Meeting Racism Where It Is

As educators, we tend to the entire person of the student. Thus, whether conscious or not, character education plays a critical role in much of what we do, and it’s character education that must necessarily lie at the heart of any anti-racist and DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice) initiative worth its salt. Historically, schools have attempted to operationalize their DEIJ initiatives merely by “outsourcing” the associated instructional efforts exclusively to the humanities—disciplines such as English or History, where a great number of educators feel that moral categories like race, gender, and social justice are broached more organically given the broad nature of the course content.

The risks, however, of relegating anti-racist training to merely the academic realm, rather than the social realm, are twofold: 1) students are prone to engaging the issues as mere intellectual exercises, and 2) motivated more by grades than by virtue, students are apt to engage such issues only mechanically via their employment of strategies—proven, formulaic, and necessary—designed mainly for the purpose of landing high academic scores.

The sort of character education necessary in any anti-racist effort must address racism where race is most commonly enacted for all of us, and most certainly for teenagers—that is, in the murky, complicated universe of our social and emotional relationships with one another. This world exists mostly apart from the heavily controlled and otherwise regulated and monitored environment of the studio classroom, science lab, or other sanitized academic space. Effective efforts at addressing racism among students should encourage educators to meet racism where it is—in the chaotic realms of locker rooms, alcoves, group chats and other high-stakes teenage congregation areas.