At the C. W. Henry School, an urban, multiethnic middle school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Merri Rubin helps her students work with students from an upper-middle-class, white suburban school to compose, produce, and perform a musical on racial tolerance. Funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Music Theater Festival, this project not only features the content of interethnic understanding, but also requires students from different racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds to work together.
At Dreher High School in Columbia, South Carolina, Annette Walker serves as faculty advisor for the school's racial task force. Although the school's population is racially balanced, students initiated the task force to move beyond tolerance to acceptance, understanding, and celebration of racial and cultural differences. The task force meets weekly to share information that is sometimes controversial and difficult to talk about. Students build trust and empathy and gain experience in dealing with racial issues.
Like Rubin and Walker, educators are increasingly undertaking a daunting educational reform—reducing the effects of racism in schools. In the last 40 years, as a profession and as individuals, we have shifted from concerns about segregation—removing legal constraints or policy barriers based on race or gender—to issues of equity—ensuring that all students experience challenging instruction that supports their personal, academic, and professional growth. However, research on the resegregation of U.S. schools (Orfield & Eaton, 1996) and the inequalities in school funding (Riddle & White, 1993) indicates that significant issues remain unresolved.
Confronting the Roots of Racism
To make continued progress toward solving problems of access and equity, we must confront the root cause of such practices and policies. To mitigate the fears, misconceptions, and disappointments that racism creates and to develop learning communities where diversity contributes to the richness of learning, we must remedy the insidious and pervasive effects of personal and institutional racism.
First, educators must address a tough issue: humankind's difficulty in acknowledging racism and its consequences. Like other conditions that create dysfunctionality in individuals, relationships, and institutions, racism thrives on denial. Unless one holds extremely bigoted beliefs, most people do not perceive the influences of racism in themselves or in their peers. Fair-minded, service-oriented educators consider racism to be inconsistent with the values that attracted them to teaching and therefore do not recognize that their own attitudes and behavior may be tinged with its effects.
To confront racism in their own attitudes, individual educators must be willing to examine unconscious, often deeply held assumptions; to acknowledge their own privilege or resentments; and to recognize how their own values, priorities, and attitudes, and those of others of different ethnic or cultural groups, are expressed in community life and in school. To heal personal and institutional racism requires preservice and inservice education characterized by insight and sensitivity that is unprecedented in current professional development practices.
Getting Started
Recognizing racism involves acknowledging beliefs, attitudes, and symbols that are legitimized by those with cultural and political power and are socialized in successive generations (Derman-Sparks & Phillips, 1997). Once educators acknowledge the nature of racism, they can explore the relationship between racism and other issues, such as teen violence, safe schools, gang behavior, drop-out and suspension rates, diversity and equity in personnel policies and school administration, poor achievement among students of color, inequity in school funding, and the needs of children living in poverty. Such school problems directly or indirectly reflect past or present racism and may not be meaningfully remedied until racism is addressed.
To approach this initiative, teachers and administrators identify the conditions that reducing racism would ameliorate. Once educators clarify the immediate and long-term benefits of reducing racism, they can decide what combination of interventions for prevention, abatement, and healing will address local needs and goals.
Often, school districts undertake diversity training or a multicultural education program without being clear about what they expect such initiatives to accomplish. For example, if student behavior at a local high school reflects racist attitudes, instituting a multicultural education program aimed at preventing racism is not likely to address immediate conflicts and reduce tensions. Peer mediation, conflict resolution, or antiviolence education may be necessary initially to create a culture of openness before students can realize the benefits of multicultural education.
Prevention involves classroom instruction and professional development that identifies racist influences and prevents them from taking hold in hearts and minds. Such efforts include antiracism curriculums, peace education, global education, moral reasoning, emotional intelligence instruction, and critical thinking.
Abatement involves reducing the tensions and barriers created by intercultural or interracial discord. Unless strained relations have erupted into incidents that the public cannot ignore, teachers and administrators tend to minimize or deny divisive influences. Abatement involves techniques to mitigate distress, such as conflict resolution, peer mediation, and diversity training for faculty. It also includes activities to promote communication and interdependence, such as service learning, cooperative learning, and community mentoring.
Healing the effects of racism is the approach with which individuals and communities have had the least experience, although it offers remarkable opportunities for personal and institutional renewal. For people of color, healing entails developing a greater understanding of and security in their own ethnic identity, viewing their own and other ethnic groups more objectively, establishing meaningful relationships and coalitions with whites and other groups, and becoming antiracist in their own spheres of influence. For whites, this process includes developing an understanding of their own racial and cultural identity, engaging in a self-examination of their participation in racism, working effectively in multiracial settings, and becoming actively antiracist (Tatum, 1995).
- developing experiential and conceptual knowledge of the oneness of the human family,
- respecting the spiritual and material values of cultural groups,
- gaining understanding of one's own and others' experiences and challenges,
- changing dispositions of certainty about other cultures to become curious and receptive of new understandings, and
- understanding others' experiences and transforming one's own assumptions and views before seeking solutions.
Program Changes
- curriculum promotes cultural competence and appreciates ethnic diversity;
- instructional methods promote cooperation, interaction, and success for all students, regardless of background, language proficiency, social class, or learning style;
- assessment practices include alternative methods that allow for cultural differences and encourage community review to ensure an equitable appraisal of students' work;
- a school culture of oneness supports growth of all students; and
- public conversation and policy making are sensitive to the perceptions and values of the total community.
