude man and a rude white man have different presumptions. Just as when a white person confronted by an actual black human being needs to negotiate stereotypes of blackness so that he can arrive at the person standing before him, I hoped to give the man the same courtesy but in the reverse. Seeing his whiteness meant I understood my presence as an unexpected demotion for him. It was too bad if he felt that way. Still, I wondered, what is this "stuckness" inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies? I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.
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The phrase "white privilege" was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define "invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." McIntosh came to understand that she benefited from hierarchical assumptions and policies simply because she was white. I would have preferred if instead of "white privilege" she had used the term "white dominance," because "privilege" suggested hierarchical dominance was desired by all. Nonetheless, the phrase has stuck. The title of her essay "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies" was a mouthful. McIntosh listed 46 ways white privilege is enacted. "Number 19: I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial"; "Number 20: I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race"; "Number 27: I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared"; "Number 36: If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones." I'm not clear why McIntosh stopped at 46 except as a way of saying, "You get the picture." My students were able to add their own examples easily.

My students and I also studied the work of the white documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow. In the last couple of years, Dow has been part of Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (Incite), which gathered data on more than 850 people who identify as white or partly white and the communities in which they live. He filmed more than a hundred of their oral histories. This work, like McIntosh's, was another way of thinking about the ordinariness of white hierarchical thinking. I asked Dow what he learned in his conversations with white men. "They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their own narratives and coming up short," he said. "I include myself in that," he added after a moment. "We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male archetype. The individual actor on the grand stage always had the support of a genocidal government, but this is not the narrative we grew up with. It's a challenge to adjust."

The interviews, collected in Incite's initial report, "Facing Whiteness," vary greatly in terms of knowledge of American history and experiences. One interviewee declares: "The first slave owner in America was a black man. How many people know that? The slaves that were brought to America were sold to the white man by blacks. So, I don't feel that we owe them any special privileges other than that anybody else has, any other race." While this interviewee denies any privilege, another has come to see how his whiteness enables his mobility in America: "I have to accept the reality that because I'm a man, I - whether I was aware of that or not at any specific time - probably had some sort of hand up in a situation." He added, "The longer I'm in law enforcement and the more aware I am of the world around me, the more I realize that being of Anglo-Saxon descent, being a man and being in a region of America that is somewhat rural, and because it's rural by default mostly white, means that I definitely get preference." This interviewee, who while recognizing his privilege, and who according to Whitney Dow had been "pretty ostracized because of his progressiveness" in the workplace, still indicates - through his use of words like "probably" and phrases like "because it's rural by default mostly white" - that he believes white privilege is in play in only certain circumstances. Full comprehension would include the understanding that white privilege comes with expectations of protection and preferences no matter where he lives in the country.
[How privilege became a provocation.]
How angry could I be at the white man on the plane, the one who glanced at me each time he stood up the way you look at a stone you had tripped on? I understood that the man's behavior was also his socialization. My own socialization had, in many ways, prepared me for him. I was not overwhelmed by our encounter because my blackness is "consent not to be a single being." This phrase, which finds its origins in the work of the West Indian writer Édouard Glissant but was reintroduced to me in the recent work of the poet and critical theorist Fred Moten, gestures toward the fact that I can refuse the white man's stereotypes of blackness, even as he interacts with those stereotypes. What I wanted was to know what the white man saw or didn't see when he walked in front of me at the gate.

It's hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence. Frank Wilderson III, chair of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, borrows the sociological term "social death" to explain my there-but-not-there status in a historically anti-black society. The outrage - and if we are generous, the embarrassment - that occasioned the white passenger's comment were a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of the understood privileges of whiteness.

I was waiting in another line for access to another plane in another city as another group of white men approached. When they realized they would have to get behind a dozen or so people already in line, they simply formed their own line next to us. I said to the white man standing in front of me, "Now, that is the height of white male privilege." He laughed and remained smiling all the way to his seat. He wished me a good flight. We had shared something. I don't know if it was the same thing for each of us - the same recognition of racialized privilege - but I could live with that polite form of unintelligibility.

