Critical Exploration of Race

Introduction to the topic and methodology

What is race? Is race skin color? Is race hair texture, or facial features? Is race the geographic origin of one’s ancestors? (And if so, is race a matter of continent, of nation, or of tribe? And how far back in time must these ancestors originate?) Is race culture, or religion? Can race be measured using numbers or percentages? Can anyone be of mixed race? Can everyone?

This paper documents and reflects on a nine-session curriculum I created this semester about race. The curriculum poses none of the above questions; instead, the learners pose them. The aim of the curriculum, and of the methodology of critical exploration on which it is based, is to engage the learners in the topic and follow their emerging understandings of it, along the way figuring out how best to keep them engaged as they construct deeper understandings. Consequently, I developed the curriculum week by week, as my learners shared new observations and puzzles.

My decision to teach about race using this methodology has its roots in my own classroom teaching prior to entering graduate school. As a teacher of seventh grade social studies, I would reveal to my students each year that race is imaginary — that it has no scientific justification and exists only because our society has constructed it over time. My students seemed intrigued by this possibility, and most of them could regurgitate the information back to me easily. Yet as the curriculum progressed, my students continued to refer to racial groups as if they were fixed entities. Clearly, the idea of race as a social construct remained unexamined.

As I began to study critical exploration at Harvard under the guidance of Professor Eleanor Duckworth, who pioneered this teaching methodology, I recognized its potential for fostering deeper understandings of race. What if, rather than a teacher telling learners about other people’s theories of race, learners were to construct their own theories through their own explorations? Might this methodology nurture the learners’ engagement so that they develop more complex understandings of the topic and, in turn, of larger societal issues regarding race?

My learners for this curriculum were two fellow students, Tara and Nilda, with whom I had taken Professor Duckworth’s introductory course on critical exploration earlier in the year. Neither of my learners was born in the United States. Tara is a native of Quebec, Canada, and moved to the United States at age twelve; English is her first language. Nilda is a native of Peru who moved here five years ago for college; Spanish is her first language, although she speaks fluent English. We met for nine sessions, usually leaving one week between each session. I made audio recordings of each of the sessions, which lasted approximately one hour.

Session 1: Exploring the United States Census

I began the curriculum by giving my learners copies of Document 1, which, unbeknownst to them at the time, is an excerpt from the 1990 United States Census questionnaire. The questionnaire asks if the respondent is “of Spanish/Hispanic origin” and then for the respondent’s race, with multiple-choice options underneath each question. After giving my learners an opportunity to examine the document silently for a moment, I asked them to share things they noticed about it.

As Tara and Nilda proceeded to voice their observations, they immediately began to notice inconsistencies within the document. Nilda noticed that the first two options underneath the race question are White and Black rather than Caucasian and African American, even though the second two options are American Indian and “Asian or Pacific Islander.” Tara noticed the use of the word “origin” in the first question, in contrast to “race” in the second.

Nilda also questioned the way in which the options are grouped. She explained that Spanish and Hispanic mean two different things to her, and she wondered why “Spanish/Hispanic” is presented separately from the question about race. Nilda also expressed her uncertainty about whether Asian and Pacific Islander comprise “the same race.” Other interesting observations included Nilda’s comment that the questions do not allow the respondent to be of mixed race and Tara’s observation that there is no blank for “filling in what that other race might be, if you checked ‘Other.’”

Nilda’s frustration about Peruvians being labeled Spanish caused Tara to wonder whether “White” means of European origin. Nilda responded that many White people are of mixed race, claiming, “I’m probably nineteen different races… I don’t know which one to mark… I look White.” She dismissed the idea that “we’re all pure races” and revealed that when confronted with this type of question she usually checks both White and Hispanic even though only “one tiny little side of my family” is Hispanic. Nilda added that despite being born in a Spanish-speaking country, “biologically, racially speaking, that is not my race… Your race is not Peruvian.”

Already, Tara and Nilda together had raised many implicit questions about what race might be, encompassing skin color, physical appearance, geographic location, “origin,” “biology,” and degree of “purity.” They also suggested puzzles about how to go about grouping together different race categories.

Tara now offered a new lens through which to see race: one of social equality. She suggested that “these questions exist because of affirmative action,” so that the receivers of the data might “act in the true spirit of affirmative action.” On my urging, Tara further explained that this “true spirit” means “ensuring that there is opportunity for everyone regardless of their race.” Yet upon hearing Tara’s explanation, Nilda wondered, “If it’s regardless of my race, why do they need to know what my race is?”

