A Pernicious Silence: Confronting Race in the Elementary Classroom

Glossing over issues of race in the classroom or pretending that they don't exist does not accord with what even very young children know to be true. Ms. Polite and Ms. Saenger maintain that it is much healthier for everyone when race can be freely discussed, and they offer suggestions to help teachers overcome their discomfort.

By Lillian Polite and Elizabeth Baird Saenger

TEACHERS often speak about creating classroom communities. Indeed, constructive, developmentally appropriate communities of learning are essential if solid learning is to happen. And, of course, everyone needs to feel comfortable in order to take risks, and learning is built on risk-taking. But teachers may also unwittingly create communities of silence.

Communities of silence cannot be moral communities. And the most pernicious and pervasive silence in primary school classrooms is the silence surrounding the subject of race. Where there is not silence, there is often a complacent orthodoxy purporting that, since Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., changed the world, everything is just fine.

But children are quick to realize that everything isn't just fine. Beneath the surface, they are learning rules about what can be acknowledged and what can be discussed. As Beverly Daniel Tatum has written, "Children who have been silenced often enough learn not to talk about race publicly. Their questions don't go away, they just go unasked."1

As teachers, one African American and one European American, we offer some specific suggestions for helping fellow teachers become aware of this silence and begin to break it. Honest acknowledgment of the realities of children's experience serves to liberate them and allows school communities to become places where all kinds of learning can thrive. In the March 2003 Kappan, Donna Marriott vividly relates her own experience in helping to liberate two children.2 Having made presentations on the subject at teachers' conferences since 1998, we can attest to the continuing importance of addressing this issue.

Many studies have shown that even very young children are aware of the powerful effects of race in our society or any society. They think about what it means for them to be of African, Asian, European, or Native American ancestry because they need to make sense of their world. They are bombarded with images of race from the news and entertainment media, from their families, from their religious and secular communities, and from their classmates. When teachers avoid the subject, pretending that it doesn't exist as an issue, or when they portray its existence as merely a fringe issue, they are sending a very strong message. Although this message may be unintentional, the result can be stifling. But when teachers find ways to address the effects of race in society, we have found that children feel liberated. They begin to trust that "the elephant in the room" may be mentioned. And there is more space for them to focus on all kinds of learning.

Ways to "break the silence" are both general and very specific, but they require reflection, courage, and planning. An obvious place to begin is self-education. As Peggy McIntosh famously showed more than a decade ago in her list of the privileges of being white, everyone who is white in societies where whites are in the majority and in control enjoys myriad benefits that derive from that status alone. For example, if a white person needs to move, she can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in any area that she can afford. She can also be pretty sure that her new neighbors will be neutral or pleasant toward her. A white person can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on his race. And white people can consider many different options -- social, political, imaginative, or professional -- without asking whether people of their race would be accepted in those contexts. (Of course, these differences hold true only within a given society. Disparities between industrialized and "developing" societies just as urgently call for attention in the classroom.) As teachers, we need to acknowledge these realities, but we also need to ponder their implications in our own lives and in the lives of the children we teach.

Certainly, thinking about these things can make us uncomfortable. However, none of us can escape them. Morally, we must face them or be guilty of what James Baldwin described long ago as the "crime of innocence." Jane Lazarre writes, "It is not that we cannot understand each other, but that we presume that understanding too quickly, close the unfamiliar story down with our own intrusive narrating, have no patience or endurance for the difficult times of exile -- that wilderness which can often feel lonely and unsafe."3

In addition to this "crime of innocence," people in the majority may have what David Mura describes as the "double narrative" in their heads: the conflicting agendas that surround simultaneous ideals of meritocracy and deep feelings of superiority. Such realities are painful to acknowledge. This acknowledgment also needs time and work, but it is necessary before the classroom silence can begin to be broken.

Children are aware of these conflicts already, consciously or unconsciously. Consider some examples. In a prekindergarten class in a progressive school, there was only one child of color, who was thought to be too young to be aware of racial demographics. Without preamble, this child said to the teacher, "Maybe, someday, I'll be in a school where everyone is black and there's only one white child." While learning songs and stories about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a different kindergartner protested, "Mommy says we shouldn't talk about color." Third-graders spoke spontaneously and knowledgeably about a case in which the police shot and killed an unarmed black man. A 10-year-old suddenly asked, "Who discovered Europe? I mean, we learn about how people from Europe discovered North America and South America and Africa before that and Asia, too. But who discovered them? Who did it to them? And when?" Whether or not children reveal such awareness and concern, they are present.

So after self-education and serious reflection, what can teachers begin to do? Certainly, we must have courage. We need to trust ourselves, we need to be ready to use our mistakes wisely, and we need to be ready to respond to the children. And they will help us. After the first few times, addressing these issues gets easier -- and not addressing them seems unthinkable.

We teachers must set a tone of working and learning together. We must ask whether the silence comes more from us or from the children. This part of the "hidden curriculum" must be made explicit. It must become a clear focus of our attention. Once everyone understands that "permission is granted," teachable moments appear frequently, and the wise teacher will be alert to them and will make use of them, regardless of what the formal subject may be.

