Christine Sleeter

New Blog Location

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:27:29 GMT

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https://christinesleeter.substack.com/about

Defending Ethnic Studies

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:10:30 GMT

Greetings to my newsletter and blog followers! I am shifting my blog and newsletter to Substack .

There’s a lot going on these days. I intend to offer a monthly commentary on events related to education and racial justice, and my most recent work.

You are probably aware of the January 29, 2025 White House Executive Order entitled “ Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling .” It claims in part that “innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.” This—whatever it means in practice—will be deemed illegal and enforced through the withdrawal of federal funds to schools, teacher preparation programs, and any other education institutions that receive federal funds. At the same time, the White House proposes to resurrect the 1776 Commission with the charge of promoting a patriotic education. There is much that can be said about the vagueness of the executive order and what it might mean. More on that vagueness in a later post.

For now, so far Ethnic Studies (now required by several states and many additional school districts) is not exactly in the crosshairs of this executive order. But it could land there. Therefore, all of us should be familiar with the research that supports the academic value of Ethnic Studies.

Although ethnic studies was not designed specifically to close racial achievement gaps, it has a track record of doing exactly that.

In two studies of San Francisco Unified School District’s ninth-grade ethnic studies program, Stanford researchers Dee and Penner , and Bonilla, Dee, and Penner found the course to improve students’ grade point average, school attendance, and graduation. In other words, a course taken in ninth grade improved the GPA of students in other courses, and also their rate of high school graduation. Impressive!

Similarly, University of Arizona researchers Cabrera, Milam, Jaquette, and Marx found that participation in Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program raised students’ achievement on the state’s reading, writing, and math achievement tests and virtually closed racial achievement gaps; their study is published in the American Educational Research Journal. Several other studies have also documented gains in the achievement of K-12 students of color taking ethnic studies courses, but the studies described above are the largest in scale and strongest methodologically.

Two additional studies have found that majoring in ethnic studies at the university level benefits students of color academically. San Francisco State University researchers Sueyoshi and Sujitparapitaya found that students who major in ethnic studies graduate within six years at a much higher rate (92%) than students in other majors, and that students in other majors who take at least one ethnic studies course boost their graduation rates compared to students who do not. At the University of Louisville, researcher Tomarra A. Adams found that Black students who major in Pan-African Studies have a higher graduation rate than Black students who major in something else.

The consistently positive impact of Ethnic studies on the academic achievement of students of color is not due to ethnic studies watering down the curriculum (let alone compelling students to adopt identities as victims or oppressors!). Indeed, students usually describe it as more academically challenging than their other courses. By offering a relevant curriculum that speaks to issues of concern to their lives and communities, ethnic studies engages the knowledge students bring to the classroom, allowing them to draw from and recognize their own expertise. The classes offer an environment where relevant issues related to race and ethnicity can be addressed openly. Further, as students of color come to see education as relevant to addressing problems and needs in their communities, and themselves as academically capable, they gain confidence to thrive in school more generally.

So if you hear anyone attempting to argue that ethnic studies violates the Executive Order, you can tell them that, on the contrary, ethnic studies empowers students, and particularly students of color.

See you on Substack next month!

Playbook for Obscuring Truth

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 16:15:47 GMT

How did the tobacco industry sow doubt about the research-documented link between smoking and lung cancer? Why are we still debating the link between human activity and global warming?

In a recent conversation, a colleague and I began to explore connections between the anti-Critical Race Theory movement, and science denial. (For an excellent examination of the latter, see Science Denial by Gale Sinatra and Barbara A. Hofer.) I was directed to the book Merchants of Doubt (by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway), which lays out the playbook created by the tobacco industry, and has been applied since then to sowing doubts about other science-documented problems. Essentially, the playbook is this:

When research evidence begins to undercut an industry or a way of life that some people are benefiting from greatly, the industry or benefiting group begins to seek out credible spokespeople who will cast doubt on what has otherwise become a consensus. To be credible, the doubters need to be scientists themselves, or otherwise members of the community that has been marshaling the unwelcome evidence.

The doubters then gain access to the media, who report the doubts and cast the issue as still open to debate, even if it isn’t. They do this by pointing to exceptions and contrary evidence, exploiting claims of causality, and using hot button terms. Most journalists aren’t experts, but journalists relish having a good story. Journalists strive to present both sides, even if there isn’t really another side that has much evidence or credibility. The public, unaware of the research, learns about the issue from how the media report it—as a debatable issue with many unresolved questions.

Much the same playbook being used to generate fear and backlash as white people lose control over a nation whose population continues to diversify. The strength of a multiracial coalition of voters put an African American man into the White House twice. By the mid 2040s, the nation is predicted to be majority “minority.” How will white people fare, especially if rules and norms that are biased in favor of whites are changed? Behold the disinformation campaign that has resulted over the past three years:

When research evidence as well as narratives by people of color undercut the claim that systemic racism does not exist, many white people begin to seek out spokespeople who will cast doubt on its existence. To be credible, those spokespeople need to be people of color themselves, and/or people who have studied racial issues.

The doubters gain accessed to the media, who report the doubts and cast the issue as still open to debate, even after those who study race agree that the existence of systemic racism is clear. They do this by pointing to exceptions (people of color who made it on their own) and contrary evidence (e.g., DEI training that went badly), and exploiting claims of causality, and using hot button terms. Most journalists aren’t experts, but journalists relish having a good story. Journalists strive to present both sides, even if there isn’t really another side that has much evidence or credibility. The public, unaware of the research, learns about the issue from how the media report it—as a debatable issue with many unresolved questions.

In September of 2020, when Chris Rufo was invited to appear on Tucker Carlson’s Fox news show, this playbook sprang into action for the field of education. Here’s what happened:

Research evidence as well as narratives by people of color document that systemic racism exists (the books and articles reporting research are voluminous). In education, systemic racism includes factors like tracking, school segregation, Euro-centric curriculum, an overwhelmingly white teaching force, discipline policies, etc. (Again, voluminous research publications for each of these; my work has synthesized research related to curriculum; see for example What the Research Says about Ethnic Studies ).

Many white people who worry that addressing these factors will harm white children seek out spokespeople who will cast doubt on the existence of systemic racism in education. The doubters gain accessed to the media, who report the doubts and cast the existence of racism as still open to debate. They do this by pointing to exceptions (students of color who excelled in traditional schools, particularly Asian students) and contrary evidence (e.g., anti-racist teaching that went badly), and by using hot button terms (critical race theory; pornography).

The right has used this issue to mobilize white parents to resist or overturn equity-oriented school policies, and to vote for MAGA candidates.

What should be done? In agreement with authors of the books mentioned above, I believe that those of us in the research community need to give much more attention to synthesizing what the research says in terms lay people can understand, and put this work in places where they will encounter it. I gave a lecture for a lay audience in my community recently, which was very well received. Attendees had heard various things about “critical race theory” in the news, but didn’t know what to make of it until I clarified what critical race theory is, what systemic racism is, and how this controversy has been manufactured.

Research alone will not change everyone. Race and racism evoke strong emotions; many people hold opinions they are strongly wedded to. But more communication about what the research says for a broad audience will help.

State-Sponsored Ignorance

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 23:44:49 GMT

State-Sponsored Ignorance

The United States now has officially state-sponsored ignorance, pushed in the name of freedom. Although Florida is one of about 18 states that have officially restricted lessons about race and racism, Florida has taken this censorship to the next level by banning not only the teaching of Critical Race Theory and the New York Times’ 1619 Project , but also discussion of race, racism, and gender identity in schools. Through both legislation and gubernatorial pronouncements, Florida now also bans most of African American history and African American perspectives on history. Textbook companies, racing to keep up with what is required for sales, are now attempting to tell the Rosa Parks story without mentioning race . Hmmm. In a bill addressing K-12 schools, teachers cannot use a student's preferred name and pronouns, and discussing gender identity and sexual orientation would be prohibited topics until high school.

This is state-sponsored ignorance.

Writing in Black Rights/White Wrongs , philosopher Dr. Charles W. Mills stated in 2017: “Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge . . . . (p. 49).

State-sponsored ignorance. Where we are now.

There is a long history of marginalized peoples fighting for recognition in textbooks and in schools. There is also a long history of people fighting for not just representation, but also voice. And there is a concomitant long history of groups with power banning curricula that might disrupt the status quo. During the 1930s and early 1940s, for example, Harold O. Rugg, who was affiliated with the social reconstructionist movement that critiqued laissez-faire capitalism, wrote a series of social studies textbooks that emphasized critical thinking, stressed active citizenship, and included social action. The texts took up themes like class conflict and the unfair distribution of wealth. Although the textbooks sold well, large corporations organized to foment grassroots protests to have them banished from the schools. The corporations succeeded.

Immediately after World War II, partly in reaction to how Nazis used the concept of race, many teachers began teaching lessons about what science had to say about race, and analyzed issues such as racial inequality. For a brief period of time, this work had political and popular support because it was linked with tolerance and democracy. In an effort to combat domestic racism, many teachers also began introducing texts by and about African Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans. Black teachers in segregated schools, who were already teaching Black history, contributed to antiracist teaching. But within two years after the end of the war, spurred by McCarthyism, teachers were pressured to scale back their lessons about racism, since under McCarthyism, support for racial equality was a marker for communism. In fear, teachers retreated.

"Our schools must deliver a good education, not a political indoctrination," Ron DeSantis has said, even while pushing for state-sanctioned white-washed indoctrination.

Writing in Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse , Lee, White and Dong argue that “It is only through public schooling that a society can require a baseline preparation” (p. 2). While attention to developing young people’s civic reasoning has lagged over the years, today’s polarized landscape clarifies its importance. The authors do not advocate for a specific course in civics, but instead for intentional integration into the curriculum of the practice of civic reasoning—thoughtful discourse about the nation’s most pressing problems—so that “we have the opportunity to engage our differences, and ideally, find compromises rooted in democratic ideals” (p. 12). A significant challenge for civic reasoning in a diverse democracy is learning to hear and consider multiple points of view, and to examine the reliability of sources of information that underlie such viewpoints. One need not necessarily agree with the viewpoints of others, but one needs to hear, respect, and try to understand them in order to learn to talk across differences.

This is an education needed now more than ever.

Not state-sponsored ignorance.

This blog contains some excerpts from Critical Race Theory and its Critics (López and Sleeter, Teachers College Press, 2023).

Book Bans

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 19:51:16 GMT

Posted earlier on the Teachers College Press website

On November 16, 2022, PEN America released a report that found Missouri schools to have banned nearly 300 books since August, when SB 775, a new law that criminalizes “explicit sexual material,” went into effect. Under that law, providing such material to students in class is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in jail and a $2000 fine. Although the law allows for some exceptions directly related to education, many educators find it intimidating. To be on the safe side, 11 school districts pulled almost 300 books from their shelves. These include books that go far beyond the letter of the law, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , Gabriella Di Cagno’s Michaelangelo: Master of the Italian Renaissance , Sean Murphy’s Batman: White Knight , and Don Nardo’s Life in a Nazi Concentration Camp .

Some of the recent surge of censorship aims to omit historical accounts that present the US in an unfavorable light, and some aims to sustain the marginalization of people of color and members of the LGBTQ community. In spring of 2022, two reports investigating book banning were released, one by PEN America and the other by the American Library Association. They found, respectively, 1,145 and 1,597 books had been challenged or removed from shelves during 2021, far more than in previous years. As Natanson noted, “Most titles targeted in 2021 were written by or about LGBTQ or Black individuals.” The most challenged book that year was Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a memoir about what it means to be nonbinary. Other books on the most-challenged list include Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Even biographies about famous people of color, including Ruby Bridges, Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Sonia Sotomayor have been banned.

In September of 2022, PEN America released an update to their spring report, and found that the number of titles banned had increased to 2,532. They also found that in the 32 states with book bans, Texas led the nation, followed by Florida, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Forty-nine percent of the banned material was aimed at young adult readers (students in high school), but also included hundreds of books aimed at younger readers.

There is a long history of school book censorship in the United States, which occurs mainly in response to movements that challenge social injustices based on race, gender, and sometimes class. During the first half of the 19th century, books about the enslavement of people were seen as dangerous, especially in the South. It was not only illegal to teach enslaved people to read, but by the 1850s, multiple states had outlawed expressing anti-slavery views. In 1873, in an effort to push back on women’s activism, Congress passed the Comstock Act, outlawing possession (and mailing) of “obscene” or “immoral” texts—namely, texts about sexuality and birth control. During the first half of the twentieth century, the United Daughters of the Confederacy pushed to ban school textbooks that were not sympathetic to the South’s loss in the Civil War. During the late 1940s, several large corporations succeeded in banishing Harold Rugg’s social studies textbooks that openly criticized capitalism. Ten years later, McCarthy-era censors challenged books they deemed sympathetic to Communism or socialism, including Huckleberry Finn , The Catcher in the Rye , and To Kill a Mockingbird .

So, book censorship has a long history. Although many might assume that it reflects parents’ concerns, PEN America identified strategic advocacy organizations—73% of which had been formed as recently as 2021—as the main sources of agitation.

In Critical Race Theory and its Critics , we delve into today’s culture wars in schools, situating them within a history of right-wing pushback against efforts to expand who counts as a full American citizen, and to address racism through education. We see the flurry of book banning and state legislation banning “Critical Race Theory” as a series of policy distraction tactics or contrived crises designed to distract citizens from real, pressing problems. Policy distraction diverts attention from pressing social issues such as the rapidly escalating wealth gap, and from conservative policy initiatives many people may not support, such as shrinking or eliminating social programs they are using. The efforts are highly strategic: as Pollock and colleagues have shown , anti-CRT provocation by media, politicians, and pundits has been concentrated in predominantly White contexts where there has been an increase in diversity of the student population. The rhetoric provokes fears that an equitable curriculum will make White children feel guilty for being who they are, and will indoctrinate cis-gender heterosexual children to engage in “ controversial lifestyles .” It is no accident that today’s anti-CRT efforts to distract the public increased immediately before elections.

In our book, we also describe the role of social media in accomplishing the goals of those who aim to thwart equitable efforts in education. That is, by leveraging the reach of social media, politicians and pundits provide language and material for others to use in spreading fears about equity in schools. This was consistent with PEN America’s findings that book bans operate predominantly through spreading fear and misinformation via social media.

What to do?

Lawsuits are beginning to be filed, and they have precedent. In 1982, in the case Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico , a group of students in New York sued a school board for removing books by authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Langston Hughes—books the board saw as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” The Supreme Court, in upholding students’ First Amendment rights, wrote: “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”

By Spring 2022, educators in three states, working with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other advocacy organizations, had filed four lawsuits. In October 2021, the first was filed against the State of Oklahoma by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and other advocacy groups. The lawsuit claims that Oklahoma’s HB 1775 violates the First Amendment and denies students the access to learning their history.

In December 2021, teachers and parents in New Hampshire, working with the American Federation of Teachers, filed suit. The suit “alleges the law is at odds with the state’s Constitution, prevents teachers from meeting certain education standards and violates their constitutional rights to free speech and due process.” A week later, two educators, working with the ACLU, the NEA, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), and the Disability Rights Center–NH also filed suit against the same law for the same reasons.

In April 2022, three teachers, a student, and a consultant who provides diversity and equity training filed suit against Florida Governor DeSantis’ Stop WOKE Act (HB 7). The plaintiffs are claiming First and 14th Amendment violations. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed an amicus brief, claiming that the new law “has already interfered with the ability of students to obtain true and accurate information about the history of their society.”

In all three states, educators found support by working with the teachers union and the ACLU. These cases illustrate steps educators can take to challenge gag order legislation .

Messaging

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 18:03:57 GMT

In the context of anti-CRT efforts, the right’s core narrative, which relies on fear and anger, manipulates the public into believing equitable education efforts are designed to harm White students, and that science-based policies conflict with common sense. Many parents and legislators had not thought deeply about these issues until they became the focus of controversy, and had never heard of Critical Race Theory until the right transformed it from an academic theory into a scary caricature. We now see predominantly White parent groups and state legislators organizing to oppose curricula and pedagogy that research finds beneficial to all students, particularly students of color. Many voters are simply perplexed, but hear the right’s narrative more loudly than they hear an alternative.

Francesca López and I are in the final stages of completing a book, Critical Race Theory and its Critics (Teachers College Press), that will be available for purchase this coming spring. In that book, we examine right-wing messaging strategies and how to counter them. For example, in April, 2022, conservative blogger Christopher Rufo tweeted:

The teachers unions shut down schools for more than

a year, endorsed critical race theory at their convention, masked children

against the evidence, and trapped families in failing districts. Now they're

looking to shift the blame. But it won't work. Parents have seen the truth.

This tweet follows a pattern that is common on the right. It frames Critical Race Theory and mask mandates as the problem, teachers and teachers’ unions as the villain, and families who fight against these things (who are mainly White and affluent) as the solution. Based on his excellent analysis of messaging, in his book Merge Left , Ian Haney López (2019) explained: "The Right’s core narrative urges voters to fear and resent people of color, to distrust government, and to trust the marketplace. The Left can respond by urging people to join together across racial lines, to distrust greedy elites sowing division, and to demand that government work for everyone " (p. 174).

Similarly, the organization Words that Win aims to educate the public about strategic messaging. In a series of short articles, Words that Win summarizes key strategies that are imperative to successful coalition building. Three key components of a successful message include naming a shared value, calling out the villain, and ending with a shared vision.

So, Rufo’s tweet can be countered with a message that goes something like this:

No matter where they are from or what color they are, families want high quality education that their children can relate to, provided in schools that are safe to attend. These are measures that the teachers’ unions support. But today, a few political pundits and legislators are opposing inclusive curricula and public health safety measures in schools. By standing with teachers, we can ensure that all children can learn in classrooms that reflect people like themselves, and that they will not get sick in the process.

Ian Haney López and his colleagues conducted extensive research to determine what kind of messages were most likely to persuade voters, particularly those in the middle. In a racially and ethnically diverse society, is it best to downplay our diversity, or to name it explicitly? Specifically, Lopez and his team wanted to know whether diverse coalitions can be built to work for economic justice initiatives, by naming our differences. He refers to such messaging as “race-class” messaging.

He and his team found that “race-class messages were more convincing than colorblind economic populism” (p. 175). He points out that voters in the middle “hear racial fear messages everyday,” but find messaging that explicitly connects people across racial and ethnic lines to be more convincing.

What all of this says to me is that those of us working to make social institutions such as schools work well and equitably for everyone can win public support when we frame value messages in explicitly inclusive ways (ways in which most readers can see themselves), name “villains” directly, and propose inclusive solutions that call on government to serve us all.

You will see more discussion of these issues in our book, Critical Race Theory and its Critics , which will be available in spring, 2023.

Upending Gag Order Legislation

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Wed, 11 May 2022 16:10:17 GMT

In most states of the U.S., educational "gag order" bills have been introduced, and in fifteen states, they have been passed and signed into law . These laws are having a chilling effect on teachers' attempts to teach U.S. history honestly and to address contemporary issues involving race and gender in the classroom.

But in Florida, two educators—Dilys Schoorman and Rose Gatens—have figured out how to upend gag order legislation and use it to support teaching from multicultural perspectives.

Gag order legislation is often vague. That vagueness, as well as media spin regarding what any given legislation or proposed legislation implies, instills fear in teachers who aren’t sure exactly what they might be fired for. Gag order legislation also generally presumes a White and heterosexual point of view, attempting to ban concepts or practices that are uncomfortable for White people, but the absence of which may be uncomfortable for people of color and/or LGBTQ people. In addition, such legislation is often based on one-dimensional views or assumptions about what happens in schools, in the process banning practices that don’t actually happen or practices writers of the legislation did not intend.

Let’s look at Florida’s House Bill 7, the Individual Freedom Act. HB7. This bill:

Provides that subjecting individuals to specified concepts under certain circumstances constitutes discrimination based on race, color, sex, or national origin; revising requirements for required instruction on the history of African Americans; requiring the department to prepare and offer certain standards and curriculum; authorizing the department to seek input from a specified organization for certain purposes; prohibits instructional materials reviewers from recommending instructional materials that contain any matter that contradicts certain principles; requires DOE to review school district professional development systems for compliance with certain provisions of law.

How did Dilys and Rose reframe the bill? Below are examples from their text, which you can download here.

For example, the law bans “indoctrinating” or “compelling individuals to believe” certain things. The faculty members’ reframing notes that educators do not typically do these things, and that teaching multiple perspectives in a way that encourages students to make up their own minds is consistent with the law.

The law bans teaching “an individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or should receive adverse treatment because of, actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color sex, or national origin.” The faculty members’ reframing notes that the law only bans holding individuals accountable; it says nothing about groups. As a result, it is permissible to teach about historic patterns in the treatment of people, and who benefited from that treatment (such as through redlining and disenfranchisement), and while doing so, space should be created for students to consider morally responsible steps they as citizens might take today.

The law bans making an individual feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” The reframing acknowledges that BIPOC students have long had to endure distress because of many practices in schools that need to be changed; that erasure of LGBTQ people from the curriculum and from school policies creates distress; and that teachers attributing guilt to Muslim students in the wake of 9-11 caused anguish. In other words, the best way to uphold the law for everyone is to help teachers learn to teach weighty topics in a way that takes students’ feelings into account and mitigates potential negative feelings. Teachers should also use a multicultural curriculum with everybody (and one that includes attention to anti-racist White people in history), link lesson plans to curriculum standards, and keep administrators and parents in the loop.

An implication of this thoughtful and creative work is that educators should carefully read the letter of the law rather than simply listening to what the media say. You may be able to upend the gag order legislation in your state!

Source: Schoorman, D., & Gatens, R. (2022). Reframing FL HB7 as a call for Multicultural Education.

Confronting Whiteness with Critical Family History

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 18:27:10 GMT

One of my former doctoral students, William Watson, is in the process of publishing Twelve Steps for White America . This is a book designed to help White people work through layers of racism in order to become allies in work for racial justice. The book and its accompanying workbook draws on the twelve steps that are presented in Alcoholics Anonymous, since they function as a useful set of problem-solving principles for the human condition.

The book itself weaves together story, factual information, and reflection tools. The workbook involves readers more specifically in applying tools and insights from each of the twelve steps to their own lives. Both are organized around three parts. Part I, Confronting the Truth, engages readers in various forms of reflection that focus on the gap between the ideals of a democratic society, and the realities, particularly for people of color. Part II, Reconciliation, engages readers in recognizing whiteness-affiliated rigged advantages and learning to seek ways to relinquish those advantages. Part III, Renewal, engages readers in ongoing reflection and spiritual strengthening that will enable White people to stay in the work for racial justice for the long haul.