Nilda’s question was one in a series of puzzles my learners had offered. I encouraged them now to share anything else that they wondered about related to the document. Tara wondered “where all the other races are,” yet when I asked her what some of these other races might be, it took her a few minutes to think of one (Arabic). They also revisited the puzzle about whether to label races by color (White and Black) or by geography (American Indian and Asian). Tara remarked, “Could you imagine if it said White, Black, Red, Yellow?” and suggested that some races “take offense at the color description” while others do not.

I soon introduced Document 2, which reveals revised versions of the same two questions as they appear in the 2000 Census. Tara and Nilda immediately noticed the relative surplus of multiple-choice options in Document 2—especially, as Nilda expressed, “lots of Asian races.” When I asked her which are Asian, however, she launched into a fascinating analysis ranging from Native Hawaiian (“in a way, kind of”) to Filipino (not Asian “per se”). Noting the absence of similarly specific labels for South American countries, Nilda remarked that her native continent has “so many immigrants it’s not even a race anymore.” She expressed uncertainty about whether a racial distinction exists between, for example, Peruvian and Venezuelan, suggesting that perhaps “now it’s the same race” due to “mixing.”

I closed the session by giving my learners copies of Document 3, which provides more detail about the Census Bureau’s categorizations. Tara seemed interested that Arab is grouped under “White” and mentioned a friend of hers from Iran who, according to Tara, would “definitely” have been “proud” to check an Arab box. Yet my request of her to tell us more led Tara to puzzle over whether her friend is, in fact, Arabic: “Muslim’s a religion… Maybe she’s not Arabic; is Arabic a place?”

By the end of Session 1, race had begun to encompass religion in addition to the physical, geographical, and biological aspects previously mentioned. My learners had also discussed social implications of race, relating to inequality and offensive language, as well as the question of whether race can disappear as a result of “mixing.” Clearly my suspicion that learners, when encouraged to explore, might pose the most interesting questions about this topic was bearing fruit.

I identified two challenges in preparing for Session 2. First, how might I most effectively track my learners’ shifting definitions of race in a manageable way that is useful to me and to them? And second, how might I continue to engage my learners in their puzzles of racial categorization and its social implications?

Sessions 2 & 3: Skulls and subfamilies

I commenced Session 2 by asking each of my learners to begin writing a “working definition,” which I described as “constructing a definition of a word based on the activities you do.” Their definitions would be of the word “race,” and Tara and Nilda would return to them regularly throughout the sessions, revising them to reflect their emerging thoughts and ideas — a new tool to track my learners’ understandings.

The first version of Tara’s definition read: “A group of people defined as a group based on shared ethnic background and shared physical characteristics.” Nilda’s began: “Particular races are comprised of groups of individuals who share characteristics that can be of: 1) genetics/biological order; 2) nationality or region of origin.” She considered a third criterion involving “Mexicans who’ve moved to America.” Both definitions seemed to be attempts to consolidate and reconcile the observations and questions that emerged from Session 1.

Their initial observations of Document 4, an 1849 skull-measurement chart, focused on evidence of bias in favor of the European groups. Tara soon noticed the Teutonic Family’s division into three groups while other groups are “lumped together.” In Tara’s comment, I recognized the thinking skill that Nilda had employed with Document 2’s disparity between the numbers of Asian and South American races. Nilda now also wondered about the term “family” and its relationship to “race” and “tribe,” echoing Tara’s observation of the terms “race” and “origin” in Document 1.

In sorting out whether she might be able to distinguish by sight between people from China, Japan, and Korea, Tara suggested that while race is different from nationality, groups do have “defining historical characteristics.” This prompted Nilda to admit that she disagreed with race-as-nationality despite its inclusion in her working definition, believing that race is more “physical… Racially, you’re not an American.” Tara introduced the term “lineage” but added that she didn’t “agree” with it.

Nilda also came close to disavowing the use of colors to define races, but she remained ambivalent. Tara suggested that color-words are “cultural,” that “people of European descent have become comfortable being called White… It doesn’t necessarily make it right.” I could sense the tension in Tara’s mind throughout this discussion, as she suggested an idea only to quickly state that the idea’s premise made her uncomfortable.

As my learners revised their working definitions, they struggled with geography and nationality. Nilda tried to reconcile origin and race by theorizing that skin color results from interactions with a region’s climate; she retained the term “region of origin” yet abandoned her previous idea that “new groups of immigration” constitute a race. Tara’s definition now allowed groups to “define themselves,” based on ethnic “lineage” because the term seemed “biological… traced back to genes.” To illustrate, Tara posed a scenario in which her daughter Hannah spurs generations of White offspring in Tanzania. How would she label her descendents? “You can’t say Black because that’s a color. African? Yes, in nationality, but not in race.”

