As part of my credential program in graduate school, I did a student teaching placement in the fall of 2019 at an elementary school a few miles south of Palo Alto. I was in a fifth grade classroom taught by a young and White Bay Area native, Ms. Williams, who to this day was one of the most effective teaches I have ever seen, able to both command the attention of her class and instil firm boundaries, whilst also being able to laugh and have fun and take care of the more than 30 preteens in her classroom.
At the time, the school and the classroom was predominantly Latinx, with some White and Asian students making up the rest of the balance, and at least half of the school was receiving free or reduced lunch. As a result, my students were mostly working class Latinx living in the South Bay, which was a demographic that was new to me, having spent three years previously on the Upper West Side of New York City with the usually White toddlers of professors and consultants. Nevertheless, kids were kids and I immediately fell in love with the nine- and ten-year-olds constantly singing Post Malone and occasionally calling me a “boomer,” that was being popularised on a new app called TikTok.
One morning, I arrived at school a little early and a flurry of girls rushed at me, not in their usual glee but with serious faces of concern. I asked what was wrong and they all started to talk at the same time, looking at me, but also at each other, and echoing how something bad had happened the day before that they didn’t want to tell me. Eventually, one of them blurted out that one of the Latinx boys in our class during the after-school program was doing an impersonation of me where he was doing an accent, a walk, and repeating, “I’m Black, I’m Black,” to which when relayed back to me, resulted in the girls looking down in embarrassment and restraint, not wanting to share any more of what had taken place. They looked up at me, frozen and waiting for my response. I looked back at them, frozen and waiting for my response.
The story of race and education in the United States often follows a certain narrative. From 1619, enslaved Africans were forbidden from accessing education, and that prohibition continued into centuries where African-Americans were denied high quality education due to separate but unequal segregated schools until the 1954 Brown v. Board decision intended to strike down racial segregation in schools. Much of the discourse around race and education today explores the failures around integrating schools and the consequences of an educational system where the legacy of anti-Black racism remains impervious, resulting in racial gaps in everything from reading scores to high school graduation rates.
But there are other stories about race and education that are often missing from the archive of the mainstream. The colonial boarding schools for Indigenous students from the 17th century to the era of the Carlisle Industrial Indian School in the 19th century, setting up assimilation as the central educational objective for Indigenous students. The cases that preceded Brown v. Board, such as Tape v. Hurley in 1885 and Mendez v. Westminister in 1946 in which Chinese and Mexican families, respectively, used legal activism to fight against school segregation. The continued targeting of Arab students by their peers and educators in our contemporary era in the aftermath of the 21st century “War on Terror.”
Discourse around race and education tends to be narrowly and almost exclusively focused on a Black-White binary, that often falls into the narratives of Black students and their White teachers. What is often missing is larger and more specific discourse around the educational experiences of students and teachers who are Black, White, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and more, all of whom are participating in this continued experiment of multiracial education. As a Black teacher with students from a variety of different racial backgrounds, what language and history do I have access to with which I can better understand and analyse what is happening in the interactions between me and my students?
I thanked my students for telling me and excused myself as I went to the classroom to drop off my bag. As I walked, I played back previous interactions that I had with the student who had imitated me, recalling times when I had helped him with math problems or spoken to him about his mother who I knew was living with cancer. During all of our conversations, was my identity as his teacher coming second to my Blackness, something that I rarely even spoke about in the classroom?
As I wrestled with this, I spotted Ms. Williams getting set up at her desk in the corner. I was still unsure of how I was going to respond, but I knew I had to tell her what was going on in her classroom, especially if other students were talking and thinking through it. “Hey,” I casually opened, “Some of the girls just told me a weird story…”
In contrast to my inaction, Ms. Williams jumped up with a response. “I’m going to find someone to watch the class after the kids take their math test and we’ll sit with him and talk about what happened.” Simple. Not for the first time, I was in awe of her speed and decisiveness when responding to all that came up with her students, like an older sister’s suicide attempt on one day, and a family’s experience of an ICE raid on another. I was grateful for her because I still didn’t know what to do.
