Trying to be a less racist teacher

I had a moment several years ago where I was reading about a terrorist attack where someone had shot and killed people and based on the race of the shooter media had begun reporting about mental illness.  Reading the response immediately brought to mind that I had done the exact same thing when I was a new teacher at my first teaching job. I had had a white student go on a swearing rampage and storm out of the classroom.  I remember thinking that he had lost control of his emotions. Later in the year a black student had a similar although lesser violation. This time I asked two other teachers what I should do in response and they both told me to write a referral.  I did and when I talked to the student he literally told me what I was doing was wrong. And his rationale bounced right off of my dense head. No I thought, I can’t be racist I thought. I’m a good person, I’m a teacher. I asked two other teachers.  The other student was different because they had a documented issue. I dismissed his comments and followed through. In retrospect, this student was probably used to getting the short end of the stick and this was a common experience for him. And I had no idea until years later that I had been in the wrong.  

Since then I’ve been working at trying to make sure that I would not fail another student because of their race and also trying to elevate talented students that get overlooked because of their race.  It has been a surprisingly uneven journey were I have learned a lot but often at the expense of my students. When I messed up I would always try to apologize and reflect on what I should have done instead.  Here are some lessons that I’ve learned to this point.

1.  We often present racism as something that black people need to fix instead of white people.  In the above scenario I am the racist. I had no ill intentions and if I could do something to fix what I did I would in a heartbeat.  I feel awful about it. But instead of recognizing our own role we tend to shift race onto minorities and onto students instead of white people.  I was confusing not being a bigot with being unable to be racist. And that confusion is common and it is very counter productive. I was the one with the problem and I missed that because of my ignorance.

2.  Everyone is racist.  It’s not a binary system where you’re racist or you are not racist.  It’s a spectrum like autism and everyone is somewhere on the spectrum.  One of our biggest problems is that people confuse racism with bigotry. Being a bigot means that you don’t like a person because of their identity.  Being racist means that you contribute to the construction of racial structures where people of a minority group become linked with no evidence or rationale.  This happens frequently. We all do this. When a student is loud they are being disruptive but when a black student is loud they are being loud because they are black.  Teachers tend to notice the black students being loud even if the decibel levels are comparable.

A racist comment I read once was a lady saying that she isn’t racist and she makes sure to teach her children to treat everyone equally.  This doesn’t come off as racist to many people but it is because what the person is doing is reinforcing the idea that black people are all one group.  She’s not telling her kids we treat everyone equally when something arises with white people, only when black people are involved does this phrase manifest.  That distinction causes black people to become linked when they are just individual people. The reality is the more you ignore race the larger your racism impact becomes for most people.  

3.  There are methods to be less racist or more anti-racist.  The biggest thing that I’ve learned to do is to always pause.  Your brain uses two systems to work, one is automatic and the other involves thinking.  If you have positive intentions but negative impacts, it’s frequently due to automation.  So when you are about to discipline a student, you need to pause and determine if this is an automated trained response where you are being unfair or if this is a reasonable course of action.  In order for this to work you have to be honest with yourself and for many that is a challenge.

My favorite compliment I ever received was at conferences a parent had come in even though their child was doing very well in the course.  She just wanted to let me know that her daughter had told her that in every class she took she always felt like the “muslim girl” but in my class she was just a normal kid.  This should be one of our primary goals. Our students are not free in our schools to be themselves. We should be looking for opportunities for our students to be free from their race and this doesn’t come about by ignoring race.  This also doesn’t come about by treating racial disparities as a problem for black students and not for white students.

A good way to improve your thinking is to try hard to analyze white people for a length of time.  Every time you talk to a white student try and pause and evaluate if you are doing so differently because of their race.  Are you asking them a harder question that requires more independence because they are white? Are you asking them about academics or social things instead of athletics because they are white?  Were you standing closer in proximity to them because they are white? At first it is very odd, but I think we secretly do this for black students and that differentiation is perceived by the student whether the teacher is aware they are doing it or not.  And it makes an impact. If you’re skeptical you can start by taking an IAT here.  