By Session 2’s close, Tara and Nilda had inspired each other: Nilda replaced the term “order” with “lineage,” while Tara added “history” to her list of criteria — both terms that reference the passage of time. Nilda had deleted “new groups” from her definition.

In Session 3 my learners explored Document 5, in which the skull chart’s creator, Samuel Morton, offers descriptions of four racial groups. As they examined his biased writing, they considered new ideas about what race might be. Nilda noticed Morton’s emphasis on the races’ “characteristics as people,” such as their diet and intellect. Yet Tara discounted the idea that long hair points to race by exclaiming, “You can shave it! It’s not a genetic thing.” She wondered if there is a “scientific classification of race.”

Nilda dismissed Morton’s “intellect stuff” but suggested the concept of “subfamilies”: “Are Japanese and Chinese two families within the Asian race?” When Tara asked Nilda if she believed in Morton’s four major races, she replied, “I think so, and then mixes of races.” Nilda explained that she did not think of herself as “of one race” due to her mother’s darker skin — the result of her grandmother being from Puerto Rico. Tara rebutted that “darker color doesn’t necessarily establish a different race,” noting that Italians are considered White. Nilda wondered which race Arabs would be; Tara suggested a fifth major race, which Nilda named “Middle Eastern.”

Nilda revised her working definition to emphasize “place of origin” and “physical/biological/genetic characteristics,” adding that “racial subgroups… share more specific characteristics.” Tara’s definition, which “might have offended [her] three weeks ago,” now read: “A classification, designated by ethnic lineage characterized by distinct physical characteristics, of the four (or five?) major subgroups of the human species.” She listed a few but wondered about people who might not fit into any of them.

The documents in Sessions 2 and 3 allowed my learners to puzzle over which characteristics constitute race and to grapple with how to classify races. The revisions of their definitions displayed shifting priorities, although the tensions between physical appearance, biology, geography, and culture remained. After Session 3 I wrote, “I would love to be able to tell them directly that… race has no truth genetically… Yet I feel that to hand them a document with this information would be to violate the spirit of critical exploration.” Little did I know that this decision soon would be made for me.

Session 4: A social construct

A chief aim of critical exploration is to keep learners engaged. I knew I had done my job when Tara informed me over the weekend that she had discussed race with many friends, one of whom provided her with a Princeton course description that begins: “Race, it is commonly claimed, is a social construct of no biological significance.” I felt cheated, however, because Tara now had read this information rather than having the opportunity to discover it for herself. Believing that I must initiate some form of damage control, I decided to make Tara’s course description my curriculum’s Document 6.

Rather than passively absorbing the knowledge that race is a construct, as my seventh graders had, Tara and Nilda expressed skepticism, perhaps because they themselves had been engaged in exploring race. Tara in particular wondered about the phrase “commonly claimed,” as she had never before heard the claim; she also wondered how “genomes” relate to race. Nilda returned to Tara’s question about whether race is scientific, revealing that her own racial ideas had originated from White Peruvians calling the natives “inferior.” Tara referenced Morton to suggest a “chicken-and-egg” question: “Does science come from belief, or does belief come from science?”

Nilda now recalled Document 3’s assertion that race encompasses “self-identification… not [to] be interpreted as scientific.” Yet Tara doubted that the average person would say, “I’m not really Black, I’m socially constructed.” Nilda considered the possibility that most people identify as a heritage or nationality rather than a race, and she wondered what differentiates ethnicity from race. This led to a discussion about who “commonly claims” race to be socially constructed — scientists or average people?

The most surprising result of Session 4 was that neither learner wanted to significantly revise her working definition. Despite this, huge questions arose in the ensuing conversation. As Nilda began to question her belief in “racial subgroups,” Tara wondered why the difference between Japanese and Korean is considered less racially significant than the difference between Asian and Black. Nilda at one point suggested that the difference between Asian and White is “not as significant” as the difference between Black and White.

Tara, whose “whole world just freaked out” as a result of this conversation, exclaimed, “Maybe there is no race! Maybe he’s right! Who decided which ones were actually separate? Maybe it’s continental — I do think there’s something in the lineage, the history of where people came from.” In Tara’s comment, I recognized a battle between my learners’ belief that race involves genetics and geography and the new idea that race is a creation of people’s minds. They were not yet ready to subscribe to the new idea because their previous belief continued to hold enormous weight in their own minds.

