A high school class on race and racism

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2004 by Lawrence Blum

Ahmad, from an Indian immigrant family, had a similar reaction. "Like in my AP history class now [the semester following my class], there are only four minority and the other 26 are white. We don't really want to talk; I am not really sure why but we just don't talk.... Like I would think twice before answering because if I said something stupid then people would be saying, what is he doing here, why is he in the AP class." Parris, discussing an AP literature class, said, "Like you gotta watch out. Make sure if you say something bad. You don't want to give them a negative impact of Black people. They act like we're like the first Black people they've ever met."

Several students discussed one particular such course, with a white teacher who was very eager for the students of color to participate in class, but, according to my students, found this difficult to achieve. We had discussed this course in my class, and a Latino student, Vanessa, who was accustomed to being in white-dominated classes, was shocked to discover that her classmates from my class who had taken the class in question had felt uncomfortable speaking up in this class, given the teacher's encouragement. Clearly there are complex issues of identity and critical mass involved in the levels of comfort students feel in different classes. For example, this Latino girl thinks of herself very distinctly as "a minority" (the term of choice at the high school), and assumed that became she herself felt comfortable speaking up, that other "minority" kids would do so as well. Ahmad, who did not feel comfortable, also, like Vanessa, distinctly saw himself as a "minority" (although the South Asians, and other Asian students as well, often do not identify with the Black and Latino students). Perhaps Ahmad's particular way of appropriating a "minority" identity was bound up with his growing up in a largely Black and Latino housing project in Cambridge. He had adopted some hip hop cultural mannerisms and felt comfortable with the Blacks and Latinos. While Vanessa infers from her comfort in speaking that other minority students will fed such comfort as well, Ahmad (in no way a shy student) feels inhibited by what he perceives as a lack of a critical mass of minority students.

At the same time, both Efriem and Parris articulate a distinct sense of racial vulnerability absent in both Ahmad and Vanessa. Both say they are worried that a "stupid" remark they make will make Blacks look bad in general; Ahmad says only that he is worried that a stupid remark he makes will make students wonder why he is there, not members of a specific racial or ethnic group. The Black students' responses are akin to Steele's idea of stereotype threat, except that the students do not say that they performed less well on the graded assignments in the class, but only that they did not feel as comfortable speaking.

At the end of my course quite a few students suggested that the course should be mandatory (though some also recognized that this would make for a very different atmosphere in the class). One Black student said, "Things you would want to say in other classes you can say in this class." And another: "Other teachers are not as educated about it. It isn't that they don't want to talk about it." This suggests to me that many high school students, not only the few in my own class, are eager to engage with racial issues in a thoughtful and non-dogmatic manner, if a safe and respectful context can be provided for doing so, in which there is a critical mass of the relevant groups. Some students thought that several of their teachers would actually like to have more conversations about racial topics, but were either not sufficiently knowledgeable to do so, or not sure they could handle the emotions that might emerge in such discussions. The high school is currently engaging these issues in some helpful ways. As mentioned, racial issues are increasingly part of the school's discourse about education, and the school has always offered several courses on African-American history and other race-related topics. In 2003-04, Peggy McIntosh's SEED project (Seeking Educational Equality and Diversity) ran groups for parents, teachers, and administrators, and this initiative will be carried into the future. I believe that many teachers at the school are eager to take on the challenges suggested by my students' comments above.