Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines

Learning Activity #1: Understand Internalized Systems and Social Implications

Without an emotional or personal connection to a learning experience, students can easily detach or find the learning experience irrelevant.  Creating this experience is especially important if we’re working with more privileged students. While my students are mostly Latino, because we’re a Selective Enrollment school (a magnet school), these students have a history of academic success.  This can blind them to the realities that students who are disadvantaged academically face.  Plus, they might feel themselves superior to internalized racism and sexism because they might claim to to know better.  Or they might question, as I’ve been told by skeptical teens many times, “Does everything have to be about race?” 

As Paula Iaonide discusses in “Negotiating Students’ Affective Resistances,” “In-group bias, particularly at implicit levels, is more pronounced in people who belong to advantaged, socially valued groups than those who belong to disadvantaged ones.”¹²  Whether a student population can be considered more advantaged or more disadvantaged in terms of academic success, income, experience, housing security, this exercise allows students to examine how they internalize attitudes towards race.

To help students build self-awareness about their own bias--which will likely be representative of larger social biases--students complete an online experience at Harvard’s Project Implicit, “a non-profit organization and international collaboration between researchers who are interested in implicit social cognition,”¹³ as described on their Website.

For this unit, students should take the Race IAT (Implicit Assesstment Test), which will help them understand why “most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.”¹⁴

They don’t need to share their results; in fact, it’s better that they do not.  These are some self-reflections questions to help students process the experience.

1. Were you surprised by the results of the assessment or were they what you expected?
2. What are experiences that you’ve had or situations that you’ve seen or read about that might contribute to your bias?
3. According to the assessment, what are a couple of steps you can take to decrease your bias? What might be difficult about doing this?

Then, to see how these interalized systems of preference for white over black, students can view the following texts with these guiding questions:

1. Who are the researchers and what situation(s) did they study?
2. How did the researchers gather information?
3. What are insights from the research that re-affirm ideas you previously had?
4. What are insights from the research that give you new information?
5. What questions about opportunity and obstacles does this raise for our community?

From the Brookings Institute, “Is American Dreaming?: Understanding Social Mobility.”

From Slate, “A Roshanda by Any Other Name: How do babies with super-black names fare?” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

A caveat to both of these texts: Neither text argues that a person’s potential is pre-determined by the social status one is born into or the name one is given.  Instead, we need to be aware of the obstacles and opportunities that inherently accompany a person’s social status and name at birth.

To wrap up this introduction, students can write a reflection paragraph to this prompt inspired by Lipsitz’s article: How does the information in these texts reveal the “the indecent and unjust social order of our society?”¹⁵

Reading Journalism:

To see how organizations or individuals are working to address systems that promote racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, students can read one of these texts and respond to this question inspired by Lipsitz’s article: How are people interviewed or profiled in these articles working to address “the indecent and unjust social order of our society?”

To help guide students’ understanding, they can complete these guiding questions:

1. What’s the conflict or problem that needs to be addressed, according to the article?
2. Who is the person or people most affected by this in the article?
3. Who are the experts or what is the research cited? What is this intended to help readers understand?
4. What stereotypes, myths, or misconceptions is the article challenging?
5. What are the implications or next possible steps indicated or suggested?
6. Should we accept the journalist’s bias? Whose side does the journalist appear to be on? If readers accept this information, will this contribute to a more decent and just social order in our society or no?

“How a Young Activist Set Off a #MeToo Avalanche in Mexico” by Paulina Villegas, New York Times, March 28, 2019

“‘They know what they see’: Chicago educators reach out to students about racism, police brutality after George Floyd’s death” by Cassie Walker Burke and Samantha Smylie, Chalkbeat Chicago, June 3, 2020

“How to Help Teenage Girls Reframe Anxiety and Strengthen Resilience” by Deborah Farmer Kris, MindShift, February 12, 2019

“Unfortunatley, Anger Is Still the Default Emotion for Men” by Joseph Lamour, Mic, August 12, 2020