I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing (as well as obnoxious). Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play about white male privilege in one act. I appreciated the drama. One or two of them chuckled at their own audacity. The gate agent did an interesting sort of check-in by merging the newly formed line with the actual line. The people in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and accepting.

After I watched this scene play out, I filed it away to use as an example in my class. How would my students read this moment? Some would no doubt be enraged by the white female gate agent who let it happen. I would ask why it was easier to be angry with her than with the group of men. Because she doesn't recognize or utilize her institutional power, someone would say. Based on past classes, I could assume the white male students would be quick to distance themselves from the men at the gate; white solidarity has no place in a class that sets out to make visible the default positions of whiteness.

As the professor, I felt this was a narrative that could help me gauge the level of recognition of white privilege in the class, because other white people were also inconvenienced by the actions of this group of men. The students wouldn't be distracted by society's abuse of minorities because everyone seemed inconvenienced. Some students, though, would want to see the moment as gendered, not racialized. I would ask them if they could imagine a group of black men pulling off this action without the white men in my line responding or the gate agent questioning the men even if they were within their rights.

As I became more and more frustrated with myself for avoiding asking my question, I wondered if presumed segregation in business or first class should have been Number 47 on McIntosh's list. Just do it, I told myself. Just ask a random white guy how he feels about his privilege.

Image

I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem? Credit... Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

On my next flight, I came close. I was a black woman in the company of mostly white men, in seats that allowed for both proximity and separate spaces. The flight attendant brought drinks to everyone around me but repeatedly forgot my orange juice. Telling myself orange juice is sugar and she might be doing my post-cancer body a favor, I just nodded when she apologized for the second time. The third time she walked by without the juice, the white man sitting next to me said to her: "This is incredible. You have brought me two drinks in the time you have forgotten to bring her one."

She returned immediately with the juice.

I thanked him. He said, "She isn't suited to her job." I didn't respond: "She didn't forget your drinks. She didn't forget you. You are seated next to no one in this no place." Instead, I said, "She just likes you more." He perhaps thought I was speaking about him in particular and blushed. Did he understand I was joking about white male privilege? It didn't seem so. The red crept up his neck into his cheeks, and he looked shy and pleased at the same time. He brought both hands up to his cheeks as if to hold in the heat of this embarrassing pleasure.

"Coming or going?" he asked, changing the subject.

"I'm returning from Johannesburg."

"Really?" he said. "I was just in Cape Town."

Hence your advocacy, I thought ungenerously. Why was that thought in my head? I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem?

As I looked at the man in Seat 2B, I wondered if my historical positioning was turning his humanity into evidence of white male dominance. Are white men overly determined by their skin color in my eyes? Are they being forced, as my friend suggested, to absorb the problems of the world?

On the long flight, I didn't bring up white male privilege, jokes or otherwise, again. Instead we wandered around our recent memories of South Africa and discussed the resort where he stayed and the safari I took. I didn't bring up Soweto or the Apartheid Museum that I visited in Johannesburg or the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala., which the Apartheid Museum reminded me of. I wanted my fellow traveler to begin a conversation about his privilege this time. For once. I wanted him to think about his whiteness, especially because he had just left South Africa, a country that suffered, as James Baldwin said, "from the same delusion the Americans suffer from - it too thought it was a white country." But I imagined he felt the less said about race relations in the United States or South Africa, the more possible it was for us to be interlocutors. That was my fantasy, in any case.

Back home, when I mentioned these encounters to my white husband, he was amused. "They're just defensive," he said. "White fragility," he added, with a laugh. This white man who has spent the past 25 years in the world alongside me believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition. These phrases - white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation - have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation. At that moment, he wanted to discuss our current president instead. "That," he said, "is a clear case of indignation and rage in the face of privilege writ large. Real power. Real consequences." He was not wrong, of course, but he joined all the "woke" white men who set their privilege outside themselves - as in, I know better than to be ignorant or defensive about my own privilege. Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white male dominance is the privilege. There's no outrunning the kingdom, the power and the glory.

