Anti-Racist Teaching: So…How Do I Do It?

Anti-racism has been making the rounds on social media as to what we should be doing as educators. There are book lists for kids and for adults to read. There are articles about being equity minded and centering kids of color, especially Black children. And by the end of reading many of these articles, I find myself inspired, yet still fuzzy on the details. How do I engage in this work?

The short answer: reflection.

The longer answer: I have a way of thinking through anti-racism that I have found useful. I hope that this can help you think about what you can do that matches your children, their experiences, and your community. Think of it as a starting point that can get you to a variety of places, depending on your community and goals.

To understand how to do anti-racist work, know what racism is.

Why Is Everything About Race?

Because it is. Racism is everywhere. It is inside of us. It is outside of us. We are swimming in it. In Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, he mentions how we are all capable of being culturally racist or culturally anti-racist, independent of our conscious intentions. He writes:

“C. Delores Tucker campaigned against rap in the mid-1990’s. ‘You can’t listen to all that language and filth without it affecting you,’ …The sixty-six-year-old chair of the National Political Congress of Black Women, the venerable veteran of the civil rights movement, kept coming at us like a Biggie smalls battle rap.”

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, 2019, p. 88

Our racism is so internalized and so enveloping none of us are immune to its corruption. How do we extricate this beast from our bodies?

If you accept that racism is a system of oppression that exists and that we are all capable of doing racist and anti-racist action, you’re likely ready to begin engaging in serious anti-racist work. If you are still not sure, first: a) I’m happy you’re being honest with yourself and b) I highly suggest reading and immersing yourself in U.S. History first and THEN reading more up on anti-racism. Anti-racism is much more likely to “click” when you know enough about racist history in the states. Listen to the 1619 Project Podcast, read Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi. If you like fiction, consider reading Kindred by Octavia Butler (really, anything by Octavia Butler she’s an excellent writer). Scour lists of critical history. Once you feel you have a better sense, then I suggest delving deeper into Anti-Racist work, for example reading How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. There is such a rich literature out there to explore. This is just the surface. Basically, immerse yourself so that you can better see racism as it happens in real time. Or do everything at once, consider where you are in this journey.

Okay, so one more important thing to get down….

We are our Narratives

A narrative is any message we internalize about how the world works, whether it is verbal or through inferences we make of others’ behavior. Our brain is shaped by and runs on narratives, which leads to our actions. So, if we want to change our behavior or the behavior of others, we need to consider what narratives we want to center and which narratives we wish to unravel and destroy. If we want to tackle racism, we have to consider the narratives that are actively anti-racist and decenter narratives that are both passively and actively racist.

We also need to understand how narratives come about. Narratives come about directly or implicitly. When I was thinking of college, I was conflicted about living on campus or living at home. Living on campus was what I saw most people doing when they went to college. While nobody directly told me, I got the message that “When I go to college, I need to live on campus.” This is an implicit narrative I internalized. But my parents, being from Mexico and a different culture, directly told me that living at home was fine because it would save a lot of money and was just more comfortable. That was a direct (counter) narrative. I ended up living on campus the first year of college, but decided my parents were ultimately right and lived at home the rest of the three years. I acted based on the narratives in my head.

Overall, anything we do or say communicates a narrative.

Narratives for Change

Above I made an image to help us see how narratives work in and outside of the classroom. We can leverage how narratives change the brain to change behaviors in the short and long term. Think of narratives as individual fine threads that, by themselves, are not that weighty. It is the compounding and braiding of these threads that we get the narratives that largely run our lives. We go from layered narratives to deeply internalized meta-narratives that govern our lives. The longer narratives go unchallenged, the tighter wound they become and the more work that needs to be done to decenter problematic narratives and center helpful, empowering narratives. Most all our actions stem from our most internalized narratives, for better or worse.

This is not just head in the sky thinking nor is it just for racially diverse schools. This has real world implications. When Ahmaud Arbery was murdered, it took a series of narratives to converge in the head of the white men who hunted him down. Their brains are programmed through narratives of white supremacy to hunt and kill Black people. Anti-racist teaching is necessary for ALL children.

