Is All Race Teaching Good Race Teaching? Racial Literacy, Educative-Psychic Violence, and Slavery Pedagogy

• In Event: 66.038 - Renewed Risks of Race Talk: Discussing Race in K–12 Classrooms, Teacher Education Courses, and Research

Abstract

Teaching about race within the education field has been an enduring concern for scholars for a few decades. Teachers who engage and expound on race and its societal constructs and systemic implications provide emotional and complex instruction that leads to understanding the nuances of race and race relations (Blum, 2013; Howard, 2004). Yet, many classroom teachers either ignore race in classroom discourse or promote problematic narratives that do more harm than good.

Grounded through Foucault’s notion that “nothing is innocent and everything is dangerous” (Lather, 2006, p. 47), I ask the question, is all race teaching, good race teaching? My inquiry centers on recent viral news stories concerning slavery pedagogy. For the sake of brevity, two recent case studies serve as my focus. The first case study centers on student’s participation in mock slave auctions in schools (King, 2018). The second case study centers an analysis of slavery math problems (King & Woodson, 2017). Juxtaposed with recent literature on Black history pedagogy, I engage these case studies through two theoretical frameworks, critical racial literacy (Guiner, 2004; Sealey-Ruiz, 2011; Twine, 2004) and educative psychic violence (Leonardo and Porter, 2010).

I argue that these case studies may have potential benefits as a critical racial literacy tool. I define critical racial literacy as (1) understanding the intersections of power and race, (2) being able to locate and critique racial systems, and (3) possessing the grammar and the vocabularies associated with racial discourse. However, these perceived benefits are not without consequence. Through educative-psychic violence, I explain how these pedagogies cause more harm than good. Educative-psychic violence is defined as pedagogies that do harm to Black students when we teach about slavery in superficial or reductive ways. The ‘violence’ in educative-psychic violence does not refer to physical actions that injure, harm, or damage persons or property. Instead, it is a type of psychological violence, one that keeps students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds from developing a full sense of their racial, historical and political identities.

Implications situate Black history pedagogies as violent, which can be argued, a purpose for counter curriculum and pedagogical approaches. Yet, the violence achieved continually perpetuates violence on historically oppressed communities and does not share the violence with historically privileged communities. For education, our notion of good or effective racial pedagogies need to further be explored. We need to ask for whom are this pedagogies for and what violence is perpetrated as we teach. Educators will have to come to the realization that there are no safe ways to teach race; yet we can become more cognizant to the violence involved in teaching and how violence should not be geared towards only historical oppressed groups.

Author

• LaGarrett Jarriel King, University of Missouri - Columbia