It is an honor for me that my work on Critical Family History is part of this book. It is nested within Chapter Four, which guides readers in drilling down into their own family histories in order to identify rigged advantages and how these have played out in the past to structure one's life in the present.

With William Watson's permission, I am posting the section of the workbook that deals with Critical Family History here, for your use.

Now is the Time to Rethink Schooling

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 16:55:28 GMT

Now is the Time to Rethink Schooling

Kappa Delta Pi Laureates

Now that students and teachers have settled into the current academic year, we’re in danger of compounding last year’s felonies. To put things simply, the years 2020-22 will be seen as the year that students and families suffered, while pundits and politicians panicked about “learning losses.” Trying to catch up will only make things worse.

Part of the problem is “progress” as we measure it. As every teacher knows, a lot of academic progress is illusory. During the “summer slump,” students forget a large chunk of what they learned the previous year. Why? Because they didn’t learn or understand it deeply, but crammed it so they could pass standardized tests. After the tests, much of this so-called learning evaporates. What meaningful content do you remember from your school days? How has it helped you make sense of the world, or think clearly about issues that really matter? Chasing test scores is a dubious enterprise under the best of circumstances, and a major multiplier of inequality today.

COVID’s impact has fallen disproportionately on communities of color, people who are economically disadvantaged, and immigrant children/children of immigrants. Privileged students often have good technology, good wifi, and quiet, well-furnished places to study. In contrast, everyone who works with students from under-resourced communities can tell stories of teachers who had to track down their students in order to give them school-issued electronic tablets so they could do school work, only to have some of those students parking themselves outside of schools to get a wifi signal. Social and educational inequities were troubling before COVID, and they’re worse now. Things will be even worse if we continue to pursue narrow academic goals without addressing pressing social issues both inside and outside the classroom. Some students will learn some important ideas, but most of what’s learned under the pressure to make up for “learning losses,” if it’s learned at all, will evaporate in a few months or years; and key social and historical issues will once again go unaddressed. We need to find modes of schooling that support students socially and academically, in meaningful ways.

What matters academically are the big ideas – the things we hope students will remember and be able to use months and years from now. That’s what we need to focus on, not the minutia we typically test and then panic about when testing reveals “learning losses.” Learning isn’t about answer-getting, it’s about thinking and understanding.

What if we asked, what meaningful problems can students learn to think about in school? Can teachers help them read up on critical issues? Can teachers help them develop the historical understandings that enable them to make sense of tensions in today’s world, and scientific understandings that help them think through issues of Covid transmission and vaccination? Can students learn to find things out, to make meaningful conjectures, to test and build on each other’s ideas, to become effective and collaborative thinkers? Our goal is not to compel students to be test-focused memorizers. We want them to be sense makers, meaning makers, and problem solvers – people who participate in and profit from a humane and caring learning enterprise.

We need to think expansively, viewing this past year’s schooling disasters as a learning experience. There is a crisis, but it’s much bigger than “learning loss.” It’s a crisis of having too narrow a conception of students’ learning capabilities, especially students from poverty backgrounds and students of color. And, we should never let a crisis go to waste. It’s time to think expansively and creatively about student learning, and focus on helping them become powerful thinkers and learners. Let’s invest our energy in our youth – and support them in becoming thoughtful and reflective learners. Let’s focus on how we can help students grapple with big ideas. This is an opportunity to re-think what’s really important in education, rather than being bound by traditional tunnel vision. There’s little to lose, and a lot to gain.

Critical Family History - a way around prohibitions on teaching

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 16:41:40 GMT

State laws taking aim at Critical Race Theory and anti-racist education are making many teachers, teacher educators, and other university faculty wary about teaching students about structural racism. Chalkbeat has tracked efforts in 28 states to restrict education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics. But it has also efforts in 15 states to expand education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics.

I'm grateful to be living in one of those 15 states. But if you live in one of the states that restricts what can be taught but you are committed to teaching the truth, what do you do?

Critical family history can provide a way around restrictions on content. Family history has become a popular pastime that few would regard as subversive. Yet, digging into one’s own family history often reveals structural racism at work. After all, everyone participates in racism in one form or another. The trick is not so much one of finding examples, but rather of recognizing them and using them to piece together a larger picture of how racism (and classism and sexism) work. Here are some examples, some from my work and some from the work of others.

When seeking information about a great-great-grandmother, one of my sisters tried googling her name. What she found was an article published in the Sacrament Bee in 1882 (the article is no longer freely available online) about an organization our ancestor was helping to found, called The Woman's Protective League. It was dedicated to eradicating the employment of Chinese people in San Francisco, and particularly Chinese workers in white families. The document raises so many questions! Why was this happening during the same year Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act? Why did our ancestor, a white immigrant from Switzerland, become involved in trying to expel other immigrants? What additional organizations, city ordinances, state laws, and so forth were aimed at driving out the Chinese? What responsibility do the descendants of this ancestor have today to confront and deal with consequences of our ancestor's actions?
Googling another ancestor, I found evidence of another set of great grandparents acquiring land in Colorado through homesteading, and building up wealth from selling that land, to reinvest in buying up and then selling additional land. Before finding that evidence, although I had traced the movements of these ancestors, I wasn't sure how they had acquired their wealth. Finding that piece of evidence gave rise to other questions, the big one for me being: What do I do with inherited wealth, knowing its roots in the dispossession of Ute people? Are there implications for other descendants of homesteaders? Grappling with these questions led to my novel The Inheritance .
Mica Pollock looked into how her European ancestors became U.S. citizens, after noticing that her students seemed to assume that the same rules for becoming a citizen had always been in place. She found that he was treated as a citizen before actually becoming one, and that citizenship was granted easily to white people at that time. Her study of her own family history raises important questions about how people become citizens, what the rules have been during different decades of history, who could and could not become a citizen, and how those rules have been applied to which groups.
Newman and Gichiru used oral histories with six women in three generations of the African American Newman family to paint a portrait of how they navigated the structural racism embedded in schools they attended. They contextualized the interviews with other data sources such as newspaper articles and census records. Racism spills out of the stories the women told in the interview process, enabling the authors to elaborate on what structural violence looks like and how it works, from African American perspectives.
Mokuria, Williams, and Page describe the learning that occurred when an African American student (article co-author Williams), in delving into her family history, discovered the reality that many enslaved women, including one of her ancestors, were forced to become concubines -- in other words, they were raped. The student chose to present her findings to the class, which was mostly white. For the student and the class, the learning experience was transformative.

These are examples of insights that can surface when people dig into their family histories. Teachers, however, need to be prepared for the tendency of white students to re-inscribe triumphal stories they likely learned about immigrant ancestors who arrived with nothing and made good. Without denying their hard work, it is possible to encourage students to look into (or look under) what may be forgotten, hidden, or buried. For example, for a long time I assumed that none of my ancestors had been slave holders because I had not heard about it and slavery did not immediately jump out as I did family history research. But when I specifically asked myself that question, I discovered that yes, indeed, a great-great-great grandfather had owned a family before the Civil War. That discovery led to my novel Family History in Black and White .

You don't have to invent how to teach family history in a way that unearths structural racism. Others have already been doing so, and some are posting their work on the internet or writing about it. For example, Susan Thorne shares her course Reckoning with Inequality Via Critical Family History , which she taught at Duke University in Summer, 2021.

Jennifer Mueller has been teaching critical family history courses in sociology, as a way to examine inter-generational transfer of wealth, for many years. As she explains in her 2013 article in Teaching Sociology — "Tracing family, teaching race: Critical race pedagogy in the millennial sociology classroom"—she specifically asks her students to look into questions such as:

"Is there a family history connected to slavery? Did anyone in previous generations inherit property, money, or businesses? Did parents or grandparents receive down payment help for purchasing a home or assistance with college? Did the family take advantage of formal programs that would facilitate wealth/capital acquisition, like the Homestead Act or the GI Bill? Did anyone use social networks to get jobs, secure loans, open businesses?" (p. 175).

She also works to create a collaborative climate in her classroom in which "we are all in this together" so that students help each other and support each other as they deal with difficult information.

Of course, you may need to remove the term "critical" from any course title or description. But looking into family history with a critical eye for what may be hidden or buried can be an excellent tool to unearth and examine issues that have been otherwise banned.

Critical Race Theory

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Sat, 15 May 2021 22:30:32 GMT

I have watched in amazement as state legislatures have rushed to ban the teaching of critical race theory, or any curriculum that is based on it. To date, bills have been advanced in seven states banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools, and in one of these states—Idaho—the bill has been signed into law. While such bills have not been advanced in California, attacks on ethnic studies increasingly call out critical race theory. Critics claim that it is a divisive ideology that teaches hate, indoctrinates students with hate toward white people, and injects race into what should be a colorblind curriculum.

I come to this controversy as a white scholar of race and curriculum, who has used critical race theory as an analytical tool in some of my academic work, and who has spent decades teaching predominantly white audiences about race and racism. I view attempts to censor critical race theory as an uninformed reaction to fear, a reaction that over the long run will be more harmful than helpful to the nation’s ability to grapple with its legacy of racism.

Critics of critical race theory (as well as critics of various forms of anti-racist education ) often base their concern on the belief that talking about race is what produces racism, and that if we all try to be colorblind, racism will go away. This belief contradicts findings of the numerous research studies I have reviewed for the National Education Association on the impact of ethnic studies courses on students (including white students). Studies find fairly consistently that students (especially white students) begin with shallow conceptions of what racism is and how racism works, but by the end of a course that focuses on structural racism, have generally more positive racial attitudes than they began with. In other words, rather than fomenting racial hatred, coursework that examines structural racism generally improves cross-racial understanding.

The words “critical” and “race,” especially when put together, seem to operate as red flags that scare people. So let us briefly examine what critical race theory actually is. It is a stretch to call it an ideology. Merriam and Webster defined ideology as “the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program” and “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture.” Critical race theory can be understood more accurately as a body of analytical tools for examining how race and racism work, premised on the assumptions that race is a social construct rather than a biological fact, and that racism is deeply ingrained in U.S. society. Critical race theory emerged from legal scholars of color who wanted to understand why civil rights legislation and litigation that purported to eradicate racism did not achieve its goal. In other words, following the Civil Rights movement, people of color have still experienced ongoing racial discrimination. Why? That is the central question the analytical tools of critical race theory seek to understand.

For example, one analytical tool is taking seriously people of color’s experiences with racism, based on the assumption that white people experience race differently from people of color, but that most public theorizing about race has been done by white people. (The unfounded theory that talking about race produces racism is one such theory.) Another analytical tool, interest convergence, holds that people act on their own self-interest. Interest convergence asks how racial remedies that seem fair to white people actually advance white self-interests.

If this brief explanation doesn’t sound like critical race theory as you have heard it discussed publicly, you have probably heard it discussed by people who do not understand it, but extrapolate what they think combining the words “critical” and “race” must mean. If I don’t recognize critical race theory as I hear it characterized in the news and on the floor of state legislatures, that is because the bogey man people have invented out of fear doesn’t bear much resemblance to the academic theory I have studied and used.

But I think the deeper question legislators are wrestling with is this: Should elementary and secondary age children and youth study race and racism in U.S. society, particularly as framed through the intellectual work of scholars of color? Does such curriculum teach hate?

It is important to realize that there is a huge difference between understanding, critiquing, and working to change white supremacy, versus hating white people. White supremacy is an institutionalized system that uses power to prioritize the needs and well-being of white people over of people of color, based on the assumption that white people are superior. White individuals do not have to uphold white supremacy, and many do not. In fact, challenging white supremacy and building inclusive institutions requires the involvement of white people. If we want to eradicate this nation’s legacy of racism, we have to learn to confront racism directly, and to see it as a systemic issue and not only an issue of individual prejudice.

Teaching young people about racism is not indoctrination, but rather teaching viewpoints and providing factual data related to racism that they otherwise are not likely exposed to. Young people need to make up their own minds about how to think about race, but the better informed they are, the more thoughtfully they will do so. Rather than banning the analytical and pedagogical tools that enable this work, we would get much farther if we supported the preparation of teachers to teach race in the schoolhouse well.

Facing Injustices Head-on through Critical Family History

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 17:03:40 GMT

I grew up hearing a story about my grandfather who, with nothing but a third grade education, ended up providing for his family and doing well economically. The story's implication was that he worked hard for what he got, and if he could do it, so could anyone else. For a long time, I didn’t think to analyze this story critically. Like many other people, I simply accepted it. (He did work hard, by the way, that part of the story I’ve never disputed.)

As I discussed in a recent talk invited by the Sutro Library in San Francisco, I began developing Critical Family History as I delved into my own white family’s historical experiences, replacing the historical amnesia I had grown up with, with a fine-grained look at how social systems had worked for, and for the most part benefited, my ancestors and ultimately me. I sensed that locating me and my people within that past would provide a basis for joining efforts to address injustices that have long historic roots, injustices that I have inherited and for the most part benefited from. I am not by any means the first person, nor the first professional class white person, to dig into my ancestors’ roles in creating, maintaining, and benefiting from social systems at the expense of people who have been minoritized and/or economically poor. But I think that I have provided a language and some examples that are helping to bring to the table others who are interested in, thinking about, or already engaged in this work.

My own work can be found in a handful of academic articles (such as "Critical family history: Situating family within contexts of power relationships" published in 2016 by the Journal of Multidisciplinary Research , and "Becoming white: Reinterpreting a family story by putting race back into the picture" published in 2011 by Race Ethnicity and Education ). It can also be found in three novels:

White Bread examines culture and language that German ancestors were forced to give up, even as they benefited from white supremacy.
The Inheritance tells the story of a white person coming to grips with being a descendant of the colonizers of Indigenous peoples, and what one might do with that knowledge.
Family History in Black and White , which will appear in about March 2021, explores racism today and historically through viewpoints of two school administrators, one Black and the other white. Stay tuned for that one, I think it’s my best novel yet.

In mid-2020, I guest edited a special issue of the journal Genealogy , focusing on Critical Family History . Seventeen articles by authors in the U.S. and New Zealand explore topics such as uncovering a family's settler colonial history, examining what it means to be Black in an interracial family, finding out how white grandparents became citizens (the process for whites was not like the cumbersome process today), using photovoice to find untold stories in a Vietnamese immigrant family, and seeking dual U.S.-Cabo Verde citizenship. These articles show different ways of using Critical Family History, but what they all have in common are revelations that come when one's family is explicitly situated within historic relations of power.

Just a couple of days ago, I was thrilled to be featured in a wonderful article in an Australian online-publication called Conversations. That article , "Truth telling and giving back: How settler colonials are coming to terms with painful family histories" highlights several white people in Australia and the U.S. who are uncovering “their family histories as a way of re-examining the impact of centuries of dispossession and slavery of Indigenous peoples.”

When I started working with the idea of Critical Family History, I sensed that it has power to engage members of diverse groups of people in a critical examination of our shared pasts, and particularly pasts in which some of our ancestors built structures to benefit people like themselves, at the expense of other people. Those structures still exist. We inherit them. We can dismantle them. Many examples are now showing how.

Debates about Ethnic Studies

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 20:05:13 GMT

As Ethnic Studies gains traction at the K-12 level, debates about what it is have been heating up. The most difficult debates center around whether Ethnic Studies should emphasize culture or power. Obviously, both constructs are a part of Ethnic Studies, but which should drive the curriculum?

For example, writing in EdSource on November 7, 2020, Fensterwald reported that many had criticized California’s draft model Ethnic Studies curriculum as being “too polemical in presenting racial struggles and omit[ing] the achievements and history of various ethnic and religious groups. . . .Ethnic and religious groups, including Sikh, Armenian, Jewish and Korean Americans, felt left out. Others, including some Jewish organizations, said the curriculum was slanted in minimizing racial progress, opposing capitalism and favoring Palestinians in their fight with Israel over independence.” Debates swirled around the kind of story Ethnic Studies should present. Should it be a story of people with diverse cultural heritages making progress in learning to live together, or should it be a story of how it had been institutionalized and the kind of work necessary to dismantle racism? As Fensterwald put it, the debate was largely “between those who view ethnic studies as a complement to the state’s history and social studies curriculum framework and those who believe it should serve as an alternative, critical view of traditional history and encourage political action.”

I believe it is imperative that we not lose sight of why Ethnic Studies came into being during the late 1960s. At that time, even though Jim Crow laws were gradually being dismantled, it had become obvious that racism was thoroughly ingrained in U.S. society. The university curriculum was almost entirely white, taught by white professors who gave little or no attention to concerns of communities of color. To the relatively small numbers of Black, Latino, Indigenous and Asian American students in higher education, much of the curriculum was irrelevant. In the words of the late Manning Marable, writing in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America , the demand for Ethnic Studies on white campuses was “a call toward the systematic reconstruction of American learning” (p. 196).

Fifty years later, although as a society we are much more diverse and the proportion of students of color on college campuses as well as in K-12 schools is much larger, the overall situation has changed only somewhat. Racism is still deeply institutionalized, which can be seen in the ongoing police killings of unarmed Black people, the mass incarceration of Black and brown men, U.S. government intrusions into Indian lands, an upswing of attacks on immigrants from south of the U.S. border, disproportionate COVID deaths in Indigenous and communities of color, and so forth.

A systematic analysis of the curriculum, from kindergarten through the university, will continue to reveal its biased Eurocentric underpinnings. The entire curriculum needs to be revamped to admit a wider diversity of stories, perspectives, and narratives. Within any such revamping, diverse cultural groups should be part of the curriculum, and should be celebrated. Uplifting stories should be told.

But this cannot happen at the expense of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian American communities who have fought for a “systematic reconstruction of American learning” for the last fifty years. Ethnic Studies came from struggles against racism. Those struggles continue. Eliminating racism was the central purpose of Ethnic Studies in 1969, and needs to remain its central purpose today.

Two Novels on their Way

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 03:02:46 GMT

Two of my social fiction novels will be emerging soon! An anniversary edition of White Bread is in the process of being released from Brill-Sense. This second edition is very similar to the first edition, but with some improvements based on feedback from the first edition. You can order it now from Brill and Amazon .

White Bread narrates Jessica’s journey into her family’s past, into herself, and into the bicultural students she teaches but does not understand. Jessica, a fictional white fifth-grade teacher, is prompted to explore her German-American family history by the unexpected discovery of a hundred-year-old letter (I fictionalized the letter but not the people in the letter). White Bread pulls readers into a tumultuous six months of Jessica’s life as she confronts many issues that turn out to be interrelated: Why does she know so little about her German-American family’s past? Why are the Latino teachers advocating for Raza Studies, and what does that mean? Can she become the kind of teacher who sparks student learning?

White Bread was inspired by many things, but one of them was a German language textbook written by my great aunt, Flora Ross, published in 1938. My grandmother and great aunt were born to a German immigrant who became a pastor, and a second-generation German woman. What puzzled me was, why did I not learn a single word of German at home while growing up? Aside from a couple of my grandmother's favorite dishes, why was almost no German culture passed on to my generation, nor historical memory of my family's German roots? White Bread explores that question.

Family History in Black and White , also to be published by Brill-Sense, will be out sometime early in 2021. Situated within today’s rapidly shifting racial demographics, this novel traces two competitors for the position of school superintendent. One is white and one is Black; both are urban high school principals. Ben, who had been bullied as a child, craves public recognition but, unsure whether he can trust today’s competitive process to be fair to a white man, wrestles with compromising his own integrity to get what he wants. Roxane, who has navigated racism all her life, craves recognition of her humanity, but can’t be sure which of the professionals around her are actually trustworthy, including her chief competitor, Ben. In the end, both must ultimately reckon with the reverberations of a surprising twist in their histories.

Like White Bread , this novel was prompted by many things, one of which was deed of sale of farm animals I found in the deeds records of Monroe County, Tennessee, while tracing my mother's family history. I couldn't figure out why someone (one of my ancestors) would write and record a deed for 3 farm animals. As I looked further into it, I realized that the transaction was between my white ancestor, and an African American sharecropper (probably) nearby. Further, the deed was worked out as a loan rather than a sale. What could be the story behind it, I wondered?

In Family History in Black and White , you will discover what might have been the story and how that story relates directly to the present day. Stay tuned for early 2021!

Online Education during COVID

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 16:17:58 GMT

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, schools across California and the nation are beginning the new academic year with continued reliance on educational technologies to deliver instruction online. The problem? Overreliance on and misuse of educational technologies can widen the inequities and disparities that already plague public education.

To support leaders and educators in these challenging times, on September 1, 2020, the California Alliance of Researchers for Equity in Education (CARE-ED) released a brief titled, “The Shift to Online Education During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Concerns and Recommendations for California.” You can read and download the whole brief here .

I helped to organize and write this brief. My concern about overreliance on educational technology was sparked in March 2020 as I watched my seven-year-old grandson's experience with second grade. His teacher, like many teachers, was not trained in, nor comfortable with, distance education. She never met with her students over video such as Zoom, nor did she use the telephone to contact them. Instead, she emailed worksheets and assignments students could complete using their Chromebooks. My grandson, who is very social, struggled to maintain attention to schooling, and depended on his parents to help him. From 2000 miles away, I tutored him in reading over FaceTime. Throughout the spring, I fervently hoped that come fall, schools would be able to reopen because the sudden conversion of schooling to online formats didn't seem to be working very well.

Being a researcher, I decided to look at what the research said about online schooling. Essentially I found that, until fairly recently, most of the research consisted of small-scale studies that largely found online schooling no less effective than face-to-face schooling. Then, over the last five years, came six large-scale studies comparing student achievement in K-12 settings in online formats versus face-to-face formats.

Oh my, were the results consistently awful. As we later wrote in the brief, "These studies on the ineffectiveness of fully and partially online schools should raise red flags as school closures continue into fall 2020."

Our research brief reviews the research on the impact of online schooling on students, research on inequities in online schooling, and problems associated with the push to technologize education. The brief then goes on to make recommendations for policy and practice. While we do not recommend rushing to reopen schools until it is safe to do so, we do speak to things educators can do, as well as larger issues of equitable funding of schools.

