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Audio~An Indian Father's Plea~by Robert Lake

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Day 7 of #ExploringEquity "it’s incumbent on districts to foster 'a systemic culture of valuing teachers of color' if they want to ensure they provide an enriching education for all children in the long run." I have often wished we had more teachers of color in our building.
Granted, we have a large white population, but we have enough kids of color that they would certainly benefit from having teachers of color in front of them. Of course, we would all benefit. Non-white points of view in our decision making would be warmly welcomed.

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Until now, much of the policy debate on teacher diversity has centered on filling the pipeline- expanding the pool of black students graduating from college and entering the teaching profession. But a new working paper from researchers at Northwestern University suggests the presence of an overlooked and particularly troubling obstacle to boosting the number of black educators: racial discrimination and bias in school-district hiring practices.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a professor of social policy and economics, and her co-author Cynthia DuBois, used the ruling in and outcome of a decades-old desegregation lawsuit in Louisiana- Moore v. Tangipahoa Parish School Board- as a case study to evaluate whether certain changes to hiring practices can substantially increase a school district's share of black teachers. "This was a pretty stringent court order [and] we wanted to understand what happened as a result," Schanzenbach explained, referring to a directive that the Louisiana district adopt new, affirmative-action hiring practices. "How quickly was it able to change? And, ultimately, how did that impact student achievement?"

In 1975, the U.S. District Court of Louisiana in New Orleans issued a consent decree meant to desegregate faculty in Tangipahoa Parish, instructing the school board to fill vacant teaching positions with qualified black applicants until the share of black teachers in the district aligned with that of black students. But for 35 years, that court order had sat dormant, "largely ignored by the district and unenforced by the court," the authors write. It wasn't until 2010 that the court issued a ruling reaffirming the consent decree. Under the new plan, not only did Tangipahoa Parish have to ensure its teaching force was racially representative-it also had to explain its rationale every time a qualified black applicant wasn't chosen for an open position.

The court had good reason to reinforce this long-standing desegregation order. Over a 10-year period prior to the new court-ordered mandate (1998 to 2008), Tangipahoa had, on average, hired a smaller portion of black teachers (19.8 percent) than had other school districts in Louisiana (24.1 percent). What's more, its overall teacher workforce included fewer black educators (17.1 percent) than the rest of the state (23.2 percent.)

After the court-ordered criteria went into effect in 2010, the number of black teachers hired in Tangipahoa spiked dramatically. And by 2014, new hires in the district were significantly more likely to be black (32.2. percent) than new teachers hired statewide (21.7 percent). In turn, the difference between the district and state in the share of the total teacher workforce identified as black closed to within 2 percentage points (19.9 percent vs. 22 percent)-a shift that the researchers attributed not, say, to white teachers retiring but rather to the surge in new black teachers spurred by the hiring policy.

The influx of African American educators was able to shrink the black-student-to-black-teacher ratio even as the share of black students slowly increased over the same timeframe. In fact, the new policy reduced the "representation gap"-defined by the authors as the difference between the share of students that are black and the share of teachers that are black-by between 3 and 4 percentage points. The policy also resulted in a greater share of black teachers employed at predominately white schools, which tended to have few black teachers before the court intervened.

And the value of this policy, it seems, wasn't just a matter of optics. Since the paper was released, Schanzenbach has obtained additional race-specific data that reflect notable achievements for black students. After the court order was implemented, the black-white achievement disparity in test scores narrowed by 5 percent. While it's difficult to assess causation, this improvement, Schanzenbach theorized, happened "just from hiring different teachers within the pool of applicants."

DuBois, a native of Tangipahoa Parish and an emerging scholar who co-authored the study but passed away earlier this month, surveyed teachers in the district to provide more context on the quantitative data. Some 81 percent of participants reported that they heard about job openings through word-of-mouth, describing a "decentralized, accelerated, and insular hiring process" that resulted in uneven access to employment opportunities for black and white teacher applicants in the rural-Louisiana school system.

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A Root Cause of the Teacher-Diversity Problem

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Until now, much of the policy debate on teacher diversity has centered on filling the pipeline- expanding the pool of black students graduating from college and entering the teaching profession. But a new working paper from researchers at Northwestern University suggests the presence of an overlooked and particularly troubling obstacle to boosting the number of black educators: racial discrimination and bias in school-district hiring practices.

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Day 6 of #ExploringEquity No truth. No reconciliation. We have to tell the truth. I will work harder to learn the truth.

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Update: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, honoring more than 4,000 victims of lynching in America, opened to the public April 26th, 2018, in Alabama. Below, Oprah Winfrey's first look inside:
There is a reckoning taking place in America over how we remember our history. Much of the focus has been on whether or not to take down monuments that celebrate the Confederacy. But this story is about a new monument going up in Montgomery, Alabama. It documents the lynchings of thousands of African-American men, women and children during a 70 year period following the Civil War.