One of my biggest challenges in my Masters classes was finding myself in the literature. The assumption in education in the United States is that the teachers are always White, and I often craved more personal narratives of Black teachers and more strategies, tools, and frameworks to support my development as a Black teacher. After hearing about my student, I was frozen with questions like if this was a common experience with Black teachers or if it was just me? I wondered how to talk about race with students, not in the abstract way, but how to talk to students about anti-Blackness in which I, as the teacher, was the target? Finally, I struggled to even understand how to name that experience — could I even call it racist or anti-Black given the complex intersections of race, immigration, gender, class, gender and power at work in my context? This, I found, was the problem. The limits of language in an education system built and governed by a White-Black racial hierarchy, but populated with those outside the binary.
The other assumption in education is that the students too are either Black or White. The field has been filled for decades with scholars using their research as activism to highlight the specificity of the educational experiences of Black children and how to support their success in schools, like Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark’s “self-consciousness,” Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings “culturally responsive pedagogy,” Dr. Bettina Love’s “abolitionist teaching.” Then, in papers or studies that are not explicitly about race, the scholarship is almost exclusively researched on White students and communities. And consequentially, we are left with a void. Where are the narratives around the educational experiences of Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx students, and what are the tried and tested pedagogical techniques and approaches can best support all students and their cultural backgrounds to aid their academic and social-emotional success? It is not to say at all that the literature does not exist, or that teachers and all students are not all working on and producing tools to understand their own cultural identities in schools and what cultural competency might look like. But one look at the curricula of a teacher credential program or a scroll through a news organisation’s reporting on education reveals that there is not even enough language to describe all of the racialized interactions taking place in schools, particularly when it comes to students and teachers who fall beyond the parameters of Black and White.
The consequences for this are vast and evident in particular through one contemporary example. For years, groups of Asian-American students raised the alarm around a college admissions process that disproportionately disadvantaged them due to race-based social biases. Instead of these concerns being reported and discussed in good faith in the mainstream and within the context of a long history of Asian-American educational activism, the binary was returned to, in which Asian-Americans were grouped with White students looking to overturn affirmative action in opposition to the Black students who affirmative action was created to support (despite its biggest benefactors being White women). An inability to discuss issues of race in education beyond our neat understandings of Black and White makes us inefficient in understanding and addressing the very real concerns that students of all races are bringing up in our education systems. But how do we even move towards that?
After the math test, Ms. Williams and I sat with the student outside where she curtly reprimanded his behaviour and followed it with an explanation of how labelling others solely by their racial identity was hurtful because it limited all the others aspects of their identity. Simple. Although the story does not end with that neat little anecdote. Later that night, Ms. Williams called me and told me how, through a Spanish translator, she brought up the incident during the student’s parent-teacher conference, and his mother responded to him with, “Again?!” It turned out, the student had a history of anti-Blackness outside of school that his mother had attempted to admonish him for, with little success. Ms. Williams and I ended up laughing somewhat darkly at the absurdity of the situation, but until today, I am not sure what I could have done differently. Despite the last two years of books and podcasts dedicated on how to stop racism in children, little again goes into the complicated histories of racial communities beyond Black and White, and confronting the weeds of biases that exist between them.
My way of moving towards more language is by asking questions. To my teacher friends about their experiences teaching students of different racial and cultural backgrounds, and to my friends about their experiences as students of different racial and cultural backgrounds. A greater understanding of our experiences might expand our understanding of how issues like segregated schools, bilingual education, the reading wars, standardised tests, school choice and more affect all students and all teachers based on the uniqueness of their backgrounds. We have got to replace the broad strokes that we brush with for the fine work of our individual experiences.
Lastly, my other way forward is by reading the history. Though I am not always the biggest fan of the “People of Color” umbrella term, it can be useful in considering the different groups of folx in the United States that have organised against White supremacy for centuries in ways big and small, and often stand in solidarity and co-conspiratorship with one another. Studying how the issues that effect some of us actually affect all of us begin to produce a history and a narrative years in the making. Hopefully with a language that emerges right there waiting for us.
I loved this series at the Atlantic, a lot of which profiled non-White teachers: https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/on-teaching/. Also, the Integrated Schools podcast has some great episodes about the history of education/integration when it comes to Latinx and Indigenous folks.