Protests and White Supremacy

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Sun, 31 May 2020 17:51:34 GMT

Recently we have witnessed white people in several states (including Michigan and California) protesting restrictions designed to prevent spread of COVID-19. Some of these protests include not only white people wearing MAGA hats without facemasks, but also some carrying confederate flags, nooses, and guns. As Hailey Branson-Potts, Anita Chabria, Andrew J. Campa, Priscella Vega noted in the LA Times , “The overwhelmingly white makeup of the protests is not lost on people of color, some of whom see it as an overt display of privilege.”

White people protesting what they see as infringements on individual liberties has a long history. Today’s protests do not come out of nowhere.

I see them as part of a long arc of racial history in the U.S., dating back about four hundred years. In his book The Invention of the White Race , Theodore Allen explained that the ruling class created the notion that people can be divided and ranked hierarchically based on biology (race) as a form of social control. European landowners feared rebellion by their workers who might unite around common grievances of exploitation. They came up with a solution. Give some status and privileges to the patchwork multitudes from Europe in exchange for their languages – unite them as white – and they would help keep everyone else in line.

That strategy worked. Back in the 1700s, white people might have toiled as indentured servants, but not as people enslaved for life. Following the Civil War, many white people used violence to try to recreate the antebellum racial structure. During the rise of labor unions, white workers for the most part prohibited people of color from joining, and refused to advocate on behalf of issues of concern to workers of color. (Ever wonder why farmworkers and most domestic workers do not qualify for unemployment? Think racism.)

Today’s white protestors swim in the same stream as their predecessors, protecting Trump in much the same way white ancestors protected white landowners. Today’s gun-wielding protestors may not be able to become wealthy like Trump – they cannot become the landowners themselves. But being white like Trump, they feel emboldened to demand privileges that just so happen to require the labor and risk-taking of people of color.

If we are to build a racially just society, we need to begin by unearthing and addressing the historic roots racism.

Voice in Novel's History Stories

csleeter@gmail.com (Christine Sleeter) — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 02:41:08 GMT

I'm working on my third novel, which is loosely connected with the first novel ( White Bread ). If you liked Esteban in White Bread , he's back, although this time as a high school principal. And he's married to his college sweetheart, Brenda. (No updates on Jessica in this novel, you'll have to wait for the next one.)

Like the previous two novels, this one is set mainly in the Bay Area of California in the present, but has flashbacks to the 1800s, mainly East Tennessee, where historical roots unfold. And like in the previous two novels, the history stories have been meticulously researched, then brought to life with characters drawn partially from my own family history.

I'm struggling with what voice to use in the history stories. All of them are framed as if one of the characters is telling the story -- Roxane, one of the novel's protagonists; Ada, her mother; or the other protagonist Ben. One is even framed as though it is told by Ben's ten-year old son, but not written in a ten-year old's voice. If it were, I wouldn't be able to include nearly as much information as I did. A ten-year-old just wouldn't tell a story in the same way as an adult.

I wanted to frame the history stories this way in order to link them with how a character came up with the story, and how the character or other characters reacted to its telling. The history stories all emerge from work characters do peeling back the layers of their family histories. What they find is central to the novel's overall story arcl.

If I didn't wrap the stories within the lives and goings-on of the characters, if I just dropped them in, they wouldn't have a clear purpose.

But these history stories are all written in the same voice -- my voice. Hmmm. I'm not sure what to do. Drop me a line if you have an idea!

Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools released!

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 16:47:43 GMT

I am thrilled to announce the release of Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools (Sleeter & Zavala, Teachers College Press, 2020 ).

Ethnic studies has gathered considerable momentum in schools and school districts around the U.S. over the last few years, particularly since the state of Arizona declared war on the highly successful Mexican America Raza Studies program in Tucson. Miguel Zavala and I wrote this book, initially on the urging of James Banks to update my earlier research review on the impact of ethnic studies on students. But as we got into the project, it became clear to us that we needed to do more, including laying out core principles and practices of K-12 ethnic studies at its best. As we explained:

“Ethnic studies seeks to rehumanize experiences, challenge problematic Eurocentric narratives, and build community solidarity across difference. Ethnic studies can be framed as anti-racist in the sense that it attempts to unpack, challenge, and eradicate racism as it takes place in our schools and in the broader society. But ethnic studies attempts to do more than this. Ethnic studies can be framed as part of a broader process of decolonization or ‘delinking that leads to de-colonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics’ (Mignolo, 2007, p. 453).” (p. 4)

To me, ethnic studies does not mean only the addition of an ethnic studies course to the curriculum, but more fundamentally it is a stance from which to rethink the entire curriculum, its purpose, and its pedagogical processes. For example, in Tucson the Social Justice Education Project , which was part of the Mexican American Raza Studies program, encompassed four high school courses students were taking anyway. Three were core social studies courses and one was a core literature course. It is even possible to rethink mathematics through the lens of ethnic studies, as demonstrated by Math in a Cultural Context .

As ethnic studies gain steam nationally, like multicultural education, it faces the challenge of remaining true to its purpose and true to the communities who have fought for it, in a time when others will push back against it or try to domesticate it. We can see that process at work in California in the current debates over an ethnic studies model curriculum. Ethnic studies teachers and specialists were appointed to write a model showing what robust ethnic studies curricula look like. But since ethnic studies articulates a vision who we are as a nation — and the model curriculum draft did that — it received push back. Enough push back that at the time of this writing, it isn’t clear what will happen next.

So, Zavala and I take a step back in this book and ask: What do we mean by ethnic studies at K-12 levels? What does it look like, how do its teachers experience and think about it, and what might help move a way forward? Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools builds on and adds to the grassroots momentum for ethnic studies, and the research track record it has generated.

We hope that this book is useful to ethnic studies teachers and advocates, educates those who question how (or whether) racism structures curriculum, and helps to move practice forward.

Welcome to new website

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 19:05:10 GMT

Welcome to my new website! I’m excited to showcase my work in this updated, visually-appealing way, and in a way that responds to the various devices you may be using to view it.

Since my last blog post, various things have happened; I will highlight three.

First and most difficult, my life partner for the last 32 years, Joe Larkin , passed away September 16, 2019, due to the combined and devastating impact of two strokes. As you can imagine, this has thrown my life out of balance in numerous ways. I’m only gradually getting my feet back on the ground, and will continue to miss him a great deal. For any of you who might be interested in the websites he maintained for our hiking and attendance at arts performances , I shifted the billing to my credit card so that this legacy of our lives together won’t disappear.

A second development has been the work toward ethnic studies in California. In spring, 2019, the California Department of Education appointed a committee to advise the writing of a model ethnic studies curriculum for the state. Over the summer, the draft model curriculum was opened for public comment. Much controversy ensued! I wrote a letter to the state superintendent for public instruction, Tony Thurmond , explaining why the draft model curriculum needs his support. Additions can be made to it, but its basic framework and structure needs to stay intact. I based that letter and my thinking on the growing body of evidence about the impact of white-centered versus ethnic studies curriculum on K-12 students.

Which leads to a third development. In spring, 2020, Teachers College Press will release a new book by myself and Miguel Zavala , entitled Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Research . The book updates and expands on my earlier research review for the National Education Association . Using a framework of hallmarks of ethnic studies Miguel and I developed, the book illustrates a range of approaches to ethnic studies curricula that are currently being used in different schools and states around the country; and it reports interviews with several ethnic studies teachers, as well as scholar activists, about their work with ethnic studies. Look for it this coming spring!

Critical Family History Book Review: Bella’s Legacy

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 11:05:13 GMT

Who was Bella, and what might be her legacy? In her debut novel, Luanna Meyer fictionalizes four generations of her family history, with a focus on the women and their life choices. Journalist Bella Colquhoun emerges as the novel’s fictionalized writer. Young widowhood, lost babies, triumph and regret, conflict and reconciliation, dreams taken up and dreams deferred — these are some of life’s turning points that Bella’s Legacy explores.

This novel opens with Bella, elderly by now, wondering how her life would have been, had she had a child. As she studies a diagram of a family tree that locates her within the family she married into, she reflects on the lives of the various women in the tree. What choices did their lives present to them? How did they deal with those choices? Which of them made the most of their lives? What might their stories suggest for young women today? (I appreciated the family tree diagram, flipping to it frequently to locate specific characters.)

Bella acts as a bookend, appearing at the beginning and in the epilogue, and as a young woman as the stories unfold chronologically. Meyers organized Bella’s Legacy around key moments in each woman’s life. These are moments in which the women had to confront major decisions, be it because of tragedy, personal relationship, powerful aspiration, or unexpected opportunity. As members of two connected extended families, the women’s lives overlap, creating braided stories that converse with one another.

Meyers researched the lives of the women in as much detail as possible, and the contexts in which they lived. As she explains in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, she spent much time scouring libraries and archival sources in Wisconsin and Michigan, where most of the stories take place, in order to build portraits that accurately reflect the time and place. She then blew life into the characters, rendering them through a mixture of dialog and vivid description.

This novel is an engaging read. I got caught up in the stories themselves, which is what I expect of a good novel. For family historians, Bella’s Legacy also demonstrates a way of communicating history, in this case in a way that focuses on gender at the levels of personal identity and social context. In other words, Bella’s Legacy demonstrates Critical Family History as told through fiction.

Oh, and what was Bella’s legacy? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Esoteric Clues: It’s no secret that slave-owners fathered children with their slaves

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 21:11:30 GMT

The claimant’s mother’s name was Clora, and since you ask me I will tell you that Overton, her owner was the father of the claimant. “I will tell you everything you ask me.”

— Testimony of former slave Nancy Hawkins, in the Civil War pension file of Henry Jones (March 12, 1920)

It’s no secret that slave-owners fathered children with their slaves. Stories of children begat between owners and their slaves are the subject of many oral stories concealed through painful whispers and gossip. That black women endured rape as the collateral asset of slavery is a deeply unspoken subject. In my experience researching my once enslaved ancestors, relatives have different ways of re-remembering, telling or concealing the fragments of our family “history” depending who is telling the story, from what perspective they embrace the past and the importance or significance of the part they choose to share through re-telling.

The dynamics of African American genealogy host a number of simultaneously moving and acting parts. First, captive people were real estate, Next, as real estate they were transferred through a myriad of family gifts such as marriage, divorce settlements, death, mortgaged and sold to pay debts. Third, there are an infinite number of motivations and reasons for slave transactions between slave-owning families; so understanding their genealogy is essential to following how they trafficked slaves between each other generation after generation for nearly 300 years. I call this doing genealogy twice — once for the slave-owning families and another for following slaves in the family. Esoteric clues lay in a disjointed fashion between the owning family and captive humans.

As a consequence, my method of genealogical research requires a concurrent practice of following the ancestry of the slave-owning family and their slave transactions to ascertain the relationships between slaves that culminate into recognized citizens for the first time on the 1870 census. Prior to this census, unless a former slave were free, the only identity relinquished to identity them on the census was as property on the slave schedules. An important record in-between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1870 census are black marriage records. In several Missouri counties, black marriages are separately indexed. It is the first time the formerly enslaved are legally recognized in a public process and document.

On slave schedules in 1850 and 1860, slaves are enumerated only by their color, age and gender. In probate records and other real estate transactions, they could be mentioned with only their first name, and often simply referenced as a black man or woman, aged about 45 years old etc. Even babies lack identification by name — many times inventories as “child” or “infant” next to the mother. Fathers are not mentioned or associated with a family group. I’ve seen only one document in my 20 plus years of doing research where a black family is documented with two parents and their children are associated as a biological family unit. It’s an emancipation record. The most complicated record I’ve analyzed was a “record of slaves” — one enslaved man, fathered children with three women within a small family household of slaves.

When I present my genealogical sleuthing practices in workshops, I focus on what I consider esoteric clues. These are clues that are only meaningful to me. Someone else following the same case, might be drawn to a different set of esoteric clues and interests based on their own sense of discovery, background story or family memories. To me, esoteric clues are fragments of meaning. They can be in the form of an unanswered question, or a series of unanswered questions. It could be a memory of a relative who figures in recollections and family lore, but the haunting and traces of their past that continues to slip into utterances in the presence can’t be explained. You may have a skeletal framework of a memory, story, or unnamed photo or documents without a narrative, but the who, what, where, why and when still makes no sense. When you ask other family members for their recollections, there are conflicting accounts, or they complain that your facts are wrong, or better yet, cry or get angry about a memory where those being “re-remembered” are long dead.

Esoteric clues can be muddled in memories, slippages during interviews or clues drawn from a wide array of legal documents and family papers. I am suspicious of crying, anger and conflict — see those moments as obvious signs of a haunting waiting to be recovered. In such instances, family members often resist direct questioning. Older family members can be provoked into “spilling the beans” but only if you are aloof in your questioning and spend considerable time listening. Chronological ordering of events is meaningless during the sleuthing journey because esoteric clues can present themselves simultaneously in multiple moments in every generation. There is a kind of eye, ear, cultural memory, and historical knowledge coordination that requires looking for patterns of activity, hints of concealment and pulling large and small pieces of erasure, denial, and neglected snippets of factoids called “oral history” into a grander landscape for understanding. Power dynamics are always in play. Critical family theory provides a way of disturbing, rupturing and questioning the power relations of the unspeakable, unspoken and unanswered. Children fathered by slave-owners are a perfect example. White men in general, were not as open about their explicit sexual exploitation of their female slaves in captive relationships as was Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson, who served under President Martin Van Buren. Mr. Johnson also figures faintly into my slave-owning family tree, but I’ll save that for a future blog post!

An Affecting Scene in Kentucky

Seeing/Eye Coordination

I consider the 1870 census the most provocative, essential and important of all the current census years. It’s the first time former slaves appear on the census, but their location — who they live near or with, gives an important clue to who they were connected with prior to emancipation. This is isn’t a fool-proof strategy; but it is a working mechanism of “seeing” who lives next to whom and why. It’s a tool of seeing I return to again and again. The seeing began with a census enumeration. It began at the bottom of the page and continued on the next.

Anderson and Laura Johnson, 1870 Lewis County Missouri

Clory Munday, Virginia and Nancy Overton, Serilda and Willis Johnson

This seeing was set in motion by two esoteric clues of oral history through memory. One, my dad’s desire to know more about cousin Easter. When questioned about her, he could provide no details. His sister, Aunt Sharon, is my only paternal biological aunt lamented, and I missed this clue initially, when it flopped out in a conversation slippage, “You’re going to discover that there are a lot of people in the family who don’t look like you.” Those were the days when I heard and transposed information literally. It was sometime before I realized that she wasn’t talking about facial features, or family characteristics but rather skin color. As I learned more about my father’s maternal side of the family, I began to understand that my dark skin would stand out among some of my lighter-skinned ancestors. My dad claimed there was some kind of connection to indigenous heritage. Maybe Cherokee? Another slippage came from Dad’s uncle, or my great uncle Albert who questioned whether I had found a Zerilda. “Who’s that?” I asked in response. And he kept repeating “I don’t know. But it’s Zerilda, Zerilda! Did you find a Zerilda?” Sigh. I hung up feeling that our conversation was going nowhere. It was a boring Sunday afternoon and I was intent on trying to figure out what the heck Uncle Albert was prattling on about.

My father’s maternal ancestral lineage has the most secrets. In fact, it is so fat with secrets that I’ve learned to not share what I uncover to protect the dead from the living. But finding Zerilda was by chance. Uncle Albert’s blathering, verbal slippage was heavy with curiosity and he was insistent about what he was saying.

I found a Serilda Johnson in 1900, with her daughter Mary Anderson and her two sons named Amos and Hazel Anderson. I knew dad’s mother had uncles with those names; but going backwards, I could not place Serilda on the census before 1900. In fact, while talking to Uncle Albert on the phone, I forgot about Serilda because he said Zerilda with such an emphasis on the Z sound — I forgot about Serilda with the S sound.

Forest Cemetery, Section D: Mace Wilson family burials

And then another discovery. A seeing one. Serilda was enumerated twice on 1900 U.S. census in Kirksville, Adair County Missouri. She was enumerated once with her daughter Mary Anderson and her two sons Amos and Hazel. Secondly, she was enumerated as a servant for a black man named Mason “Mace” Wilson. Another esoteric clue came from digging through cemetery records for black burials in Kirksville. Alongside Mrs. Mason Wilson’s burial was a notation that one son (Willie) was from Canton, in Lewis County Missouri. Aha! Maybe that’s where Serilda is Zerilda that Uncle Albert was talking about. The cemetery record for Mason “Mace” Wilson’s burial in the Forest Llewellyn Cemetery notes he was Black and died in August of 1904.

Mason Wilson burial, Black, died August 1904

One of my hobbies when I first began doing slave research was studying cemetery records. Older records before the digital age, recorded burials according to placement in the cemetery. As things have become digitized records are put in alphabetical order; which erases traces in the “order” and “space” burials were made. These older burial records tended to have other clues, such as who was “colored” if the cemetery wasn’t segregated. I used to stay up late studying cemetery record books. My husband teased me pretty mercilessly: “Honey, you do realize you are reading lists of dead people. You realize that is a very strange thing to be doing late at night?” In any case, my mind kept track of names, locations and descriptions that seemed to come alive (LOL) when a corresponding fragment seemed to arise from nowhere.

I suspected Serilda Johnson knew Mace Wilson from a past association, which is how she came to be his servant. This is a curious thing of her being a servant for another Black person.

Mace Wilson enumerated with Serilda Johnson 1900 Adair County Missouri

Mary Anderson with her sons Amos and Hazel; and mother Serilda Johnson 1900 Adair County, Missouri

Going backwards to recap, a review of the 1870 census placed Anderson Johnson, his wife Laura, Clory Munday, Nancy and Virginia Overton and Serilda and Willis Johnson in the same household (8-3) on pages 1 and 2 of Township 61 Range 7 in Lewis County. Mason Wilson and his family are enumerated on page 12. Seeing the actual images is important to understanding what esoteric clues matter. I wanted to know why there were multiple surnames in the household? Who were the two young girls listed as mulatto, and how were they related to each other? When I found Serilda on the 1870 census, I called Uncle Albert back and said, “Uncle Albert, did you mean to say Serilda (with an S)? Is that who you were talking about a minute ago in our call? I found a Serilda!” He replied quizzically and somewhat confused, “What? Who are you talking about?” “Serilda?” I said. You just mentioned Zerilda. Maybe you meant Serilda?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about” he snapped emphatically. “I didn’t mention any such thing.” Stunned, I didn’t respond. There was a silence plus a pause on the line. And then I said, “Well, ok Uncle Albert, thanks for talking to me.” I hung up feeling confident that I found Serilda but also feeling in that very moment that Uncle Albert had a little dementia?

All of this gets messier. Much messier. By 1880, Anderson Johnson is not married to Laura but to Nancy Overton.

Anderson and Nancy Overton Johnson with children and Clory Munday, 1880 Knox County, Missouri

Then I wondered, were Nancy and Laura sisters? Turns out Serilda’s mother was Clory Munday. Serilda’s daughter, Mary Anderson, who she was enumerated with in 1900, was my dad’s great-grandmother. Dad fondly refers to her as Big Mama. Big Mama’s family was a huge mystery to me in the beginning and over time unraveled as a complicated series of messes. There was no oral history on the Munday family. Cousin Easter, who was a relic in my father’s memory, was apparently a Munday — but no one could explain how she was connected to the family. Some remembered she had a daughter named Aunt Betty. Again, when it came to details, I got nothing. Zero. Big Mama’s daughter Bethaline was called Little Mama. They all lived together on Sycamore St. in Quincy, Il — just across the Mississippi River from Canton, MO. Their names Big Mama and Little Mama were invoked in many discussions about growing up. But when it came down to making a claim to the Munday lineage, there was inaudible and absolute silence. What everyone knew unequivocally, was that Big Mama had been married several times. Uncle Albert had mentioned a Lewis Munday. He thought he might be kin to Big Mama, but he wasn’t sure how. So, I had some leads, but they were very thin.

Serilda is aka Dorcas, with Willis Johnson, 1880 Lewis County, Missouri

What did I learn? Serilda married Willis Johnson; but I never found a marriage record. I pieced this together with the census and other records that came up along the way. I could not (for many years) account for Serilda on the 1880 census. Eventually, I discovered that she was enumerated as DORCAS living doors away from a household of Black Mundays.

Willis Johnson died before 1900 and Serilda died shortly thereafter, sometime in the early 1900s — as she does not appear on the 1910 census. Willis served in the U.S. Colored Troops and his pension file (a small one) was recovered via the National Archives. More clues (some esoteric) lay among the pages. Serilda’s sister Jennie Jones, was a witness in pension case file; supporting Serilda’s claim for her husband’s pension benefits as a widow of a Civil War veteran. The file notes Willis was owned by Daniel Lignon, one of the largest slave owners in Lewis County, Missouri. All of these fragments would eventually steam roll into larger fragments; leading to more esoteric meanderings that begged for answers.

I have leap-frogged over several esoteric clues in jumping here. In my next post, I will discuss the messiness of the in-between space created by esoteric clues that bring fragments on the margins together using documents, photos and interviews. I’ll discuss how each of the family members in Anderson Johnson’s household are related and why two girls are named Overton. Finally, I will theorize and comment on insights I found while peering into Serilda’s family and the power dynamics at play that work to keep the Munday Overton “history” silent and invisible.

Traci Wilson-Kleekamp is a 2nd-year doctoral student at the MU College of Education with an emphasis in Social Studies education. She is a graduate of California State University, Long Beach and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism, Public Relations. She is a neighborhood and community activist who advocates for community-oriented policing, responsive local government, and sustainable urban planning. She is the president of Race Matters, Friends a non-profit organization focused on social justice advocacy based in Columbia, Missouri.

Claiming the Legacy of Oppression through Art

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 03:00:00 GMT

I Am My White Ancestors: Claiming the Legacy of Oppression is a touring installation and public engagement project. It contains thirteen life-size photographic self-portraits that explore European-American heritage, family history, and its legacy of oppression in the history of race, class, colonization, and genocide. The personas, real and imagined, span over 2000 years from the Celtic Iron Age to the present day with the artist’s contemporary self-portrait. The 84” x 54” portraits, printed on fabric panels, are accompanied by audio and written narratives from the perspective of each character. The project was initially exhibited in 2016 at Clackamas Community College, Oregon City, Oregon and also was shown at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. My dream venue is a school that wants to collaborate with me on a program that includes conversations, lectures, and class assignments about racism and whiteness.

I have always used art to explain the world. I love how disparate elements can be combined to transform complex issues. And more personally, I love what that process can do to me. My work is primarily content driven, which means that the form changes to accommodate content. For my recent project, I researched genealogy, designed and sewed historical costumes, painted backdrops, and wrote and recorded audio stories. It is important to me to be clear about my message but I also hope that people will come upon their own interpretation and understanding.