The project is being led by criminal defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, who is determined to shed light on a dark period in our past that most people would rather forget. It's a shocking and disturbing reality that lynchings were not isolated murders committed only by men in white hoods in the middle of the night. Often, they were public crimes, witnessed -- even celebrated -- by thousands of people. Stevenson believes if we want to heal racial divisions we must educate Americans -- of every color and creed.

These cotton fields in southern Alabama are quiet now, but in 1937 a brutal murder took place here: the lynching of Wes Johnson.

Last January some of Johnson's descendants came here in what has become a ritual taking place at lynching sites across the country, organized by civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson.

Bryan Stevenson: Something happened here that was wrong. Something happened here that was unjust. And too few people have talked about it. And so we want to acknowledge the wrong that happened to Wes Johnson.

This is 18-year-old Wes Johnson. It is the only known image of him that remains. He was a tenant farmer accused of assaulting a white woman. Before he could stand trial, a mob of one hundred men dragged him from jail, shot him and left him hanging from a tree.

Bryan Stevenson: The blood of Wes Johnson is in this soil. I'd like you to begin to dig this soil in remembrance of Wes Johnson.

The soil collection is part of Bryan Stevenson's project to document and remember African-Americans lynched during a period of what he calls "racial terror."

Bryan Stevenson: We want to call this community to repentance, to acknowledgement, to shame. We want to tell the truth, because we believe in truth and reconciliation but we know that truth and reconciliation are sequential. We can't get to where we're trying to go if we don't tell the truth first.

So far, Stevenson's team has chronicled more than 4,300 lynchings. They continue to find more.

Many victims, like Bennie Simmons and John Richards were accused of murder. One in four lynching victims, like Joseph Richardson and Frank Embree -- were accused of unlawful conduct with white women.

In nearly every case, no evidence, just an accusation, was enough.

Oprah Winfrey: There are so many crimes committed against African Americans. Why focus on lynching?

Bryan Stevenson: At the end of the Civil War black people are supposed to get the right to vote. And the only way people who were white could maintain their political control was to intimidate black people. And lynching was especially effective because it would allow the whole community to know that we did this to this person. It was intended to send a message that if you try to vote, if you try to advocate for your rights, if you insist on fair wages, if you do anything that complicates white supremacy and white dominance and political power, we will kill you.

Oprah Winfrey: Anything that upsets the power structure as I want it to be.

Bryan Stevenson: That's exactly right.

In 1993 Bryan Stevenson founded an organization he called "the equal justice initiative." It's a legal advocacy group, based in Montgomery, Alabama, focused on defending the poor and powerless. Stevenson is best known for his legal victories in the United States Supreme Court and for successfully overturning the wrongful convictions of over 100 people on death row.

But ten years ago he turned the attention of his organization to also investigating crimes of the past: the lynchings of African-Americans. Defense attorney Sia Sanneh has spent hundreds of hours searching through newspaper archives and visiting county courthouses.

Oprah Winfrey: Is there usually newspaper evidence or documentation?

Sia Sanneh: Often there were public reports, because people acted with impunity. And so there would be newspaper reports, sometimes in advance, saying, "A man will be lynched later this afternoon."

Sia Sanneh: This is an article about the lynching of a man named Jesse Washington, who was accused of a crime in Waco, Texas.

The newspaper headline read: "Burn young negro in public square as 15,000 look on."

A mob dragged Jesse Washington, a teenager who was convicted of murder after a one-hour trial, from the courtroom to the public square.

Sia Sanneh: There's a remarkable photograph of the crowd. And it's people dressed in their Sunday best--

Oprah Winfrey: Sunday best.

Sia Sanneh: --with their hats on.

Oprah Winfrey: (READING) "His clothing oil-soaked. He is strung to tree. Fire is set under him. And he is dropped into flames as 15,000 people look on."

Sia Sanneh: I think it's incredibly revealing that death was not enough. That it wasn't enough to kill people. People would be killed, and then shot. And then set on fire. And then even, after that, there are cases where the body was dragged to the heart of the black community.

Fear of that kind of mob led Wes Johnsons' relatives to bury him in this unmarked grave.

Walker Howell: Right here is where Wes Johnson is buried. And--

Oprah Winfrey: Right here?

Walker Howell: Right here.

Faye Walker Howell, who is a filmmaker and Wes Johnson's distant cousin, spent decades interviewing relatives who were alive at the time and remembered the lynching.

Walker Howell: They had to bury him in a hurry.

Oprah Winfrey: Uh-huh. Why?

Walker Howell: Because the lynch mob, they were coming they wanted Wes' body to take around town, to drag around town, to show the body off.

Bryan Stevenson: It wasn't just Wes Johnson who was killed and victimized. It was the entire black community.

Walker Howell: Exactly.

Bryan Stevenson: Everybody was feeling fear and panic and menace and trauma the night of this lynching. And for the weeks and months and years after that lynching, it was a community crime. This wasn't done by the Klan, or people who had to wear a mask. This was done by teachers and clergy and law enforcement officers.

Oprah Winfrey: And people you had to deal with every day.

Bryan Stevenson: Every day.

