Coaching Letter #204
On conceptualizing racism
Hi, how are you, I hope you’re doing well. In my little patch of New England, the nights are colder, the leaves are turning amazing colors, and it feels like everything smells of pumpkin spice. I don’t have a salient photo to put at the top of this Coaching Letter, so instead I’m posting a photograph of the Northern Lights as seen in eastern Connecticut on Thursday night, taken by my friend Shianne.
This Coaching Letter was going to be about Complexity, but writing it has been a bit of a struggle, and in the meantime, this came up…
I read the New York Times on my phone whenever I’ve got a minute. One of the opinion writers, John McWhorter, is a professor of linguistics at Columbia. He writes about language, which is always interesting and I always learn something, and he also writes about race, which I usually object to for one reason or another. His column of October 3 (this link should work even if you’re not a subscriber) discusses the example of Amy Wax (a professor who has espoused inflammatory racist and sexist views) but argues that universities are not fundamentally racist spaces. Here is an excerpt from his column:
When I was a graduate student at Stanford in the late 1980s and early ’90s, I heard that claim [that universities are fundamentally racist spaces] a lot. The main basis for it was an incident in which white pranksters had colored Beethoven in as Black on a flier. Some Black students alleged a larger pattern. But when a scholar conducted interviews with dozens of minority students and asked them about other examples of racism, they often had trouble specifying any. When I taught at Berkeley in the 1990s, I spoke with a Black student who had attended a protest against the banning of racial preferences in admissions. He told me that attending Berkeley meant constantly encountering racism. I asked him what kinds of things he was referring to, and he responded as if he had never been asked such a thing before. After a pause he mumbled that white students regularly gave him “looks.”
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I am working on one of our next books (in my organization, there are always a few us working on writing projects at any given time—here is a list of our publications); this next one is on equitable instruction. The premise is that our thinking about equity in schools should be focused on instruction to a greater extent than is currently typical—and that some instructional practices are more likely to support high achievement of ALL students than others, and that some instructional practices are more likely to lead to inequity. The chapter I’m working on right now is about Equity and Expectations, so I am particularly well primed to take issue with Professor McWhorter’s conceptualization of racism.
Specifically, he thinks of racism in terms of events, which are obvious and observable and are clearly BAD. And it’s true that any given student may not be able to point at many events and say, “that was racist.” But that does not mean that racism is not happening. I think we should be thinking about racism in terms of process—small things that happen all the time and accrete. A beach, for example, is created by the daily action of erosion and deposition by tides and currents, and is made up not of one big block of sand called a beach, but of millions of grains of sand that have accumulated over hundreds of years. The creation of a beach is not an observable event except in very unusual circumstances (a hurricane, for example, which may take sand from one area and dump it someplace different in the space of a few hours), and yet there it is.
In a chapter of White Logic, White Methods, Quincy Stewart Thomas puts it this way: “Racial inequality is created in countless social interactions taking place at various levels (e.g., organizational) and locations in society. These interactions represent the social space where actors’ characteristics, such as race, are converted into rewards and opportunities—that are often modest in size—and, in turn, observed racial inequalities are created and maintained.” So I want to write about racism as a constant process because the way that Professor McWhorter thinks about racism is quite common, and misses so much else of what goes on that creates and sustains racism, sexism, and inequity. Here are big ideas that I think he misses, and therefore gets racism wrong.
Discretionary spaces. This is a term coined by Deborah Ball to describe the hundreds of decision points that teachers encounter every day. Her research suggests that teachers face 1200-1500 discretionary spaces on a daily basis. And what happens inside those spaces is determined to a large extent by the perceptions teachers have of the students in front of them. You can watch Professor Ball’s 2018 AERA presidential address here, or read an article she wrote for the Kappan here. There is well-documented evidence that teachers are subject to the same biases and stereotypes as everyone else in society, which is quite a lot. This report from Brookings contains findings about explicit and implicit teacher biases showing that teachers are not biased because they are bad people, but because they are just like everyone else. What happens inside a discretionary space is largely invisible, because it is going on inside the teacher’s head. But it shows up over time in, for example, the feedback that teachers give to boys rather than girls, the closed questions that they ask of students they perceive as being less intelligent, and the questions that they don’t ask the students of color. And as Professor Stewart says, these very small interactions are the mechanism by which some children are rewarded and some punished, often based on characteristics like race that have nothing to do with the students’ inherent capabilities or worth. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy in action.