I have been working on my racism for about 25 years but it wasn’t until I created I Am My White Ancestors that things became real. There was something about going public as a white person that highlighted my fear of challenging the rules and getting attacked. Evidently it is not ok to talk about being white so blatantly. Each time I described the project to a new person I steeled myself for their confusion and possible judgment. Even saying the title felt like a risk. But it also opened a door into a wider and richer world that I never knew existed in my white bubble.

My initial goal was to “claim my people” and see if I could find the source of racism in my family. I wanted to understand what my ancestors had experienced and passed on to me, the legacy of oppression. I expected to also see links to related oppressions, like sexism, anti-Jewish oppression, genocide, greed, war and colonization. When I began the project in early 2014, I didn’t know how many ancestors I could find and was prepared to imagine some if necessary. But I also had a feeling that my family would yield enough for the project and happily it did. It was helpful that on my mother’s side I have ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 since those descendants have been documenting and researching their ancestors for centuries.

The process of finding the characters was profound. Just knowing that this person who lived so long ago was intimately connected to me was mind blowing. What if my 16th century ancestor Sir Nicholas Baganel had a nose just like mine? And here is the thing—doing this research made me see who I am in a new way.

Ancestor Desire Howland Gorham, born in Plymouth Colony in 1623, grew up in a Puritan family during the early years of the colony. I learned that it was common practice for children to be sent away to live with another family either to lessen parental attachment, protect them from illness, or when a new baby was born. Amazingly, or maybe not, when I was three my sister was born and I was sent away on an extended trip to South Carolina with my grandmother. My memories of that trip are not happy ones. How is it that a practice like that is still alive and well almost 400 years later? What else has been passed down to me and other people?

My goal as I sifted through the generations was to find individuals who had stories that illustrated various oppressions and how they were involved and perpetuated them. My theory is that people only hurt others if they have already been hurt or oppressed in some way. We have to learn it somewhere. In challenging oppression, we usually focus on the victims. But for this project I was interested in reaching the oppressors, who are the ones with the problem and who are responsible after all. Also, given their dominant role, present day people in oppressor roles could, if they chose, have a significant impact on ending that oppression. Since we are all members of dominant groups–adults, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, men, white people, Protestants, for instance—things could change quickly.

It was not hard to find the oppressions. War, greed, colonization, sexism, racism, and more permeate US and European history. But somehow they get covered over as normal. I wanted to bring them to light and see how they affected each individual. Once I found an ancestor I wanted to use, I delved into what was going on at the time and what their lives might be like. I used this information to imagine their early lives, how they might have been hurt and thus susceptible to hurting others. Listen to the audio narratives here.

Ancestor Mark Mawer, a 17th century Scottish farmer, was a juror on a witchcraft trial that sent two women to the gallows. A deathbed promise to his mother when he was a child and rigid church teachings led to his inability to say no to convicting the women even though he regretted it. This fear of standing up alone against social pressure was something I have felt too. I could also see strengths in him that we share, like loyalty and sincerity. The story ends with Mark deciding never to marry so that he wouldn’t hurt another woman.

So how has this project affected me? First, it’s clear that who I am came from my history. The legacy of oppression I inherited includes my unconscious beliefs, my fears, my strengths, and of course my position in society. I am not at fault yet I am responsible. I can be both proud and ashamed of my history but it is mine. Second, I can see racism more clearly. I believe this is because my whiteness is becoming more defined as a distinct identity to me with qualities and behaviors that before were invisible. Here’s a small example of something that happens all the time. A couple of years ago I was at an artist talk. Behind me was a black woman sitting beside a white man. After the talk he got up immediately and almost stepped on her in his rush to leave his seat. As I was watching this unfold she noticed me and we shared a moment of exasperation at white people being stupid. I was pleased that she could tell I wasn’t completely clueless as an ally. But a further step would have been for me to say something to the man, like, “Hey brother, hold your horses. She’s first.” For white people in general our whiteness is still the invisible normal. Someday we will be just another group in the world, no better and no worse than anyone else. In the meantime I am thrilled to be part of this exploration and liberation of all people.

So what do you do with this information?

Finding our families is one step but how can we use that information to understand our place in the world and grow as people? Focus first on the ways you can be proud of your family. For descendants of immigrants, your ancestors survived hardships, distance from homeland and family to find a better life in the US or wherever they emigrated. They did their best, were hardworking, inventive, loyal, brave, strong, and loved each other. Many were honest, had integrity and were generous to whoever they came across. Learn what was going on at the time and the societal pressures your people experienced. It’s ok to feel sympathy for them and connection. That is your base that will allow you to look at the oppressor side.

But don’t stop there. An African American man I met was adamant that white people don’t get a pass by ignoring the negative parts of our past. So also explore the oppressor side. Yes, they were blind to the suffering of native cultures and enslaved people, greedy for resources and land, put their own needs first, and built a culture of isolation and independence. How does that past still affect you? How does it feel to think about that? Can you imagine their lives and why they lived that way? Learning this information contradicts much of what we have heard about our families. You may feel confusion, shock, shame, or sadness for instance. That’s ok. Can you share those feelings with someone?

Anne Mavor is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work combines storytelling, research, performance, visual imagery, and collaboration to illuminate social issues. She received a grant from the John Anson Kittredge Fund for her book Strong Hearts, Inspired Minds: 21 Artists who are Mothers tell their Stories and a residency from The Mesa Refuge. The installation I Am My White Ancestors: Claiming the Legacy of Oppression premiered in 2016 and has been supported by The Puffin Foundation and RACC. Anne has a BA in art from Kirkland College and an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, LA.

Immigration and White People’s History

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 03:00:00 GMT

Today in response to immigration issues, we often hear white people say something like, “My ancestors came here legally, why can’t ‘they’?” This kind of wondering leads many to support deportations of anyone who is undocumented.

It can be very eye-opening, however, for white people to look critically at immigration within our own family histories. Americans in general tend to think about issues a-historically, and many who are white regard immigration as having to do with “Others.” (You may be familiar with Ann Coulter’s bizarre claim that her ancestors were settlers rather than immigrants.) How might turning the lens for analyzing immigration to our own family pasts broaden our understanding?

First, learn to use vital statistics data that are digitally available to identify who in our family trees immigrated when, and from where. Family history research has become sufficiently popular that it is not difficult to find resources to use for this purpose. I maintain this blog that discusses, for example, both free and subscription resources people can use.

Second, learn to ask what push factors cause people to leave their nation of origin, and what pull factors draw them to specific places. These questions can begin to move past simplistic stereotypes, such as the notion that immigrants come for welfare benefits. For example, we can apply a push-pull analysis to German immigration during the late 1700s and 1800s. What many people do not know is the “pull factor” of practices aimed toward building a white nation. For instance, shipping companies engaged recruiters to go to Germany to encourage people to migrate to the U.S., the shipping companies arranging transportation (German Immigration, 2004). These recruitment efforts were particularly successful during the Prussian wars and years when agricultural harvests were bad (“push factors”). One can extend a push-pull analysis by also asking what kinds of punishments immigrant arrivals experienced because of who they were (such as language discrimination), and what kinds of privileges they experienced (such as access to ethnic organizations).

A third tool is examining immigration and naturalization laws and processes over different periods in the nation’s history, mainly to see what has and has not change, and which groups have been favored or disfavored. For example, the only requirements of the first naturalization law of 1790 were having resided in the U.S. for two years, being white, and being of good moral character. In order to qualify for “free land” through homesteading (land the U.S. took away from the Indigenous peoples), during the early years of the U.S., a white male only needed to announce intention to be naturalized. It wasn’t until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that specific groups were excluded, and the National Origins Act of 1924 that immigrants were required to produce papers (See Why ‘legal immigration’ doesn’t apply to early immigrants to the U.S., 2018).

So, in response to the thought that “my ancestors came here legally,” many of us who are white should recognize that at least some of our ancestors were recruited, never asked to show papers, afforded an easy naturalization process, and given Indigenous people’s land to use for farming. Immigrants today, whether documented or undocumented, experience push factors that are probably similar to those white people’s ancestors experienced, pull factors that may or may not be similar, and punishing factors of racism. But what is very different are the immigration laws and processes for becoming a naturalized citizen. I hope that studying this history in a personalized way might help white Americans to develop more empathy for what immigrant families are experiencing, and a commitment to human rights of people, whether documented or not.

A slightly different version of this essay appeared in a 2018 issue The Teacher Educator (vol. 53, no. 3) on p. 232-233.

Repatriation of Land to Tribes

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 03:00:00 GMT

My second novel, The Inheritance, deals with repatriation of land that was stolen from Indigenous peoples. The novel traces my own experience of uncovering the history of an inheritance, finding that it originated in my great-grandparents homesteading land from which the Utes had been expelled. My great-grandparents sold the homestead and bought land in Steamboat Springs, then later sold that land. What I inherited wasn’t the land itself, but rather investments made from acquiring and selling it. So when I made the decision to repatriate what had been stolen, While I couldn’t return the land itself, in September 2017, I returned my share the monetary value that had accrued.

I am starting to keep track of other white people who have repatriated land to tribes. Below are those I know of. Please contact me if you know of others; I’m adding them as I learn of them.

In 2015, California landowner Bill Richardson transferred 700 acres of his family ranch in Sonoma County to the Pomo Kaisha Tribe, on whose ancestral land the ranch was located. The ranch had been in the Richardson family since 1925. Richardson worked with fund raisers, including the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, to raise funds to buy the land at a generously discounted price. While Richardson will continue to live on the land, the Pomo gained immediate access to it for their own use and management.

In 2016, Jean-Louis Goldwater Bourgeois (son of the artist Louise Bourgeois) began the process of transferring the deed of his $4 million, landmarked house in Manhattan to a nonprofit controlled by the Lenape tribe, on whose ancestral land Manhattan was built. Bourgeois said, “This building is the trophy from major theft. It disgusts me.” He feels “rage against what whites have done and some guilt, no, a lot of guilt, that I have profited from this major theft. The right thing to do is to return it.”

In June, 2018, Art and Helen Tanderup of Nebraska signed a deed returning ancestral land along the “Trail of Tears” to the Ponca Tribes of Nebraska and Oklahoma. As reported in the news, “The land gifting ceremony and deed signing between farmers Art and Helen Tanderup, Ponca Tribe of Nebraska Chairman Larry Wright, Jr., and Ponca Nation of Oklahoma Councilwoman Casey Camp-Horinek took place on Sunday, June 10th, during an event that also included the 5th annual planting of sacred Ponca corn on the Tanderup farm.” Nearly 200 people gathered near Neligh, Nebraska at the farm to plant and to celebrate the transfer of 1.6 acres of the land. (Coincidentally, on p. 138, The Inheritance recounts the expulsion of the Ponca from their lands in Nebraska).

In October, 2018, Rich Snyder voluntarily signed over the deed of ancestral land in Colorado to the Ute Tribe. After buying the land and spending some time on it, he learned of its history and the expulsion of the Utes in the 1880s, so decided to repatriate the land to the tribe. He explained that the power of the power of the Ute Indian Tribe’s presence on that land had overwhelmed him.

In September, 2018, Jim and Margaret Hogan transferred their deed to 1 1/2 acres in Burlington County, New Jersey to the Brotherton Indian Reservation in Tabernacle Township. The original reservation of 3,000 acres in what are now Tabernacle and Shamong Townships was established in 1758. Fifty years later, New Jersey began selling off pieces of the reservation to private buyers, and most of the Leni-Lenape people who had been living there left. On learning of the transfer of the deed, Joseph Littlefeather, recently elected chief of the Sandhill Lenape Cherokee Tribe, said “I want to thank him [Hogan] for doing this. We want to put a farm stand on the land, and eventually open an office there, so people who live down there don’t have to travel so far.”

In 1991, Arlene and Irving Crandall returned about 350 acres in Rhode Island to the Narragansett tribe. John Crandall b.1612 had been a Baptist elder, very vocal in his beliefs and ideas of fairness. He was summoned and fined by the courts for holding religious meetings, resisting authority, sedition and rebellion. In 1661, he purchased land from the Narragansett tribe. The present-day Crandalls could no longer afford to pay taxes on the land, and were afraid the town would auction it off. “The Indians are the only people we thought gave a damn about the land,” Arlene Crandall said. John Brown, a tribal council member, said, “This whole thing kind of renewed my faith in mankind. It has now come full circle. My people gave this land to the original Crandalls as a gesture of goodwill, and now it has been returned to us in the same spirit.”

I am hopeful that these examples of repatriation of land to tribes will inspire other descendants of the colonizers to do the same. Ideally, repatriation of land would occur through tribal government — federal government collaboration, since it was the federal government that took the land in the first place. But that is unlikely to happen soon. In the meantime, these examples offer varied examples of how families can repatriate land to tribes themselves.

Butler, a white man taking a stand against slavery

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 03:00:00 GMT

Who was Benjamin Franklin Butler, and why would anyone care?

Who was Benjamin Franklin Butler, and why would anyone care? I am in the process of exploring ideas for my third novel, and am considering Butler as a historical character. My two previous novels – White Bread and The Inheritance – have featured present-day educators wrestling with social justice issues that link the present with the past, as they learn to become activist educators. Butler’s work during the 1800s serves as an interesting historical case of a white man taking a stand against slavery.

I first encountered Benjamin F. Butler when, while researching my own family, I noticed one my ancestors (Dewitt Harris) naming his first-born son Benjamin Butler Harris. Why saddle one’s son with the middle name Butler, I wondered? I figured this son must be named after someone, so I began scouring the post-civil war records.

Rather quickly, I found Benjamin F. Butler, who had served as the Union General occupying New Orleans for eight months during 1862. The following year, he was named the North’s special agent for the exchange of prisoners of war. In that capacity he negotiated release of Union prisoners being held in various Southern prisons, including Cahaba Prison in Alabama. My ancestor Dewitt Harris was one of the prisoners he freed. So, when the war ended, he named his first-born after Benjamin Butler.

That fact would not have intrigued me for a story had I not found more about Butler. This was not hard to do; a couple of books have been written about him, and he even published his own autobiography .

Butler was born in New Hampshire in 1818, then raised in Lowell, Massachusetts after his father died and his mother needed to figure out how to support herself and her children. In Lowell, she opened up a boarding house for factory workers in the rapidly-expanding textile industry. Butler grew up hearing about women’s working condition s from the point of view of the women themselves. He attended college in Maine, in a milieu of anti-slavery activism, and although he apparently did not become involved himself, activism against slavery was not a foreign concept for him.

Butler began making headlines as an activist in May of 1861. A day after taking command of the Union’s Ft. Monroe in Virginia, three escaped slaves crossed the James River and asked for asylum at the Fort. Butler ordered that they be fed and sheltered while he figured out how to handle the situation.

The following day, when Major Carey showed up to claim Colonel Mallory’s “property,” Butler replied that he intended to hold the three men. He said: “I mean to take Virginia at her word, as declared in the ordinance of secession passed yesterday. I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.” He declared the three escaped slaves “contraband of war,” meaning that they would not be returned to what was now a foreign and hostile country. At the time, Butler’s concern was that the South was using slaves to attack Union forts, such as Ft. Monroe. Refusing to return slaves to the South deprived the enemy of a source of labor.

But word spread quickly. More slaves began arriving from across the river, including whole families, who saw that implicitly Butler’s policy was one of emancipation.

Apparently President Lincoln saw it this way as well. Lincoln was not at all eager to take a stand against slavery. He directed Butler to focus on the war, not on emancipation. Butler ignored Lincoln and admitted more and more escaped slaves. As they talked about their lives in slavery, Ft. Monroe’s solders – including Butler – received an education that made them more determined that what they were doing was right.

Later in his assignment as occupying general of New Orleans, Butler took on the pervasive poverty he encountered there, viewing it as having been created by the rich. To that end, he taxed wealthy secessionists to fund jobs for the poor and to improve city services such as public health. While Butler himself did not launch a program of emancipation in New Orleans, his Brigadier General John Phelps did so by organizing fugitive slaves into troops for the Union. Accounts differ regarding the extent to which Butler did or did not support Phelps.

But Butler’s actions in Ft. Monroe, and his work with Phelps in New Orleans helped to push Lincoln toward finally issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

I find Butler interesting because he was an imperfect white man (quite an understatement, actually) who irritated a lot of people and did not seem to have a well worked-out philosophy regarding racism. Yet, when presented with an opportunity to uphold the humanity of people who had been dehumanized through slavery, he did so. He took a stand against slavery, putting the weight of his power behind his actions. His actions turned out to matter, not just for the escaped slaves he supported, but also for the nation’s dismantling of slavery itself.

An interesting person to give attention to! Stay tuned!

Genealogy and Anti-Racism: A Resource for White People

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 03:00:00 GMT

I want to connect my love of genealogy with the work of anti-racism. As a child and teenager, I loved genealogy. With handwritten charts and typed biographies, I had no question about the goodness of what I was doing. I was honoring and preserving the past. What could be better?

Eventually, I went off to college and set genealogy aside. There, I learned a history that was broader than I could have imagined. History is complex and messy, just like humans are. This complexity produces systems of oppression, and it takes humans working together to change these systems. Each system is more powerful than any one individual.

As I learned, I became relentlessly forward-focused. How can I make a difference in the world? How can I shape the future for the better? I chose a career where I thought I could do this, and I forgot about those backward-facing, individually-focused ancestor charts in the basement.

When I received an ancestry DNA test, I was surprised by how much enthusiasm I still had for genealogy. I had not outgrown this hobby!

With this return to genealogy, however, I had a problem. I was now aware of my privilege. I could quickly list how I benefit from the whiteness of my ancestors:

Local, state, and federal governments valued keeping my ancestors’ records and writing down their names.
My ancestors bought houses, gained educations, and participated in intergenerational transfers of wealth. These actions left paper trails and also gave me the financial resources to track them down.
The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) kept my family trees going back to the 1700s (during an era when the DAR excluded people of color).
Some of my ancestors benefited from the Homestead Act, in which the U.S. government transferred to white citizens land stolen from indigenous peoples.
All of my ancestors participated in settler colonialism, meaning that they deliberately replaced native peoples.

These privileges don’t even begin to address slavery. Earlier, I had naively believed that because my ancestors were lower/middle class white Northerners, Midwesterners, and Appalachians, none of them were slaveholders. But this time I double-checked the census records: my ancestors included enslavers.

I began to struggle with whether the very hobby of genealogy was racist/privileged. My European-American genealogy would necessarily center the stories of white people — while ignoring the stories of people who don’t look like me. Further, studying my individual ancestors could reinforce the myth that individuals are in charge of their own destinies by removing them from their cultural context. Is it possible to engage in genealogical research without perpetuating currently existing inequities/injustice? How can I be anti-racist while exploring my white ancestry?

The answers to these questions began filling page after page. I quickly learned that searching online for “white genealogy” would only lead me to people with the surname “White.” Soon, however, I found a celebrity profile of someone who wanted to hide his slaveholding ancestors . From there, I was off into the genealogical recesses of the internet. Was anyone out there approaching their own family history holistically? I was so gratified when I finally discovered Christine Sleeter’s Critical Family Histor y — this was the kind of genealogical praxis that I’d been seeking!

Genealogy and Anti-racism

Accumulating more and more links and notes (on subjects as diverse as DNA, historical societies, neglected cemeteries, and how the census shaped U.S. definitions of race), I created a google doc with what I found. After seeking feedback from other people engaged in anti-racist work, I linked to my document, Genealogy and Anti-Racism: A Resource for White People , on an online genealogy forum.

As soon as I posted, the accusations that I was racist started coming in. I had assumed that people interested in history would be interested in all of history. But we white people doing genealogy can have as much white fragility as white people without historical perspective. People in the genealogy forums pretended to be “colorblind,” insisting that the very act of naming racism was “racist.” (To be clear: I’m racist because I participate in racist systems, not because I name that participation!)

Fortunately, other white people wanted to move beyond “colorblindness.” We wanted to use our genealogical tools to support others — because the desire to know one’s ancestry is not a “whites only” issue. I hope that people who use this resource will do the following:

Share what we learn with other genealogists.

Hold our own research with an open hand.

Make open-access database contributions and transcriptions.

Work up a sweat through African-American cemetery maintenance and advocacy.

Name settler colonialism (and thereby change the national conversations on indigenous peoples and immigrants).  

Most importantly, we can change the narratives within our own families. Our ancestors were works in progress, just as we are. They, like us, sometimes participated in oppressive systems and sometimes resisted them. Our work as genealogists is to engage this complex legacy.

Because when we ask, “How can I be an ally?” or “How can I be anti-racist?” we’re really asking, “How can we positively shape what we hand down to the next generation?”

And that’s the best genealogical question to answer.

Read Genealogy and Anti-Racism: A Resource for White People here.

Diane Kenaston is the pastor of University United Methodist Church in St. Louis, MO, continuing the legacy of her Methodist circuit riding great-great-great-grandfather.

Critical Family History Book Review: Before we were Yours

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 02:00:00 GMT

Adoption presents challenges to family historians. Perhaps the greatest challenge is figuring out how important it is to trace biological ancestors, especially if they have had little or no role in actually raising a person. Lisa Wingate, in Before we were Yours (Ballantine, 2017), grapples with this question, although her purpose is mainly to critique unethical adoption practices.

The storyline follows two main characters. Avery Stafford is a young lawyer from South Carolina who, in 2015, had been living in New York but returned home to help care for her ailing father, a prominent Senator. Avery is also being groomed to run for his seat in the near future, although she has mixed feelings about this possible future. Rill Foss is a young adolescent who, during the 1930s, had been living with the family she adored on the Mississippi River in a boat large enough to hold a shanty, and who (along with her four siblings) was kidnapped and taken to an orphanage while her parents were in the hospital attempting to deliver a baby. These two characters connect when Avery bumps into an elderly woman named May Crandall at an elder facility, who initially believes Avery is someone named Fern.

Wingate was inspired to write this novel after learning about the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, and particularly its Memphis branch operator Georgia Tann. Under Tann’s direction, the organization kidnapped thousands of children to sell for adoption on the black market, mainly to prominent, wealthy families. While waiting to be adopted, the children were badly mistreated; many were sexually abused. In Before we were Yours, readers accompany Rill and her siblings as they are yanked from life with a family who lacked money but not love, and placed in a facility that renamed children in order to hide them from their parents and treated them as commodities. As Wingate put it, they were “five little river gypsies who suffered at the hands of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society” and who “deserve to have their stories carried forward into the future.”

