BIAS AND RACISM
You can be moving toward cultural proficiency with actions such as visiting students’ homes, and by studying other cultures, but still inadvertently act towards your students with implicit biases (see the “Implicit Bias” online as- sessment at www.implicit.harvard.edu). Sometimes messages based on implicit biases—that individuals of a particular gender, ethnicity, or race are “less than,” less intelligent, less responsible, less motivated—can be sent subtly. Messages of this nature that students receive are even more damaging than those that flow from cultural improficiency. Beyond being perceived as less valuable (cultural improficiency), bias assumes someone is less able and less worthy because of a trait like gender, ethnicity, or race.
Racism in the U.S. is not just about a void in one’s ability to see beyond one’s own race as the norm and acknowledge differences with respect. It is about stereo- types and oppression by a dominant racial group built into our institutions. Racism is a social construct that operates as a system of oppression based on race. By oppression we mean here the use of power to push down or deny advan- tages and access to certain groups. And it shows up in the behavior of members of marginalized groups toward themselves as internalized racism; it shows up in the behavior of individuals from the dominant group committing microaggres- sions as externalized racism (Sue, 2007); it shows up in the operation of struc- tures like special education and the implementation of school procedures for student placement as structural racism (Frattura & Capper, 2007); and it shows up in public policies like mortgage red-lining, stop-and-frisk practices, and in- vestment in where public transportation routes go and where infrastructure is built as institutional racism (Alexander, 2012).
Racism is certainly a first cousin of cultural blindness and cultural improfi ciency, but it is profoundly different. Almost all American immigrants came
Video: Implicit Bias
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from ethnic groups who chose to come here. Not so with citizens descended from African slaves. American society harbors a heritage of enslavement that still lives on in the world that surrounds people of color, particularly black Americans. Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016) refers to it as the plundering of “the black body” to fuel the economy of the entire country (not just the South) for two centuries. This sense of blackness, however, is complicated by the diversity of dark-skinned Americans who may not identify as “African Americans” and are not descended from former slaves.
The presumed inferiority of African Americans shows up in a range of places unknown to any other group or for so long a time. We can see this bias in unequal distribution of governmental resources to schools, unequal access to health care, in drug laws and the mass incarceration of black men, in the milita- rization of police forces and the shooting of unarmed black men that has filled the news in recent years. While these shootings are not new as events, their being considered newsworthy events is new.
The American view of intelligence as innate, fixed, and deterministic com- pounds the problem. It is reinforced periodically in books declaiming the genetically inferior intelligence based on race (Jensen, 1969; Shockley, 1992; Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). It mingles with other angles of racism and creates the secret (and not so secret) belief that people of color, particularly African Americans, are less intelligent than white people. This implicit racism induces differential teacher behavior toward students of color (Torff, 2011; Rosen, 2017) and stereotype vulnerability (Steele, 2010) among the students themselves— lower performance in situations where race even subtly calls their ability into question. One consequence of this history is what Claude Steele identified 25 years ago as “stereotype threat.” His book, Whistling Vivaldi (2010), summa- rizes his quarter of a century of research in engaging and nonjudgmental prose.
“Stereotype threat” is a psychic condition that inevitably, for people of color, induces a look around every room one enters to count how many people like you there are and to react to any social cue that identifies you as a person of color (like having to check your race on an application form or an exam header) with an unconscious loss of performance edge. All humans are vulnerable to stereo- type threat, but because of widespread racist beliefs about who is intelligent and has the potential to become highly educated, students of color are more likely to experience stereotype threat on a daily basis in school.
While the all-black Rosenwald Schools in the Jim Crow South did not throw stereotype threat in the face of black children (though it was certainly triggered by the surround-sound messages by the rest of society), integrated schools inadvertently and inescapably do. This is not an argument for return to segrega-
Videos: Microaggressions, Stereotype Threat
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tion. On the contrary, it is the reason why educators in integrated schools must have high expectations and actively push and encourage students of color, just as the best all-black schools did in the first half of the 20th century despite being underresourced. And it is certainly a reason why all the professional learning we advocate regarding cultural proficiency is applicable to the varieties of culture represented by students in our schools. These students have a very different im- migrant history, but the impact of racism ensures that they too experience the macro- and microaggressions that African Americans experience.
Cultural and institutional manifestations of racism carry over into school and curriculum as the stereotypes, distortions, or omission of cultures other than white Western European. School and classroom audits of curriculum units for cultural proficiency and for racism can be most revealing (Frattura & Capper, 2007).
Working on Anti-Racism
All of us, but especially those of us who are members of the dominant white culture, need thorough education about these issues of race. We need informa- tion and experiences that will cause us to examine our tacit beliefs about people of color and the societal practices that reinforce these beliefs. And above all, we need to build culturally relevant instruction into our practice (see Chapter 16, “Classroom Climate”).
The developmental continuum for anti-racism (illustrated in Figure 4.2) might be described using the following statements:
p Racism is any policy, practice, or behavior that effectively subjects a person to oppression by a member of a dominant racial group.
p Color Blindness is any policy, practice, or behavior that uses the power of the dominant racial group to deny recognition of differences to the op- pressed group.
Figure 4.2 Anti-Racism Continuum
Racism Color Blindness Awareness of Racial Identity
Awareness of White
Priviledge
Active Anti-Racist
Actions
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p Awareness of racial identity shows recognition and respect for those fea- tures of one’s identity that are associated with race.
p Awareness of white privilege is recognition of the advantages in everyday life and in navigating the rules and practices of government and the econ- omy that accrue automatically to whites.
p Active anti-racism means taking actions to interrupt cycles of oppression and end racism in society.
As teachers, we can deepen our understanding of racism by studying the cur- rent manifestations of white privilege and the history of racism in our coun- try and in other countries. Often, it is an unexamined history and one whose consequences for people of color, especially African Americans, can be hard for whites to comprehend deeply, at least deeply enough to begin to appreciate the experience of people of color in our society.