Nilda built on Tara’s musing: “Didn’t we all come from Africa, and then we started moving around, and then we ended up in Asia and that’s when we became Asian because of — because of the eyes, we had to adapt to the weather or something?” I was intrigued by Nilda’s thought that people could “become Asian” by “adapting to the weather.” Tara hypothesized that in a million years, if humans become able to control the planet’s climate, people might all look the same — or even more interestingly, “if you moved all Africans into Europe and all Europeans into Africa, would the Black people become White and the White people become Black?!?”

Regardless of what their working definitions said, my learners seemed to be contemplating, simultaneously, the possibilities that race is a human creation and that it can change due to natural factors — and what each of these possibilities might mean. Document 6, rather than sabotaging the exploration, had actually enhanced it. In preparing for Session 5, I searched for a document that might prompt further discussion about which physical characteristics determine separate races.

Session 5: “It’s the same guy!”

I structured Session 5 a bit differently, giving Document 7a to Nilda and 7b to Tara and requesting that they explore their documents separately, without looking at the other learner’s paper. The faces in the two documents are exactly the same except for the hair, supposedly causing 7a to appear Black and 7b to appear Latino. I asked each learner in turn to share her observations and wonderings about her image.

Interestingly, Nilda began by describing her person’s hair. She assumed that he is not White due to factors such as his dark skin and “thick” hair and lips. She had trouble deciding whether he is Latino or Black, or possibly mixed Black and White. Tara expressed guilt that she was “attaching race” to her person’s facial characteristics yet suggested that his Latino-seeming hair is “more cultural than racial.”

Once I allowed them to view each other’s images, Nilda exclaimed, “It’s the same guy! — With different hair! — Who turned Latino!” I inquired as to how this person might have “turned Latino,” prompting my learners to attempt to identify numerous traits that might somehow signify race. At one point, Tara said, “Could you erase all these tapes when you’re done? It feels wrong to be talking about this stuff.” Once again, the premise of Tara’s own thoughts was making her uncomfortable.

I also introduced Document 7c, the same face with no hair at all, and my learners admitted that he could be of any race. Still pondering hair, Tara told us that she had read that natural blonds will soon become extinct. She wondered, “Why is skin color more important than hair color… Does anyone care that the last blond will be born? No… But if someone were to say the last African person was to be born, people would be freaking out!” Tara explained that “the reason [race is] so difficult to talk about is that it’s so much more than physical characteristics.”

This got her going further: “White people have always had the luxury of not thinking about their race… [So] if you say scientifically that race doesn’t exist, White people can continue to say it’s not important to think about, when of course it is important for people who have been isolated and segregated and marginalized because of their race! I feel like it’s a disservice to say, ‘Oh well, it doesn’t actually exist,’ because for them it’s huge, it’s gigantic, and it should be gigantic for all of us.”

Tara’s speech left me speechless. Here I was, thinking I was teaching Tara such a valuable lesson — that race does not exist — and I suddenly found that instead, Tara was teaching me that it does exist. And I believed her.

Nilda concluded the session by wondering whether, if humans had looked the same after their migrations out of Africa, slavery of Africans would still have happened: “Would the stigmas we have against races have happened if we all looked the same?”

I had intended Session 5 to focus on physical appearance, but it instead introduced an important issue into the exploration: the races’ relationships to one another. Nilda had begun to discuss how racial power dynamics might have originated, while Tara pondered the implications of these dynamics. Furthermore, rather than calling physical distinctions into question, Tara had called the social construct theory into question! I sensed this was the appropriate time to introduce an intriguing article I had read a few weeks earlier, which I was certain would challenge their thinking about these matters.

Session 6: Family tree

Session 6 began by revisiting the working definitions. Tara changed “created by ethnic lineage” to “created on the basis of ethnic lineage,” the new language implying that “someone else did the creating.” Nilda remained dissatisfied with her concept of racial subgroups but opted not to alter it.

Document 8 claims that “you and I are descended from all of the [humans] who were alive three millenniums ago and still have descendants living today.” Prior to introducing the document, I provided my learners with a calculator and challenged them to answer this question, which I predicted would get them thinking deeply about “lineage”: “How many great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents do you have?” (That's eighteen "greats.")