Becoming less racist is not something you can accomplish without effort.  But if minimal effort is the best you can do, listen to other people who speak honestly about it.  If you can find someone to follow on twitter, or read a book about race. Without critically thinking and reflecting you’re unlikely to change enough but do something.  

4.   We don’t listen well.  I had gone to a professional development session.  It was for white women to talk about their role in racism under the pretense that white women often escalate tensions as men feel a need to protect them.  I didn’t want to intrude on the session so I decided to go, but sit in the back and not comment the entire time. During the session as people offered up ideas and comments one of our black teachers started to talk about our district.  My ears perked up. This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted the expertise of someone who lives this every day. We don’t have a lot of black teachers and so not only does she have her own experiences but also a lot of black students confide and trust in her so she is incredibly knowledgeable.  And yet the second she finished speaking another teacher said that they disagreed and they felt that we were doing a great job with race. Another teacher confirmed this and I watched the room completely miss what was said. Later I was at a different PD session and a black professor from Michigan State was working with us to help us. A teacher asked the most inane question and he was so patient with her. When she first spoke I felt the urge to chastise the question but instead he listened to her, met her where she was and tried to help her in spite of her question being what I considered to be dismissive of his efforts.

I hear a lot of teachers claim that students play the race card to get out of trouble but the evidence I see would make this incredibly rare.  And that doesn’t mean that you won’t be supported by others in your claim it just means that you are likely wrong. As a teacher I watch white students perform infractions constantly and get away with them.  I listen as administrators tell me about parents who obstruct discipline for their white children in spite of clear evidence of rule violations. But our perspective is the opposite and that is dangerous. If you don’t know the statistics but assume they benefit black students you are wrong and contributing to a racist narrative.  

5.   We are too comfortable with our racial disparities.  If white students started to achieve less than black students we would work tirelessly to make sure we were being fair.  When black students struggle we consider this the norm and make ceremonial efforts at mitigating the damage. Part of this arises because people think that they are special and that others are the problem.  But we all share this burden and it’s time we put together a more concerted effort. Psychological evidence shows that teacher expectations have a massive impact on achievement. We know of the study where random students were given a gifted label and then outperformed their peers.  We know of the blue eyes, brown eyes study. And yet when we see these same results in our classrooms with consistency we can’t reflect on what we do to contribute to the problem.

One of the solutions is that each teacher needs to think hard and reflect and work on being more anti-racism and less racist.  The other is that we need teachers to anticipate that students are going to come with deficits and have a plan to help students achieve even if they start out behind.  As a chemistry teacher lots of my black students struggle and there are methods for them to still be successful if I put in the effort to give them opportunities to catch up.  But if I give a math pre-test on day 1 to scare struggling students out of the class to make my job easier then that’s not going to happen. If I don’t give students current cognitive research strategies and instead tell them they need to work harder or study more when they’re scrambling to keep up as it is they aren’t going to be successful.  It’s not your job to set out a set of parameters that negatively impact one racial group over the other. It’s your job to figure out methodologies that allow students to succeed. And it will take more effort to do that and it is worth the effort to do so. When you tell 9th graders that in order to be a chemistry student you need to have done X by the time you were fourteen years old the students you are most often restricting are black students who may very well be on a path to being a chemist but need more time to get there.    

But a huge part of your job that also is important is that we need to not have students going into teaching (or other professions for that manner) without a strong understanding of race and racism.  There were people who could have taught me about racism before I failed that student and they didn’t. I think that I would have been receptive to the conversation even if it was critical but I never got the chance and someone else paid the price for that.  We need our white students to not leave school thinking that diversity doesn’t apply to them. We had a professional development session once and the speaker asked us to name white people that had been supportive of civil rights for black people. I knew of none and I knew that I was not on a path to be on that list in the future.  We teach that white people are the cause of racism but not the solution and shifting that focus goes a long way towards being successful at reducing racism towards our children.