Well-meaning parents and teachers alike stumble into revealing their own deep worries and prejudices. For example, a white child in a predominantly white kindergarten classroom complained to his mother that a black child in his class had hair that "smelled funny." The mother anxiously shushed her child, saying, "Everyone is different, and that's fine." Perhaps the mother herself feared that there actually was something unclean -- or at least strange -- about the black child's hair. Perhaps she simply didn't feel ready at that moment to ask or learn about hair that was different from her own. Almost certainly she didn't want her child to harbor negative or racist attitudes about a classmate. But by treating the whole topic as somehow forbidden and undiscussible, she conveyed her fear about the "otherness" of the black child in a powerful way. Sadly, she missed a perfect moment for learning and growth, both for herself and her child.

Probably, the black child's family used a hair product whose scent was unfamiliar to the white child. "What's on your hair?" "How do you use it?" "Could I see it?" All these could have been quite acceptable, honest questions and would have opened up the whole subject. Hair is very important to children. They are full of natural curiosity about hair that is curly or straight, blond or black, long or short. Quite naturally, they want to touch the hair of their classmates and compare it with their own. The truism that "everyone is different" snaps a lid on the subject just when a child is struggling to understand the implications of these differences. And it also emphasizes difference over similarity in a potentially hurtful way.

Another example of this unwitting negative focus on difference is one that happens less frequently these days but should never happen at all. This is the presumption on the part of white teachers that children of color in their classrooms are ready to serve as representatives of or spokespeople for their racial group. Singling out a black child and asking, "Aisha, what would you have to say about this topic?" is unfair and destructive, no matter how well-intentioned. If the atmosphere in a classroom is one of safety and respect for all children, they will be sure, eventually, to offer important observations or to ask important questions. The life of such a class will be rich with opportunities for everyone to learn from one another.

But we needn't wait for teachable moments. The most obvious vehicle for engendering healthy discussion is the reading aloud of good stories. We offer readers a list of books that have proved to be excellent for this purpose. (See "Suggested Books to Read Aloud with Children," page 275.) Ideally, these books should not merely inspire but also provoke and disturb and generate new questions for the teacher and students alike.

But all sorts of books can be used in new ways. For example, most authors fail to specify race when a character is white, assuming that to be white is to be "us," to be "normal." It is the default setting of much of children's literature. A teacher who merely inserts the adjective "white" or explains that the characters in this story are white doesn't change the story. But that teacher has put "white" on the same footing as "black" and thereby changed everything. This kind of awareness can be powerful for children and for teachers. "We" can be any race. "They" can be any race.

This matter of which racial group is "we" and which is "they" plays out in all sorts of ways that usually remain hidden from the racial group in the majority but are starkly obvious to members of the classroom minority group. Nonwhite children and their parents are too often "welcomed," implicitly or explicitly, by members of the majority group. The subtext is that they are "tolerated" by those in charge. And it is the members of the minority group who feel the condescension, not those doing the "welcoming." The discomfort, even fear, of being somehow "allowed" to be where one doesn't quite belong is palpable.

Many schools have networks of parents, teachers, and even children that control -- typically through behind-the-scenes activities such as volunteering, fundraising, and phone trees -- the classroom and school community. These networks may be so entrenched that those involved may take them for granted, not recognizing their influence. However, their existence can create an atmosphere of "insiders" and "outsiders" that can lead to feelings of resentment by those not included, especially if those not aware of or excluded from the networks are from minority groups and those included are from the majority group. Teachers need to make themselves aware of such hidden networks, and they need to make them explicit. If these networks can benefit anyone, then they can benefit everyone, and the school can become a more just place.

In addition, teachers can be role models of activism and concern. Children are fascinated with their teachers' own examples. We should never forget the power of the roles we play in children's lives, for good or ill. Personal narratives, experiences, and concerns can be brought into the classroom to good effect, and everyone gains.

What's more, for older children, there are frequently rich stories in the newspapers about incidents of racism and discrimination. Clipped and copied, these stories provide very powerful lessons for discussion. For example, a recent newspaper article described the struggle of a white employee of a large children's clothing store chain to battle the specific racist injustices she encountered on the job. Her supervisors had directed her to not give shopping bags to black customers and to discard job applications submitted by black adults. Ultimately, she won her case, and the stores involved had to pay huge fines and institute sensitivity classes for all their employees. Since virtually all African American children have had the experience of being followed closely the minute they enter a retail establishment, this article provoked powerful discussion. And since the woman won her case, it was a story of acknowledgment, vindication, and hope. It was also an eye-opener for the European American children.

Of course, there are caveats. Teachers can't use tales of their own activism or interesting news articles in bullying ways. Nor can they fall back on a "television sit-com" mentality that seeks to tie up messy things into tidy packages with phony resolutions by the end of a class period. We need to develop new ways of listening and a willingness to hear uncomfortable or even disturbing remarks from our students. Allowing the space for students' comments and questions isn't easy. Nor is sustaining it. But the rewards are rich -- both liberating and enduring. We have been trying to learn how to do it well, and we are encouraged enough to strongly urge that our fellow teachers try to do it. Communities of silence need the sounds of voices raised in free inquiry and discussion in order to become truly moral communities.

2. Donna M. Marriott, "Ending the Silence," Phi Delta Kappan, March 2003, pp. 496-501.

3. Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 77.

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