Tara and Nilda worked together to construct a diagram resembling an upside-down family tree, V-shaped, with each successive generational row containing twice as many people as the previous row (because each person has two parents). After a few minutes, they seemed surprised to conclude that eighteen generations back, each of them had 524,288 ancestors. I then posed a follow-up question, asking them in what year, approximately, these 524,288 ancestors were alive. Upon agreeing that they would have lived about 500 years ago, Tara remarked that “it seems like an astronomical number to be so recently;” furthermore, the nineteenth generation would be twice that number and thus contain over one million ancestors. She then offered a question that I had not anticipated: “At some point you’re going to go back so far as to be larger than the population that existed, so how is that possible?... At some point the population gets smaller.”

My learners puzzled over this question for a while; Tara hypothesized that the numbers of ancestors would decrease as people “married their cousins.” Nilda related the puzzle to her earlier theory about all human ancestors originating in Africa, wondering “how many humans were alive then.” Once I distributed Document 8, Tara and Nilda considered with fascination the content of the article, already having done the math that forms the basis of its conclusions. Nilda wondered, “If we’re all related in the past, does that mean we all looked the same at some point? And how then did we each get our current physical characteristics?” Tara realized that the European extermination of Native Americans meant that “they were killing their relatives!” Returning again to their working definitions, Nilda offered a “new perspective” that cast doubt on the idea that the physical characteristics commonly linked to race were “always there,” referencing Native Americans’ supposed passage from Asia across the Bering Strait. I sensed here echoes of her comment in Session 4 that people could “become Asian” due to weather-induced adaptation. Nilda suggested that Native Americans might have “once looked like Asians;” Tara subsequently wondered why the reverse might not be true, that Asians might once have looked like Native Americans.

Tara said she did not “know what to do with” her definition. She wondered how Irish people “get to look like that to begin with — where did all the freckles come from?!?” She also wondered again about DNA’s relationship to race (from Session 4) and if you can “scientifically find out what race you are” if in fact “race isn’t anything but where you ended up being and the result of your surroundings that defined how you look.” This sounded like a new definition to me, but I did not press her to record it.

In thinking about how to approach the next session, I sensed a need to connect my learners’ new thoughts about lineage and DNA to Tara’s concern about the social implications of race’s existence, which had remained unexamined throughout Session 6.

Sessions 7 & 8: Three percent

Shortly before we gathered for Session 7, Nilda informed me that she would bring a guest: her Puerto Rican cousin Manuel. I became excited to meet part of the reason that Nilda did not consider herself to be “of one race” (from Session 3). Manuel’s presence also offered an opportunity for Nilda and Tara to review their explorations to date.

Nilda began by discussing Documents 1 and 2, for which her major questions were “Is race Asian or is race Chinese?” and “Are ethnicity, nationality, and race the same thing? Who decides?” Her excitement about Document 3’s reference to “self-identification” made me realize that the idea of race-as-construct actually had been introduced prior to Tara’s discovery of the Princeton course description — yet it took the Session 4 exploration for “self-identification” to hold meaning for my learners.

Tara now noticed a previously unexamined phrase in Document 3: race “as used by the Census Bureau.” This confirmed Tara’s suspicion that there are many ways in which race might be defined, because “if there was an actual definition, they [the Census Bureau] seem like the type of place that would know about it!” Nilda told Manuel that she and Tara had been thinking of race as more “biological” than “socio-political.” Tara, though silent, looked a bit puzzled by Nilda’s comment, and I wondered to myself if she took issue with it.

They reviewed the subsequent explorations and discussed Session 6’s family tree. Nilda offered a new version of her earlier question: “Do we all come from the same place and physical characteristics have to do with where we moved in time, or did we all evolve at different times and places?” Tara begged me for “numbers and facts and data” — other than those from Morton — that might help them define race.

Tara’s request allowed for a convenient transition to Document 9, which narrates the saga of Susie Guillory Phipps as she sues Louisiana for labeling her “Black” on her birth certificate because three percent of her ancestry (her great-great-great-great grandmother) is Black. Tara did some Session 6-style math and determined that Phipps had 64 ancestors in that generation, which Nilda estimated to have lived about 100 years ago — “and one of them was Black!”

Tara noted that Phipps must “care a lot” to spend $20,000 to change her birth certificate. She wondered if this is “because she doesn’t want to be considered Black” and if Phipps would go to the same lengths to switch instead from White to Black. Tara’s suspicion of a double-standard was reminiscent of the census and Morton explorations, and I enjoyed seeing her apply this thinking skill in a new context. Manuel chimed in to wonder if there might be social “repercussions” for being Black, prompting Tara to suggest that Phipps grew up during the civil rights era.

