Revealing the Invisible

Confronting Passive Racism in Teacher Education

Sherry Marx

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135925970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This book examines and confronts the passive and often unconscious racism of white teacher education students, offering a critical tool in the effort to make education more equitable. Sherry Marx provides a consciousness-raising account of how white teachers must come to recognize their own positions of privilege and work actively to create anti-racist teaching techniques and learning environments for children of color and children learning English as a second language.

CHAPTER 1

Talking about Race

Because contemporary White Americans have been conditioned not to think about race and, especially, not to talk about it, facing the topic can be a challenging, frustrating, and even frightening experience for many. Preservice teachers in the multicultural issues in education classes that I teach often feel defensive when the word race is introduced in class. The topic makes them uncertain and sometimes angry. In the beginning of each semester, White students spend a lot of time arguing that race should not be the primary marker of diversity. Also, many argue that race is overemphasized in the field of education and that, in reality, we are all individuals with much in common and little that separates us. On some points, I agree with them. For example, I agree that race is neither the only marker of difference nor the only kind of diversity. In these classes, we talk about numerous aspects of diversity including socioeconomic class, gender, sexual identity, and more (see Adams, Bell & Griffin, 1997; Banks & Banks, 2003). However, I recognize the color-blindness that influences students’ discomfort with the topic of race and, in a continual effort to dismantle color-blindness, I persistently call race to the students’ attention and weave it into most every topic we discuss in class. Because the majority of my students and teacher education students around the country are White, I give a lot of attention to Whiteness. This makes students uncomfortable. But, as time goes by, most of them begin to develop language with which to talk about race, and many open their eyes to the influences of race on everyone’s life.

A color-conscious repertoire of language and tools would be in contrast to the color-blindness embraced by most members of U.S. society, including most practicing teachers. The “color-blind” teachers with whom I have worked readily dismiss the notion that race has any influence on their students or themselves. At the same time they reject the influences of race, they often point to the underachievers in their classes, the “problem students,” and the students who “don’t fit in,” many of whom are children of color. Sometimes all of these students are children of color. In these cases, race is definitely having an influence in the classroom. Across the United States, there is an achievement gap between White children and children of color. As recently as 1999, just over 7 percent of White students age 16 through 24 were considered to have dropped out of high school, while this was the case for nearly 13 percent of African American students and nearly 27 percent of Latinas/os (NCES, 2001). At the same time, Whites continue to outperform African Americans and Latinas/os in reading and math at every grade level measured (NCES, 2003b) and to attend college at higher rates (U.S. Census, 2003). Given the number of children of color who receive most, if not all, of their education from White teachers, race is an incredibly important topic that teachers must be able to think about and discuss.

Expectations and Race

The beliefs teachers and preservice teachers have about students make their way into the classroom even when the teachers themselves are unconscious or “dysconscious” (King, 1991) of their thoughts. Unacknowledged, passive racism certainly had an effect on Mrs. D’s teaching. It is also evident in many of the schools that I visit today and in the tutoring experiences of my teacher education students. Not long ago, I taught a teacher education class that focused on issues related to English-language learning school children (ELLs) in the United States, including second language acquisition and teaching strategies for ELLs. This class was required for all elementary education and bilingual education majors. For the sake of simplicity, I call this course “Second Language Acquisition,” or SLA. As a requirement for the course, all students tutored an ELL in a local public school or library for 10 hours during the semester. Because of the southwestern location of our university and the segregated nature of our town, nearly all of the children were of Mexican descent and from low socioeconomic backgrounds. This was usually the first experience the teacher education students had working with children whose linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and economic backgrounds were quite different than their own. Like most teachers, my students tended to be White, middle class women who spoke only English and who grew up in what Fuller (1994) terms monocultural environments; they had very little experience with racial or ethnic diversity.

While teaching this course, I discovered that many of the White students in the class had exceedingly low expectations for the ELLs they tutored. To learn more about their beliefs, I interviewed fourteen students in the class—nine Whites and five Latinas/os—about their tutoring experiences (Marx, 2000). While the White students professed to care deeply about the children they tutored and described the kids as “bright,” all nine nonetheless predicted that the kids they tutored would drop out of school before graduating. Saliently, all of these kids were in elementary school. In contrast, all five Latina/o students I interviewed predicted that the children they tutored would be able to succeed in college at least to the extent that they, themselves, had. Some even predicted that the children would go further than they had educationally and economically. Although the White and Latina/o teacher education students shared many similarities in the ways they talked about the children they tutored, the differences in expectations between them were stark. After these interviews, I made substantial changes in the course syllabus and the way I taught the class. As the semesters went by, the low expectations and misunderstandings of ELLs became much more subtle, but they continued to surface semester after semester.

