Contemplating Being White

This week’s readings have really challenged my thinking about my educational background and perspective as a white person particularly with regards to becoming a teacher of non-white students.  I volunteer in a very diverse elementary school and clearly recognize how different an environment that this is compared to my own elementary school experience.  However, our readings this week really convicted me that, because of my upbringing, I may possibly (probably?) have a deep-seated bias that I am unaware of and need to uncover and address through self-reflection and proactively educating myself regarding other races and cultures.  

It was painful to read in the Howard article about “recognizing one’s own privilege as a member of a group that has received unearned opportunity and advantage” and furthermore that “failure to begin dismantling these privileges once [one is] conscious of them is, in many ways, tantamount to acting in discriminatory ways.”  It made me realize that I cannot just say “it’s not my fault I was born into an affluent white family and that I will strive to value all races and cultures in my classroom,” but that I must further ask myself “What am I going to do about not only changing our biased system of thinking but actually dismantling my own privileges??”  This is a very big question to which I do not yet know the answer(s).  What I do know is that it is a path that I need to actively pursue.  I need to make myself vulnerable to self-examination as well as to criticism from others and to actively seek to give up false power that I have been given by virtue of the color of my skin.

On a different, but related, note -- there were two anecdotes in particular from this week’s readings that really struck me with regard to my need to be aware of the strong and valid feelings of the parents of minority children.  The first was from Lisa Delpit’s “Seeing Color” in which she is discussing Vivan Gussin Paley’s book White Teacher.  Paley is meeting with a black parent who relays that “in her children’s previous school the teacher had said, ‘There is no color difference in my classroom.  All my children look alike to me.’ ‘What rot,’ said Mrs. Hawkins [the parent]. ‘My children are black.  They know they are black, and we want it recognized.  It’s a comfortable natural difference.  At least it could be so, if you teachers learned to value differences more.”  The second anecdote is from William Ayers’ To Teach where in chapter 2 (Seeing the Student) he reprints a beautifully articulate yet scathingly telling letter from a Native American mother written to the white teacher of her son challenging her to be sensitive to his race/culture.  She concludes: “Will you help my child to learn to read, or will you teach him that he has a reading problem?  Will you help him develop problem-solving skills, or will you teach him that school is where you try to guess what answer the teacher wants?  Will he learn that his sense of his own value and dignity is valid, or will he learn that he must forever be apologetic and “trying harder” because he isn’t white?  Can you help him acquire the intellectual skills he needs without at the same time imposing your values on top of those he already has?  Respect my child.  He is a person.  He has a right to be himself.”  These anecdotes challenge me to remember to be always sensitive to each child’s individual background and to actively seek parents’ input.  As Delpit says, “When teachers are teaching children who are different from themselves, they must call upon parents in a collaborative fashion if they are to learn who their students really are.”