‘Bad Men Doing Bad Things’: K-12 and The Misdirection Myth of the True Roots of Racism

Simon Legree‘Bad Men Doing Bad Things’: K-12 and The Misdirection Myth of the True Roots of Racism by Keffrelyn D. Brown | The Op-Ed Project | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
From George Zimmerman, Donald Sterling and Dylann Roof to the Ku Klux Klan, Eugene “Bull” Connor and Strom Thurmond, when it comes to teaching about American-style racism, the narrative gets boiled down to bad men doing bad things.
In a time when the country can’t parse the meaning of #blacklivesmatter vs #allivesmatter, we continually engage in an incomplete dialogue around race and racism. This miseducation starts at school, where we need to take a different approach if we hope to come to common ground in the larger conversation around these issues.
For many well-meaning people concerned about race the aforementioned  names and words conjure images of the consummate racist: an individual or group of people whose actions are motivated by overt racial bias and prejudice.  Over time the images of “bad men who did bad things,” become emblematic of American racism, blinding us to the insidious ways racism impacts us every day. Not so incidentally, they emblems of badness are generally always positioned as bad men. This is the prototypical way race is understood in U.S. society and taught in official school curriculum.  
Yet when racism is viewed only as the individual actions of a person or group toward others, it is disconnected from the histories and practices that have helped to maintain its power. This individual view of racism slips into the idiosyncratic; racism becomes simply the interpersonal relations between “bad” and good people.  
In fact,  racism is a historic feature of our country, existing since its founding and ratification by the U.S. Constitution.  Some legal scholars such as the late Derrick Bell even argue persuasively that it holds a foundational and permanent place in U.S. social relations. One cannot deny the legacy racism has played in our country’s major institutions. Politics, law enforcement, media, education, health care and housing are all mired in a system historically characterized by racialized inequities and oppression.
Yet when researchers look at how racism is treated in the official school curriculum, specifically in social studies, an area ripe for this exploration, one finds a different perspective. In a study I conducted with Anthony Brown on how Texas state adopted U.S. history textbooks across grades 5, 8 and 11 addressed racial violence targeted to African-Americans, we found racism positioned as individual behavior. Racism, even in the context of state-sanctioned, extra-legal violence rested on the individual predilection of individuals alternately depicted as different from normal, presumably non-racist people who had no culpability in our system of white supremacy.
But is this the only knowledge that more than 50 million children attending U.S. public schools today learn about race in school? No. Racism is also taught in an indirect, more pervasive way through what is called the “hidden curriculum.” This is accessed through the organization of schools and students, in the knowledge offered or left out of official school curricula, and through the curriculum and teaching decisions teachers still make, in spite of increased standardization of their practices. The challenge of indirect forms of racism found in schools is students absorb them without ever having to unpack their significance and power.
As a black female, I experienced this in my K-12 schooling. I encountered African-Americans in the curriculum only in the context of learning about slavery and in two texts assigned in my Advanced Placement English classes. This gap continues in my own son’s education. Every year we push his educators to provide a more racially inclusive curriculum through the inclusion of books and other material that reflect a fuller representation of blackness, black people and the place of race in our society.  
Certainly, schools cannot end racism. Racism reflects a set of deeply entrenched histories and social practices that cannot be upended through the implementation of a magical curriculum. But acknowledging this does not diminish the need to disrupt how racism is taught — officially and informally — in schools.
K-12 schools need to intentionally teach students about race and the fundamental role racism plays in schools and society. But this would require schools take a radically different approach in acknowledging what I call sociocultural knowledge, the social, cultural, economic, political and historical knowledge that informs society. It impacts every aspect of teaching from curriculum and approaches to teaching to daily decisions teachers make about them both. It also impacts classroom organization and how teachers view their role and responsibility as teachers, their students and the families and communities from which students come. Too often educators and researchers dismiss sociocultural knowledge as only the context surrounding school, rather than knowledge constitutive to the fundamental work of school.
If we truly want to transform the work of schools, society and future of this country, we need to ask ourselves what knowledge matters and what knowledge is forsaken. In addition to the traditionally exalted disciplinary knowledge of science, mathematics, literacy and social studies, we need recognize sociocultural knowledge, in this case race, as venerated and valid curriculum.
All teachers need this knowledge, but at a time when 80 percent of teachers are white and 50 percent of students are of color, this is vitally important. Those preparing to become teachers and those currently in classrooms need targeted opportunities to acquire a stronger sociocultural knowledge of race and racism. This is just as important as content area knowledge teachers are expected to know and teach.
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Dr. Keffrelyn Brown, a Public Voices Fellow, is an associate professor in curriculum and instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow her on Twitter: @DrKeffrelynB