Believing that simple lack of information about ELLs and second language acquisition could not explain the low expectations White students consistently held regarding the children of color they tutored, I decided to probe deeper into the beliefs of the White students in the class to learn more about the factors contributing to these low expectations for ELLs. Because so many of my students had pointedly addressed the racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds of the children they tutored when sharing their beliefs about them, I knew I had to specifically focus on race and racism. As a result, one fall semester I explained to the students in the SLA class that I wanted to learn more about the beliefs of White, female, preservice teachers who spoke only English regarding race, racism, Whiteness, and the children they tutored, and I appealed to the class for volunteers. I chose students with these characteristics because they represent the dominant face of teaching, and their beliefs about children of color and English-language learners need to be better understood.

Creating a Trusting Discussion Environment

When I decided to talk with SLA students about race, racism, and their own White identities, I took into consideration the politically charged nature of any discussion of race in the United States and the pervasiveness of color-blindness and color-evasive language. To enable the young women to talk about race rather than just talk around it, I knew that I would have to create a trusting environment where they would feel safe sharing their honest thoughts. In addition, because most White Americans are so inexperienced talking about race, I knew that I would have to explicitly focus our conversations on race and continuously pull us back to the topic if necessary.

As I gave attention to the construction of a trusting environment, I realized that any White person invited to talk about race, ethnicity, and racism, in many ways, would be asked to speak a new language. Our society has become that adverse to talking about these issues. My background as an English as a second language (ESL) teacher reminded me of some foundational advice given to new teachers in my subject area:

Overtly display a supportive attitude to your students. While some learners may feel quite stupid in this new language, remember that they are capable adults struggling with the acquisition of the most complex set of skills that any classroom has ever attempted to teach. (Brown, 1994b, p. 23)

Just like new speakers of English, new speakers of racial matters often “feel quite stupid in this new language.” They have fragile egos and often are worried about saying the wrong thing. Without support and patience from others, these factors can easily lead to silence. Silence reinforces reliance upon color-evasiveness and color-blindness, entities that maintain racial inequity and should be deconstructed and discontinued (L. Bell, 2002; Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Frankenberg, 1993; Leonardo, 2002; Omi & Winant, 1994). In order to facilitate language that is race conscious, rather than race blind, patience and empathy are critical.

Although I respect and value the work of those antiracist educators who take a more confrontational approach to issues of race—such as McIntyre (1997), O’Brien (2004), Berlak and Moyenda (2001), and others—my approach is to develop mutual trust and respect with those willing to talk to me about such sensitive issues as race and racism before engaging in confrontation. While I believe that confrontation has an important place in intervention, the confrontation style that I share in this book is firm but gentle and respectful, something I will discuss at length in chapter 4. However, when first getting to know someone and in first broaching the topics of race, racism, and Whiteness, I take a congenial, information-gathering approach that is devoid of confrontation. This approach enables me to establish qualities that are critical to successful qualitative inquiry, such as mutual trust (Coenen, 1987; Boog, Coenen, Keune, & Lammerts, 1996; Gonzalez et al., 1995), dignity and respect (Lincoln & Guba, 1989), and optimal rapport (Brooks, 1989; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; Jorgensen, 1989; Miller, 1952; Spradley, 1979).

In addition, my own background as an ESL teacher strongly influences my beliefs in the importance of trust. In ESL pedagogy, a safe, risk-embracing environment is the fundamental setting for successful language learning. The notion of an “affective filter,” first proposed by Dulay and Burt in 1977 and adopted by ESL researchers and practitioners, uses the metaphor of a filter or wall that “goes up” and blocks out the learning at hand when affective factors such as anxiety, self-confidence, and attitude are activated. High anxiety creates a high filter. Conversely, when the affective filter is “low” or “down,” the learner is open to receiving new information. As a teacher of ESL students, English-speaking high school students, and teacher-preparation university students, I have seen the value of a trusting learning environment for all kinds of subject matters, not just language.

Without a trusting, mutually respectful relationship between investigator and participant, participants cannot be expected to share their honest feelings about controversial topics. Confrontation at the early stages of discussion would likely lead to defensiveness and an even firmer embrace of color-evasive language for most Whites. At the same time, it could easily inspire those not yet committed to taking a deep, difficult look at race and racism to adopt the racial backlash about which Omi and Winant (1994), Helms (1990), and Kincheloe and Steinberg (1998), among others, have written. Racial backlash is characterized by a defensive attachment to White privilege and a renewed rationalization for racism. For example, rather than continuing to examine their own contributions to racial inequity, Whites experiencing racial backlash might suggest that African Americans or Latinas/os deserve the inequities they experience due to their own anger, untrustworthiness, ignorance, laziness, ineptitude, etc. Once a White person adopts racial backlash, it is very difficult for her or him to critique this stance, shake it off, and move forward in examinations of Whiteness, including White privilege and racism (Helms, 1990). In my own experience, I have witnessed confrontations that resulted in a renewed attachment to racism. Thus, it was very important for me in this project not to contribute to racial backlash.

