Introduction
As a United States History teacher, my classes engage with challenging content on war, slavery, segregation, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. Every year, some of my students ask the heart wrenching and obvious question: “Why? Why did people do such horrible things?” I always flounder at this question, because it is an immensely complicated one. Although I teach them that sometimes we have to just sit with not-knowing and anger at injustice, I also want to be able to give my students tools to unpack this question for themselves.
I believe that part of understanding the why has to do with a seemingly human inclination to exclude, and to physically harm, based on arbitrary markers such as race, gender, nationality, and religion. We need to ask the big questions about how exclusion--in all its forms, from systemic racism to bullying in schools--perpetuates injustice and inequity. We also need to ask what it means to be included, to belong, to be part of a community, and how that belonging can be harnessed for justice. Through this unit, I hope for my students to turn that painful question into investigation and empowerment.
My students are already thinking about these issues, already have their own brilliant insights about how society works. As teenagers, they are especially preoccupied with their sense of self and making sure that they are part of the in-group. The answers they come up with about what it means to belong, and why people exclude and hate, will be their own. As an educator, what I can bring to the table is the language, theories, and data to help them think through these issues.
I believe anthropology, the study of human societies in the past and present, is uniquely positioned to help students explore big, abstract questions like “What does it mean to be part of a society or group?,” “What are the causes of human violence?”, “How are we the same and different from each other?”, and “Who am I and where do I belong?” Anthropology not only makes these questions a focus of inquiry, but also makes them concrete through a combination of local examples and global comparison. Consequently, this unit is written for an 11th and 12th grade IB (International Baccalaureate) Social and Cultural Anthropology class. Students will read an ethnography of a gang in Chicago and the urban neighborhood where it operates. This ethnography will be put in conversation with historical context, anthropological concepts and theories, and examples of belonging and exclusion in other places and times.
The central goals for this unit are threefold. First, students will be able to read and engage with a full-length academic monograph. As juniors and seniors in high school, this will be a challenge and will require scaffolds, but it is important that they are exposed to the type of texts many of them will face at the university level. Second, students will be able to apply anthropological concepts to their own social circumstances. I believe that it can be empowering to describe your life in social science terms. For teenagers, particularly teenagers in 2021, particularly teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds, the world can be a very confusing and frightening place. Having the language to explain the historical roots of your family’s economic struggles, describe an incident of discrimination, or discuss why you do not feel that you belong in certain spaces, is immensely empowering. Third, students will explore the factors that impact who belongs to or is excluded from social groups and understand the way that social groupings are constituted through inclusion and exclusion. In short, the goal of this unit is to give students the tools they need to make sense of society.
School Context
I teach at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Booker T. is a historically African American high school founded in 1913 by a remarkable man named Ellis Walker Woods. Born to freed people in Mississippi, Woods migrated to Tulsa after college by walking. He soon founded Booker T. as a school to serve the growing black community known as Black Wall Street. Booker T. survived the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, as well as other challenges of the Jim Crow period, and came to be known as an excellent school.
Booker T. was integrated in 1973 when it adopted programs designed to incentivize white students to attend. One such program was the International Baccalaureate program in which I will be teaching. The ethical and instructional complexity of the fact that I will be teaching a unit on race and belonging at a historically black school, in a program intended to recruit white students, does not go unnoticed.
Today, Booker T. is a magnet school of about 1300 students. Our demographics are roughly 30% African American, 30% White, 30% Latinx, and 10% other ethnicities, including a sizable and overlapping Native population. My students will be juniors and seniors from all these backgrounds, as well as diverse socioeconomic statuses. About a third of my students will be in the full IB Diploma Program. I hope for this unit to open up conversations about what it means to belong at Booker T. I want to challenge students to think critically about our school, as well as help them feel connected. High school should be a place where they can belong.
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