Stevenson's team started their investigation in Alabama, but soon uncovered accounts of mobs murdering African-Americans throughout the southern states, and beyond.

As the cases mounted, Stevenson wanted to do something to commemorate the victims.

So in Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of the deep south - which still has dozens of monuments celebrating the Confederacy - Stevenson's equal justice initiative took on a bold project: they bought six acres of land and started construction on a memorial to the victims of lynching.

Bryan Stevenson: Actually, you can still see names ...

Cannon: Yeah.

Sia Sanneh: from here.

Cannon: You can see it a lot better than I thought.

Bryan Stevenson: I think this looks great.

"The National Memorial for Peace and Justice," which was paid for through hundreds of private donations, will open to the public April 26th.

"I don't think we get to pretend that this stuff didn't happen. I don't think you can just play it off. This is like a disease. You have to treat it."

It contains 805 steel markers: one for each county where lynchings took place. And on each marker, the names.

The markers are suspended to evoke the horror of being strung up and hanged from a tree.

Oprah Winfrey: So you start with them at eye level, and then on this corridor, they begin to rise.

Bryan Stevenson: And then you get to this corridor, and this is when you begin to confront the scale of all of these lynchings.

Oprah Winfrey: Whoa.

Oprah Winfrey: This is something.

Bryan Stevenson: Yes, yes. We wanted people to have a sense of just the scale of what this violence, what this terrorism was.

Oprah Winfrey: So, this is over 4,000 that have been documented, but of course, there are more.

Bryan Stevenson: Thousands more. Thousands more--

Oprah Winfrey: Thousands more.

Bryan Stevenson: And--

Oprah Winfrey: Will we ever even know how many?

Bryan Stevenson: We will never know.

Uneven, rusted steel is meant to echo the many shades and skin tones of those African-Americans lynched.

Oprah Winfrey: Every name has its own story.

Bryan Stevenson: Yes, yes, that's right. Eliza Cowen was lynched in Laurens County, South Carolina.

Oprah Winfrey: Eliza, a woman.

Bryan Stevenson: A woman. A woman.

Oprah Winfrey: Were women often lynched?

Bryan Stevenson: They were, they were. Sometimes because they were accused of something, and then sometimes women would be lynched if they couldn't find the man they were looking for. They would lynch that man's wife or daughter or child.

Bryan Stevenson: And this was a minister, Reverend T. A. Allen, who began talking to sharecroppers about their rights. And because he was doing that, the plantation owners, the landowners got together and they lynched him. And the proof they used that he was somebody worthy of lynching is that when they found his body he had a piece of paper that talked about sharecropper rights. And the other piece of paper he had in his suit jacket was a note that said, "Every man a king."

Bryan Stevenson: A lot of these folks were lynched because they showed too much dignity. They showed too much humanity. He just wanted to be respected as a human being, and it got him hanged.

Bryan Stevenson: On the side here, what we do is we start to tell stories. We want people to hear and understand what happened to some of these folks.

Oprah Winfrey: Oh my. Robert Morton was lynched for writing a note to a white woman. David Hunter was lynched in Laurens County, South Carolina, for leaving the farm where he worked without permission.

Bryan Stevenson: Yeah.

Lynchings became so acceptable onlookers would send picture postcards to friends and family. This card, depicting the horrific image of a burned corpse, casually notes: "this is the barbeque we had last night." Even young children looked on.

Oprah Winfrey: You know, the thing that gets me in so many of the photographs that I've seen is the fact that people treated it like major events.

Bryan Stevenson: Yeah.

Oprah Winfrey: I think about who are those people--

Bryan Stevenson: Yes.

Oprah Winfrey: --that are smiling into the camera?

Bryan Stevenson: And I think it's done real psychic damage not just to black people, but to white people, too. Because you can't bring your child to the public square and have your child watch someone be burned to death, be tortured, to have their fingers cut off, to be castrated, to be taunted, to be menaced, to be hanged like that and not expect it to have some consequence, some legacy. And the legacy that I think it's created is this indifference to how we treat people who look different than us. And I think that's tragic. I don't even think that white people in our country are free. I think we're all burdened by this history of racial inequality.

Oprah Winfrey: What about everyone who says, and there are black and white people say it, enough already, of all that. That happened. That's the past. Let's move forward.

Bryan Stevenson: I don't think we get to pretend that this stuff didn't happen. I don't think you can just play it off. This is like a disease. You have to treat it.

To do that, Stevenson says, we need to talk about it. So along with the memorial, he is also opening a museum in Montgomery -- designed to teach people more about what he calls, "the ugly parts" of American history. It traces the African-American experience from enslavement to mass incarceration.

Bryan Stevenson: Slavery doesn't end in 1865, it just evolves.

Stevenson wants people to understand that lynchings were not just brutal footnotes in history, they reflected a belief in racial differences that reinforced segregation in the 1950s and 60s, and, he says, has resulted in a pattern of unequal justice today.

Bryan Stevenson: And now we live in a landscape where you see young black boys and men being rounded up. One in three black male babies born in this country is expected to go to jail or prison.