Nilda suspected a second double-standard: “If you’re Black and one great-great-great-great grandparent was White, would you be considered White?” This led Tara to recall learning that people with ten percent Native American ancestry “get money,” and she wondered why the defining percentage might be different for different races.

Nilda asked Tara what a “fair percentage” might be. Tara’s initial response was whatever “the law” says, but then she voiced an intriguing wondering: “How do they know the great-great-great-great grandmother was Black? What makes her Black?” Manuel suggested DNA, but a brief discussion about finding “lines of chromosomes” in “dried blood” prompted Tara to rebut, “That’s not race, that’s DNA.” For the first time, Tara seemed to be answering her own question about what DNA might have to do with race, suspecting that the two are separate.

In addition to wondering how the state calculated Phipps’s ancestor’s ancestry, Tara now realized that Phipps’s child would have only 1.5 percent Black ancestry and therefore be White. This question about “where the line is” prompted Nilda to revisit questions about what constitutes whiteness in the first place, noting that her own White lineage encompasses English and Danish and wondering if Danish might be a separate race. She thought aloud: “I don’t know… People in Denmark look different from people in Italy—but not like Asian-and-Black different.” Tara vehemently disagreed and asked Nilda for her thoughts about the difference between Irish and Iranian, both “Caucasian.”

I jumped in and asked both learners whether the difference between Irish and Iranian is the same as between Asian and Black. Tara, Nilda, and Manuel all contributed ideas, culminating in Nilda asking, in a frustrated tone, “Do we think there are 300 different races?!?” I asked if Document 9 is of any use, but Tara dismissed it as having been “created for discriminatory purposes.” Surprisingly, however, she did express a suspicion that there is something “that’s distinguishing underneath the skin,” although she “always had thought that the definitions were clearer.” Nilda stated, “But of course we’re all mixed; what are we thinking?” Nilda’s tone suggested that it was an epiphany.

Echoing an earlier idea of Nilda’s, Tara wondered if perhaps different races “evolved differently” in various areas of the globe, prompting her to worry that she was “talking like Samuel Morton.” She elaborated on her feeling of guilt: “I have been identified — and identify — as a White person, and I’m aware of the privilege given to me… [White people] have historically abused that position of privilege, which makes me ordinarily very cautious of what I say about race. Saying that races evolved differently seems loaded.”

Session 7 ended here, although I felt that my learners could use more time exploring Document 9 and the issues of measurement and privilege that accompany it. I decided that we would continue working with the document in Session 8. During the intervening week, Tara researched race and DNA online and shared a second article, which I subsequently assigned for “homework” as Document 10. I had become confident that outside sources could only enhance the exploration; I knew that my learners were not about to believe anything without first examining its source in detail.

My learners’ initial observations upon re-reading Document 9 involved the realization that Louisiana, the United States, and foreign countries all might have different ways of determining if someone is Black. Tara remarked that humans “classify people into relationships based on how they look, and race is, the way we’ve historically looked at it, a visual thing… even if the skin color in fact means nothing… you still see it.” Yet when I asked her if Louisiana views race as “a visual thing,” Tara said no, with the qualifier that the state’s race law “was based on seeing something different… darker skin resulted in people viewing those people differently, and that evolved into… racism.”

I suggested that Tara and Nilda attempt to write out how Louisiana might explain to Phipps what race is — similar to the working definition but from the state’s perspective. Tara shared her definition first: “You’re only White if you are 97% ‘pure’ based on your ancestry, if you can prove that your ancestors were all above 97%; otherwise, you’re whatever you look like.” Nilda noted that Phipps’s parent would be considered just as Black as her great-great-great-great grandmother, prompting Tara to wonder why Louisiana did not simply point to the Blackness of her mother to make its case. A series of similar questions caused Tara to exclaim that “the whole system is stupid.” Nilda’s Louisiana definition focused on “lineage,” but further consideration of Document 10 caused her to state that no one’s lineage could ever be “pure.”

Tara commented that humans are “organizing by nature” and that we have “for whatever reasons” organized ourselves by race instead of, for example, hair or height. I thought she might be on the verge of defining race as “some trait that human beings use to classify each other,” when Nilda offered a different perspective: Race is not merely physical characteristics but also things people do that we “associate with the physical characteristics,” similar to what Morton had implied. She explained that “racism comes from the association of… where you come from geographically with what you’ve done as people, what has happened to you as people.”

