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There is a certain formula a racial story can reach, some unknown combination of timing, rarity, and the notoriety of those involved that draws analysts to gravely suggest that “we need to talk about race.” And then we do. A lot. With little regard for substance or coherence, we find our airwaves filled with empty rhetoric and thoughtless repetition.
More recently, we have collectively held forth on the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner decisions; riots in Baltimore; shootings in Charleston; and the burning of black churches. As supremacists march, we talk. As confederate statues come down, we talk. We tweet, we post, we meme, we chat.
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it … There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
Douglass knew what many are noticing now: that we never seem to graduate to the next conversation. The hard one. That we hide our stasis beneath puffed-up punditry and circular debate. He called for us to infuse our conversations with fire—to seek out and value historical context, to be driven by authentic inquiry, and above all, to be honest—both with ourselves and with those with whom we share a racial dialogue. Just as fire rarely passes through an environment without acting upon it, so too should our world be impacted by our students’ race conversations.
We have long known that students given the opportunity to speak and listen take more responsibility for their interpretations, retain these interpretations longer, and develop agility of mind.
Students are not empowered; rather they are shown that their inherent power has been recognized—and that it matters. Well-crafted discussions build confidence, and confidence is sacred currency to students and teachers alike.
It is hard for a student to unlearn empathy, to forget discernment, to dismiss the importance of solid evidence once they’ve grown used to demanding it.
race talk is oxygen to black folks—breathed into our jokes, our social norms, our storytelling at family gatherings. I’d tell them how we identify strangers by race before other physical descriptions. If I was close to them, I’d add that whiteness, especially, occupies a special, complicated place in our dialogue. Black folks tease it in its absence, talk about it behind its back. I’d tell them that, no, teenage me was not afraid to discuss race. I’d ask if these teachers were projecting their own fears onto me. If they were, what were they afraid of? Messing up? Saying the wrong things?
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Shocking students, of course, requires teachers to eschew students’ expectations. In all three of these movies, teachers offered brutal directness—when their students, presumably, expected meekness. Hollywood’s seamless execution of such techniques, and the prompt rewards that followed, caused a generation of teachers to attempt their own racial shock and awe campaigns, only to find out that it was nowhere near as easy.
The penalty for misspeaking, improper planning, or a lack of foresight can be the total loss of a teacher’s moral authority. And once lost, students’ respect can seem impossible to recover.
No teacher wants to be the villain in someone else’s horror story, or the fool in a dark comedy.
The more a teacher’s work is ignored, the easier it is for him to ease up on the work, start slipping, and have no idea what went wrong.
students who undermine such spaces are viewed as troublemakers, and to mete out appropriate discipline, we pull from our bag of behavior modification tactics. Meanwhile, familiar classroom hierarchies and interactions remain stubbornly visible—outspoken kids still dominate conversation, and students remain disagreeable when they disagree. This, of course, frustrates us. Why won’t students share in our utopian vision? Did they not hear us? They did. However, for most students, a teacher’s safe space designation doesn’t mean much.
In order to nurture hard conversations about race, first we must commit to building conversational safe spaces, not merely declaring them. The foundation of such spaces is listening.
Students and teachers might spend their entire lives learning how to listen. It is one of our hardest self-improvement missions, and can be the most costly—
Students learning how to listen to one another might show the same symptoms of those who are “being bad.” But when we manage both issues equally, we scuttle students’ opportunities to develop key listening skills. We can no more punish our way into a conversational safe space than we can conjure one from thin air—so we must instruct where we used to admonish, encourage where we used to excoriate, and carefully track what we used to ignore.
In my classroom, the conversational safe space is established with three discussion guidelines: Listen patiently, listen actively, and police your voice. After their introduction, each is practiced explicitly over the first few weeks—a period of time that I like to think of as a conversational “training camp.”
But to help students listen patiently, we must invest considerable focus on the students who are not speaking. And in doing so, offer some rules: First, hands should not be raised while someone is still talking. When a teacher calls on one student to speak, the rest of the hands in the room have to go down. Any student who does otherwise is communicating to everyone in the room that they don’t care about the person who is still talking. That raised (and sometimes waving) arm is saying, “I wish you would shut up! I have my own thing to say!”