I finally got up my nerve to ask a stranger directly about white privilege as I was sitting next to him at the gate. He had initiated our conversation, because he was frustrated about yet another delay. We shared that frustration together. Eventually he asked what I did, and I told him that I write and teach. "Where do you teach?" he asked. "Yale," I answered. He told me his son wanted to go there but hadn't been accepted during the early-application process. "It's tough when you can't play the diversity card," he added.

Was he thinking out loud? Were the words just slipping out before he could catch them? Was this the innocence of white privilege? Was he yanking my chain? Was he snapping the white-privilege flag in my face? Should I have asked him why he had the expectation that his son should be admitted early, without delay, without pause, without waiting? Should I have asked how he knew a person of color "took" his son's seat and not another white son of one of these many white men sitting around us?

I was perhaps holding my breath. I decided to just breathe.

"The Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues," he added after a moment. Perhaps the clarification was intended to make it clear that he wasn't speaking right now about black people and their forms of affirmative action. He had remembered something. He had recalled who was sitting next to him.
[50 years of affirmitive action: what went right and what it got wrong?]
Then I did it. I asked. "I've been thinking about white male privilege, and I wonder if you think about yours or your son's?" It almost seemed to be a non sequitur, but he rolled with it.

"Not me," he said. "I've worked hard for everything I have."

What was it that Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing? "I got into Yale Law School. That's the No. 1 law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college." He apparently believed this despite the fact that his grandfather went to Yale. I couldn't tell by looking at this man I was sitting next to, but I wondered if he was an ethnic white rather than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, in "Whiteness of a Different Color," describes "the 20th century's reconsolidating of the 19th century's 'Celts, Slavs, Hebrews and Mediterraneans.' " By the 1940s, according to David Roediger, "given patterns of intermarriage across ethnicity and Cold War imperatives," whites stopped dividing hierarchically within whiteness and begin identifying as socially constructed Caucasians.

I said to the man, "What if I said I wasn't referring to generations of economic wealth, to Mayflower wealth and connections?" I asked him if he gets flagged when he passes through T.S.A. "Not usually," he said. "I have Global Entry."

"So do I," I said, "but I still get stopped." The "randomness" of racial profiling is a phenomenon I could talk about forever, but I stopped myself that day. "Are you able to move in and out of public spaces without being questioned as to why you are there?" I asked. "Do people rush forward asking how they can help you?" I knew the answer to my question, but I asked it anyway, because I wanted to slow down a dynamic he benefited from.

He said he saw my point. I wanted to say, "It's not my point, it's your reality," but the declarative nature of the sentence felt sharp on my tongue. I wanted to keep talking with this man, and I knew my race and gender meant he was wary of me and my questions - questions that might lead to the word "racist" or "sexist." If only skin color didn't have such predictive power.

I didn't want our different historical positioning derailing our already strained chat. I wanted to learn something that surprised me about this stranger, something I couldn't have known beforehand. Then it hit me. There wasn't enough time to develop trust, but everyone likes a listener. "Coming or going?" is the traveler's neutral, nonprying question. So now I asked him. He was heading home.

The word "home" turned him back to his son. He said his son's best friend was Asian and had been admitted to Yale on early action or early decision or early admissions. Neither of us knew the terminology. I wondered how he comforted his son. Had he used "the diversity card" as he had with me? I didn't want to discuss college-admissions policy anymore. I wanted our conversation to go down any other road, but I had somehow become a representative of Yale, not a stranger sitting next to another stranger.