Oprah Winfrey: You actually think that slavery and lynchings led to African-Americans being disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system?

Bryan Stevenson: Yes, I do. And I think, actually, it's not a hard thing to understand, you know, I look at--

Oprah Winfrey: I think it is a hard thing to understand for people who think people get locked up, people are locked up because they commit crimes.

Bryan Stevenson: About 13 percent of the people illegally in possession of drugs in this country are black. That's about our proportion of the population. You know what percentage are arrested? That's about 35 percent. That is an echo of this consciousness that doesn't value the lives of these folks.

Equal value for every life is what Bryan Stevenson has spent his life fighting for. So now, soil from the place of Wes Johnson's lynching sits on this shelf in the museum in Montgomery - along with hundreds of others.

Bryan Stevenson: And right now, when we talk about our history, when we talk about our past, we're not telling the truth. We're just not. America can be a great nation, even though there was slavery, even though there was lynching, even though there was segregation. But if we don't talk about those things we did, we don't acknowledge those things, we're not going to get there.
Produced by Denise Schrier Cetta. Associate producer, Megan Kelty. This report was originally published on April 8, 2018.

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Inside the memorial to victims of lynching

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Update: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, honoring more than 4,000 victims of lynching in America, opened to the public April 26th, 2018, in Alabama. Below, Oprah Winfrey's first look inside: There is a reckoning taking place in America over how we remember our history.

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Day 5 of #ExploringEquity. Am moved by @ClintSmithIII’s poem that was recommended by @DingleTeach. Makes me think of the “You’s” whom I have known but never really known. I want to know them. I want to sit down with them, so I can know them. Can I know them?

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Day 4 of #ExploringEquity. Stress. Stressed brains don't learn. And while we all feel stress, those of us inside the margins cannot imagine the additional stress that our marginalized students experience every day as they face the realities of racism. Encouraged by the suggestions in the article to help my kids who experience this on a daily basis, I am still struggling a bit with how to put those suggestions into specific actions here in little, old, mostly-white Cheney, WA. Maybe it's simply engaging my marginalized kids on a personal level. Can I do that? Will it offend them? I don't think it will. I have good relationships with all of them. Maybe it's just taking that first step. Wish it wasn't so hard, but that it is hard means it's important.

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A new study shows that the pressures associated with discrimination contribute to the achievement gap.

For 15-year-old Zion Agostini, the start of each school day is a new occasion to navigate a minefield of racial profiling. From an early age, walking home from elementary school with his older brother, Agostini took note of the differential treatment police gave to black people in his community: "I [saw] people get stopped ... get harassed ... get arrested for minor offenses." Almost a decade later, Agostini said he now faces the same treatment as a sophomore at Nelson Mandela School for Social Justice in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. "Me being a black male, I'm more likely to be stopped and frisked by a cop. Then, [I'm] going to school with more cops ... [messing] with me at 7 in the morning."

The strain of these interactions is heightened by the daily routine of passing through a metal detector, emptying pockets, and removing clothing that frequently makes him late to his first-period class. "The fact is now I'm [tardy] because I'm being scanned four times because of the metal in my necklace or my keys. I missed whatever [the teacher] was explaining ... a lot goes on in [chemistry], and because of that I'm behind." All of this combined takes a toll on his schoolwork, he said. "It does make it extremely hard to focus on the classwork ... You're upset, or sad, or just emotional about what just happened. It takes a while to settle."

A recent study from Northwestern University corroborates Agostini's experience, suggesting that the stress of racial discrimination may partly explain the persistent gaps in academic performance between some nonwhite students, mainly black and Latino youth, and their white counterparts. The team of researchers found that the physiological response to race-based stressors-be it perceived racial prejudice, or the drive to outperform negative stereotypes-leads the body to pump out more stress hormones in adolescents from traditionally marginalized groups. This biological reaction to race-based stress is compounded by the psychological response to discrimination or the coping mechanisms youngsters develop to lessen the distress. What emerges is a picture of black and Latino students whose concentration, motivation, and, ultimately, learning is impaired by unintended and overt racism.

Emma Adam, a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern and the study's senior author, said prior research had established racial differences in levels of cortisol-a hormone that increases when the body is stressed-between black and white youth, and linked this to the impact of discrimination. In the current research review, she and her co-authors set out to connect the dots. "We had observed these [dissimilarities] and knew that sleep and stress hormones have strong implications for cognition ... we also knew that there was a strong racial gap in academic attainment."

Two sources of stress encountered by black and Latino students and examined in the report are perceived discrimination-the perception that you will be treated differently or unfairly because of your race-and stereotype threat, the stress of confirming negative expectations about your racial or ethnic group. According to the paper, among this population of students, perceived discrimination from teachers was "related to lower grades, less academic motivation ... and less persistence when encountering an academic challenge." The study also found that the anxiety surrounding the stereotype of academic inferiority undermined students performing academic tasks.

