recipes for anti-racist educators

June 4, 2020

As any home cook will tell you, ingredients react with other ingredients. And learning a few new techniques can up your game in ways you never imagined. I was 35 when I was introduced to a pastry cutter. Before that I used my fingers. I wondered why my pie crusts were tough -- I was warming up the butter as I broke it into the dough. I learned, I do better and now my crusts are kind of great.

Now is a moment for both new ingredients and new techniques.

Educator and culturally responsive leadership coach Joe Truss reminds us that when we change the way we think, our actions change. For educators, that means that new ways of thinking "might actually change the world for students of color and finally close the opportunity gap." He goes on to say, "with hate crimes on the rise, police murders of black people, and Karens on the attack, not to mention mass shootings and our current conservative politics, there is NO time to waste."

Truss developed a list of books for an anti-racist book club that responds to white fragility. White fragility, according to Robin Diangelo, is a term that helps describe and frame white people's responses to race, which are often characterized by a "disbelieving defensiveness ...when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy."

With his permission, we share a link to Truss' list and his reflection questions here: 40+ Antiracist Books for Educators.

As many of our contributors and readers are oral and public historians as well as foodies, we want to highlight three books from his list that speak directly to the work we do and the ways we can think, act, write and teach from where we stand to incorporate anti-racist practices that challenge white fragility here:

1. Between the World and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates

How do we reckon with history? How does knowing history enable us to begin to free ourselves from its burdens? How do we dismantle racist and exclusionary heritages and rebuild? Novelist, essayist, and literary commentator Ta Nehisi Coates illuminates the ways the political is personal and how personhood is defined through the multiple and varied lenses of history. His book comes to us in the form of a letter to his teenaged son at a time when new stories of an old phenomenon -- police brutality against Black male bodies -- were coming out regularly. Eviscerating the idea of the American Dream, Coates at once castigates it, reframes it and asks necessary questions as a way to challenge readers to grapple with the myths that have made us. “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” Between the World and Me invites readers into an understanding of the power of history and to the possibilities of revising the myths that shackle and bind us to an unsustainable political and cultural structure of white supremacy.

2. Ghosts in the Schoolyard by Eve Ewing
   Eve Ewing was a student and a teacher in Chicago public schools before she became a scholar; as a sociologist of education, she has studied school closures in the wake of the destruction of public housing in the Bronzesville district of Chicago, long considered a hub of African American life and culture in Chicago. For those interested in oral history and public history, the questions -- whose story will be told and who will tell it? -- define and frame our work. At the same time, many of us are concerned about the connectedness of seemingly unrelated things and are committed to holistic processes that result in fuller stories that do not compartmentalize human experience. Ewing's book is a model and guide for us. Diane Ravitch called Ghosts in the Schoolyard a triumph because, "it is a history told from the point of view of those who were acted on, rather than the point of view of those at the top of the pyramid." Moving beyond the statistics of declining enrollments that appeared to motivate school closures, Ewing highlights community efforts to keep schools open as centers of community life, meeting spaces, places that worked. While one logic was at play from the city, state and school board, students, teachers, and parents actively resisted both the processes at work and the stories and narratives that shaped those processes. Ewing reminds us that intimate knowledges of lived experiences make possible an analysis that is often impossible for outsiders. Juxtaposing the vibrant and resilient Bronzeville community against the narratives about it --propagated by mostly white outsiders that applied a logic and framework designed to further isolate and marginalize the community and its residents -- Ewing illuminates a whole new way to go about preventing and alleviating poverty and disenfranchisement.

3. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed has long been heralded as a key work in the field of critical pedagogy. Empowering and preparing students to question and challenge both domination itself and the structures that do the work of dominating is at the heart of this framework for teaching and learning. Written by Paulo Freire in his native language, Portuguese, in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The book was initially a tool for adult education programs, specifically literacy programs. Like Myles Horton, co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, Freire observed that people learn most effectively from their contexts; even more, they learn in process of trying to change the things that oppress them. Learning by doing. Learning by questioning. Learning by challenging. Freire argued that the "banking model of education," where students are containers and teachers fill those containers with information, was built on a faulty and yet deeply embedded power dynamic. The educator has the power to name, to narrate, to determine what information is, and the student must learn according to the teacher's framework, values and ideas of meaning. In fact, students are evaluated based on their compliance with the teacher's authority. Freire offered a pedagogy of liberation, wherein everyone involved is a co-learner and the products of teaching and learning emerge out of collaborative, democractic processes rooted in the world and dedicated to making that world better for the most marginalized. For us, as oral and public historians, the liberatory possibilities for storytelling are very much rooted in people's efforts to name for themselves what matters and for us to see the frameworks that limit and shape our naming as things that are constructed, and that can also be torn down and remade.

If you want to learn some tools and ways of framing to dismantle cultures of white supremacy, consider a workshop with Joe Truss:

https://culturallyresponsiveleadership.com/wsc-virtual/

For our statement, please see our Food for Thought “Silence isn’t an option”