Does Teaching Anti-Racism Promote Racism?

Lawsuits are popping up all over the country suing school districts for implementing Anti-Racist policies and curriculae. Litigants claim that their kids are being taught that white people born in the US have advantages over black and brown people. Teaching this, the complaints argue, makes some kids feel guilty and others feel oppressed on the basis of the color of their skin and that itself constitutes racism.

Folks who say that these litigants don’t want schools to teach kids about slavery or the Civil Rights movement are tackling a straw man. That isn’t what the majority of these folks want, and banging on at the straw man serves no purpose other than to prevent a real discussion. The arguments they do raise range from weak to something closer to reasonable.

The weak arguments these folks are making are that 1) white kids do not have any advantages over black and brown kids, and 2) any advantages/disadvantages that do exist are solely a product of hard work or a lack thereof, not institutions and structures geared towards creating racial disparities.

A cursory review of data regarding racial disparities in wealth, educational achievement, home ownership, incarceration, etc. is sufficient to bury that argument. I’ve written previously about the fact that the median white family’s net worth is almost 10 times that of the median black family’s. People clearly believe there is an advantage growing up in a wealthier, safer home environment with better educated parents who aren’t incarcerated, otherwise they wouldn’t say in common parlance that they’ve worked hard to give their kids all the advantages they can!

This second argument is also easily dismissed by pointing out the number of policies and practices (dismantling black business districts, segregated housing, redlining, etc.) making it incredibly difficult for black people to build wealth, and largely allowing the already wealthy (who were almost all white) to pass wealth from one generation to the next largely tax free. The idea that these practices were in the past and are no longer relevant ignores ongoing discrimination in housing, loan applications, the use of eminent domain, and even the way kids are treated in school. It also ignores the generational impact of wealth, or lack of wealth, on succeeding generations. Gone are the days when the US led the world in economic mobility. The best predictor of a person’s wealth or poverty is whether their parents were wealthy or poor.

A better argument for the plaintiffs involves the idea that no one is average. The gaps in wealth, educational attainment, income, incarceration, etc are gaps between averages or medians. There are black individuals who’ve grown up wealthy, with highly educated parents, who’ve never been mistreated by the justice system. There are white kids who come from generational poverty, whose parents dropped out of high school, are in prison, etc. It is hard to call the former disadvantaged, and hard to call the latter advantaged.

Perhaps the best argument the plaintiffs advance is the idea that telling black kids that the system was and is rigged against them may cause them to “give up” trying, which will lead to worse outcomes. Conversely, telling white kids that they have advantages in the game may cause feelings of guilt, and may even discourage them from working hard to succeed since the game is rigged in their favor. Moreover, classifying kids as part of any race reinforces racism, which we shouldn’t be doing. I’ll address these arguments together starting with the last.

The fact that race is an entirely human construct with no basis in science is a key teaching of Anti-Racism. But it is disingenuous to ignore the fact that most people still identify with a race and see others as members of a race. Honesty demands acknowledging that people are still treated differently because of their perceived race, because the facts demonstrate it clearly.

With respect to the fact that there are relatively advantaged black kids and relatively disadvantaged white kids, so what? In the first place, we should be explaining to kids the basics of statistics at an early age so the fact that average doesn’t mean all shouldn’t be a shocker. Second, if we fail to teach kids how the racists practices of the past are responsible for the gaps in wealth, education, housing, incarceration, etc., which are reported on and discussed everywhere, what conclusions will kids draw about the causes of those gaps? If the gaps weren’t created by racist policies both directly and indirectly in creating a degree of understandable despondency, then what other explanations will kids reach for? Gaps in talent? Effort? Ignoring the reasons why there are median differences in measurable success levels reinforces racist attitudes that still pervade this country.

We’re then left with the idea that “telling” kids that our society has benefitted some folks to the detriment of others on the basis of perceived race may cause black kids and white kids to do worse than they would if they were blissfully ignorant. Leaving kids ignorant is not the goal of schools. Black kids grow up knowing the history of racism; knowing relatives who were forced to attend separate schools, were denied loans they were qualified to get, were forced to drink from separate water fountains, etc. Failure of schools and teachers to acknowledge that fact and the long term generational impacts of racism, direct and indirect, that we still see today would be another slap in the face in a long history of the same.

Undoubtedly, a bad teacher could butcher this lesson and leave black kids believing that they had no chance to succeed and white kids believing they couldn’t help but succeed. Bad teaching could convey the wrong notion that white people are morally bankrupt and black and brown people morally superior. Bad teaching can butcher any lesson. Lessons on the World War 2 could leave all kids believing that Germans and Japanese are congenitally horrible people. These aren’t reasons to avoid hard subjects; they are reasons to prepare teachers to handle tough subjects well.

It is an undeniably difficult lesson to teach black kids that regardless of unfair headwinds they may face, they will do better in life by working hard than they will by giving up the fight, and the countless examples of black people doing exactly that successfully should reinforce that point. Kids must first succeed in the system to put themselves in a position to change the system. I know and respect black people who reject the facts about ongoing racism because they either haven’t felt it themselves, or don’t want other black folks to seek an excuse for failure. That is a strategy for black uplift, but I don’t believe it is the right strategy. Education should be accurate and reflect the best research available, and the evidence of ongoing discrimination is overwhelming. Just as the Supreme Court ultimately decided that biology teachers should be allowed to teach the science of evolution, regardless of religious beliefs or preferences of the community, teachers today should be free to teach what the best research in their field supports.

No kid should feel guilty (or for that matter proud) for anything that prior generations have done. All kids should understand the injustices of the past so they can better understand the present, and be committed to forging a more just future for themselves and others. The idea that there should be equal justice, equal access to the vote, and equal opportunities for employment should not be partisan notions; if they are, shame on the party that rejects those ideas.

The role governments should play and what policies it should implement to address past and present injustices are legitimate subjects to debate, and educators should allow kids of all political backgrounds to express their convictions without bias. But just as astronomy, geology, biology and anthropology should not bury their evidence to appease the religious beliefs of some parents, social science must not be forced to bury their research either. Others are free to tell kids that their religion teaches a different truth — that the earth is 6000 years old, the stars revolve around the earth, evolution didn’t happen, dinosaur bones are a hoax, whatever — but educators in our schools need to teach what the science supports.