Over time, Adam said, children develop strategies to reduce the racial stressors, but these, too, have consequences for academic success. Students might devalue the importance of doing well on tests or decide that doing well in school isn't a part of their identity-"If you don't care, then you're not going to feel as stressed in those academic circumstances," she said, "but obviously that [affects] your performance."

While conceding that many factors contribute to academic achievement-school quality and teacher quality among them-Adam said knowing how race-based stress affects the body holds possible answers to addressing achievement disparities. "Promoting positive ethnic racial identity would be one way to reduce those feelings of separation or exclusion and improve students' ability to focus in the classroom. Reducing student exposure to racial discrimination and improving race relations in the U.S. more generally are the ultimate solutions to this, but in the meantime, there are ways to help students deal with the stress."
"Being a person of color, you're constantly ... being targeted just because you're a person of color."
L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy, an associate professor of sociology and Black Studies at the City College of New York, said exploring the role that stress plays in the lives of black and Latino youth is a good addition to much of the research literature on academic gaps that focuses on socioeconomic factors, family background, and neighborhood characteristics. He added that the paper's conclusion-negotiating racial indignities leads to stress, and in turn, makes it harder for students of color to sleep and stay on task-is a useful contribution to the educational dialogue.

"It opens up the door for us to think about some of the interventions that we can do at the school level ... talking to children about how to process stress ... as well as the interpersonal work that we have to do [thinking] about what everyday racism looks like," Lewis-McCoy said. "Not just race as an institutional practice, or racism in terms of [school segregation], but the [routine] experiences of those people who are black and Latino."

He expressed some concerns, however, with the study's premise that black students confronted with racial hurdles regularly disconnect from school or no longer desire an education. To the contrary, he found in researching his book Inequality in the Promised Land -a look at race and suburban schooling-that black children often sought ways to circumvent race-based obstacles. "Young people are facing discrimination on the playground ... in who gets called on in the classroom and what type of feedback they receive ... in which colleges or post-education opportunities they're offered," Lewis-McCoy said, noting that children living with discrimination learn to pivot when "they don't have adults who acknowledge that or work with them to change the arrangements." The CUNY professor said the common belief that race-based stressors lead black students to disassociate from academic achievement is "actually a wrong interpretation of their actions. We can't assume that every blocked opportunity leads to someone retreating. In fact, I think the narrative and the arc around black education is often finding success in spite of barriers."

Agostini, the New York City teen, identifies with the stress of racial inequity-or what he calls the "psychological trauma" of constant racial harassment. He said it can take him up to a day to recover. "It's not something that easy to shake. Being a person of color, you're constantly ... being targeted just because you're a person of color. It makes it hard to deal."

But as Lewis-McCoy states, Agostini has found tools to combat the racial discrimination he's experienced, channeling his emotions into action. He is a member of the Urban Youth Collaborative, a citywide coalition of youth organizers working on school-based social-justice issues. Looking ahead, he hopes to break the cycle of racial targeting for future students like himself.

"I hope to be an example [via] protests, and actions, and rallies, and whatever I have to do," he said. "I don't want other black and Latino students being pushed out of school ... I want them to be able to go to school and get their education ... I want them to be able to walk home from school ... I want them to be able to just chill in the park and just hang out with their friends ... I want to change people's lives for the positive."

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How the Stress of Racism Affects Learning

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A new study shows that the pressures associated with discrimination contribute to the achievement gap.

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Day 3 of exploring equity. When the system is not fair, we can’t simply expect marginalized kids to dream or work their way to success. Provocative piece by @mdawriter

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What Happens When Poor Kids Are Taught Society Is Fair

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A new study finds that believing in meritocracy can lead disadvantaged adolescents of color to act out and engage in risky behavior.

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Day 2 of my journey into better understanding equity so I can better understand ALL my kids. Yes we can and should have conversations about race in the classroom. Easy said. Harder done. But it can be done. I’m learning. One read at a time.

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Two decades ago, Beverly Daniel Tatum published a bestselling book on the psychology of racism. Now, with the release of the book's second edition, she reflects on its relevance to schools today.

In 1997, Beverly Daniel Tatum, one of the country's foremost authorities on the psychology of racism, answered a recurring question that surfaced in her work with teachers, administrators, and parent groups: Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? The result was a critically acclaimed book of the same name that gave readers-numbering in the hundreds of thousands-a starting point to demystify conversations about race, better understand the concept of racial identity, and communicate across racial and ethnic divides.

Now two decades later, the black kids are still sitting together. And Tatum has returned with a revised and updated 20th-anniversary edition of her national bestseller that publishes today. One aspect that has changed dramatically since the original release of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race are America's demographics. Latinos and Asian Americans are the largest and fastest-growing populations of color, respectively, with children of color for the first time outnumbering white children in public schools. Additionally, the backlash against the election of the first black president, the continuing segregation of schools, and highly visible incidents of police violence seem to belie the claim of a "post-racial society"-making Tatum's perspectives on effective dialogue about race and racism especially relevant.