I reminded myself that I was there only to listen. Just listen. The man was deeply earnest and obviously felt helpless about the uncertainty of his son's future. But it couldn't be too dismal if Yale was still an option. Don't think, I reminded myself. Know what it is to parent. Know what it is to love. Know what it is to be white. Know what it is to expect what white people have always had. Know what it is to resent. Is that unfair? Resentment has no home here. Know what it is to be white. Is that ungenerous? I don't know. Don't think.

I didn't ask this white man why he thought his son was any more entitled to a place at Yale than his son's Asian friend. I didn't want him to feel he needed to defend his son's worth or his son's intelligence to me. I wanted his son to thrive. I did. Were his son to arrive in my class, I would help him do his best. The more he achieved at Yale, the more pleased I would be for both of us. If his son told the class he got into Yale because many of his white teachers from kindergarten on exaggerated his intelligence, I would interrupt him, as I have done in the past, and say, "No, you got into Yale, and you have the capacity to understand that many factors contributed to your acceptance."

College-admissions processes can't be discussed in definitive ways; they're full of gray areas, and those gray areas are often white-leaning, even as plenty of whites are denied entrance. We know that. I was suddenly reluctant to have a conversation about white-perceived spaces and entitlement or, God forbid, affirmative action, which would of course flood the space between us with black and brown people, me included. I said instead, "Wherever your son goes will work out, and in five years none of this will matter." It was in this moment that I recognized my exhaustion. And then came the realization that we were, in fact, in the midst of a discussion about the perceived loss of white male privilege. Was I implicated in his loss? Did he think so?

Not long after this, I was on another flight and sitting next to a white man who felt as if he could already be a friend. Our conversation had the ease of kicking a ball around on a fall afternoon. Or it felt like stepping out the door in late spring when suddenly the temperature inside and out reads the same on your skin. Resistance falls away; your shoulders relax. I was, metaphorically, happily outdoors with this man, who was open and curious with a sense of humor. He spoke about his wife and son with palpable affection. And though he was with me on the plane, he was there with them as well. His father was an academic, his mother a great woman.

He asked who my favorite musician was, and I told him the Commodores because of one song, "Nightshift," which is basically an elegy. He loved Bruce Springsteen, but "Nightshift" was also one of his favorite songs. We sang lyrics from "Nightshift" together: "I still can hear him say, 'Aw, talk to me so you can see what's going on.' " When he asked if I knew a certain song by Springsteen, I admitted I didn't. I could only think of "American Skin (41 Shots)": "No secret, my friend, you can get killed just for living in your American skin." I knew those lyrics, but I didn't start singing them. I made a mental note to check out the Springsteen song he loved.

Eventually, he told me he had been working on diversity inside his company. "We still have a long way to go," he said. Then he repeated himself - "We still have a long way to go" - adding, "I don't see color." This is a statement for well-meaning white people whose privilege and blind desire catapult them into a time when little black children and little white children are judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." The phrase "I don't see color" pulled an emergency brake in my brain. Would you be bringing up diversity if you didn't see color? I wondered. Will you tell your wife you had a nice talk with a woman or a black woman? Help.

All I could think to say was, "Ain't I a black woman?" I asked the question slowly, as if testing the air quality. Did he get the riff on Sojourner Truth? Or did he think the ungrammatical construction was a sign of blackness? Or did he think I was mocking white people's understanding of black intelligence? "Aren't you a white man?" I then asked. "Can't you see that? Because if you can't see race, you can't see racism." I repeated that sentence, which I read not long before in Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility."

"I get it," he said. His tone was solemn. "What other inane things have I said?"

"Only that," I responded.

I had refused to let the reality he was insisting on be my reality. And I was pleased that I hadn't lubricated the moment, pleased I could say no to the silencing mechanisms of manners, pleased he didn't need to open up a vein of complaint. I was pleased he was not passively bullying. I was pleased he could carry the disturbance of my reality. And just like that, we broke open our conversation - random, ordinary, exhausting and full of a shared longing to exist in less segregated spaces.

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I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked. (Published 2019)

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Feature My college class asks what it means to be white in America - but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do. Credit...