The trusting, safe, discourse environment that I sought to create with my students was the first step that I took in avoiding backlash and creating a mutually respectful environment. I did this by getting to know the women for several weeks through the SLA class before asking them to talk with me. In this class, I modeled patience and guidance when politically charged topics such as bilingual education, English-language education, and school equity came up. By the time I met with the individual women, they had gotten to know me as an instructor fairly well. Also, in our first conversations, I asked them about their own racial and ethnic backgrounds, their own experiences with diversity, and their own expectations about tutoring children of color who were learning English. These were nonthreatening, reciprocal, conversations that enabled us to get to know one another.

Storytelling

As a means of building trust and sharing our realities with one another, the women I interviewed and I shared the stories of our beliefs, our plans, and our lives. This storytelling served as a powerful means of conveying information rich in context and feeling. The value of storytelling as a way to better understand the human condition has been described by several qualitative researchers, including Connelly and Clandinin (1994), Foley (1997), and Parker, Deyhle, and Villenas (1999). Many more qualitative researchers choose to use the term life history to describe the historical accounts of individuals that situate the stories they tell in time and place (see Ball & Goodson, 1985; Behar, 1993, 1996; Frankenberg, 1993; Goodson, 1981, 1983; Henry, 1998; Schultz, 1997; and Valdés, 1997). Connelly and Clandinin (1994, p. 8) suggest that life stories “function as arguments in which we learn something essentially human by understanding an actual life or community as lived.” Ball and Goodson (1985, p. 24) add that through life histories, a teacher’s career can “be studied in the context of the whole life.” Because teachers’ careers with children are intimate, holistic, and laden with values and beliefs, studying their perspectives through the highly contextualized method of storytelling seemed the most appropriate means to learn more about the future teachers who agreed to speak with me.

The stories the women and I shared also marked our own places in time and space. That is, they situated us as humans socialized by our lifetimes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the places we grew up, the families and friends who nurtured us, and, necessarily, the Whiteness and racism that characterize our privileged status in the United States. As we talked, our stories constructed and then conveyed our realities. As Richard Delgado (1995b, p. 65) writes, for any event or situation, “there is no single true, or all-encompassing, description.” Rather, all events are interpreted differently by different people; moreover, as we tell the story of what we have seen, “we participate in creating [it] (p. 65).” Although we have constructed this reality, we do not necessarily see our own handiwork. Very often, we consider our own interpretations to be the “truth.” Delgado writes that membership in a particular group, where stories are shared and passed down to future generations, adds to the validity of these stories and serves to reify them. These stories often become a great source of pride because they “create their own bonds, representation, shared understandings, and meanings” (p. 64). They also, in the case of the dominant group, “remind it of its identity in relationship to out groups, and provide it with a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural” (p. 64). Delgado labels the stories we tell and retell to maintain our superior position in society “stock” stories (p. 66). López (2001, p. 31) explains that, “These stock stories are so customary, so ingrained in our collective psyche, that they assume a normality that is often taken for granted.” Indeed, these stories become our “truths.”

Storytelling is used in this book in many ways. First, every time students and I met, we shared the stories of our lives, our tutoring experiences, and our beliefs about different things. Second, students shared the stories of their tutoring experiences and the connections they made with their own lives in the journals I collected three times over the semester. Third, in this book, I present the stories students told as well as the stories of our conversations as I try to construct complex, rich portraits of the women who graciously agreed to share aspects of their lives with me. Finally, the whole book is a story unto itself, unfolding as this investigation did. I cannot emphasize enough that trust was a fundamental element of our storytelling. Moreover, the more we shared ourselves through our stories, the more trusting we became of one another (Freire, 1970/2000). In Freire’s words, we created a “dialogue,” where I was something of a “teacher-student” and students became “students-teachers”; that is, we learned from and taught one another many things.

As I taught the SLA class and the semester progressed, I met with the nine women who volunteered to talk with me individually for interviews, at least three times and up to ten times, for an hour or two hours each time. In an effort to emphasize that these conversations were not related to their grade and to also facilitate a trusting environment, we met in coffee shops around campus or in my home.¹ One young woman actually stated that she felt “safer” meeting in my house where no one could overhear her talk about race. In the first few conversations, as discussed above, the young women talked about their own racial and ethnic background...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• The Teaching/Learning Social Justice Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Talking about Race
• Chapter 2. Illuminating the Invisible
• Chapter 3. The Eye of the Beholder: Tutors Define Racism
• Chapter 4. Looking in the Mirror: Confronting Racism with Tutors
• Chapter 5. Changes of Heart: How Tutors Came to Recognize Their Racism
• Chapter 6. Becoming Empowered by Recognizing Racism
• Notes
• References
• Index