Tatum recently shared some thoughts with The Atlantic on why conversations about race remain vexing and what can happen when educators and parents avoid those conversations. The interview that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Melinda D. Anderson: Has your perspective changed on anything you wrote in the original edition of your book?

Beverly Daniel Tatum: In 1997 my goal in writing my book was to help others move beyond fear, anger, and denial to a new understanding of what racism is, how it impacts all of us, and ultimately what we can do about it. ... I still have that goal, but in 1997 we were a nation at peace and the economy was expanding. Today we are a nation at war, suffering from economic anxiety and the combination of "post-racial" rhetoric, simmering racial resentments, and an increasing 140-character culture of communication that has made productive conversation more difficult to have.

That said, it is still the case that in a race-conscious society, we all have a racial identity that develops in predictable ways, shaped largely by the interactions we have with others. I still believe that an understanding of that identity-development process can help all of us begin to build bridges across lines of difference.

Anderson: In the wake of the events in Charlottesville, Virginia-where members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists marched through the city last month-many educators are grappling with how to help students understand and contextualize America's history of racism and current racial divides. What would you say to teachers and administrators struggling in this area?

Tatum: I like to begin my conversations with educators by talking about why it's so hard for people to talk about race. I often ask them to think about their own earliest race-related memories, and without exception what I find is that many people have [these] memories-and if you ask how old they were, they'll often tell you 5, 6, 7 years old. Then I usually ask what emotion is associated with that memory. And they'll mention things like embarrassment, fear, anger, sadness, shame, [and] sometimes confusion. Most often it's some uncomfortable feeling.

[Finally] I ask: When that experience happened, did you speak about it to anyone? Did you talk to a parent, or a teacher, a caring adult about this experience? And almost always, the majority of the people in the audience will say they did not. There's often just this understanding that you're not supposed to talk about it. And I start there simply to say ... now you're 35 or whatever age, and you've had a lot of lifetime experiences that have told you, don't talk about this.

You can't solve a problem without talking about it. And certainly if we think about educational environments and experiences, it is in the classroom where you can create the space for a conversation about the meaning of the Confederate flag and [discuss] those statues [and] when they were put up. There are resources that teachers can use-provided by organizations like Facing History and Ourselves-to inform themselves, and then bring that information into classrooms in an age-appropriate way. [Also,] if I were in a classroom talking about what happened [in Charlottesville] I'd want to lift up not only the horrific things that we all know about, but also the solidarity of the people who came out the next day to remember the memory of Heather Heyer [a 32-year-old woman who was killed protesting the white-supremacist rally]. I think that it's important ... in these conversations, to always leave space for hope.

Anderson: You delve deeply into the racial-identity development process for black youth-from their early years through adulthood. One anecdote brings the specific role of black teachers to the forefront. Can you tell me about the role black educators-who make up just 7 percent of the public-school teaching force-play in black children's lives?

Tatum: I often use this analogy: If you and I were in a room together with lots of other people and somebody took a photograph of us, and I handed you that photograph at the end of our time together, and you took a look at it, what would be the first thing you would do? You're going to look for yourself in the picture.

If you think about classrooms or workspaces or conferences, wherever we are, we go into these spaces and we look for ourselves. You want to see yourself represented. In that sense, when young people walk into a classroom, they want to see someone who they identify with, maybe because they're the same race. It doesn't always have to be racial identification. [A student] can identify with a teacher because she likes music [or] identify with [educators] because they are into sports. But to the extent that kids of color walk into classrooms and rarely see someone who looks like themselves in that environment, that's a missing link.

Anderson: Your writing on the development of white identity was a revelatory look into the current cultural and social dynamics in the United States. Please talk about the process of redefining whiteness from "just normal" to a more nuanced conception of what it means to be white.

Tatum: If ... you live in a neighborhood where everybody or most people are white, you grew up in a family where all the members are white, and you go to a school and most people are white, [chances are] you [see your white identity as] the norm. And you probably don't think much about it-that's not the part of your identity that you're focused on. But when you enter into a space, a classroom or a workplace, where you are now in a racially mixed environment, and there's conversation about issues of race in particular, you may start to have a greater awareness. You start to learn what whiteness means, in some ways, because you start to see what racial-group membership means for other people. Or maybe [that awareness comes through] ... reading a book, or taking a class.

However that awareness starts to happen, what I've found is that [white] people start to realize that they've had some advantages. ... They've had some benefits as a result of being white that they'd never really paid attention to, but have taken for granted, or not even noticed. And when they start to notice or when they learn the history, it's upsetting ... There are often feelings of guilt. It's usually at that point where it can be really helpful [to join] an organization like Showing Up for Racial Justice, which helps white people support each other in their growth and learning around how to become anti-racist.

[Figuring out how to turn that guilt into action] is a learning process, and it's not as linear as I'm describing. It often requires re-educating oneself or learning things that you never learned in school, simply because it wasn't [taught]. Talking to people you don't usually talk to. It's not like it happens instantly.

Anderson: Interestingly, you expand on the conversation-shifting beyond black and white-to interrupt the frequent resistance to talking about racism in non-black communities of color. What are some of the complexities surrounding identity development for students who belong to those communities?