Toward the end of the novel, Wingate asks briefly what their lives would have been had they not been kidnapped. Four of the siblings were adopted into upper class families, where they were afforded opportunities they would not have had otherwise. (One of the siblings disappeared.) She does not answer this question, although readers are left with the sense that the Foss children and others like them would still have lived worthwhile, meaningful lives.

Both explicitly and implicitly, the novel asks who we are. Rill Foss goes through life with two identities reflected in two different names: one pre-adoption and the other post-adoption. When she was kidnapped, she was old enough to remember her Foss identity and her life as a member of a river family. Other siblings, kidnapped at younger ages, remember far less. A four-year-old begins to forget her birth family while she and Rill are together, and an even younger sibling never knew her birth family.

Yet, in the novel, four biological sisters find each other as adults, and form bonds at least as strong as those they have with loved ones in their present-day lives, bonds symbolized by shared hair texture and facial coloring. Wingate suggests that biological origins are at least as significant in determining who we are as are lived relationships. For anyone grappling with adoption and family history, Before we were Yours, a page-turner to read, provides questions to ponder.

Confronting Racism at Home

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 02:00:00 GMT

As a white teacher educator who has taken on the “daunting” (Sleeter, 2008) work of antiracist education with preservice teachers, the work of critical family history is beginning to play a key role in my classroom. Importantly, critical family history is giving me insights into my family’s complicity in the fight against multiculturalism, as it took place in New York City. For me, the work of confronting racism at home, and teaching students how they might also do this work, begins with an understanding of the role my family played in some of our city’s earliest acts of resistance against multiculturalism.

The Beginning of a Journey Toward Critical Family History: Meet “Pop”

Like Jessica—the white teacher at the heart of Sleeter’s novel White Bread—my knowledge of my family stops with my grandparents and some scattered details about a few great grandparents. The paternal side of my family tree is staggeringly complicated: Because my father never knew his father, and his mother never knew her father (these marriages did not exist, and children were born out of wedlock), surnames and countries of origin—in most cases—are simply not known. In fact, my own last name (“Berchini”) is a product of convenience: It is the name my grandmother chose for my father, to match his older brother’s name (my uncle’s father was named Pablo Berchini, a man I’ve never met, and with whom I do not share any DNA whatsoever). The words “evil” and “bastard” also had something to do with this decision.

Dr. Christina Berchini, Guest Writer

My explorations at this time are thus narrowed to my maternal side, which is a little easier to trace. This choice is both a matter of convenience but also a function of having spent a great deal of my childhood with “Pop” – my beloved maternal grandfather. My family took regular trips from our tiny apartment in Gravesend, Brooklyn to Jamaica, Queens (a neighborhood in one of New York City’s five boroughs), where we’d visit my grandfather, his sister, and brother (my second aunt and uncle). By this time (the late 1980s to early 90s) Jamaica was a predominantly black neighborhood.

I have recently begun situating my family in social and historical context by having a series of conversations with my grandfather about race. Upon undertaking this work, I knew right away that my family tree and the history in which it is situated was going to look rather different from that produced by other white academics, and possibly many white preservice teachers. I begin this work knowing some key components about my grandfather, his family, and his life as it intersected with my childhood:

My grandfather was poor as a child; he grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and has spent the last couple of decades living in a trailer park in Florida.
Homeownership and other assets were negligible, and never passed down as any form of a meaningful inheritance from which later generations would benefit. Indeed, there wasn’t anything to pass down. In fact, I am not aware of any inheritance, large or small, from which any one person in my family may have benefitted. I remember how my mother told me that her grandmother (Pop’s mother-in-law) suggested that, upon her death, her five grandchildren take themselves out to dinner, as she was not able to leave behind much more than the price of a meal.

Some of my most powerful childhood memories of my grandfather, however, are narrated by his racism. As I was growing up, Pop would make his beliefs about people of color known. From his point of view, the influx of people of color into Jamaica, Queens was solely responsible for the neighborhood “turning bad” (his words) prior to his exit from Queens to Long Island in the mid-sixties.

More recently, when hurricane Hermine was on track to hit Florida in the fall of 2016, I remember my stunned reaction to Pop’s decision to remain put, even after authorities declared mandatory evacuation. Although his trailer is inland, he is surround by trees. Trailers and trailer parks are notoriously vulnerable to extreme weather events. But his reason for staying put was simple: There were too many people of color staying at the shelters (my words). It should not have surprised me, that he chose his racism over his safety. I am used to such comments, now, as it is not often possible to have a conversation with him without some criticism centered on “the blacks” or “the Puerto Ricans”—I find myself quickly changing the subject back to family when this happens. I vividly remember hanging up the phone in tears when Hermine was about to hit. I was worried sick about his safety. He said that he was worried, too—even scared. But too racist, it seemed, to seek shelter from a deadly storm.

However, my strongest childhood memories of Pop involve threats of abandonment. As a white child born and raised in the inner-city, my experiences are anything but racially isolated. And this meant that I attended school with racially, culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse children. My grandfather threatened both my sister and me with abandonment had we ever decided to marry a person of color—the very friends who comprised my daily experiences. I remember observing his body tense up during these conversations; his jaw muscles twitching. He meant business. My mother would admonish him for saying such things. After all, she had not raised us to believe that interracial marriage was wrong. But the damage was done. My relationship with my grandfather seemed conditional, and rested upon my compliance with his wishes. I grew to avoid conversations about race. I think I even feared them. While I knew he was wrong, confronting racism at home, as a child, did not seem to be an option.

My reason for undertaking this work, then, is to grapple with and make sense of a paradox. Despite his racism, my grandfather’s lifelong friends—people with whom he remains connected—are people of color; his family came to the aid of black neighbors who were fearful of their white neighbors; and his brother (my uncle) maintained a serious relationship with a woman of color leading up to his death in 1991. As I recall, the only white people in attendance at my uncle’s funeral were those related to my uncle. Pop has also been outspoken against Donald Trump’s racism; and I, his own granddaughter, have designed a professional and personal life that is committed to antiracism—in spite of, or maybe because of, my upbringing. How to make sense of these contradictions?

Pop is my only surviving grandparent—he turns 83 this year. And while I vividly remember my parents’ attempts to shield my sister and me from his problematic stances toward people of color, my childhood memories are comprised of much more than this. He is a man who remembered every single birthday—and still does. He recently mailed me a twenty-five-dollar check for having turned 37 years old—as grandparents are wont to do. I remember how he diagnosed my car troubles nearly ten years ago when the transmission blew. Watching him stand over the hood of my car was like watching a magician: Electric sparks came and went on command, and otherwise dead components under the hood came to life with Pop’s bare hands. You never quite knew how he made it all happen, you just knew that he did. Like a magician. The army would make good use of his skills for six years, where he worked for the missile outfit and repaired military vehicles. During a recent conversation, he talked about the separate barracks assigned to people of color.

“Even when I was in the army, black men had their own barracks, and we had our own,” he said.

“Why do you think that was?” I asked. Of course I know why, but I wanted his perspective.

He told me of how he would go to the bar with people of color—friends he had made while in service. He recalled asking them about the separate barracks. “That ain’t right,” he had said to them. “You’re fighting for our country.”

I remember the annoyed and disappointed tone he had taken, as he shared this story. He was critical of how the army treated people of color, and this came through in his voice. These contradictory stories, coupled with my own experiences, have given me a complex view of my family’s history, as told through my grandfather.

A Sense of “Place”: Revisiting Jamaica, Queens

Pop was born and raised in Jamaica Queens, New York — a working-class/poor ethnic enclave consisting mostly of Italian, Polish, Irish, and Hungarian immigrants. He remembers when the first person of color moved to the neighborhood.

“The neighbors didn’t like it,” he said, during a recent discussion. “The white people in my neighborhood were very prejudiced.” He paused. “We weren’t.”

Pop’s family befriended the neighbor, who I’ll refer to as Flo. Flo asked for his family’s help when the neighbors had taken to harassing her with racial epithets and other forms of emotional violence. He witnessed his father (my great grandfather) get into fistfights with white neighbors over their treatment of Flo. Interestingly, this was his family’s way of confronting racism at home—with fists. I was surprised to learn this.

“They [the white neighbors] didn’t talk to my mother and father for years and years, but they apologized after a while,” he recalled.

“Pop”

Flo and my grandfather would maintain their friendship across the years. Because of personal hardships, he came to live with my family in Brooklyn, where he slept on the couch in our tiny apartment. He would borrow my parents’ car and take the half-hour drive to Queens to spend several hours with his old friend Flo.

His stories are dotted with memories about the Great Depression, his childhood job as a shoe-shiner making about three dollars per day on Jamaica Avenue (and running from the police who threatened to dismantle his shoe-shining box), and pigeon soup—his mother’s go-to recipe during tough times. She would actually capture a pigeon that stood perched on a nearby ledge, decapitate it, and prepare soup for her large family.

Racial events also narrated his stories. He told stories about racism and racial tensions that played out in Jamaica, Queens as though these events had happened yesterday.

“If you sold your house to a black family,” he said, “they [white neighbors] would burn your house down.”

Jamaica, Queens – courtesy of Google Maps

Whites policed their neighborhood’s home sales, and reacted violently when real estate transactions defied their expectations for white ownership. Journalist, political commentator, and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers operates Moyers & Company, a media website that brought me to the story of the Spencer family. A black family, the Spencers moved to Rosedale, Queens in 1974—approximately five miles from my grandfather’s neighborhood. Whites doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire (with an audience of about 200 white spectators); whites later ignited a pipe bomb on the property. According to Moyers, the bomb came with a note that read: “N*****, be warned. We have time. We will get your firstborn first.” It was signed: “Viva Boston. KKK.”

Moyers explains how, since 1971, more than ten instances of similar violent acts—instigated by whites—were aimed at black families living in Rosedale. Despite the violence and destruction that whites brought to Jamaica, Queens and its surrounding communities when people of color attempted to move in, it was the demographic change that—for my grandfather—pointed to how the “neighborhood was turning bad.” His family moved out of Queens in the mid-sixties to a “whiter” neighborhood in Long Island. My grandfather admitted that his decision to move was a function of white flight.

Pop’s Jamaica Avenue shoe-shining location on Jamaica Avenue

“Jamaica wasn’t safe,” he said. “They tried to break into your house.”

My grandfather, like many whites, located the neighborhood’s crime rates in the incoming black community—wholly ignoring the emotional and physical violence their white neighbors committed against people of color. Historical accounts point to how Jamaica, Queens was, like much of New York City at the time, a site of political, economic, and racial unrest—chaos that seemed to culminate in the shooting death of Officer Edward Byrne, a white rookie police officer who was murdered in the middle of the night for protecting an eyewitness to felony drug crimes. This murder, according to Charles Blow, presented political opportunities for white politicians to leverage white votes, manufacturing the war on drugs as their rallying cry. Blow argues that white politicians—Democratic and Republican alike—have long scapegoated black populations in order to further their political agendas.

I do not wish to minimize my grandfather’s concerns for his safety and that of his family (including my mother, who spent the first few years of her life in Jamaica, Queens). But I am forced to wonder whether Pop’s fears were just another symptom of a successful political campaign against people of color. Moreover, a burgeoning civil rights movement was occurring at the same time. According to Moyers, the violence against the Spencers mobilized civil rights activists outside of Rosedale—a group that was committed to helping families of color move to the neighborhood. Did my grandfather—like so many others—flee the effects of a civil rights movement that was brought directly to his home town? It is likely. Not surprisingly, he does not conceptualize his choices in this way, and if he does, he’s remained silent about it. Fleeing the “bad” neighborhood for the safer suburbs is the story that has maintained itself across four generations.

Critical Family History, Silence, and Future Plans

I have only just begun to uncover the details of my family history, and for now, I remain equal parts intrigued and perplexed. I do not yet know how to make sense of a man who critiques racism about as much as he embodies it.

During one of our discussions, he recalled a warning that his mother imposed upon her daughter—his sister: “If you ever get pregnant by a black guy,” his mother had said, “you’re not my daughter.” Recall Pop’s attempts to strongarm his granddaughters by influencing our life choices with threats of abandonment. As it turns out, his mother is guilty of the same behavior—he, too, witnessed threats of abandonment, albeit not directly.

And yet: His mother is the same woman who welcomed Flo into her home for what my grandfather describes as “Polish food.” Flo would then cook for his family, and relied on his family for support when other white neighbors retaliated. As more black families moved into the neighborhood, they learned that they could trust my grandfather’s family as friends and neighbors. My grandfather’s brother would eventually begin dating a black woman—their mother had died before this relationship came to be.

I remember attending my (second) uncle’s funeral. I was eleven years old. By then, Jamaica, Queens was a predominantly black neighborhood; many residents came to the funeral to pay their respects to my uncle. I sat in the front row, my uncle laid out in his casket only a few feet away. I vividly recall how a woman of color limped toward the casket, bent down, and kissed my uncle’s forehead. As she walked away, I was struck by the sadness in her face. The Jamaica, Queens community came out in droves to support my grandfather’s family, and to see my uncle off. I can still recall the love that permeated that small room.

I am not attempting to portray my family as uncomplicated heroes loved by all in a larger story about whiteness, racism, and flight, nor do I find my grandfather’s perspectives excusable—such as when he describes Flo as a “very, very good black woman,” as though the general expectation is for the opposite to be true. As is the case for all whites, there is plenty of evidence that my family was, and remains, located in racist dynamics, in both formal and informal ways. One of these informal ways include silence about who we are and where we come from. Historical records, academic scholarship, and media accounts are helping me to unearth of a bit of that silence.

I plan to continue the conversation with my grandfather for as long as time allows. I am hoping to learn more about my great grandparents, and perhaps their parents, through historical records but also my grandfather’s memory. My wish is to also touch base with the Queens Historical Society, whether in person or virtually, for more perspective about the history of Jamaica, Queens and its surrounding areas. Gaining a sense of place seems important to the work of confronting racism at home, and as it played out in my family’s history.

Like many whites, I used to be of the mind that, having grown up in the inner-city and attended diverse city schools, I was not implicated in the larger picture of race and racism. My family, in many ways, continues to uphold this belief system. Uncovering the silences maintained by generations’ past, coupled with a sense of place, has provided entrée into confronting how, in many ways, my family is located in some of my city’s earliest acts of violence against multiculturalism.

References

Flynn Jr, J.E. (2015). White fatigue: Naming the challenge in moving from an individual to a systemic understanding of racism. Multicultural Perspectives, 17(3), 115-124.

Sleeter, C. (2008). Critical family history, identity, and historical memory. Educational Studies, 43(2), 114-124.

Christina Berchini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, a scholar in Critical Whiteness Studies, and a frequent contributor to Huffington Post.

Returning What was Stolen

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 03:00:00 GMT

On September 24, 2017 , I returned to the Ute Nation money I had inherited derived from the sale of a homestead on the Utes’ homeland in the Yampa Valley of Colorado immediately after the Utes had been expelled. How did I trace my inheritance to the Utes’ loss of land? Why did I frame the issue as “returning what was stolen?” How did I, and how might you, go about returning stolen land? Although I wrote about this research earlier, here I bring that story into full circle by sharing where the research took me.

Homesteading: White settlers and Indigenous land

Many of us, particularly those of us who are white, descend from settlers who homesteaded. When researching a family tree, we often start the story of our families with homesteading. As explained on Wikipedia, there have been several Homestead Acts, but generally the process involves conferring ownership of public land to settlers, usually at no cost to them, if they stay on the land for at least five years and make “improvements” to it, such as establishing a farm.

By starting our family story with white settlers, we usually do not ask whose land the U.S. government took to distribute to white settlers, nor what impact this land transfer has had on disparities in wealth. According to the 2012 U.S. Census Bureau data, in 2007 the median wealth of white non-Hispanic families in the U.S. was $170,400, while that of non-white families was only $27,800. I could not locate census data on American Indian household wealth. But the 2014 U.S. Census does report that 29.2% of American Indians live below the poverty level, while only 15.9% of the nation as a whole does so, and that American Indians have the highest poverty rate while whites have the lowest.

During much of U.S. history, homesteading, which was based on theft of Indigenous people’s land, was open only to people of European descent. Homesteading, coupled with inheritances passed down generation to generation, has contributed to the enormous racial disparities in wealth. How might white people look into how they benefit personally from theft of land, then consider what to do about it?

Connecting homesteading and family wealth with land theft

I made the connection between the U.S. government taking the Utes’ land in the area around Steamboat Springs in 1880, and my inheritance, by piecing things together gradually. When my mother, and later my aunt, died, I inherited a portion of my grandmother’s estate. I wondered vaguely where it came from, since to my knowledge she had not held a job. I used some of it to pay off my house and put the rest in the bank. It was only later that my family history research shed light on where the inheritance came from.

I knew my grandmother had been born in, or near, Steamboat Springs, Colorado. That was part of our family story. One of my sisters has this photo of our grandmother standing in Steamboat Springs as an adult, a spray of columbine in her hand.

Using census data, I was able to trace where my grandmother’s parents were born (Tennessee), approximately when they went to Colorado, then approximately when they moved on to California. Some time after that, I discovered an archive of the digitized newspaper Steamboat Springs Pilot in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. The newspaper had been published since 1885. I played around with different ways of entering my ancestors’ names in the search box (last name only? full names? last name with initials?). I was surprised at how much I found, which included a listing of at least 21 lots in Steamboat Springs that my great grandfather bought. Where did he get the money to buy them, I wondered?

For a long time, I was not able to locate evidence of my great-grandparents homesteading. Records may well be housed in the Deeds Office of Routt County (a good place to check), but years ago when I visited Steamboat Springs, I did not think to look there. One day I tried Googling my grandfather’s name (again, playing with different ways of entering the name). I didn’t necessarily expect something to come up, but it did! I found a newly digitized document synthesizing various letters and other records of James Crawford, who founded Steamboat Springs. There, I found reference to my great grandparents having homesteaded five miles east of the town of Craig, in 1882. Later in another digitized newspaper article, I found an interview with a contemporary of my great grandfather, who described having gone with him and some other young men from Tennessee to Colorado in search of gold, in 1881. They didn’t find gold, but they did find an opportunity to get “free” land.

Returning what was stolen

Once I had connected my inheritance pretty directly with the government’s theft of the Utes’ land, and my ancestors getting a piece of it, I had to decide what to do with that knowledge. Returning the land would seem the obvious thing, except there are few role models of doing that. Jean Louis Bourgeois Goldwater transferred the deed of a house in New York to the Lenape Nation of Manhattan in 2016, and Bill Richardson’s family transferred 700 acres of Sonoma County to the Kashia band of Pomo Indians in 2015. These stories supported what I was thinking about. But I didn’t know anyone who is Ute, nor did a few colleagues whom I asked.

I intentionally framed what I wanted to do as “returning what was stolen,” however, rather as than giving the Tribe a donation. That framing kept me focused on figuring out who to approach and how, rather than donating the inheritance for something else. That framing also put the spotlight on the injustice of settler colonialism rather than the “generosity” of the donor.

I wondered what the procedure was for returning land. Do you just walk into the Tribal headquarters and announce that you’d like to do so? That question flummoxed me for a time.

As I learned, you can actually do just that. I was fortunate, however, to have found someone who works directly with the tribe by running a PAC organized to defend land and sovereignty. He served as an intermediary for me. In the process, I learned that the Tribe’s attorney handles things like this.

So, if you are thinking of doing the same thing I did, you can approach the Tribal Council (or Business Committee), or the Tribe’s attorney. Of course, making personal connections helps.

Not everyone by a long shot has something to return. Many people do not have ancestors who homesteaded. In some cases, descendants of ancestors who homesteaded squandered what they had inherited; I know of two of my ancestors for whom that is the case. Or, you may not be able to work out a paper trail connecting what you have with homesteading Indian land. Or, you may not have the financial wherewithall to do what I did.

There are other ways to work, however. You can donate to organizations and buy-back systems working on the return of land to tribes, such as the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. Vote for candidates who recognize and value the sovereignty of Indian nations and land. Those of us who are teachers can educate our students (after educating ourselves) about the colonization and decolonization process. All of these things are worth doing.

For me personally, this process has resulted in connecting with Tribal members I am enjoying getting to know. A new school on the reservation is closer to being built. And a tiny piece of the universe that I’m connected to has been put back into balance. I hope that in a year or two, rather than struggling to find other examples of returning to the Indigenous peoples land that was stolen, we’ll be able to create a long list.

The First Step Towards Healing

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 03:00:00 GMT

Have you ever felt disenfranchised, bullied or marginalized? How about the feeling of simply not fitting in within your environment? For some, this describes their adolescent years. For too many others this experience repeats itself throughout life. Many experience such to the extent of feeling like outsiders daily. The first step towards healing is admitting to and addressing the issue.

My work speaks to the many who, like myself, have been presented the challenge of living in multicultural world which far too often does not function in manner valuing the diverse cultures and many other differences throughout the world population. This is what led me to my current research aiming to better understand how members of a school community navigate developing answers to the questions of both students and their parents in regards to how best to function with an appreciation and understanding of racial/ethnic differences.

From my own life experiences I developed questions wondering why I regularly felt as if I did not belong in my own neighborhood where others regularly picked on me and my siblings; in the public schools I attended where teachers would regularly and blatantly mispronounce my name regardless of how many times I corrected them; in my own extended family gatherings where I would be called out for getting seconds while others in my age range were disregarded no matter how many times they returned to the kitchen for more food; in malls and shopping centers where I would be followed and watched regardless of my witnessing others steal while I was being watched instead; in my car where I would be pulled over and questioned relentlessly for what would eventually conclude in being sent on with no valid reason for being delayed any longer; or throughout my teaching experiences in America where my students would see pictures of my family and comment in tones of surprise about how attractive they thought my brothers are (all of whom have a lighter skin color like our father), even following their comments with clarification that they did not mean to hurt my feelings (as I have a darker skin color likening our mother), thus confirming their implications.