Okay, Now We’re Ready to Talk About Anti-Racism in Action

I front load all the info above because without it, any “anti-racist work” will likely be performative at best and racist at worst. To teach in an anti-racist manner is to continually engage in the process of defining the anti-racist narratives we want, center those narratives, and in the process decenter and destroy racist narratives. We then think about what we can do that will promote interruption of certain narratives and centering of other narratives. Importantly, I believe this can be applied to exploring ALL forms of anti-oppressive teaching and their intersections, as you’ll see from the examples I share below from my own practice. I hope these examples are helpful and not seen as something to copy. Rather, I invite you to pay attention to how I do my best to think about it, centering observations of my children and their needs. I hope I can make more concrete what all this talk of “reimagining” education could look like day to day.

Okay, so what can this look like?

Here is an example where I use the anti-racist framework to inform my own practice in Kindergarten. One of my children this year, I’ll call her Ana, was Afro-Latina. Her skin was among the darkest in my class. Her hair was jet black, beautiful, and coarse. I noticed virtually everyday that she would go up to another child, I’ll call her Margarita, and say how much she liked her hair. Margarita’s hair was straight, soft, and dirty blonde. I also noticed that Ana would yell and hit children if she didn’t like how they were looking at her. She would cover her hair with her hands. After a couple of these observations, I connected Ana’s complimenting of Margarita’s hair to her being upset others were looking at her. I hypothesized that Ana did not like her own hair, that she wanted to have hair like Margarita’s. I guessed that she was internalizing the narrative that hair like hers is ugly and that hair like Margarita’s was beautiful. I saw the development of Ana’s internalized racism towards herself. When I spoke to her mom about it, mom confirmed that she had to speak to Ana every day about her hair, that she told her to be proud of it, but she didn’t seem to be feeling better.

How to unthread this harmful narrative ? How to center beauty that included both Ana’s hair and Margarita’s hair? I wanted to center the anti-racist narrative that all our hair is beautiful and decenter the narrative that only straight hair is desirable. As a result, I looked through my library and chose to read a book called I’m a Pretty Little Black Girl by Betty K. Bynum. In this book, a Black girl affirms her identity by celebrating her hair, her friends, and herself. It explores the different shades of skin that may exist in Black and Brown communities. I read this book to the whole class, as well as several others with similar themes. I would encourage Ana to share her thoughts. Soon enough, during play centers, I would hear Ana saying “I’m a pretty little Black girl!”. After a couple weeks, she yelled at others much less, and didn’t hold her hair anymore in shame. After talking with mom, it looked like she was beginning to internalize a much more empowering narrative of beauty.

A Caveat

The situation above gets complicated. While I saw a much healthier narrative around hair and being Black develop in Ana, the book I’m a Pretty Little Black Girl embraced other potentially less empowering narratives. The text is full of glitter and pink, which could communicate that those things are inherently “girly” and that boys cannot engage in that. As I saw that coming out, I began to read other texts that challenged gender roles as well as what it meant to be a boy, girl, non-binary, or gender fluid. I elevated and shared the work of one of my children who identifies as a boy in my class and drew himself with a dress for all of us to celebrate during our All about Me unit. When I thought about the narrative threads I was exposing kids to, I wanted to try to decenter harmful narratives around gender through other read alouds and discussions. When trying to do anti-oppressive teaching (including anti-racism), it’s empowering when we can navigate the inherent tensions in the work, holding on to contradictions, and working through them.

Where to from here? An Invitation.

Now, I invite you to reflect. I Invite you to describe, in detail, a harmful narrative that you wish to decenter in your practice. There are the meta narratives of “Black people are like this, white people are like that” or “boys do this, girls do that” for example but how, specifically, does this manifest in your classroom and life? Think about the individual narratives that lead to the racist meta-narratives we have all internalized to some degree. If you struggle to come up with detailed narratives, consider pausing and going back to immersing yourself in anti-racist literature. Or, perhaps, set an intention to be vigilant for narratives all around you and write them down as salient ones come up. Feel free to revisit the following questions as you work on connecting your practice with your thinking:

1. What are the anti-oppressive narratives I want to center?
2. What are the oppressive narratives I wish to destroy?
3. What might I do to interrupt oppressive narratives and center empowering narratives?

I hope this was helpful. Feel free to leave your ideas in the comments, perhaps we can workshop them. Describing narratives can be tough work.

Peace.