Do people with lighter skin have different sunscreen needs?

We spent a class period researching in groups and a class period discussing our findings.  The prompt was to construct an argument that skin color matters for sunscreen use and an argument that skin color does not matter.  From there our groups diverged greatly as they built up arguments and pertinent explanations.  

Figure 1:  Whiteboard 1 explores the mechanism by which UV light causes DNA mutations

The wide variety of information in the various whiteboards led to some great discussion on content as well as generic science.  We discussed if knowing the mechanism of DNA damage by UV light is relevant so long as we see the data in Whiteboard 2 (below).  Students split but offered mostly arguments that mechanism knowledge is highly relevant to evaluate the conclusions from the data of skin cancer rates.  Multiple examples were offered such as some races might be located where they experience different exposure to sunlight, different races might also use different amounts of sunscreen on average and reporting of race can be inconsistent.  In general most students felt that just knowing skin cancer rates is insufficient and could be correlation without causation.  

We also talked about the mechanism by which UV light originates and under what conditions an electron can accelerate so much that it produces such high frequency light.  We connected the emission and absorption of light with the Balmer series for hydrogen.  We reviewed the spacing of energy levels and I instructed about the differences in energy level spacings for gaseous atoms/ions compared to molecular excitations.  We connected this later with Whiteboard 6 by talking about how a slight adjustment to a molecule can cause a minor change in the frequencies of light absorbed and how pigments and dye research often utilizes electron rich and electron deficient functional groups to shift color.   

Figure 2:  Whiteboard 2 found cancer rates based on race

Figure 3:  Whiteboard 3 went full “Natural News” to locate some arguments against
sunscreen

This board led to a good discussion on sources of scientific information, how sources manipulate data and experiment into “clickbait” articles.  We posed the question “Are any of these things actually bad or do they just sound bad?”  For example, if sunscreen ingredients are present in breastmilk, is that bad or is it so infrequent and low in concentration that it is irrelevant?  We talked about how the FDA does not have jurisdiction over supplements and how labels for supplements are sometimes shown to be incorrect.  We also compared this board to the risks of not wearing sunscreen using Whiteboard 2 (above).  

Figure 4:  Whiteboard 4 summarized different wavelengths of UV light and nanoparticles
used for sunscreens

Figure 5:  Whiteboard 5 looks at melanin and interactions of sunscreens with UV light

Figure 6:  Whiteboard 6 looks at different chemical structures utilized in sunscreens

Conclusions that students made included that the SPF data they saw suggested that anything over SPF 50 was a marketing scam and was less healthy than using SPF 50 or lower.  We concluded that the mechanisms by which electrons change motion during electronic transitions in molecules are incredibly difficult to visualize and that this uncertainty can be problematic for understanding.  We concluded that everyone exposed to sun should wear sunscreen because melanin mostly protects from sunburn but not from DNA damage.  We saw a variety of organic molecules used to absorb UV light as well as alternatives such as ZnO nanoparticles.  We started our discussion by looking at how 11 cis-retinal converts into 11 trans-retinal when absorbing visible light and this is the mechanism by which our brain becomes aware of light hitting our retinas.  We talked about the breaking of the pi bond before the rotation occurs and later compared this to potential changes in molecular structure when UV light is absorbed by molecules in sunscreen.  

As a teaching lesson I was highly pleased with the variety of topics to discuss and the variety of information students used to make arguments.  Students looked at chemical structures, DNA damage mechanisms, skin cancer data, sunburn data and how UV light itself varies.  We identified what type of light escapes the sun as a subject that requires more research.  We will continue to use this topic throughout our review.  We saw connections to organic chemistry, quantum chemistry, periodic trends and bonding.  It was interesting to the majority of students.  Some students asked what it was like to be sunburned because they had never experienced it before and most students had limited ideas coming into the discussion but left with much better knowledge.