Life History – My Inspiration

My experiences are those of a Black man maternally and paternally descending from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the U.S. which became a world power using the forced free labor provided by my ancestors with no reciprocation since. Unlike most descendants of immigrants in America, descendants of the slave trade are completely disconnected from who we are in that for the most part we carry the surnames of the family that last owned our ancestors. Our ancestral names are unknown. In addition to life experiences of being a Black male in a society and culture which continues to widely portray and view Black males as violent, deviant people to be feared, I was also born and raised as a religious minority. Being raised Muslim with an Arabic name in this Western culture of the United States of America has also directly affected my personal experiences, especially with the wide exposure of violent acts by those who have done so in the name of my religion over recent decades

Within my own neighborhood as a child and amongst my own family, I regularly experienced being accused of “acting White” and otherwise not fitting in due to speaking proper English and having success in my efforts to achieve academically. Throughout my childhood and to this day I am also faced with the challenge of being overweight. All of these factors at various stages of my life were additionally compounded by negative treatment based on the false assumptions of many that I was homosexual due to my language proficiency, borderline obsessive neatness, daily professional attire and refusal to behave in ways I felt were/are unbecoming of a mature professional. Upon completion of a Bachelor’s Degree, I found an inner reward in the field of education once I came to the realization that I had a passion and natural propensity for teaching. Ironically enough, here too in this field of education, I find myself a minority with a very small percentage of males in this profession and an even smaller percentage of Black males.

Life History – Participant’s Dedication

In our efforts to understand one another as humans, we tend to use the biographical information we learn about others, then interweaving our own lives and experiences with theirs. This is where/how Critical Life History of Critical Family History guides this Critical Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon, 2014) study. My personal experiences have shaped and molded me into being one who has a strong interest in working with people on addressing racism, sexism, classism and the many other ways in which humans tend differentiate individuals and groups, minimizing some while empowering others. This inner-drive has motivated and inspired my desire to conduct the study described below, while it is the participants’ willingness and desire to share the stories of their lives that impact the other participants and thus have lasting impacts on how each participant interacts with others going forward.

I am studying ways in which members of a school community group engage in conversations about race. With the understanding that deflecting issues of race as an educator or a researcher can reproduce racialized disparities in schools, this study is informed by interpretivism frameworks through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens, as described by Ladson-Billings. I am facilitating discussions amongst the personnel, parents, and businesses in partnership with an elementary school that has a diverse racial/ethnic population. Data is generated during the group conversations, in which participants share personal stories from their family lives as children to adolescent experiences at home, at school, in the general public. From these monthly discussions over the past two years, I have learned much not only about the participants in this research project, but also about the inner-workings of diverse groups of people having conversations about race/ethnicity.

Stories parents told in our first group discussions revolved strongly around the questions, concerns and comments of their children in regards to the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown shooting deaths and the Eric Garner asphyxiation death each while unarmed at the hands of police officers or security guards. These conversations included the effect the incidents had on the interactions of their children with one another in regards to their recognition of race and ethnicity. Elementary students were expressing concern to their parents for their classmates’ well-being due to the racial identity of their classmates, causing parents to question exactly how to respond to their concerns. Conversations extended into the school with questions about the interactions of parents based on racial and cultural grouping they witnessed amongst one another during school functions / events / activities.

The participants felt so comfortable in our group discussions that many of them shared portions of their personal life history to support or explain their worldviews. Group participants each volunteer to join and participate at the levels they individually feel most comfortable. Some engage as listeners and observers only while others by verbally contributing at their own will, the amount they feel comfortable with. Many questions participants have are being answered without participants being placed in the uncomfortable position of asking, because they are receiving explanations about others’ experiences through the stories told. Asking questions not only provides the opportunity for hearing the answer, but the fact that certain questions are asked also exposes the lack of understanding many people have about those from backgrounds or experiences different from their own. During our group discussions, it is warming to hear about how participants act and react differently upon witnessing acts or hearing comments based on prejudice, bigotry or bias now, compared to prior to their participation in our monthly discussions based around facing and addressing issues of race/ethnicity.

A Healing Summary

Many people awaken daily in the United States of America without subconsciously wondering if they will face unfair or unjust treatment due at least partially to their own race/ethnicity. Unfortunately, many others do not and what occurs in society is reflected in what occurs in schools. I expect that this study will advance the understanding present within today’s field of research within school leadership, school/community involvement, Parent Teacher Organization activity and both interracial and intercultural relations in schools. Together, these elements contribute to possible solutions in schools related questions about and/or incidents of racism. Using Critical Race Theory, Critical Life History, Critical Family History and Critical Participatory Action Research to guide discussions on race within school communities, a deeper understanding of one another’s past experiences and views on local, national and international occurrences can be gained.

As many participants in my current study have shared, I too often feel as if our group discussions are a form of therapy. The opportunity to vent and share our experiences to an audience of others who care about our experiences and the effects of those experiences can be cathartic. My skin is the color it is, as it will always be, just as my facial features are as well. Knowing there are many willing to gather and learn to appreciate the differences we all have, regardless, has been and continues to be for me, healing.

References

Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (2000). Participatory action research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.) (pp. 567-606). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore: Springer Science & Business Media.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7-24.

Omar J. Salaam, a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, is aspiring to becoming an assistant professor at a university in the Middle East. His research interests include culturally responsive school leadership, leadership for families and community engagement, race and identity intersectionality and evaluation. Omar has more than 20 years of secondary school teaching and administration experience in the United States and Malaysia, educational consultancy experience in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand and university teaching experience at USF. He can be contacted at ojs@mail.usf.edu.

Critical Family History Book Review: Homegoing

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 02:00:00 GMT

What might a family history look and feel like that, while not based strictly on genealogy, portrays in exquisite detail who one’s ancestors could have been? This is the project debut novelist Yaa Gyasi undertook in her breathtaking debut novel Homegoing (Knopf, 2016) . Perhaps her greatest impulse in creating Homegoing was articulated by one of the contemporary characters Marcus:

How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it – not apart from it, but inside of it.

Homegoing takes readers inside this story of belonging by tracing two family lines, one in what is now Ghana, and the other in the U.S. during and following slavery. The lives of two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, who neither grew up together nor knew each other, were catapulted into drastically different directions when one was sold to a British slave trader as a wife, and the other was captured, then eventually sold into slavery in the U.S. The idea for the novel came to Gyasi when visiting the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, where she learned of the luxurious upstairs quarters housing African wives of British slavers, directly above the hellish dungeons where captives were crammed for weeks or months before being marched through the Door of No Return onto a slave ship.

The book is made up of loosely connected stories that alternate between the two family lines over several generations. Each story reads like a separate short story, with only a few threads from previous stories helping the reader connect them. Effia’s descendants, while dealing with the wars and upheavals of the British and Dutch slave trade, then British colonization, maintain some sense of a coherent family memory, symbolized by a smooth stone necklace passed down from one generation to the next. Marjorie the present-day character who was born in Ghana and raised in the U.S., knows something of the stone and her ancestry:

It had belonged to Old Lady and to Abena before her, and to James, and Quey, and Effia the Beauty before that. It had begun with Maame, the woman who had set a great fire. Her father had told her that the necklace was a part of their family history and she was to never take it off, never give it away.

Esi’s descendants experience the brutality of Southern slavery and continued violent circumscription of Black lives imposed by U.S. racism. Unlike Effia’s descendants, they experience many more ruptures of historical memory from generation to generation. For example:

Jo used to worry that his family line had been cut off, lost forever. He would never truly know who his people were, and who their people were before them, and if there were stories to be heard about where he had come from, he would never hear them.

In the end, two distant relatives – Marjorie (whose life is based loosely on the author’s life) and Marcus – having no idea they share common ancestry, meet in the U.S. They travel to Ghana where they visit the Cape Coast Castle, and the nearby coast where Marjorie’s grandmother explains the family began and where spirits of the ancestors return.

One may say that this novel is not strictly family history in that the author invented characters and details of their lives. Yet, the characters, having been set within times, places, and events that did occur, breathe life into history. Further, by being based on a well-researched plausible history the author’s life rests upon, the book creates a sense of who went before, on whose shoulders she stands.

None of us can unearth the fullness of the lives of our ancestors, and some of us are able to discover very few details indeed. Does this mean that we have little or no remembered history? Gyasi offers an alternative: research the contexts in which people lived, then use everything you have learned from that research and also in your own family to craft characters who lived in those contexts, and whose lives are consistent with what you do know. In so doing, you may be able to construct quite deep and nourishing roots for not just yourself, but also for others who share much of your past.

Impact of Ethnic Studies on Attitudes

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 02:00:00 GMT

The Arizona state legislature is at it again, now considering legislation to ban specific ethnic studies teaching practices (such as the privilege walk ) at the university as well as K-12 levels. This proposed legislation is based on the belief that such courses and activities promote resentment based on race, gender, religious affiliation, social class, and/or political affiliation. However a robust body of research on the impact of ethnic studies on attitudes finds the opposite. Here I draw from and update my review of the impact of ethnic studies on students , to look specifically at its impact on attitudes, particularly at the university level.

Numerous surveys and experimental studies in higher education find ethnic studies and other diversity courses and activities to improve students’ racial attitudes. You heard right — improve attitudes, not make them worse.

Much of this research examines the impact of various diversity experiences, particularly course-taking and interracial interaction, on the development of democracy outcomes: students’ “commitment to promoting racial understanding, perspective taking, sense of commonality in values with students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds, agreement that diversity and democracy can be congenial, involvement in political affairs and community service during college, as well as commitment to civic affairs after college” (Gurin, Dey, Gurin & Hurtado, 2003, p. 25). For the most part, the courses in these studies included ethnic studies, women’s studies, and broad diversity courses.

The overwhelming and most consistent finding is that, in most cases, such courses have a positive impact on students’ racial understanding, ability to see another perspective, empathy, and commitment to civic engagement (Astin, 1993; Carrell, 1997; Denson, 2009; Gurin, Dey, Hurtado & Gurin, 2002; Lopez, 2004). For example, Mark Engberg’s (2004 ) research review of 73 studies of the impact of a diversity course, a diversity workshop, a peer facilitated invention, or a service intervention found that 52 of the studies reported positive gains, 14 reported mixed gains, and only 7 reported no change. As another example, Bowman, Denson and Park (2016) analyzed survey data from 8,634 graduates (91% White) of 229 institutions of higher education. Those who had participated in racial/cultural awareness workshops during college were significantly more likely to be engaged civically as much as six years after graduation than those who had not.

The impact of such experiences is considerably stronger when they include cross-group interaction (Astin, 1993; Bowman, 2010b; Chang, 2002; Denson, 2009; Gurin, Dey, Hurtado & Gurin, 2002; Gurin, Nagda, & Zuñiga, 2013; Lopez, 2004). Gurin and Nagda (2006) found that participation in structured intergroup dialogs:

fosters active thinking about causes of social behavior and knowledge of institutional and other structural features of society that produce and maintain group-based inequalities, . . . increases perception of both commonalities and differences between and within groups and helps students to normalize conflict and build skills to work with conflicts, . . . [and it] enhances interest in political issues and develops a sense of citizenship through college and community activities. (p. 220)

To help teachers and instructors build cross-group interaction into their courses and other learning activities, the National Association for Multicultural Education makes available a basic guide.

Perhaps surprisingly, required diversity courses have a greater positive impact on White students than on students of color (Bowman, 2010a; Denson, 2009; Engberg, 2004; Lopez, 2004), probably because exposure to a systematic analysis of power is newer to White students than to students of color, and because most students of color have engaged in cross-racial interaction previously, a while many White students have not. The first diversity experience can be emotionally challenging, especially for White students (Hogan & Mallot, 2005). But sticking with it pays off. In a large survey study of students in 19 colleges and universities, Bowman (2010a) found that many who take a single diversity course experienced a reduced sense of well-being due to having to grapple with issues they had not been exposed to before. However, students who took more than one diversity course experienced significant gains, with gains being greatest for White male students from economically privileged backgrounds. Another study of 857 White students found much the same (Neville, Lewis, Poteat, & Spanierman, 2014).

While most research on the impact of ethnic studies and other diversity coursework has focused on higher education, it is supported by a smaller body of research at the PreK-12 level. Okoye-Johnson (2011) conducted a meta-analysis of 30 studies that compared the impact of a multicultural curriculum or program, and the traditional curriculum, on racial attitudes of students at PreK-12 levels. The 21 studies of the impact of a multicultural curriculum intervention reported a large effect size showing that it “brought about more positive changes in students’ racial attitudes than did exposure to traditional instruction” (p. 1263). The remaining studies of the impact of extracurricular interventions reported a much smaller positive effect size. This meta-analysis showed that multicultural curriculum that is part of the school’s regular programming has a more powerful positive impact on students’ racial attitudes than extracurricular cultural programming.

It is imperative that education develop students’ ability to communicate with, empathize with, and hear perspectives of people who differ from themselves. Banning practices that produce discomfort among participants who are new to those ideas is no solution. On the contrary, making such courses and workshops widely available, and encouraging participation, is not only prudent, but also supported by the research.

Perhaps the legislators themselves should be taking such courses!

Studies cited

Astin, A. W. (1993). Diversity and multiculturalism on campus: How are students affected? Change 25 (2), 44-50.

Bowman, N. A. (2010a). Disequilibrium and resolution: The non-linear effects of diversity courses on well-being and orientations towards diversity. The Review of Higher Education 33 (4), 543-568.

Bowman, N. A. (2010b). College diversity experiences and cognitive development: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research 80 (1), 4-33.

Bowman, N. A., Denson, N. & Park, J. J. (2016). Racial/cultural awareness workshops and post college civic engagement: A propensity score matching approach. American Educational Research Journal 53(6): 1556-1587.

Carrell, L. J. (1997). Diversity in the communication curriculum: Impact on student empathy. Communication Education 46, 234-244.

Chang, M. J. (2002). The impact of an undergraduate diversity course requirement on students’ racial views and attitudes. The Journal of General Education 51 (1), 21-42.

Denson, N. (2009). Do curricular and co-curricular activities influence racial bias? A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research 79 (2), 805-838.

Engberg, M. E. (2004). Improving intergroup relations in higher education: A critical examination of the influence of educational interventions on racial bias. Review of Educational Research 74 (4), 473-524.

Gurin, P. Y., Dey, E. L., Gurin, G. & Hurtado, S. (2003). How does racial/ethnic diversity promote education? The Western Journal of Black Studies 27 (1), 20-29.

Gurin, P. Y., Dey, E. L., Hurtado, S., Y Gurin, G. (2002). Diversity and higher education: Theory and impact on educational outcomes. Harvard Educational Review 72(3), 330-367.

Gurin, P. & Nagda, B. R. A. (2006). Getting to the what, how, and why of diversity on campus. Educational Researcher 35 (1). 20-24.

Gurin, P., Nagda, B. A. & Zuñiga, X. (2013). Dialogue across difference. Russell Sage Foundation.

Hogan, D. E. & Mallott, M. (2005). Changing racial prejudice through diversity education. Journal of College Student Development 46 (2), 115-125.

Lopez, G. E. (2004). Interethnic contact, curriculum, and attitudes in the first year of college. Journal of Social Issues 40 (1), 75-94.

Neville, H. A., Lewis, J. A., Poteat, V. P., & Spanierman, L. B. 2014. Changes in White students’ color-blind racial ideology over 4 years: Do diversity experiences matter? Journal of Counseling Psychology 61(2): 179-190.

Okoye-Johnson, O. (2011). Does multicultural education improve students’ racial attitudes? Implications for closing the achievement gap. Journal of Black Studies 42(8): 1252-1274.

White people in Ethnic Studies

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 02:00:00 GMT

Ethnic Studies is experiencing a vibrant growth at the K-12 level. I am sometimes asked what place there should be, if any, for white people in Ethnic Studies. This is an important question. Simply leaving white people out of Ethnic studies will alienate them. In addition, Ethnic Studies is invaluable for helping white people see ourselves within rather than outside a multicultural democracy, and as potential racial justice allies.

But it is important to use lessons from past experience and research to inform what including white people in Ethnic Studies might look like.

Roots too?

Recent history provides an example of how white people’s attempt to be part of Ethnic Studies can go wrong. Writing in his 2006 book Roots Too , Matthew F. Jacobson analyzed the Euro-American ethnic revival movement of the 1970s – 1990s. He argued that, in the absence of a critique of social class, following the Civil Rights movement and rapid diversification of the U.S. population, descendants of eastern and southern European immigrants found the language of ethnic identity and collective rights to express their own concerns. Euro-Americans worked to reclaim history and immigrant heritage; part of this work involved tracing ancestors to European homelands. At the same time, they dissociated themselves from racism by pointing out that ancestors immigrating after the latter 1800s had not owned slaves nor taken land from Indians. Stories of immigrant ancestors’ hardships glossed over forms of racial discrimination that did benefit them in areas such as housing, hiring, and unionizing. Jacobson argued this attempt to be included in ethnic discourse became less a process of remembering history than of re-writing it.

Ironically, in a search for ethnic roots, white people used narratives from diverse ethnic histories to construct a homogenizing narrative of heroic and downtrodden, not quite white, European immigrants who triumphed through hard work. This narrative dismissed specificity and privilege while drowning out the Civil Rights narrative that challenged racial dominance. Jacobson observed that, “The ethnic contributions model of American nationality may have been a significant departure from the homogenizing model of the melting pot, but did share . . . an almost absolute erasure of power relations that made for a fairly sanitized and happy national narrative: diversity as feast, the nation as smorgasbord” (p. 56).

The use of white ethnicity to create a national mythology that denies racism asserts racialized power. As we think about how to include white people in Ethnic Studies, it is crucial that we not create a contemporary version of the same thing.

The conundrum of culture

Historically, as diverse European American immigrant groups submerged their own cultures and languages in order to claim racial power, most lost a sense of ourselves as cultural beings, as well as knowledge of our own ethnic origins. As a result, a growing proportion of white Americans see ourselves as “culture-less,” culture as unimportant, and race as a version of ethnicity that will wither away. For example, in interviews with Ruth Frankenberg (1993) about race, racial dominance, and white identity, white women expressed awareness of and discomfort with racial inequality, but had few concepts with which to examine it other than “long-established modes of cultural description” (p. 196). They could describe “others” as cultural, but not themselves, and they had no other language with which to understand racism. Similarly, Pamela Perry’s ethnographic study of white middle class youth in two high schools (Shades of White, 2002) found them dismissive of culture and ignorant about race. Those in a predominantly white school never had to think about race, ethnicity, or culture, and had difficulty interpreting the question of what white culture means. Those in a multiracial school viewed culture as an attachment to the past, and were simply not interested in that past.

Sociologist Stanley Lieberson (1985) reported a link between how many generations removed people are from their immigrant pasts, and awareness of ethnic roots. While about half of white Americans in his study saw themselves as “un-hyphenated,” this was true of about two-thirds of those in the South, particularly in the Southeast where 80% were at least fourth generation. The rate of intermarriage among Euro-Americans rises with distance from immigration, and that distance, combined with intermarriage, prompts disinterest in ethnicity. Yet, many white people assign symbolic value to ethnicity, perhaps as a counterbalance to a sense of lacking culture.

Richard Alba and Mitchell Chamlin, writing in the American Sociological Review in 1983, found that ethnically mixed white people often claim a single European ethnic ancestry (such as German-American or Norwegian-American), particularly those in inner cities and suburbs outside the South, and those with more education. That ethnic identity seems symbolically important. Richard Alba, in his 1990 book Ethnic Identity, found white people to view culture as something static that “other people” brought from somewhere else, and ethnicity to be a source of enrichment and uniqueness, experienced mainly through cultural expressions such as food, customs, family celebrations, festivals, and words or phrases from a heritage language. Ethnicity also provided a language with which to talk about extended family.

So, when white people take up multicultural education or ethnic studies, their interpretations of what that means stems from their understandings of culture and ethnicity, and lack of understanding or avoidance of race and racism. These are areas that Ethnic Studies involving white people should directly address.

White people in Ethnic Studies

I suggest four areas that should be part of Ethnic Studies that involves white people.

1. What culture means; self as a cultural being. White students commonly see culture as quaint or colorful practices brought from elsewhere, which people of color seem to have much more of than white people. This huge misunderstanding of culture positions white people as nostalgic for something lost, while failing to recognize how everyone is culturally constructed, and how the normalization of white people’s culture maintains power relationships.

Anthropologist Ward Goodenough (1976) defined culture as “the concepts, beliefs, and principles of action and organization that . . . could be attributed successfully to the members of that society” (p. 4). By this, he meant all of the knowledge and principles that guide shared behavior and understandings. Understood in this way, everyone is a cultural being; we all participate in shared behaviors and understandings. White people are fully cultural, but use power to make what is cultural appear natural or normal. I do not find it particularly helpful, by the way, to hand students a list of white cultural traits, as such lists sometimes cause defensiveness and do not help them learn to see with a cultural eye.

I do find it very helpful, however, to teach students to read their own everyday lives through a cultural lens. There are many ways of doing so. For example, since much culture is learned in the family, I have had students analyze how things are done in their own families through a cultural lens, using questions such as: What is your family’s structure? What roles do family members play? How is affection communicated? How are disagreements handled? How is time structured? What kinds of behaviors are rewarded and how; what kids are punished and how? How are meals handled – what is a “proper” meal, who fixes, it, and when and with whom are meals eaten? Such questions begin to get at cultural practices we learn while growing up. When students compare their descriptions, often they see similarities and differences among their peers, which begins to make culture visible.

With respect to Euro-American ethnic culture, rather than attending only to what was brought from Europe, learning how culture developed in the U.S. can be very interesting. A particularly interesting example is Appalachian culture. Research on Appalachian culture dates back to the early 1900s, but was given a considerable boost in 1977 when the Appalachian Studies Association was formed by group of “scholars, teachers, and regional activists who believed that shared community has been and will continue to be important” (Appalachian Studies Association). (My mother’s mother was of Appalachian descent, a term I never heard growing up probably because of the stigma applied to Appalachia.)

2. Remembering rather than re-writing history. Students usually encounter textbook history as boring, and few (including white students) see themselves in that history. At least white students, however, see widely varied representation of people who look like them; students of color do not get even this much. In contrast students find family history to be a highly interesting and viable entree into national history. However, people often interpret their family history within dominant national narratives rather than using family history to create new (and more accurate) narratives.

I developed Critical Family History specifically as a framework and methodology to disrupt dominant narratives. For example, if one asks what other sociocultural groups were in the vicinity of an ancestral family, and what the power relationships were among groups (a question white people rarely ask when doing family history), one begins to situate one’s own family story within larger and sometimes conflicting conversations about our pasts. For example, a past involving homesteading is also a past taking up settler colonialism and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. What does it mean to both acknowledge hardships and challenges of one’s ancestors as well as their participation in land theft?

