Scientific American: In Schools, Honest Talk about Racism Can Reduce Discrimination
““Where are the Native Americans now?” asked fifth grade students in an Iowa City classroom last year. There are many ways their teacher, Melanie Hester, might have answered. She could have pointed out that today Native Americans live in cities and towns across the U.S. About 20 percent live on reservations, and Hester could have used that to open a discussion of the U.S. government’s forcible movement and isolation of tribes. Hester might have also discussed how European and American settlers brutally killed many Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Instead she evaded the question and continued her lesson without offering historical context for her students to understand the present. Teachers across the country are avoiding explicit conversations about race, racism and racial inequality because of a series of recent laws passed in several states. In Iowa, for example, a law prohibits any teaching that suggests the U.S. is “fundamentally or systematically racist or sexist.” The Iowa law also specifies that teachers must ensure that no student feels “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.” The laws in other states lay out similar logic.
The legal language seems, for the most part, protective of children. But the effect is quite the opposite. As psychologists who study how parents and teachers communicate with kids about race, we can attest to an ever growing body of scientific evidence that suggests these laws are failing the children they purport to help.”
Some Insights From This Article
There are laws in place in which educators cannot explicitly talk about teachings that may be fundamentally or systematically racist or sexist which may cause discomfort, guilt or anguish to another student. This may be protective of children and the intention may be to help avoid situations where students can find learning uncomfortable due to discussion of race or sex.
However, this article shows that there may quite an opposite effect in avoiding these uncomfortable conversations, educators and policy makers may be allowing confusions about racism and sexism brew within children who may have certain questions and assumptions about it.
In general, having comfortable conversations and finding a solution in which “no one feels out of place” may be an idealized scenario in which we assume all people have perfect ideas of what racism and sexism entails. But for many of us, we still may have unanswered questions and confusions that may warrant a conversation about it for us to truly understand.
Full article is here!
What do you believe is the solution or an aspect to solving racism/sexism?
#Racism #Sexism #Education
@sunnyWriting4806
I think it’s important to have these conversations with children.
Yes, it can be uncomfortable, but schools are about educating.
It's best try to at least make an effort in educating children.
I feel it’s better than to just let them be confused or uneducated on the topics.
Thanks for the informative post! 💛✨
@innateJoy9602
Yes! Without education we can potentially perpetuate further race confusion and misunderstandings into the next generation. If we want to tackle racism and sexism issues we first need an actual awareness the issue exist. Without knowledge of this future generations possibly won't know enough to tackle the issues at hand.
@sunnyWriting4806 I think racism is a learned behavior and spreading awareness on it can help prevent discrimination in the future. Thanks for sharing this insightful article!
@comfortableNight4463
Yes definitely! I also think tackling racism and awareness is definitely learned as well. Use good education to tackle and defeat the bad education!
@sunnyWriting4806 I find your post very interesting. This tactic reminds me of restorative justice. When you really get to realize how someone else feels, you change your mindset about abuse and bullying. It's important that both restorative justice and teaching students about their behavior works because purely behavioral techniques without any cognitive information (such as punishment) can confuse people and make things even worse. Our goal is not revenge, it is to prevent such events from happening. Thank you so much for the post!
@calmDew1576
Definitely and we can't have other people understanding how these groups feel like unless we have these types of conversations in the first place
@sunnyWriting4806 Yikes with those laws! I was unaware of that.
There has been some pushback here on the education regarding residential schools. Some of the response to that is 'old enough to go, old enough to know', meaning the fact that would put children thought that means that children today should be old enough to hear about it. I agree with that, with some caution - grade 1 students for example are young to hear about the abuse that went on.
I don't think teaching about it is really a solution, but it is a good step.
@AffyAvo
Exactly! It's definitely a step and I think that assumption is an outdated concept that has unintended consequences like we see here.
Thank you for this. Very important topic.
Not teaching real history means we're disconnected from what's happening now. Indigenous Peoples are still experiencing on-going genocide. For example, no access to clean drinking water and poisoned land from industry, which the government knows about for decades and refuses to do anything about, no matter who is in charge. We would never accept this happening to us. And assimilation is just a different form of erasing the people entirely. That's what the boarding schools full of stolen Indigenous children was trying to achieve.
But the denial of history by refusing to acknowledge and teach it allows people to ignore that it's still happening now and that we have a responsibility to do something about it. Sadly, there are people who only care about what happens directly to them and nothing else. Sadly, this individualist disconnected approach to life leaves everyone isolated and makes systematic erasure all the easier, until it directly affects us, and by that point, resistance isn't possible anymore.
We can rehumanize those who have been dehumanized. In fact, it's essential to disrupt the pattern genocide relies upon. After all, restorative justice was a concept appropriated from Indigenous culture.
Thank you again for creating this space to talk about this. I hope there will be more spaces in the future.