Tatum: Well, I think the basic principle goes back to that picture analogy. If we want to affirm the identities of our students, the first thing we have to think about is: Do they see themselves represented? One of the points I talk about is that the representation of Native Americans is always in the past. There's a Native educator I quote who says Native youth, who have a very high suicide rate, need to see themselves as having a future, not just a past. It's thinking about how students will find themselves in the curriculum, not just who's teaching, but [also] how are they being talked about? If you're Native American, do you see yourself represented at all except perhaps as the mascot of the football team?

The common stereotype for Asians is that they're academically successful, particularly in science and math. But what if you are a young Asian person who is interested in journalism? Are you able to express yourself fully or are you being categorized so narrowly that your options are being foreclosed? In the case of Latinos, language is important to identity. Familism [prioritizing family relationships] is an important cultural value; you want to preserve your language so you can speak to [your] grandmother. But if you're in a school where you feel your language is perceived as a liability-not an asset-that has a direct impact on how you feel about being in school.

Regardless of your group membership, the questions of identity are at the heart of the adolescent experience. ... Each group has its own particular social context ... but at the fundamental core of each young person's [identity development] is a desire for affirmation.

Anderson: You admit that you're an optimist at heart, but for some the prevalence of racism in American society can seem all-consuming. What fuels your sense of confidence?

Tatum: Sometimes you have to work at feeling hopeful. Social progress tends to be two steps forward, one step back. I'm old enough to know that change is possible. I was born in September of 1954, several months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. ... If you think about the sense of urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, those young people who are out in the streets are asking: Why are we still having this conversation? Why are these things still happening? It's a difficult moment, there's no question. Charlottesville and the President's response have reminded us how difficult it is. But that said, there are a lot of people who want change.

And it's only because I have seen that change is possible that I believe it is again possible. The dialogue is critical. That's why I always put the word "conversations" in my book titles, because you can't move forward without talking to people. Talk isn't something that comes easily [and] talk by itself isn't sufficient; you want to have those conversations because you want to inspire action.

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Do Conversations About Race Belong in the Classroom?

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Two decades ago, Beverly Daniel Tatum published a bestselling book on the psychology of racism. Now, with the release of the book's second edition, she reflects on its relevance to schools today.

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Day one of my journey into better understanding equity and its role in education. Takeaway: my educational experience w/ slavery was sanitized and I have not done enough to make it any less so. The struggle is there but the need for truth is greater.

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A new report finds that the topic is mistaught and often sentimentalized-and students are alarmingly misinformed as a result.

A class of middle-schoolers in Charlotte, North Carolina, was asked to cite "four reasons why Africans made good slaves." Nine third-grade teachers in suburban Atlanta assigned math word problems about slavery and beatings. A high school in the Los Angeles-area reenacted a slave ship-with students' lying on the dark classroom floor, wrists taped, as staff play the role of slave ship captains. And for a lesson on Colonial America, fifth-graders at a school in northern New Jersey had to create posters advertising slave auctions.

School assignments on slavery routinely draw national headlines and scorn. Yet beyond the outraged parents and school-district apologies lies a complex and entrenched set of education challenges. A new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance project points to the widespread failure to accurately teach the hard, and nuanced, history of American slavery and enslaved people. Collectively, the report finds that slavery is mistaught, mischaracterized, sanitized, and sentimentalized-leaving students poorly educated, and contemporary issues of race and racism misunderstood.

In what it describes as the first analysis of its kind, Teaching Tolerance conducted online surveys of 1,000 American high-school seniors and more than 1,700 social-studies teachers across the country. The group also reviewed 10 commonly used U.S.-history textbooks, and examined 15 sets of state standards to assess what students know, what educators teach, what publishers include, and what standards require vis-à-vis slavery.

Among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Fewer than one-third (32 percent) correctly named the 13th Amendment as the formal end of U.S. slavery, with a slightly higher share (35 percent) choosing the Emancipation Proclamation. And fewer than half (46 percent) identified the "Middle Passage" as the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America.

Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, said the research, conducted in 2017, revealed the urgent need for schools to do a better job of teaching slavery. "Students are being deprived of the truth about our history [and] the materials that teachers have are not particularly good," she said. "I would hope that students would look at this and realize that they deserve to know better ... and teachers need to know there are better ways to teach this [topic]."

The student results, which the report labels "dismal," extend beyond factual errors to a failure to grasp key concepts underpinning the nature and legacy of slavery. Fewer than one-quarter (22 percent) of participating high-school seniors knew that "protections for slavery were embedded in [America's] founding documents"-that rather than a " peculiar institution " of the South, slavery was a Constitutionally enshrined right. And fewer than four in 10 students surveyed (39 percent) understood how slavery "shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness."

Examining the teachers' survey results might help explain why students struggled to answer questions on American enslavement: Educators are struggling themselves. While teachers overwhelmingly (92 percent) claim they are "comfortable discussing slavery" in their classroom, their teaching practices reveal profound lapses. Only slightly more than half (52 percent) teach their students about slavery's legal roots in the nation's founding documents, while just 53 percent emphasize the extent of slavery outside of the antebellum South. And 54 percent teach the continuing legacy of slavery in today's society.