When I work with Critical Family History with students, I encourage them to attend carefully to historical records, including those that are unsettling. There will be ancestors that one comes to admire and others one may dislike. Most, if you get to know them, were complex people that you cannot simply venerate or abhor (just like the people in our lives today). But in addition to whatever feelings this research may generate toward one’s forebears, the point is to get to know history in a much more personal and nuanced way, and one in which you can situate yourself and your family.

3. Historical construction and current workings of racism. Whiteness studies interrogates the position of power that Euro-Americans occupy within the context of racism. Whiteness studies focuses on invisibility of racial power to whites, social privileges associated with white supremacy, and relationships between whiteness and identity. Whiteness studies examine the historical processes through which people of European descent constructed race as a concept to justify conquest and exploitation, then gradually submerged their own ethnic identities in order to claim power, trading in power for a sense of themselves as cultural beings. Study of the historical construction and current workings of racism is in many ways no different for white students than for students of color, except that white students typically bring much more defensiveness and denial than do students of color, which may have implications for how it is taught.

In addition to grappling with how race works, it is very important to help students see how multiple forms of inequality are linked. In the U.S., we maintain a mythology that we are a fairly classless society. As a result, people often use race to explain class inequalities, or, conversely, reduce racial inequalities to economic poverty. Ethnic studies, in its unpacking of race and racism, should attend to social class as well, including probing historic and contemporary tensions between the white working class and people of color.

4. Becoming allies. Ultimately, including white people in Ethnic Studies should help students envision themselves as allies in work for racial justice. There are various ways doing this, such as involving white students in multiracial YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research) activities addressing racism locally. Another way is by identifying white moral ancestors, in the words of Linda Christensen — white people who worked for justice. When I began doing my own family history research, I hoped to find at least one anti-racist activist in my family tree. I didn’t, but I did bump into some white moral ancestors along the way, such as Benjamin Butler, for whom an ancestral family seem to have named one of their children. A Union general during the Civil War, Butler helped to free slaves and bring literacy to Blacks in New Orleans after the Civil War. While one can critique other things about him, his work challenging slavery in notable. For white people, learning about white moral ancestors provides a set of racial justice ally role models.

I hope these ideas help in thinking about how to include white people in the growing Ethnic Studies movement.

Theft of Indigenous Peoples’ Land

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 03:00:00 GMT

In a recent article I wrote about ancestors who, in different states and at different times, acquired land very cheaply from the state rather than from a specific person, and my realization that they had profited directly from the U.S. government’s theft of Indigenous peoples’ land. On two occasions in the last month, I have been asked how I documented that transfer of land from Indigenous hands to those of my white ancestors. One asker was intrigued because this kind of exploration is unusual in genealogy work. The other wondered how to do similar documentation in a different geographic location. Since both asked about my references, I decided to explain what I did.

About a dozen years ago, I first began to notice what became a pattern of white ancestors acquiring land from the state when Ancestry.com yielded two U.S. General Land Office patents to one of my immigrant great grandparents in central Illinois. A few years later, while visiting Tennessee, I browsed old deeds records in the Monroe County courthouse. There, I noted another white ancestor acquiring 160 acres from the state of Tennessee in 1827. On a subsequent visit to Tennessee, while visiting the Washington County Courthouse, I scanned the Direct Index to Deeds and Mortgages (North Carolina land grants are now searchable online). I found several records like the one shown below, documenting North Carolina land grants in the 1700s. (What is now east Tennessee had been part of North Carolina.) The individual named in the image below, William Nodding, is a distant ancestor.

Ancestry’s growing collection of property records now includes not only deeds such as these, but also an extensive collection of homestead records. (For a discussion of ways to search property records, see my earlier blog on Property Records .

Homesteading is one of the processes the U.S. government used to transfer land, mainly although not exclusively to white people. The Preemption Act of 1841 allowed individuals who were already on federally-owned land to buy it very cheaply if they were: 1) “head of household”; 2) a single man over 21, or a widow; 3) a citizen of the United States (or an immigrant intending to become naturalized); and 4) a resident of the claimed land for a minimum of 14 months. The Homestead Act of 1862 essentially loosened the Preemption Act. It granted plots of usually 160 acres to any U.S. citizen who had not taken up arms against the U.S., and was willing to settle on and farm land for at least five years. It required a three-step procedure: file an application, improve the land, and file for deed of title.

I realized that my ancestor’s U.S. General Land Office patents mentioned above, issued in 1849 and 1853, followed the Preemption Act of 1841. At that point, I was not sure if any other ancestors had made use of the Homestead Act of 1862, although they certainly had benefitted from other processes of land transfer.

I knew, of course, that the land had originally been the home of the many Indigenous nations of North America. I began to wonder exactly whose land my ancestors got, and how that happened. My initial queries were fairly general. For example, with respect to the land in central Illinois, I sought information about which Indigenous nation had been there earlier (Kickapoo), and when they were expelled (1819).

The more I read about the violent dispossession and expulsion of Indigenous peoples in places where my ancestors settled, the angrier I became and the more specific my research became. For example, one set of great grandparents moved from Tennessee to the Steamboat Springs, Colorado area in the mid-1880s. On a visit to Steamboat Springs several years ago, I made copies of several writings about the history of the area, including the self-published 1972 book by Lee A. Powell entitled Steamboat Springs: The first forty years. A chapter entitled “The Removal of the Indians 1879” began with:

The Sioux and the Cheyenne had attacked the settlers and had done battle with the U.S. Army. Consequently, it was not difficult to justify decimating the tribes and removing survivors to land so poor no white would settle upon it. The Utes, however, posed a different problem. They accommodated the whites, sometimes to the point of forming alliances with them against other Indian tribes. The Ute problem, that is the problem of acquiring Ute lands, became acute in the 1870s.

It wasn’t until a few months ago, however, that I was able to document that these ancestors had homesteaded on Ute land just after the Utes were expelled.

In the newspaper Steamboat Pilot, published since 1885, I had been able to find records of my ancestors buying lots in the town of Steamboat Springs in the 1890s. Entering my great grandfather’s name into Google one day, I located it in the recently digitized book James H. Crawford’s 1889 Copybook: Business letters written by James H. Crawford during 1889 – 1892 Steamboat Springs, Colorado (Crawford founded Steamboat Springs). There I read that my ancestor had visited the area in 1881, then homesteaded a year later five miles east of the town of Craig.

I sought and acquired a copy of the best history of the Utes available, Virginia McConnell Simmons’s The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (University Press of Colorado, 2000). In that book, I read about the stages in which the U.S. government pushed the Utes westward to take their land. I learned that the White River Indian Agent Nathan Meeker had taunted and browbeat the Utes until a group of them ambushed the agency in 1879. (The White River Agency administered the Yampa River Valley where Steamboat Springs is located.) The U.S. government immediately sent in troops, and in 1880 the Colorado State Legislature overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding expulsion of Utes from the state. Most white rhetoric in newspapers and such recommended complete extermination. The army took the Utes to Utah. The land, which included the Yampa River Valley, would have been surveyed immediately and advertised for homesteading.

There is no one set of references for documenting how the theft of Indigenous people’s land enriched white ancestors. In my case, I used a combination of documents available through Ancestry.com, visiting the deeds records in county courthouses, reading digitized newspapers , googling my ancestors’ names, and reading tribal histories.

I believe it is important to document this history because the theft of Indigenous people’s land and its transfer to white people undergirds enormous disparities in wealth today. According to the 2012 U.S. Census Bureau data, in 2007 the median wealth of white non-Hispanic families in the U.S. was $170,400, while that of non-white families was only $27,800. I could not locate census data on American Indian household wealth. But the 2014 U.S. Census does report that 29.2% of American Indians live below the poverty level, while only 15.9% of the nation as a whole does so, and that American Indians have the highest poverty rate while whites have the lowest. White people need to confront our inherited basis for these unjust disparities.

Critical Family History Book Review: Women of the Dawn

Mon, 02 May 2016 03:00:00 GMT

In April, 2016, I had an opportunity to visit Indian Island in the Penobscot River of Maine, and to meet some members of the Penobscot Nation. In that context, I learned about the wonderful book Women of the Dawn in which anthropologist Bunny McBride narrates the lives of four Wabanaki women of different generations. The term Wabanaki, which means Dawnland, was given to the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the north Atlantic Coast, and today includes the Abenakis, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot. The four women in the book include:

Molly Mathilde (Marie Mathilde), 1665-1717, Abenaki & Maliseet
Molly Ockett (Marie Agathe), 1740-1816, Pigwacket (subgroup of Abenaki)
Molly Molasses (Mary Pelagie), 1775-1867, Penobscot
Molly Dellis (Mary Alice Nelson Archambaud), 190-1977, Penobscot

Five portages connect the four stories of the women. A portage refers to the process of carrying one’s canoe and gear overland between rivers. As McBride explains, “The goal of any portage is to reunite with the river” (p. 133). Mary Dellis, whom McBride had previously researched extensively, actually did conduct research on Molly Mathilde; her research notes inspired the book. In this book, Molly Dellis researched all three foremothers with whom she shared the name Molly in an effort to make sense of her own life; her research served as her own portage as she face the question: “What of the past will be carried into the future?” (p. 97). Each of the four stories is introduced by a scene setting up Mary Dellis’s research into the life of that woman, and connecting her quest to the concept of portage.

Women of the Dawn

In the Methodology and References section, McBride explains how she researched, then constructed the story of each woman’s life. For family historians, this section of the book can have great value because of its detailed description of her research and writing process. McBride also consulted several Wabanaki people, including Mary Dellis’s daughter as well as author and tribal representative Donna M. Loring, in an attempt to render the four portraits, and the narrative voice, as authentically as possible.

This book fascinated me for several reasons. I was gripped by its history of the colonization of Wabanaki people, told from points of view of Wabanaki women at different times. Readers gain a sense of how Wabanaki people lived prior to colonization, and how they experienced trying to stem the tide of white invaders, then eventually being overrun by and violently killed by them. For example, when Molly Ockett, who became a skilled healer, was asked to treat white people, she did so but with full knowledge of what had happened before: “They may have missed the irony of this, but Molly did not; the individuals asking her to cure them were related to the very people who had earned bounties for killing and scalping her relatives and friends” (p. 55).

Molly Molasses watched white people not only arrive in huge numbers, but then help themselves to whatever they wanted. “Gradually it dawned on Molly and every other Penobscot that they were being swallowed up by the dreams of strangers. For them the dreams had become nightmares, grim realizations that they were losing not only a way of life, but a sense of who they are” (p. 86). But Abanaki peoples are still here, and the end of the book leaves us with young people coming to learn from their elders, Molly Dellis having become one such elder.

As noted earlier, I was quite interested in the author’s description of her detailed historical research, and how she went from the data to narrative storytelling. She describes the kind of information she was able to track down about each woman, then how she used research into the historical context of each woman’s life to construct scenes, such as data she worked with in order to construct Molly Ockett’s thoughts during the early 1800s.

Below you can watch Bunny McBride speak about women she had studied over the years, including Molly Dellis (Molly Spotted Elk), after a warm introduction by Donna M. Loring.

Women of the Dawn is a wonderful book I had a hard time putting down. I highly recommend it!

Four Generations of One Family’s Perspectives on Racism

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 03:00:00 GMT

During my doctoral program, I conducted two mini-studies on race and racism. The first was with successful Black professionals coping with micro aggressions in the workplace. I presented the findings from this study at the 2014 Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD) conference in Houston where the audience had some interesting follow-up questions that led to a second mini-study regarding coping strategy development. This additional exploration led to a family focus group with four different generations, ages 16-78, from my own family. In that focus group, I heard many stories about their perspectives on racism.

This focus group was used to begin to explore my own critical family history. Its purpose was to gain a better understanding of how we have survived and thrived for generations in the workplace, academically, and even athletically in spite of on-going, persistent racism and micro aggressions. Racial micro-aggressions are subtle yet sometimes blatant insults or exclusions perpetrated against others because of their race. Over time, these constant insults or exclusions damage the well-being of its victims (Torres & Driscoll, 2010). I wanted to know what my family did to prepare us to thrive in spite of multiple embedded institutional barriers that are doing harm to so many in America. The literature finds that positive racial identities and coping strategies are important in overcoming racism (Forsyth & Carter, 2012; Torres, Driscoll, & Burrow, 2010).

The focus group was held over dinner and recorded. Questions were prepared in advance as part of a class assignment. We talked for more than two hours and within that time, each participant shared stories in relation to their experiences with race and racism and how they managed to process their positive and negative experiences. For some, this was the first time ever having these discussions and I heard stories from family members that they had never shared with anyone before. It was funny how they talked about this experience for several months after the focus group.

One key coping strategy my family embraced was education, as it is viewed as “the one thing no one can take away”. Other common coping strategies found in both studies included career development, spirituality practices, support systems, hyper-vigilance or awareness, and empowered action as a last resort. Social capital was also an interesting finding. From my parents’ generation through my 16-year old son, my family has always had diverse social connections, recognizing that good and bad comes in all colors.

16 yr old:

“We are all human, we are all beautiful people no matter what color – Jesus made us that way… so don’t look at someone differently from their different colors.”

“As a kid you don’t look at a friend as a color. I like kids because of who they are not because of what color they are. I was not taught to hate.”

19 year old:

“I think you guys always focused on academics and made sure you do well. I think it helped that you put us in better schools and it laid a foundation for how I would do in the future.”

“I got a lot of questions about my hair a lot and I am glad they asked instead of assuming that I just didn’t wash my hair. I got that question a lot. I don’t think I looked at the whole race differently or treated them any differently but I think I was guarded.”

52 year old:

“I think they tried to protect us. That could have been positive and negative. You get blind-sided when it happens to you. I didn’t see racism until Jr High. A girl was bullying and called me out of my name and from that time on, I just didn’t get close to any white person again. Prior to that when we moved around all over the place in the military, all of my friends were white and when that happened I just stayed away from them after that.”

79 year old:

“We were taught that we couldn’t do anything with the white race. We could play with them. During my time until you were about 6 years old, you could play with them but then they went to their school and we went to our school. We were totally separated.… Although years later, some of the kids I played with between the ages of 4-6 they was asking about me and wanted to get back with me.“

This exploration of my family’s perceptions and history from this focus group was combined with stories that have been told over the years to engage a critical family history framework. I examined contextual issues and reflected regarding how my family’s story and how our present reality has been shaped and influenced by social, economic, political processes and relationships. Going through this critical family history process for the first time was emotional and eye opening. In comparison, our family has done quite well within the larger family unit. Four of five siblings have college degrees; two of us have graduate degrees. We are all doing somewhat better than our parents. This success can be credited to military exposure which led to international travel and cultural exposure, access to education, diversity acceptance in communities, a strong foundation of faith, private spaces such as my sorority, the AME church, and the various social networks that encourage, inspire, and support us through good and bad.

This framework of a critical family history was brand new for me and it is funny how stories change when you look at them from a different lens. A new sense of admiration and understanding of the strength of my parents emerged when I stopped to really think about the messages in the story that were not shared from a critical perspective.

The stories were told in a humorous way, although they were not funny when people experienced them. The truth is that the stories demonstrated a great deal of strength, perseverance, and resilience in face of the repeated assaults and triumphs in spite of white privilege such as:

The time my father was forced to go to the home of a white customer of my great aunt simply because he didn’t say “Mr.” or the anger my father felt when he saw his father in-law cowering and calling a white customer Mr. in order to keep his business.
The choices they made to escape the ugliness that they sought to protect their children from as my father snuck into the military at the age of 17 in order to see the world, and how they moved a little further away from family after retirement in order to assure we were in better schools.
The impact of interracial marriage laws on my grandmother and my mother as we were deprived of the love of my white Irish grandfather who was sent away when it was discovered he had bi-racial child. The pain he must have felt as he would come home to visit and admire my mother from a distance at the bus stop and simply say “that’s my girl” but was not allowed to give her a hug or ask her about her day.
The pain of my undercover feminist mother trapped in a traditional social role as she raised five children as a homemaker but made sure to insist that I never become dependent on a man.

There are some key artifacts that offer a daily reminder of what I have learned through this process or reframing what I thought I knew about my family. My “war room” consists of several study aides including my father’s bible from the 1980’s. Within it there are the traditional birth, death, and marriage records but also throughout the book, he has dated written personal notes, mostly about family members and events going on that I review from time to time. The bible is read often in order to continue to grow and mature spiritually as a key coping mechanism for anything that comes up in life. I also am blessed with two binders of sermons from my paternal grandfather who was a presiding elder in the AME Church. The messages in his sermons can also be examined critically as they contain current events from the 50 through the 70’s some of which addresses the political impact on Blacks. These books are a reminder of where the passion for social justice arises within and the importance of the Black church as a private space.

A picture of my mother in high school sits in my family room in a case below a five-generation pictorial family tree. All of the images represent the life they lived in order to make things better for us. My mother could clearly pass for white and her daily reminder from both blacks and whites in rural Alabama in the 30’s through the 50’s that she didn’t belong contributed to her strength and confidence in who she is a black woman. I plan to add a modern artifact for my kids and beyond. A video tape was made of both of my parents for an adult development class assignment. It shares details about their life, how they were raised, influences in their life, etc. I want to edit these videos and add additional stories so that my children can use them in their own growth and development.

I am thankful for the opportunities my generation benefited from as a result of my parents choices to prepare us with education, yet I fear for my children as they confront a repeat of the racial hatred faced by all of those before me. I am now challenged with seeking to assure that my children’s coping skills are strong and that their identities are clear as they move forward to fulfill their mission in the world. Stories, old and new, need to be a part of that process of growing, maturing, awareness of self and ancestry, and an appreciation and understanding of those who came to prepare the way for them.

Brenda Webb Johnson is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida, College of Education, Adult Education department in Tampa, FL. She currently serves at the Education Coordinator for the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans. Brenda worked for more than 20 years as a Clinical Social Worker for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) before switching to education, leadership development, and competency development within VHA.

References:

Forsyth, J. & Carter, R.T. (2012). The relationship between racial identity status attitudes, racism-related coping, and mental health among Black Americans. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 18(2), 128-140.

Lee, J., Sleeter, C., & Kumashiro, K. (2015). Interrogating identity and social Contexts through “Critical Family History”. Multicultural Perspectives, 17(1), 28-32.

Lewis-Coles, M.L. & Constantine, M.G. (2006). Racism-related stress, africultural coping, and religious problem-solving among African Americans. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 12 (3), 433-443.

Sleeter, C. Asking Historical Context Questions.

Sue, D., & Constantine, M.G. (2007). Racial micrco-aggressions as instigators of difficult dialogues on race: Implications for student affairs educators and students. College Student Affairs Journal, 26(2), 136-143.

Torres, L., Driscoll, M. W., & Burrow, A. L. (2010). Racial microaggressions and psychological functioning among highly achieving African-Americans: A mixed- methods approach. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 29(10), 1074.

Imah’s Legacy to a Science Educator

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 03:00:00 GMT

Most people call their grandmothers “granny,” “nannie” or simply “grandma”. Somehow, I knew the given Hebrew name for mother–“Imah” – which was what my grandmother told me to call her, revealed she was a phenomenal lady. As I analyzed closely the details of Imah’s life, it became apparent just how much she shaped my character as an educator and person. As a science educator, I am making a difference in the lives of my students today because of her legacy.

I collected information from multiple interviews with family elders in Chicago, obituaries, family history reports published on past family reunion programs, books on the history of Chicago Public Schools and the Civil Rights movement, old photos from my grandmother with descriptive notes reporting the date, location and event taking place, and personal memories of shared family stories about significant moments in the life of my grandmother.

Tara Nkrumah

Imah’s Life and Education

From birth, my grandmother purposed to live the extraordinary life. Born June 15, 1925 in Muskogee, Oklahoma as Ada Ruth Rollerson, her life goals embodied education for herself and for others. She lived a life without borders personally and professionally that allowed her to always see opportunities and never obstacles.

My great grandfather, Harvey Rollerson, during the early 1900s worked as a mechanic. In 1934, while watching a baseball game, a white man asked to sit on the hood of my great grandfathers car and the response was “no”. The white man in anger took a brick and hit my great grandfather on the side of his face that led to a brutal confrontation. A black man fighting a white man created a dangerous situation for a black family. My great grandparents two days later left their home in Oklahoma in a fully loaded truck with as many of their belongs as would fit and quickly relocated to safety in Chicago with my grandmother and her three other siblings.

Imah’s parents never attended college. Her mother, Cora Rollerson, dreamed of becoming a nurse but financial constraints only allowed her to finish high school and become a housewife. Imah’s father attended school until the third grade.

Imah was in 5th grade at the time they left Oklahoma to live in Chicago. The schools she attended in Oklahoma were better staffed than what they found in Chicago, so after she took a placement test, Imah was skipped up a grade. This was true for all her siblings with her youngest sibling being given a triple promotion. Imah first attended Forest Field School, currently named after an African American, before transferring to Douglas Elementary.

School systems then followed the zoning policy similar to today where students attended their neighborhood school with proof of residency. Because we had relatives that lived at 650 East 65th my great grandparents used their address to enroll Imah at Englewood High in a predominately white neighborhood during the 40’s. There, Imah survived the racial tensions through her close friendships with eight other African American students who also attended the school.

At age 16, despite her parent’s disapproval, Imah married John Smith. She continued her education after high school and attended Wilson Junior College while working, schooling and later raising two boys after her divorce. Her commitment to live by a higher standard fueled her to overcome the social norms and be the different example of how to achieve in life. She later remarried the love of her life and had a third son while progressing professionally as a professor at Fisk and Tennessee State University.

In Chicago, between the 1940’s and 60’s, African Americans, despite their earning potential, were not allowed to move out past their community. What that meant was in your community you could be living in a heterogeneous socioeconomic environment with neighbors having widely distributed incomes. Opportunities to expand into other non-black communities did not exist. The real estate parameters were extremely restrictive prior to enforcement of integration. Once integration began, African American neighborhoods were able to stretch out into the broader communities.

Imah, in Chicago, 1970s

The Civil Rights Movement trained African Americans to resist injustice and lead change for future generations. Significantly, Imah taught in Chicago during this period at Kennedy King College, while encouraging her students, in action and in words, of their ability to rise above society’s fixed standard of mobility for minorities. Imah’s richly invested time in all her students regardless of their cultural background beyond the state required role of teaching Literature and helped many students achieve their born potential. Imah believed that every child was born to do great things. It was evident in her pedagogy, her student interactions and the countless lives she touched beyond mine.

