Color Blind or Color Conscious?

School Administrator, May, 1999 by Beverly Daniel

How schools acknowledge racial and ethnic identities will affect all students' educational experiences

I've had many teachers say to me, "I'm not prejudiced. I don't notice any differences in these kids. I treat them all the same," and my question is, "The same as what?" -- an African American father

Many teachers aspire to be "color-blind" when interacting with their students. To notice the racial and ethnic differences among their students feels wrong to them, a sign perhaps of bigotry or prejudicial thinking. But from the child's point of view (and that of his or her parents), not noticing may mean that the educator is overlooking an important dimension of the young person's experience in the world and, even more specifically, in that classroom.

As the father quoted above observed, "If you're going to teach them all the same, does that mean that you don't recognize that they are black ... that they have an experience that is rich and that you can use to enrich this classroom?"

A color-blind approach often means that the educator has not considered the meaning of racial/ethnic identity to the child.

However, when dealing especially with adolescents, identity questions are very important to keep in mind. As children enter adolescence, they begin to explore the questions of identity, asking, "Who am I? Who can I be?" in ways they have not done before. For youth of color in particular, "Who am I?" includes thinking about Who am I ethnically and/or racially? What does it mean to be black or Latino or Asian?

Why are young people of color thinking about themselves in terms of race or ethnicity? Because the rest of the world is viewing them that way.

Shaping of Self-Perception

The concept of identity is a complex one, shaped by individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors and social and political contexts. Who am I? The answer depends in large part on who the world around me says I am. Who do my parents say I am? Who do my peers say I am? What message is reflected back to me in the faces and voices of my teachers? My neighbors? The store clerks? What do I learn from the media about myself? How am I represented in the cultural images around me? Or am I missing from the picture altogether? As social scientist Charles Cooley pointed out long ago, other people are the mirror in which we see ourselves.

Our self-perceptions are shaped by the messages that we receive from those around us, and when youth of color enter adolescence, the racial content of those messages intensifies. For example, the young black boy that everyone thought was cute when he was seven may elicit a very different response from adults when he is a young man of 15. Though he may be the same good-natured person, now 6 feet tall and wearing the adolescent attire of the day, he may notice that women hold their purses a little tighter when they see him or maybe even cross the street to avoid him.

He may notice the sound of the automatic door locks on cars as he passes by or that he is being followed around by the security guards at the local mall. As he rides in town on his new bicycle, does a police officer hassle him, asking where he got it, implying that it might be stolen? Do strangers assume he plays basketball? Each of these experiences conveys a racial message and his awareness of his racial group membership is heightened as a result.

Some of the key environmental messages are received at school. Though many elementary schools have self-contained classrooms where children of varying performance levels learn together, many middle and secondary schools use ability grouping or tracking. Though school administrators usually defend their tracking practices as fair and objective, there is a recognizable racial pattern to how children are assigned, which often represents the system of advantage operating in the schools.

In racially mixed schools, black children are much more likely to be in the lower track than the honors track. Such apparent sorting along racial lines sends a message about what it means to be black. One young honors student in a middle-class suburban school I interviewed noted the irony of this resegregation in what he described as a "very integrated environment" and hinted at the identity issues it raised for him.

The teen-ager said: "It was really a very paradoxical existence. Here I am in a school that's 35 percent black, you know, and I'm the only black in my classes. ... That always struck me as odd. I guess I felt that I was different from the other blacks because of that."

Social Shaping

In addition to the changes taking place within school, changes are occurring in the social dynamics outside of school. For many parents, puberty raises anxiety about interracial dating. In racially mixed communities, you begin to see what I call the "birthday party effect." Young children's birthday parties in multiracial communities are often a reflection of that diversity. The parties of elementary school children may be segregated by gender, but not by race. At puberty, when the parties become "sleepovers" or boy-girl events, they become less and less racially diverse.