Additionally, dozens of teachers rely on "simulations"-role-playing and games-to teach slavery, a method that Teaching Tolerance has warned against on the grounds that it can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification. Meanwhile, a large majority-73 percent-use "slaves" when talking about slavery in the classroom instead of "enslaved persons" (49 percent), the latter term of which has gained favor for emphasizing the humanity of those forced into bondage.

The overwhelming majority of teachers who participated in the survey (90 percent) are somehow affiliated with Teaching Tolerance and its learning materials. Costello said this indicates the problems revealed in the survey results could be much more pervasive than the findings suggest. "If anything, I think [this collection of survey respondents] is a group that's more sensitive to issues of race, more likely to confront them in classrooms" compared to the broader teacher workforce, she explained, adding that the findings are "a silhouette of the problem." Similarly, many of those surveyed were elementary-school teachers, which Costello said was noteworthy considering the ability of slavery education in the early grades to form the narrative-the "fake history"-that students carry through high school.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, a high-school U.S.-history teacher in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a Portland suburb, has encountered students' common misconceptions-such as the belief that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and that the Civil War was really about states' rights. Her straightforward solution is assigning original documents: "Read Lincoln's first inaugural address and you do not find a fiery abolitionist, but someone promising to enforce the fugitive slave clause; read the articles of secession, and you find striking declarations from slave states that their actions are rooted in a desire to protect [slavery]."

Still, Wolfe-Rocca echoed the report's teacher respondents in stressing the inherent challenges in tackling the subject well. As a white teacher, she admittedly struggles with presenting an unsanitized version of slavery that doesn't desensitize her students at Lake Oswego High School to the violence and black pain. "Kids walk into my class 'knowing' about slavery. But their recitation of this knowledge is dull, lifeless, and bored," she said. "It has the feel of something memorized [and] rote, rather than internalized and meaningful." She uses personal narratives of enslaved people to teach the ugliness and injustice of the past while being "careful to keep the rape and whipping to a minimum."

Wolfe-Rocca aims to strike a delicate balance, but she wonders whether she's whitewashing history: "How do we surface the realities of slavery without resorting to spectacle?" Like teachers cited in the report, she finds that exploring the true costs of slavery is difficult but essential.

Further compounding teachers' difficulties is the quality of textbooks and state content standards. Teaching Tolerance found that textbooks generally lacked comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved people-the best textbook earned a score of 70 on the project's rubric of essential elements for bringing slavery into the classroom-and state standards were generally "timid," focused more on abolitionists than on the everyday experiences of slavery.

Taken together, the study exposes a number of unsettling facts about slavery education in U.S. classrooms: Slavery is taught without context, prioritizing "feel good" stories over harsh realities; slavery is taught as an exclusively southern institution, masking the complicity of northern institutions and citizens in America's slave-based economy; slavery is rarely connected to white supremacy-the ideology that justified its perpetuation; and slavery is seldom connected to the present, drawing the arc from enslavement to Jim Crow, the civil-rights movement, and the persistence of structural racism.

LaGarrett King, an assistant professor of social-studies education at the University of Missouri, served on the Teaching Tolerance advisory board that developed a framework for teaching American slavery-basically, the concepts that every graduating high-school senior should know-as part of the report's recommendations. As a teacher educator, he said the study fills a significant void.

Students training to be teachers, especially those being educated to teach in elementary schools, know little about the history of slavery, he stated, noting that "much curriculum and teaching around racially and ethnically diverse [people] features a fun-foods and festival-approach to learning." By contrast, King said, the framework provides a guide to delve into topics such as slavery and black history with a thorough and academically sound approach, versus teaching slavery in reductive and superficial ways.

"Can you teach slavery without it being psychologically violent to the children? The answer is no, violence will occur and is expected," he said. "The key is the recognition of white supremacy and [of] the humanity of black people that helps aid in the complexity of the subject."

Relatedly, the study also drew attention to teachers who struggle to have open and honest conversations in mixed-race classrooms about the atrocities of slavery. Antoinette Dempsey-Waters, a black social-studies educator at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, said she relies on autobiographies to give a vivid picture of enslavement that helps all students in her highly diverse school "walk away with the knowledge of the evil of slavery," as they come to "understand and respect ... the fight for freedom" waged by enslaved people.

Notably, Teaching Tolerance recommends using primary sources and original historical materials to improve instruction, and making textbooks better to reflect a more accurate and inclusive view of slavery.

"It's clear that the United States is still struggling with how to talk about the history of slavery and its aftermath," the report concludes. "The front lines of this struggle are in schools, as teachers do the hard work of explaining this country's history and helping students to understand how the present relates to the past."

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What Kids Are Really Learning About Slavery

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A new report finds that the topic is mistaught and often sentimentalized-and students are alarmingly misinformed as a result.