More Than an Ally. Michael L. Boucher Jr.
in Ahwatukee, Arizona, near Phoenix made black T-shirts with one gold letter per shirt spelling out “best*you’ve*ever*seen*class*of*2016” in large gold letters. After the picture, six White female students stood together laughing and photographed themselves with their shirts spelling out “ni**er” using the letters and asterisks from the previous photo formation.
The photo went viral on social media and created a storm that enveloped the students and the school. The students were immediately punished with five-day suspensions, and one student gave a public, tearful apology for “offense” while insisting that she was “not racist” (White & Ruelas, 2016).
When these students apologized for their offense, they did not understand that while their actions were indeed offensive, they were offensive because the students were both disrespectful and dismissive of the history of that word and its use as a tool of oppression. They tried to explain that to them it was just a “bad word,” and they were just breaking the rules of decorum, not trying to subjugate their classmates or neighbors. They considered the word to be a vulgarity on the same level as swear or curse words that they could not use in school. They refused to see that this action was different. It was an act of oppression, and the administration reinforced that impression through inaction.
The language around offense places the blame on those who receive the disrespect, not on those who wield words as weapons. In schools and our social discourse, we have dealt with the language and not the reasons for the language. These students argued that their actions were not racist because their White privilege allowed them to avoid seeing that they were not only being offensive but oppressive. These personal actions were not understood by them as racism because to them only bad people are racist, and they did not perceive themselves as bad people. Instead, it was a professed act of rebellion, using a “bad word” they knew was taboo.
In the investigation that followed, the tearful apologies were accepted, and the students returned to school. However, the most important question was not asked by the administration: Against whom was this a rebellion? The rebellion was against the idea that, as White people, there is something that is forbidden for them to say or do.
In the effort to paint racists as bad without dealing with the roots of White supremacy, schools have made oppressive language forbidden fruit that can only be experienced among trusted associates. By avoiding race and the history of colonial oppression from Arizona’s founding, the Arizona school’s approach fed racism and pushed White students toward White supremacy rather than extinguishing it.
White America’s unease and denial about race, the history of race, and White supremacist structures create the ability to be “bad” in safe contexts. These words, when used in these contexts, are supposed to be fun, festive, or risqué. These spaces allow White people to vent their anger at perceived transgressions against White supremacy.Ultimately, by not teaching explicitly about racism, oppression, and race, schools are perpetuating the worst of these things.
Ending Color Blindness
So then, is the answer to just ignore difference and treat all kids the same? Kids are kids, right? That is the refrain stated in conversations with teachers and sometimes even in the halls of teacher preparation programs. However, research shows that kids are not all the same. Kids are individuals, but they are also members of identity groups, families, and communities. This race-evasive phrase is a way to avoid looking at students as different from their White teachers, but students are almost always different from their teachers racially, ethnically, and culturally on many levels.
Even if a teacher racially identifies as being in the same group, there will be differences based on economic status, age, and social groups, and social media has accelerated these divides and how teachers interact with students. This makes a statement like “kids are kids” one that is meant to let adults off the hook. If there is no difference in kids, then there is no need to meet the different needs of students. Bartolomé (1994) explained that this “kids are kids” approach to children’s learning has been skewed by the mentality that frames adults as whole and fully human and some kids as broken. It also seeks to erase racial and cultural differences between White kids and kids of color. It tries to rise above difference but instead enforces whiteness on everyone as though that were the cure to some kind of pernicious ailment. Because they are not broken, there is not, nor should there be, a magic method that would fix students of color. Kids are not broken, and kids of color are not broken White kids.
To sum up, as Black students will see and experience the overwhelming whiteness of teachers for most, if not all, of their schooling experience in America, to be successful, White teachers must understand their own positions as White people and of how that impacts their teaching. As Love (2019b) explained, learning about race leads to uncomfortable but crucial understandings of American history and society:
Teachers who disregard the impact of racism on Black children’s schooling experiences, resources, communities, and parent interactions will do harm to children of color. This ignorance is not just a painful sign of a blatant lack of information—a function of racism is to erase the history and contributions of people of color—it is a dangerous situation as these teachers go on to take jobs in schools filled with Black and Brown children. This turns schools into places that mirror society instead of improving it. The hard truth is that racism functions as a “superpredator” of Black and Brown children within our schools.
Until race is centered in conversations about White teachers, there can be no real progress toward a more inclusive curriculum or pedagogical framework (Sleeter, 2005). Until educators at all levels begin the project of dismantling White supremacist structures in schools and then the larger society, there will be no progress toward the multicultural goals they espouse. The current discourse of inclusion has proved insufficient to meet the challenges of today’s versions of White supremacy. More is needed and more is required from White teachers to solve the largest problems in American education.
Meet the Participants
It is important to ground the approach presented in this book in empirical research. The method is available in other works (Boucher, 2013, 2016, 2018; Boucher & Helfenbein, 2015). To study the relationships of solidarity built by White teachers of African American students, teachers were interviewed and observed using a technique called photo-elicitation (Boucher, 2018). This technique allows for the observation of interactions between the teacher and an African American student. The photos taken during the observation are then shown to the participant, who is able to theorize about pedagogy and practice. These photos were then intentionally destroyed as their purpose was only to elicit responses from the teacher participants.
| The Participants | ||||||
| Pseudonym | Gender | School | Grade | Degree | Years of teaching | Persona |
| Frieda Kohn | F | Central | 9–10 | MA | 22 | The Warm Demander |
| Bianca Romano | F | Central | 7 & 11 | MA | 2 | The CareBear |
| Mark Johnson | M | Westview | 11 | BA | 9 | The Fighter |
Each session began with the simple question, “What is happening in this photo?” From there, teachers would tell their stories and their truths about their teaching and how they built solidarity relationships with students. Included in this book are vignettes from three of the participants in the study. These participants demonstrated some form of solidarity with their students, but in very different ways. Two are female, and one is male. All are White teachers of different ages. All of them taught high school in segregated schools with largely African American populations in a medium-sized city in the Midwest. The grounding of the framework in both research and theory can aid White teachers in their quest to build a more equitable classroom where African American kids, and their teachers, succeed, thrive, and find joy in learning.
1.
I have chosen to use they, them, and their in replacement of he/she or other gender binary phrases, especially