Tara now revisited her earlier idea, from Session 5, that race must exist “because to deny it now [is] to take something away from people who are trying to have pride… It exists because we’ve made it so.” Nilda suggested Europeans might have “made it so” by enslaving Africans, prompting Tara to wonder whether slavery would have occurred if the two groups had looked the same. Nilda theorized that race is a “confluence of genetics and physical characteristics with culture” and asked Tara whether racism would exist if the cultures were the same. Both of my learners seemed to be attempting to isolate defining variables in an effort to determine the origins of racism.

Tara suggested yet another possible origin: the fact that skin color, as opposed to attributes such as eye color, “blends” in mixed offspring. She wondered if Louisiana’s racism came from White people thinking, “Oh look, they’ve darkened that white skin!” I asked Tara if she thought that if skin colors did not blend, and babies were born either light or dark, Phipps’s situation would be different. Without hesitating, Tara agreed.

When revising their working definitions, Tara noted the challenge of “reconciling” all of their recent ideas, while Nilda wondered how to retain the physical and genetic elements of her definition. Tara noted that “the social construct… is just as important as the genes.” I asked them if they could identify some ways other than the already-mentioned “pride” in which race is important socially. Before Nilda could answer, Tara voiced a worry: “If an African American person wants to hold onto their race [as being] important, how is that different than what White people were doing” when they enslaved Africans? “Maybe the social construct of race is just as dangerous as the biological construct!”

We had only one session remaining, and Tara’s worry inspired what became the final area of our exploration. Over eight sessions, my learners had grappled with the physical, biological, genealogical, and geographical meanings of race. In their recent explorations of race’s social meanings, they had differentiated clearly between race’s positive and negative implications. Now Tara was beginning to consider “pride” itself as having potential for “danger.” I decided to conclude our explorations by returning to the field in which all three of us have immersed ourselves this year: education.

Session 9: White Heritage Club

The final session began by considering other ways to define race. Nilda told us of a friend’s relationship that had broken up over her Judaism, which the friend had described as “a race thing.” She noted that other religions are not considered races, although she was unsure about Muslims because they do not “all look different.” When I asked Nilda whether “what someone looks like is race,” she grunted and admitted that she had “fallen into the trap” of describing race through a single lens of physicality.

Tara suggested that a person can become Jewish but not become Black. I asked her whether a “criterion for what race is” might be that “you can’t become it,” and Tara tentatively agreed, claiming race to be “intrinsic” although you can become part of the “culture.”

The discussion of culture led nicely into Document 11, an article about the controversy surrounding high school student Lisa’s quest to form a “Caucasian Club.” I selected this article for its connections to both Session 8’s discussion about racial identity being “dangerous” and the nine-week exploration as a whole.

Nilda wondered about the last page’s distinction between “race” and “belonging” and wondered if “cultural groups” comprised of, for example, both Blacks and Latinos might be considered races. Tara viewed the reactions of many of the adults in the document to be “knee-jerk,” treating Lisa as if she were “young and doesn’t get it” when Lisa actually seems to “get” the need to discuss issues of whiteness and privilege that are ignored by many adults. Nilda felt that the double-standard of allowing clubs for other races is reminiscent of Document 9’s inconsistent way of measuring race.

Discussion soon focused on three names offered for the club in the document: Caucasian Club (Lisa’s proposed name) and the alternatives White Heritage Club and Euro-American Student Union. Tara noted that recent names for Black such as “African American” have attempted to communicate power and dignity, whereas “here they are trying to the find the name for White that would connote the least amount of power!” She added that the “White Heritage Club” sounds even worse than “Caucasian Club,” citing the importance of not “escaping history” such as the Ku Klux Klan.

Nilda cited the importance for marginalized people of congregating with those who look the same as themselves while also recognizing the potentially negative effects of self-segregation. She noted for the first time that she and Tara had been exploring race specifically “from the lens of people who are White.”

Tara called the usage of the term White a “bad idea” in the context of the club but acceptable in the context of the census, because of the club’s intent to “designate” “culture.” Nilda mocked the idea of being “proud to be White,” which prompted Tara to note that people are fine with having pride in being Black. Nilda responded that any feeling of “pride” that causes a group to become exclusive is inappropriate. Tara mentioned her suspicion that a White student joining a Black group would get “much less flack” than a Black student joining a White group—“giving in to the dominant culture.” Nilda added that White students make an anti-racist statement by joining a Black club.

Listing their ideas of “having things in common culturally, having things in common genetically, having things in common physically, dominant culture, making a statement,” I asked them to turn for the last time to their working definitions. I suggested a goal of “if you were having a discussion about race, being able to explain what you’re talking about.” They spent many minutes revising their writing.

