In Honor of Critical Race Theory and Derrick Bell
The willful misunderstanding and skewing of Critical Race Theory in recent news has saddened and angered me. Without Critical Race Theory, there would be no Raising Race Conscious Children.
I was in college when a short story, “The Space Traders,” written by legal scholar Derrick Bell, the “father” of Critical Race Theory, had a profound impact on my thinking. The story narrates a futuristic scenario where intelligent life from another planet invades Earth and offers riches and technology in exchange for slave labor. Spoiler alert: the powers that be make the decision to send all Black and brown people off with the space traders. The discussion around this story opened a space to examine and reflect on continued systemic racism in the United States, the legacy of enslavement/slavery. My memories of reading this piece of writing are intertwined with my sense of self.
I embraced the multicultural education canon, including Banks, Grant, Sleeter, McLaren, Nieto, Ladson-Billings, and Giroux—who, like Bell, drew on Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bell’s and Freire’s emphasis on the examination of power structures and patterns of inequity gave me a framework to make sense of our world as it was.
A quote from Henry Giroux inspired my career as a young educator to develop a project called Border Crossers (now re-named the Center for Racial Justice in Education): “…schools should become places where students and teachers can become ‘border crossers’ engaged in critical and ethical reflection about what it means to bring a wider variety of cultures into dialogue with each other.”
These authors/activists also informed my parenting which pro-actively includes race conscious language and has a strong focus on creating social change. These authors inspire me in my daily practice of exposing an unjust world with my White children.
Recently, for example, I was walking with my four-year-old who pointed up and said, “Look, Mami, a ‘grúa.’” (My family’s home language is Spanish as my husband is Argentine). My son was pointing at a crane at a construction site where another shiny glass building was going up. “Now people are going to go to jail,” he then informed me. Like you, reader, I was confused by this comment, until I reflected on two separate (and ongoing) conversation threads.
The first thread involves jails and prisons, which come up in my four-year-old’s and almost six-year-old’s play despite ongoing conversations which I have blogged about before here and here. In these conversations, we talk about the many (Black and brown) people who have been imprisoned who should not be in prison but instead, should have the things they need such as a place to live, food, and a job so they can make enough money to pay for a place to live and food.
“If people don’t have the things everybody needs, like a home and food, they might steal to get the money they need so they (or their children) can eat. Stealing is wrong—but it also isn’t fair that someone should have to steal to get the things they need.” As such, and as my children wrote in their letter to Biden and Harris when they were elected, we often talk about the need to build more hospitals, schools, and affordable housing—as opposed to prisons/jails, so that people can have the things they need. These conversations focus on the unfair structures that maintain the status quo of systemic inequity and racism.
The other conversation thread my four-year-old had drawn from involves gentrification, which I have also blogged about before. I have lived in Brooklyn for 14 years and in that time I have seen Brooklyn’s skyline rise with buildings that provide amenities like 24-hour doormen, gyms, and playrooms to people who can afford them. My children know my distaste for new construction based on the groans which escape me when we walk by new construction sites. In explanation of my groans, I say something like, “buildings like this bring people who have a lot of money to Brooklyn…and when they come live here, it makes the neighborhood more expensive to live in. So sometimes, the people who have already lived here a long time don’t have enough money to stay here. In Bedford Stuyvesant (our neighborhood) the people who have lived here for a long time are mostly people with brown skin. It’s not fair that a building like this can mean that someone who has lived in Bedford Stuyvesant their whole life can’t afford to live here anymore.”
Back to my four-year-old who looked at the crane at the construction site and (erroneously) assumed this new building would automatically result in people going to jail. I was confused by his comment until I connected these two conversation threads (less people would end up in prison if our communities met peoples’ basic needs and gentrification can cause people to lose their homes). On various occasions, he has explained how it works to me: “First they build a new building, then the people don’t have enough money, then they have to rob, and then they go to jail.” While the connection is not as direct as he has detailed…he is not so far from the truth.
In college, I remember excitedly selecting a new text entitled “We Are All Multiculturalist Now” published by Nathan Glazer in 1998. Given the title, I was shocked to read a passage that suggested de-emphasizing our nation’s history of enslavement/slavery in the education of Black and brown students, going so far as to say they would be better off without learning about this history. I remember re-reading this passage several times, sure that I had misunderstood the author’s meaning. I had not—and I felt Glazer’s sentiment as absolutely contrary to my belief that all students need to be taught the truth about the history of enslavement in the United States and its continuing legacy.
The book “Nurture Shock,” which was published in my post college years, confirmed both the need for explicit race talk (Vittrup) and for teaching the truth of racial injustice (Bigler) to enable children to develop positive racial attitudes and decreased bias towards those who are “other” to them. Without this truth, we leave children ill-equipped to make sense of a world that has been shaped as inherently inequitable as a result of our history of enslavement.
I remember when my daughter was in kindergarten, she repeatedly “reported” to me that several children in her class had been having a hard time “being steady and following the rules” (in her words)—and who, as a result, were removed from the classroom on several occasions. With one exception, the children she mentioned were Black. After a few days of noticing this pattern, I named this pattern out loud:
“I am noticing that most of the kids you are talking about who are having a hard time being ‘steady’ are kids with brown skin. And I want to make sure you know that this doesn’t mean that kids with brown skin have a harder time ‘being steady.’ What I think is that when you go to a school with mostly White teachers and principals (this accurately described my daughter’s school), it’s easier to understand and follow the rules if you are White, too, and it can be harder if you are a kid who calls themselves Black and all of your teachers and principals are White.” (What I didn’t mention then, but have in different conversations as she has gotten older, is the disproportionate “behavior” related consequences given to Black children by a largely White teaching force.)
I don’t want my children to wait until college to encounter Critical Race Theory and finally have a framework to examine systems and structures that explain inequities they see in the world. I want them to have these tools as children as they make sense of their worlds, their place of privilege in it, and their responsibility to be a force in shifting inequitable power structures.
Beautiful essay.