Second, listening patiently means that students should never be interrupted. This is not new. Many teachers have variations of “one voice at a time.” The problem is that too many of us frame the rule as more disciplinary necessity than skill development. Students who have an impulse to interrupt each other care deeply about what is being discussed—this is a win! Calling out signals impatience, not meanness. Something in the student’s brain is boiling, and the lid couldn’t hold it, but students must be taught that (1) their big eureka might be influenced by what is currently being said, and (2)
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Students should reflect on what they appreciate from a listener and try to mimic those behaviors when someone else is speaking. Regardless of whether or not they are in doubt, they should ask each other if they feel “listened to.”
A commitment to the language of listening patiently drastically impacts not just students’ peer-to-peer interaction, but our core relationship with students.
The teacher’s choice to not be adversarial means that we might actually get to hear Mike’s story, as he won’t be too resentful to share it.
Mike, in this moment, has just been reminded to listen patiently to his classmates. He may be tempted to ask, “Why?” The answer is too often, “To be respectful” or “Because calling out is bad.” The ideal answer should be, “Joe’s ideas are worthwhile to everyone in the classroom community.”
Early on in the school year, I constantly nudge my students to turn their faces away from me when answering a question, looking instead at peers. The reminder is gentle, and often excited, as if I am trying to say, What you are saying is too good for just me to hear. Let’s get everyone else in on this stuff!
understanding that students (and teachers) should speak succinctly. This means that, as a speaker, you are humbly aware of how much space you are taking up at any given moment. Class time is limited. Students should not speak forever; they should not repeat themselves or deliver sermonettes.
I appreciate that you care enough to speak passionately in my class. Thank you for being awake! However, I need you to realize that other people are also awake, and they deserve the opportunity to speak as well.
My students know that their ideas are the sacred currency of our classroom, and that they will be received with a purposeful and structured empathy.
“I don’t want to talk about Ferguson with white people. No matter how liberal they are, it’s still going to be just … academic for them. But it’s our actual lives. We really have to be black when this stuff is going on. I don’t have the energy to explain my emotions every time a teacher decides to talk about race.” There was near-universal agreement,
daily cultural exchange with students from different races has duped many teachers into assuming an intimacy that does not exist. We reason that since students from different backgrounds are comfortable discussing occasional racial topics with us, they are automatically eager to join us in “unpacking” their deepest racial anxieties, anger, and confusion.
When I open up class with these conversations, just about every day, I acknowledge that neither student nor teacher powers down when we leave the classroom. I show that I find them worthy enough to warrant five minutes speaking as equals.
This time commitment is minimal, until one steps back and considers that five minutes a day becomes nearly two hours of informal chatter over the course of a month. This banking of conversational democracy buttresses all other classroom dialogue—students can take more risks, and our classroom culture can survive more mistakes, because students are less likely to consider our respect for their opinions either disingenuous or capricious. We build with them every day, and not just about things that they will eventually be graded on.
I have since put my own touch on the activity, framing it as a way to practice our three discussion skills. While someone is sharing, the students must listen patiently. Their questions must show that they have been listening actively. The presenters must police their voices. For the same reasons that I burn the first five minutes of each class, every Monday begins with good news.
Fifteen minutes of a Good News activity, once a week, is an investment of one hour per month. This hour of building a classroom community helps the students to celebrate the best of each other’s cultures. It lays the foundation of empathy that the heavier conversations depend on.
A high-grade compliment says, “I see you. I appreciate you. And here are some of the reasons why.”
School, life, and any number of outside forces had tuned them into hearing criticism from others, and even accepting it. And while critique has its place in the building of better ideas and examining beliefs, it shouldn’t be our default when people start to talk about us or our work. Living in the belief that the world wants you to know what’s wrong with what you’ve built doesn’t lend itself well to inspiring the building of new things.