Multicultural education is the key curriculum reform in combating racism. Cultural competence is the necessary but not sufficient condition for students and teachers to acknowledge and appreciate the values, experiences, and contributions of all groups within the human family. Meaningful multicultural education allows students to relate the strengths and values that have sustained people from other cultural groups to the students' own challenges, experiences, and struggles.
The public's growing awareness of the value of multicultural education is reflected in a 1998 Ford Foundation poll of 2,011 registered U.S. voters. Ninety-four percent believe that the growing diversity in the United States makes it important to understand people who are different from themselves. Sixty-six percent believe that colleges should explicitly increase diversity in higher education. Seventy-two percent believe that students are more likely to learn workplace skills, such as teamwork, problem solving, and communication, if college courses teach about diversity (Marklein, 1998).
However, the Florida College Student Diversity Study, also funded by the Ford Foundation, surveyed 610 randomly selected students at 11 Florida public and private institutions, including 2 traditionally black colleges. It reported that 58 percent of the students believe that diversity education creates division and conflict. Forty percent characterize diversity education as nothing more than political correctness, with more African American or Hispanic students than white students expressing that view (Van Norstrand, 1998). Such findings remind us that one residual effect of racism in the lives of people of color is an understandable skepticism about positive change in racial attitudes. Because meaningful multicultural education must deal with substantive issues that touch people's lives, perhaps a generation of students and teachers may be uncomfortable and disappointed as the content and the conduct of multicultural education evolve toward greater effectiveness in combating racism.
- Content integration: using examples, data, and information from a variety of cultures to illustrate the key concepts, principles, generalizations, and theories in subject areas.
- Knowledge construction: helping students understand how knowledge is created and influenced by factors of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class.
- Prejudice reduction: developing strategies to help students acquire positive racial attitudes.
- An equity pedagogy: using instructional techniques that promote cooperation and include the learning and cultural styles of diverse groups.
- An empowering school culture: creating a learning environment in which students from diverse racial, ethnic, and social groups believe that they are heard and are valued and experience respect, belonging, and encouragement.
Components of a Multicultural Curriculum
- Character education helps students understand that the qualities of being a good person are expressed in practices across cultures and are not exclusively demonstrated by individuals in one's own group.
- Moral education clarifies principles of ethical behavior that promote understanding, respect, caring, and fairness toward all people.
- Peace education demonstrates the quality of human interactions when divisive influences have been minimized or eliminated.
- Peer mediation and conflict resolution enact strategies for reducing discord created by overt or covert racism.
- Emotional intelligence instruction helps students manage fears or resentments resulting from misapprehension or from experiences of interracial conflict.
- Service learning builds community and gives students purposeful experiences with people of ethnic groups or social classes with whom they do not commonly interact.
- Antiviolence education teaches students to recognize problematic situations and to take steps to reduce violence that results from racist influences, such as gang behavior.
- Critical thinking instruction teaches strategies for making well-founded judgments, uncovering assumptions, evaluating sources of information, analyzing arguments, fostering fair-mindedness, controlling impulsivity in action or belief, and considering other views.
- Global education addresses racism as a human problem. In addition to the spiritual and interpersonal principles that students learn in confronting racism, they gain greater understanding of their national history, world history, global conditions, and current events. They can identify racist influences that underlie international conflicts and the challenges needed to overcome them.
A Long-Term Challenge
- Individuals and institutions must commit themselves to healing the effects of racism. They must become comfortable about their own and other people's discomfort about race. Learning to face racism and to talk about it transformatively with others requires compassion toward oneself and others and sufficient intellectual character to not abandon the effort as it becomes distressing.
- Individuals who pursue their own inner work regarding racism and who are sufficiently knowledgeable about the transformative process can mediate such conversations.
- Understanding and confronting racism involve recognizing its expression across all cultural groups.
- Effective multicultural and antiracism instruction in preservice teacher education is crucial to decreasing racism in the long term.
- Meaningful change involves confronting racism at both a personal and an institutional level. Teachers, administrators, teacher educators, and community advisors must all have an opportunity for change and self-renewal.
- School programs must ensure a quality education for children of poverty. Past and present conditions of racism contribute to reduced expectations, opportunities, and resources for students of color who live in poverty. The influences of racism result in policies and conditions that are debilitating for children and young adults, perpetuating rather than reducing the cycle of poverty.
- White administrators, teachers, and teacher educators must largely undertake leadership responsibility. To identify subtle but insidious racism within past and present policies, community relations, and instructional practices, decision makers must become aware of their own beliefs and dispositions. In most school districts, this introspective task is undertaken by educators of European descent who may not have previously understood the perceptions of people of color or appreciate the personal challenges that individuals of other ethnic groups experience in their own schools or districts. Examining one's own attitudes and experiences of racism is a complex process that requires time, compassion, and commitment (Kivel, 1996).
- Decision makers who seek to remedy the effects of racism depend on constituents who understand and support such efforts. That constituency becomes frustrated and confounded by public policies and utterances that disclose racist connotations or that support the conditions or attitudes that perpetuate the effects of racism.
The organizational health of schools rests on the values, behaviors, and attitudes of all its members. Although racism may be covert, it nevertheless affects the moral life of schools, the vitality of faculties and students, and the peace and well-being of all participants. To reduce the effects of racism in the lives of students and teachers, schools must move beyond teaching tolerance to become "beloved communities," learning environments free of "the daily dose of tension, suspicion, and distrust that crosses racial lines in both directions and eats away at human potential on every side" (St. Rain, 1998)—a worthy undertaking for a new millennium.