Belonging/social homelessness. A student of color may not be able to point to a single racist incident that has happened to them in class, but they internalize the lower expectations in terms of lower quality feedback, less challenging questions, and even lack of eye contact. Conversely, in the presence of an effective teacher of students of color, they feel like they belong. Belonging is a very powerful emotion. There is a great book about belonging, called Belonging, that I wrote about in Coaching Letter #175—the quotations in that CL are also available here (and you could easily turn them into slides). The characteristics of a teacher who is able to instill a sense of belonging in academic settings are captured in the expression Warm Demander, from an article by Judith Kleinfeld in 1975. I want to emphasize that the sense of student agency that comes from being with a teacher who optimizes challenge and support is measured not by what the teacher thinks, but by what the students believe the teacher thinks about them. There’s a useful slide describing the warm demander in the Coaching Letter slides (currently slide 35 but it’s an active deck and things get added and moved around) and here’s a practitioner-focused summary from Ed Leadership, but I prefer the original article. I wrote a couple of CLs about Holding Environment, #178 and #179 (179, the Ted Lasso post, is one of the most popular of all CLs—more emails about this one than any other), and creating a sense of belonging is very important for establishing a strong classroom culture, aka holding environment. And the opposite of belonging is social homelessness, when students feel like they do not have a place where they belong, or a tribe that they belong to, and that is a significant threat to student’s academic success and emotional well-being. My brilliant colleague Rydell Harrison wrote his dissertation on this topic.
Stereotype threat. This is a concept separate from, but related to, belonging. The idea here is that there are very many stereotypes in play in our social interactions, and that we are aware of them, and dread them. I was at my orthopedist the other day, and was telling him about my various issues with my various joints and tendons, and at one point I got really tongue-tied because the issue with my hip has made it hard for me to get on and off a bike and I just hated sounding old and pathetic and fulfilling the stereotype of elderly decrepitude. I’m not even that old. But I was thinking so much about not sounding old and feeble that I sounded like an idiot instead. This phenomenon exists for Black students when it comes to academic performance, girls when it comes to math, and is so powerful that it suppresses performance in the salient field, because the awareness of the stereotype threat, and the desire to not fulfill it, takes up a lot of cognitive bandwidth. My brilliant colleague Kerry created graphics to illustrate this, which are also in the Coaching Letter slides, currently starting at number 37. The book written about stereotype threat is called Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steels, and is definitely a must-read. And you can find an interview of Claude Steele by Adam Grant here. Students in settings where they feel like they belong, where they are taken seriously and where their teachers believe in them, are less likely to be affected by stereotype threat. Students of color experiencing social homelessness and stereotype threat likely attribute these feelings to racism, and the adults in charge may be completely unaware of this.
Microaggressions. Microaggressions in classrooms are subtle, often unintentional, actions or comments that communicate biased or stereotypical beliefs and are experienced as slights or insults by the recipient. The recipient may not be an intended target of a microaggression, they could simply overhear a conversation and be offended by the remarks. Microaggressions can affect students’ sense of belonging, self-esteem, and engagement, particularly among marginalized groups. These show up in a variety of ways, such as forgetting or mispronouncing names that are not “typical” (White) American names; a teacher giving extra help to a Black student without being asked, assuming they need support, or might call on Asian students in math class more frequently, expecting them to excel; complimenting based on stereotypes—the stereotypical example is of Black students being complimented for being articulate, as if that’s a surprise. I have been in the United States for 34 years and people still laugh at me for the way I pronounce certain words or expressions that I use—the last one I remember was saying “cough sweet” instead of “cough drop”, which was apparently totally hysterical. People remark on my name all the time: “Spelled with an O? Are you sure?” And I am a quite successful, well-regarded author, consultant, and coach, and it still annoys me and wears me out. I get this feeling of being “othered”, like I don’t really belong here but my presence is amusing so I’m allowed to stick around. So if I feel like that, imagine what it must be like for students of color, students whose native language is other than English, and students who are migrants or refugees trying to make their way in a White-dominated society. The struggle to feel like you belong is a real one. The source book on microaggressions is Derald Wing Sue’s Microaggressions in Everyday Life. You might also want to check out Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, or read this CNN article.
The thing is, I would bet money that Professor McWhorter has heard of all these ideas and has read the same books and articles as I have. His opinion piece feels, therefore, disingenuous. His observation that Black students cannot name more than one or two overtly racist incidents should be neither surprising nor unexpected. And that does not mean that those Black students are wrong. When we hear from students about their experience, we should believe them, and the bigger problem is that we don’t ask them often enough. My colleagues Rydell and Tisha Markette are working on a project right now to elevate Student Voice. Check out more about that here.
As always, please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you in your work. Oh, and it’s my birthday this weekend so I’m raising money for Covenant Soup Kitchen—please help if you can! Best, Isobel