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The hungriest eyes I have ever seen for want of learning were on my third graders the day we first had a classroom discussion explicitly about race. As nine-year-olds, they were keenly aware that the topic is taboo, and yet they understood this perplexing concept was shaping the world around them. The entire class was quite shocked that their white teacher was willing to discuss it with them, but as I was tired of hearing them regularly label any reference to skin color as racist, it was clearly time for a talk.
Looking back on this important moment in my teaching career drove me further into the past, back to my own education, when I was the one eagerly waiting to learn about the adult world around me and how it functioned. And as it turns out, I was lied to. We as American public schools have done students a severe disservice by not teaching them the truth about inequities and privilege, as well as avoiding explicit discussions of race, gender, and class, the most important issues of our time. By truthfully educating students on these matters, we can provide accurate context for them to utilize when developing their awareness of the world around them; therefore, creating a new class of citizens who are both acutely aware of how institutions intersect to oppress people and passionate about revolutionizing these very systems.
Growing up a middle-class white girl in Texas, I have no specific memories of race being discussed in any of my public-school classrooms, from kindergarten all the way through high school. Instead, my understanding of race relations in this country was founded upon superficial activities most likely given as busy work around Martin Luther King Jr. Day each year, and vague references to his dream of children of all colors holding hands. This line rang true for me—I, thankfully, attended a diverse, multi-cultural elementary school, and the very friends I romped around with on the playground were a range of skin colors. The race problem seemed to have died in Dr. King’s era, and for me, that was the end of that.
Blindly riding on my privilege, I coasted for years without critically thinking about this topic, truly believing that America was the land of equal opportunity for all. And my public school education functioned exactly the way it was set up to--it never once confronted my privilege, never once gave me any inkling that my success was a meritocratic mirage, based much less on my hard work and much more on the intersecting institutions that led to an easy rise for a white, middle-class young woman.
Racial justice holds a special place in my business' mission because of all the issues I had to relearn in my adulthood, this is the one that shook me to my core when I realized the truth; though of course, it was not the first injustice to penetrate my thick bubble of privilege. Gender inequity was unsurprisingly the first personal issue that made me discover that I was merely one small player in an expansive, oppressive system that had been invisibly twisting its way throughout history until it smacked me hard enough that I became aware of how it had been shaping my entire life.
When my eyes were finally open to my own oppression, I was able to see, for the very first time, the oppression of others. And this awakened within me an anger I had never felt, one that still has not died. This anger flows in many directions, but one aspect of it is my utter outrage toward a school system that had purposefully disillusioned me and my peers with a propagandic view of our country and our place in history. My heartbreak in realizing the idyllic America of my childhood never actually existed was absolutely devastating. Though I can only imagine how much deeper the wounds are for someone who has never once experienced the America I knew for years. I can never know the devastation of someone who has always viewed the warm glow of America from the other side of a cold window, even though they were told they had been invited. The contradictions between America's values and its actions have shattered too many hearts, and far too many much harder than mine.
And though I doubt any of our wounds will ever fully heal in this regard, having experienced this crushing level of yearning for an ideal that has yet to come to fruition drives me onward, and I’m sure I am not alone. This drive, this desire to create institutional change for the sake of the America that has yet to be is what I try to instill in my students as an educator, for they are worthy of the truth. And the earlier we allow our students to face the devastation that I faced far too late, the sooner they can begin the eternal process of healing and creating revolutionary change.
This idea of devastation is partially responsible for the lack of explicit curriculum over heavy topics like race, gender, class, and privilege, for I believe even the most liberal educators don’t want to risk breaking their students’ hearts and puncturing their childlike innocence. But it is a necessary step we must take in order to give students the most accurate context upon which to build their awareness of the world around them. In graduate school, we read a piece from C. Wright Mills' book, The Sociological Imagination, and he understood the difficulty of this aspect of the endeavor for truth. He argues that teaching anyone about their true place alongside others within history is “in many ways…a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one,” a sentiment to which I can personally relate.
Opening my classroom up to a discussion about race with third graders was simultaneously magnificent and terrible. Magnificent in that I could feel how significant it was for these children to see that we could discuss skin color in room filled with people of all races, and what a relief it was for them to see that they were united in this exploration of curiosity. Magnificent in their realization that the idea behind race is rather simple—our skin color tends to reflect where our ancestors came from and how close they were to the Equator—and that fairly superficial piece of information bonds us as humans who just happen to be from different places around the globe. Magnificent in that they took solace in this narrative and would continually beg me to shut my classroom door and teach them about race again and again, like a bedtime story they couldn’t get enough of.
But it was also terrible—for I had to address the fact that people have leveraged these differences in skin color to create prejudices and oppressive systems throughout history that still exist today. Terrible for I had to reveal that someone today may still judge them or their friends in the room according to the color of their skin, and most terrible of all, because some may already have known that from experience.
But then we circle back to the magnificence of exposing the truth, for learning about these systems allows room for justice—they all recognized that something as small as where your ancestors were born generations before shouldn’t negatively impact any person’s life. There was something about learning about this topic within the classroom that legitimized the concept of race for them, even if they had known about it beforehand. Armed with legitimate knowledge of where it comes from and that it still exists in modern times, all my students could not only potentially identify racial injustices when they arose but stand up and fight against them as well.
This issue of being uneducated about inequities by our public-school curriculum didn’t coincidentally just occur to me when I was a student and again when I was teaching third grade; this is an issue that spans our nation and has affected generations of students. We must take advantage of this moment and create exclusively anti-racist curriculum that facilitates important discussions in elementary classrooms. No longer should American graduates be unable to recognize power structures and the way they intersect to impact each one of us. Every student should leave the national public school system with a commitment in their heart to making America what it should be, can be, and will be.
Subscribe so you know when I publish Part II of this series, where I discuss the twofold consequences for the public if racial justice remains a void in our curriculum.
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