Nilda had come to the “realization that race doesn’t exist,” citing as evidence the theory that humanity began as “all one race” and that the subsequent divisions have to do with environmental adaptation and culture. She clarified that “it is not that we’re racially mixed” but rather that “the race is one.”

Tara felt “surprisingly more comfortable” with the topic of race. She decided to settle for two complementary definitions, as many dictionaries do: “(a) A classification of human beings based on genetically inherited physical characteristics including skin tone, eye shape, and hair color/texture; (b) A social construct created through identification with a shared ethnicity and culture.” She explained that her “big question… is which one goes first.” Tara also admitted that she was “missing” criteria such as location and percentage of lineage, and she added that (b), as opposed to (a), is “something you can change… Susie Phipps’s argument to Louisiana was (b)” because Phipps felt culturally White, while the state argued (a) based on unchangeable genetics.

Nilda remarked that if she saw Tara’s definitions in a dictionary she would find them acceptable, but that our explorations had caused her to view race as being “way beyond what I look like today.” Nilda’s curiosity about human ancestry had developed over many sessions, and she now based her assertion of race’s nonexistence on this curiosity, rather than on the plentiful evidence of inconsistent categorization or our discussions about cultural implications.

Nilda’s comments prompted a short discussion of the similarity between the concept of human “race” and domestic animal “breed,” which caused Tara to once again “freak out.” The extent to which Tara would have continued freaking out in a tenth session will never be known, as we had finally reached the end of our time.

Implications for social studies teaching and learning

Each practitioner of critical exploration has his or her own way of describing the methodology. Eleanor Duckworth has described it as encompassing, in part, “situations where teachers listen and learners do the explaining.” I believe that my curriculum demonstrates not only the value but also the necessity of allowing learners of social studies to do the explaining.

When I told my seventh graders that race does not exist, they accepted my premise, yet it conflicted with their own real-world observations. Race was all around them! They saw race in their school, in their sports teams and places of worship, on the streets, and on the news. They themselves were races! How could race not exist?

Critical exploration done well can transform this obstacle into the crux of social studies learning. Learners construct new understandings based on their existing ones. By encouraging learners to examine their existing understandings through explorations of engaging texts, ongoing writing tasks, and deceivingly simple activities such as figuring out how many great-great-great… grandparents one has, a teacher can help learners construct much deeper and more complex understandings of a topic than they would have developed if the teacher had stood in front of them and told them about the world.

Yet critical exploration is not always done well. At many moments over the course of my nine sessions, I worried that I had pushed my learners in directions in which they were not already headed. Some teachers view this pushing as essential to pedagogical practice. However, if a learner feels compelled to build on the teacher’s thinking rather than on his or her own, it risks preventing the learner from reconciling old understandings with new ones and constructing new ways of seeing the topic that work for the learner.

Learners live in society just as teachers do. Learners and teachers have a lot to teach each other, and a lot to learn from each other. I set out to teach my learners that race is a social construct, that we all think it’s scientific but it’s just an illusion that our society has built to excuse our prejudices. My learners taught me that I was right, but also that there is more to the picture that I had not considered.

After nine sessions, I learned as much about race as my learners did. I learned it by engaging them in the topic, listening to them struggle with it, posing questions when I (or they) did not understand what they meant, and figuring out how I might help them learn more. I entered this project believing that I understood race. Now I recognize that I do not, although I am much further along than I was at the beginning. And so are my learners.

Sources of the Documents

• • Documents 1 & 2: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. United States Census 2000: Individual Census Report. (cited 19 May 2006).

  • Document 3: U.S. Census Bureau. Race. (cited 19 May 2006).

  • Documents 4 & 5: Facing History and Ourselves. (2002). Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves.

  • Document 6: Princeton University. Spring 2006 Writing Seminars Offered by the Princeton Writing Program. (cited 19 May 2006).

  • Document 7: MacLin, O., & Malpass, R. (2003). The ambiguous-race face illusion. Perception, 32, 249-252.

  • Document 8: Olsen, S. (2006, March 15). Why we’re all Jesus’ children. (cited 19 May 2006).

  • Document 9: Facing History and Ourselves. (1994). Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves.

  • Document 10: Schoofs, M. What DNA says about human ancestry—and bigotry: Part 3, The myth of race. The Village Voice. (cited 19 May 2006).

  • Document 11: Vargas, J.A. (2003, Sept. 20). Club for Caucasians stirs up Oakley. (cited 19 May 2006).