In 1985, at age 60 Imah earned her PhD from Loyola University. Her dissertation was on “The Impact of Desegregation on the Curricula of the Secondary Schools of Nashville, Tennessee”.

Imah, Summer 1972, Chicago Polish Community

My Education

My kindergarten through grade five school years were split between Illinois and Texas. At one point when my parents relocated my third grade year to Texas in 1981, I was one of two African American students in the entire class placed in the special education program despite being a strong student. Imah spent every summer creating an academic boot camp for me. When I reached middle school, Imah instructed my father to enroll me in St. Peter Lutheran School in Chicago where he also attended and graduated. There I succeeded and continued on the path towards academic excellence as designed by Imah, who tracked my performance. Imah, keenly aware of the top schools in Nashville, was instrumental in my receiving the best education from the city’s top magnet school. By high school, I knew the path to success involved goal setting so I identified with my science passion and pursued science education.

The Epiphany

This Critical Family History project literally transformed the surface knowledge I attributed to my professional beliefs and habits as a science educator. I never needed to be convinced of Imah’s commitment to ensure her granddaughter received the best opportunities in life to develop into the created purpose I had been called for at birth. The revelation for me was the extent to which I live my life daily by her example of the lessons I learned over the years as her granddaughter/apprentice. She has taught me many significant life lessons however; five remain active in my daily practice as a science educator.

1) Be a life learner. Imah at the age of 70 simultaneously ended her career as a professor in the United States and started a second career as an educator in Ghana, West Africa. Imah did the unthinkable of moving overseas at considered retirement age to build a home and teach the children in Africa. Her passion to serve silenced the voices of others who questioned her decision to move because Imah always believed one should seek to grow and evolve no matter what age in life.

2) Treat every student as your own. Imah infected me with the perception that the students on my roster were not just people I taught science, but individuals I cared for as if they were my son or daughter. The mindset of seeing every student that way changes your sense of urgency and compassion for their needs. This has been a critical lesson that enhances my ability to touch so many lives the same way Imah encouraged many others.

Imah in Ghana, 2014

3) Learn to teach students from diverse backgrounds. In today’s global society, experience in teaching students from diverse cultures is no longer an option with the burgeoning rate of classroom diversity. Imah understood this early on in her career through her example of teaching in a Polish community during the early 70s in Chicago. She always embraced the unique qualities of all people and raised me to explore and learn about all cultures. This became evident in my desire to expand my knowledge of other cultures through direct experience that lead me for eight years to teach overseas.

4) This is foundational to all educators: Remember to always welcome your class with a warm greeting. Imah’s favorite greeting was “Good morning Lovely Students”. In the number of years growing up that I watched her teach, I was always moved by the positive responses from her students each time she walked into the classroom and greeted them. I have gained access to many hearts of students just like my grandmother because of my repeat practice of greeting my students as she taught me by her example.

5) This one is personal to me because not only did she teach me to believe these words, she also taught me the purpose of every educator to convey this message to their students. Imah’s philosophy of education that every child is born to achieve, were the words she spoke to me personally as a little girl. Then I knew, from the confident way she spoke those words to me that I had an assigned purpose unknown to me at that moment to help students achieve. I know Imah just happens to be my legal grandmother on paper but for many she represented their extended family. Because of her legacy, I too continue the practice as a science educator of reminding students that just like me, they too were born to achieve.

Tara M. Nkrumah, a doctoral student in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa, is an Instructional Leadership Science coach in Hillsborough County. Her research interests include culturally relevant pedagogy, leadership, curriculum, teacher training and social justice. Tara has more than 16 years of secondary school teaching experience in the United States and West Africa. She can be contacted at tnkrumah@mail.usf.edu.

Educational Life History and Teaching Metaphors

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 02:00:00 GMT

What do life history and metaphor have to do with each other? Years ago, I shifted my orientation to teacher education to emphasize the significance of personal, educational-life history and self-development in becoming a teacher. Although many factors nudged me in this direction, my growing dissatisfaction with the limited impact of my own teaching on students’ thinking about teaching and themselves as teachers was the major influence. It slowly dawned on me that prospective teachers picked and chose what content they responded to in my courses, based upon unarticulated assumptions or “implicit theories” about teaching, learning, students, and themselves as teachers. Most embrace content and activities that confirm their implicit theories and ignore those that do not.

This realization should not have surprised me. Early in the twentieth century, John Dewey discussed the tendency among people to respond selectively to events based upon their prior experiences, to develop “private theories” to make life meaningful. In my journey to become a teacher educator and increase the influence of my teaching on my students’ development, Dewey’s concept of “teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience” has been pivotal. My essential task is to induce prospective teachers to identify the assumptions–most of which are hidden–that compose their implicit theories about teaching and themselves as teachers. Most of these are embedded in their personal educational-life histories. I then prompt them to reconstruct these assumptions–via the articulation of a personal teaching metaphor(s) — in ways that are likely to lead to increased control over their future professional development. In particular, my aim is to help them develop the kind of understanding of self as teacher that will enable them to establish a role in school within a community of educators that is educationally defensible and personally satisfying — in other words, congruent with their desired teaching self or personal teaching metaphor.

Below I illustrate this process by sharing an abbreviated version of my own educational-life history, analyzing it for personal teaching metaphors, and then engaging in “action research” to explore my own teaching in relationship to my teaching metaphors. What follows is more than just an illustration of an approach to the study of a teaching self however; it is part of an on-going journey for authenticity in teaching, a journey driven by my desire to integrate personal and social identities and discover the truth of who I am as a teacher. Following Robert Bullough’s advice to teacher educators in Becoming a Student of Teaching: Methodologies for Exploring Self and Social Context (1995, 2001), we need to both shift our emphasis to attend to the individual student and how s/he make teaching (and our programs) meaningful and also engage in a parallel study of our own practice.

My “Initial” Educational-Life History

Fall 1968, I could never have predicted my degree of personal transformation my first two years at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. Campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War and marches for civil rights peaked during this time period. For me, it was a time of unprecedented social consciousness and activism, especially among those of the draft age. I participated in as many demonstrations as possible. Though I loved going to class, I thought I learned most discussing social issues in the dorm with my friends and during sit-ins and teach-ins. Spring 1969, there was a student strike. I now faced the possibility of failing the courses that I did not attend and, more important, failing out of school and becoming eligible for the draft. When I supported the strike and quit going to class, I had made one of the most difficult decisions of my young life. When I received my grades a few weeks later I found I hadn’t failed out of college. My professors had awarded me A’s, rather than F’s, as an informal “conscientious objector.” But I found my relationships to my friends and family strained, to say the least because of my new politics. Ultimately, I severed some of my hometown friendships and my relationship with my family was damaged that first summer vacation.

Campus politics and attendant thoughts of how to help make a better world were not the only factors leading to my developing interest in teaching my sophomore year. After being embroiled in a debate with his students about grades and grading before they were to take a test, a political science professor finally accused them of only being concerned about grades and not with what they were learning. Evidently, the class disagreed. He then told his class that if they ate their blue books they would automatically receive an A for the course and that class attendance was now voluntary. Twenty-three of twenty-five students promptly ate the test. Word about this swept through campus. I remember discussing this incident and the “meaning of education” for days on- and off-campus. When the political science professor was dismissed shortly thereafter amid little fanfare, I became very disillusioned with my “educational institution.” I felt an urgent need to discuss “blue book” issues in a formal classroom setting, either now with my own teachers or in the future with my own students. At this point I was even more sure that teaching was the vocation for me.

During the early 70’s, the army research center at Wisconsin was bombed, an innocent student was killed, and Richard Nixon and others successfully deflected and deflated the antiwar and civil rights movements. Disillusionment with social activism and its impact began to affect me profoundly. Slowly, college and becoming a teacher lost much its meaning. I simply ran out of gas by the end of my senior year and couldn’t muster enough energy to apply for, let alone take seriously, a teacher credential program. I graduated with an English major and math minor but the future looked bleak. Filling out Vista and Peace Corps applications, I become aware that I had no “marketable skills.”

Somewhat panic-stricken I immediately considered going to school to get a license for public school teaching. I enrolled in an introductory education course in a small private school near my home when I realized that I could finish the necessary coursework in one year. It soon became clear that the college was not interested in substantive education — it was interested in student tuition. My course met for a grand total of ninety minutes, aside from mindless independent work that lacked rigor. But I was willing to quietly play the game. I was already heavily steeped in English and math, I was still tired of college, I wanted a license in a hurry, and I was confident that I’d figure out teaching later on-the-job.

In August I was hired as a “temp” to take inventory in city hospitals in New York City. I put my plans for teaching on hold. As I look back now, this temporary, 6-month position was important not only because it paid well and allowed me to live quite extravagantly in an interesting place. More important, it gave me an opportunity to think about what I wanted to do with my life without having to worry about supporting myself. Even though the job was interesting and I was making more money than I knew what to do with, thinking of ways to make some kind of contribution to others, some kind of social impact, continued to bother–or animate–me. Outside of work, I volunteered for McGovern’s campaign in Manhattan, discussed politics and the future of the U.S. with whoever would listen, continued to read novels–in short I realized I missed school and began to think about public school teaching again and much more seriously.

When I returned to finish my licensure coursework spring semester, I was enthusiastic about education. I successfully tested out of nine more credits of coursework and thoroughly enjoyed the three classes I did have to take. In late spring, I was awarded a teaching internship the following fall in English in a culturally diverse, junior high school in Racine, Wisconsin. As I stood outside my classroom the first day fall semester, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t been around or really spoken to junior high kids since I was one. Apprehension, actually dread, began to creep in at that point.

Metaphor Identification and Analysis: Take One

Through a small stream of metaphors, I visualized myself in the classroom world, a “dream” of myself as teacher. I imagined myself in a classroom teaching just as my favorite teachers had taught: I imagined myself as a charismatic expert in English and math; and I imagined that my students would be grateful for my willingness to share my expertise: teacher-is-subject-matter-expert and teaching-is-telling.

The junior high school made short work of these imaginings. In response, I found myself embracing other metaphors associated with the diverse roles I was forced to play in my journey to make a difference in the lives of students. The unarticulated metaphors that guided my classroom actions were usually contradictory. Teacher is friend and policeman, entertainer and father. I seemed to be all of these “selves” and more. It was when disciplining students that I felt the contradictions most acutely, when I felt most ill at ease and out of character. The counselor, confidant, friend in me rubbed against the disciplining father and “good cop/bad cop.” My loyalties were torn; I was many warring selves, schizophrenic professionally. I punished students yet understood their disengagement, the lacking of meaning, in the classroom. As I look back now, it seems clear that I responded to the situation; I did not control it, it controlled me. I would characterize my beginning teacher self in English and math as a “teacher-as-learner.” I was learning how to be a “teacher-gardener” in English and a “teacher-as-provider” in math.

My Educational-Life History as a Graduate Student and Teacher Educator

After 4 years of turbulent junior high school teaching, I left to pursue a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction full time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One of the courses I enrolled in was self-study group dynamics. Another was critically-oriented teacher education, focused on incorporating class, race/ethnicity, and gender perspectives on school curriculum/instruction. Each course affected me deeply and ultimately shaped my decision to pursue a Ph.D. and focus my program and research on the role of seminar groups in critically reflective teacher education.

To support myself during the seven years of graduate school, I first worked as a librarian teaching research strategies in one-shot presentations. Teaching was “telling” and a teacher was an “information-dispenser.” About halfway through my graduate program, I was hired by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to facilitate small groups composed of individuals arrested for drunken driving. Unable to inject much depth psychology into groups where membership was coerced, teaching became “moralizing.” The year before graduating, I supervised elementary school student teachers and led a weekly seminar, which focused on their school-related concerns. Perhaps because I had never taught in elementary school, I was again unable to elicit in-depth critical perspectives into our discussions on campus or in-school. Like many graduate students in education, I was heavily steeped in meaningful theory but had little idea how to translate it into school practice. Teacher-as-talking-head!

Graduating, I left Wisconsin and assumed a position at a small liberal arts college in Ohio, Mount Union College. I taught language arts methods, social studies methods, and two educational psychology courses to elementary education majors. During my three years at Mount Union, I planned activities and presented materials that prevented me from getting too involved with students. Again faced with teaching unfamiliar material, I put all my energy into being an “expert,” even though (or perhaps because) I felt like an impostor. Unfamiliarity with elementary school practice led me to withdraw more and more into theory. I had no intention of getting involved in the lives of prospective teachers and considering how they made their lives meaningful.

About that time, I suddenly realized that in my own teaching I was not seeking communication as much as domination, a means of maintaining my distance from students and of legitimating my position as professor. Put succinctly, I had lost my passion for teaching and found too little pleasure in it. Lecturing lost its luster; theory disconnected from practice lacked power. Pleasure in teaching, I realized, would only come by making an effort to connect with the students in more than superficial ways.

I moved to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota in 1989. This represents more than just a switch from an elementary to a middle school one but rather an emotional and intellectual transformation. When I assumed coordination of the middle school program in 1990, I found myself intimately involved in teacher education program development, and I liked it. Theory and practice could be linked.

The program was a “cohort” which meant I would be with the same students on-campus and in-school for a quarter. Almost despite myself I became involved in their lives as I attempted to help them gain the understanding and skills needed to begin teaching. As a result of these students, and subsequent cohorts, and of the caring relationships I developed with them, I crossed the psychological and intellectual barrier that separated me from meaningful teacher education and led me to escape into theory. It was my growing interest in my students’ and their professional development that came as a result of working with the middle school cohorts and my concern that the program was having too little impact on that development that led me, eventually, to begin to emphasize personal history and self development within the program.

Metaphor Identification and Analysis: Take Two

Despite all the shortcomings, all the visions of education as social reconstruction and continuing personal commitment to social justice, “teacher as expert” dominated my teaching during my first few years as professor. I was clearly not an expert, but in the classroom I acted as though I was one, or at least tried to act like one. Despite all I knew, teaching was telling and students were vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. Drawing on Freire’s (1970) metaphor, education was a form of “banking” where knowledge is deposited in the heads of passive students.

Growing dissatisfaction with “banking” education was prompted by spending a few years in a cohort where I could not escape the obvious shortcomings of the “teaching is telling metaphor” and my concern for the lack of program impact. Continued reading on critically reflective teacher education enabled me to reconsider my thinking about myself as a teacher. Increasingly, I came to think of teaching as critically reflective dialogue, and then discovered that dialogue easily becomes disputational, in conversation terms. Although there are times when I find it necessary to be a “teller” and engage in “dialogue” in the classroom for what I consider legitimate reasons (such as when a substantial amount of information needs to be presented), for the most part, my current metaphor for teaching is “Teacher-as-critically-reflective-conversationalist.”

Engaging in Action Research: A Self Study

As I plan my university course work, I explicitly attend to my teaching metaphor, seeking to create the conditions necessary for its implementation and being mindful of when I must set this metaphor aside temporarily to achieve a different end.

After class begins, I find myself from time to time stopping to evaluate the course and my performance through simple audio-taping. Some of the conditions necessary for a rich, interesting, and worthwhile conversation to take place only emerge over time, and I monitor this progress always hopeful but never being quite certain that a decent conversation has or will result. The process of stopping to take one’s bearings and to evaluate one’s classroom performance, particularly as it relates to the achievement of personal teaching metaphors, is formalized for me in action research.

Consistent with the requirements I have established for the preservice teachers (and now graduate students) with whom I work, I periodically use action research as a means of studying my practice, particularly for exploring the relationship between my teaching metaphor and my classroom performance. I require that they focus their study upon a class or classes that are particularly surprising or troubling.

As I continue to explore my personal teaching metaphors and seek to improve my skills associated with achieving my personal and professional ideals, I find myself returning from time to time to my education life-history for insights into who I am and what I am becoming as a teacher. It is from this story that I make my actions sensible; and changes in the story reverberate outward, affecting how I think of myself in the various roles and, institutional contexts I inhabit. With each return I discover something different and new about myself as a teacher. Just as I expected teacher education students to explore their own educational-life histories and personal teaching metaphors, I expect continue to study my own. To do so is but to recognize something that I previously had ignored and I that is too often forgotten in teacher education, that becoming a teacher is inevitably and always an idiosyncratic and profoundly personal affair. For my student and me, the writing and analysis of educational-life histories, the identification and analysis of personal teaching metaphors, and action research have proven to be powerful means for encouraging professional development.

Walter J. Ullrich is Professor Emeritus at CSU Fresno. His professional interests and expertise now center on equity-oriented teacher education (preservice and graduate) in online environments.

Searching Freedmen’s Bureau Records

Wed, 30 Dec 2015 02:00:00 GMT

About a month ago, I learned that searching Freedmen’s Bureau records was now a possibility. What a wonderful resource for African American family historians! Between 1865 and 1872, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (what came to be known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) assisted tens of thousands of former slaves and impoverished whites in the South and the District of Columbia, in a wide range of areas that included education, employment, and poverty relief.

The Freedmen’s Bureau archives contains well over a million documents. For African American family historians, what is important is that records kept in the Bureau enable one to push further back historically. The records name not only people who were emancipated from slavery in the South, but also their family members and specifics about where people lived, what they did, and who was related to whom. This video from the Freedmen’s Bureau Project elaborates on the importance of these records:

Actually, Freedmen’s Bureau records have been publicly available for years through the National Archives, but only on microfiche. Headquarters records include letters and telegrams related to administration of the bureau, its education division, and communication with state offices. State records include much more localized information that family historians would find useful, such as reports about the destitute, misuse of public stores, reports on murders, and reports on schools; some state records such as labor contracts name specific people. Field office reports can be highly useful to family historians, as these are filled with information about individuals (such as census records, applications for land, and marriage certificates) as well as detailed records about conditions Black people faced, such as forced labor, violence, and “Black Codes.” A marriage records series contains various kinds of marriage records and certificates. The microfiche are viewable at the National Archives in Washington DC, as well as ten regional sites around the country.

Recently, the Freedmen’s Bureau Project was launched to make searching Freedmen’s Bureau records possible from anywhere. The project involves a partnership between FamilySearch International, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), and the California African American Museum. As records are digitized, they need to be indexed so they are searchable. Indexing refers to entering into a database specific information from a record, particularly names of people. At the time of this writing, about 30% of the documents have been indexed.

The project seeks volunteers to assist with indexing. Easy directions are provided on the project website. Essentially, becoming an indexer entails setting up a Family Search account, downloading and installing a Family Search indexing program, joining an online indexing group, and jumping right in. I hope some of my readers volunteer, as I believe this resource will open up a wealth of data to African American family historians, as well as anyone else interested in searching Freedmen’s Bureau records to learn more about African American history.

Good Liberal White People?

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 02:00:00 GMT

“Our philosophy of life is that a man must teach his child to increase the goodness in the world more than his father before him… [My wife] is an English teacher. I hope some day to become a teacher of social studies and a high school counselor and advisor. We believe we can, through our teaching, help to eliminate racial and religious prejudice.” – My dad, Jim Carter, autobiographical essay, 1947.

My parents were idealists. One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, “What have you done today to make the world a better place in which to live?” And although she said it with a humorous lilt, I knew she meant it.

As a white liberal child growing up in Burlington, Vermont (an almost exclusively white place in the 1950s/early ’60s), I became aware of racism for the most part in the abstract. I thought racists were very bad, mean people who mostly lived in the South. An unconscious aspect of this belief was that if you were smart enough to know that racism is a bad thing, then you were already better than those other white people who were racists.

Fast forward to the 1980s. I had graduated from Antioch College, lived and worked in much more diverse environments than Vermont, and ended up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although I had more awareness of institutionalized racism, and the subtleties and complexities of racial issues, I still clung to the belief that I and my family were the “good white people” and the bad racist people were somewhere and someone else (albeit a lot closer than “the South”).

Then, one afternoon in the 1980s at a Carter family reunion in Hampton, Iowa, where my father grew up, he dropped a quiet bomb. He was driving my sisters and me around Hampton, showing us houses he’d lived in, the field where he picked strawberries with his brothers and sisters, and downtown where he used to “monkey around” with his friends. We were on a two-lane highway outside of town when he said in his matter-of-fact way, “Your Aunt Mary told me that our father once burned a cross on that hill over there.”

My parents, Jim and Evie, Denver 1947

What?! NO! Our grandfather in the K.K.K.? Dad didn’t know any more than that. My grandfather, James Ellis Carter, had died in 1934 when Dad was eleven; Aunt Mary was gone, too, so we couldn’t ask her. Would we have asked her? Would we have wanted to know?

Maybe it was just once, I thought, scrambling to excuse it, deny its significance. Maybe my grandfather just went along because, because — there was no getting around it –- because he held racist beliefs, anti-Semitic beliefs. How long had my liberal white Dad known this about his father? Had he forgotten it until that moment, left it buried in the emotional landscape of his hometown until recalled on this tour of the sites of his youth?

I had to know more.

My father described his father as a man who worked very hard, first as a sharecropper and later at Farris’s Nursery. He had a terrible temper, but had lots of friends and loved dancing — in fact, he allowed his children to play music and dance on Sundays, which scandalized their neighbors. He was head usher at the fundamentalist Church of Christ, and one year was elected Grand Master of the local Oddfellows.

Researching further, I discovered that in the mid-1920s, a Ku Klux Klan revival was in full swing, inspired by D. W. Griffith’s popular 1915 epic film Birth of a Nation. The Klan had chapters in almost every state, including Iowa. Their agenda was essentially Anglo-Saxon protestant, white supremacist, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, under the banner of “100% Americanism.” In Franklin County, Klan activity targeted Catholics and people involved in bootlegging, gambling, “lewdness,” and other scandalous behavior. Often, the Klan’s introductory tactic was to march into a church service, robed and masked, quote the Bible, and present a cash donation to the local minister. As a result, church members formed the mainstay of the K.K.K. in Iowa. As in other states, the Klan became a force in politics, backing candidates for governor, the U.S. Senate, and local school boards.

But was the Klan active in Hampton itself? When I called the Franklin County Historical Society to find out, I was nervous, feeling strangely exposed, as though even asking about the Klan were dangerous somehow. Some visceral fear that the Klan would find out and target me? That the historian would think I was a Klan sympathizer? Or, more realistically, that I might learn something more I didn’t want to know?

My grandfather, Jim Carter, age 21

A thick manila envelope arrived with the contents of their K.K.K. file. Heart beating a little fast, I carefully slit open the envelope. A large ad in the Hampton Chronicle invited the townspeople (“Americans”) to a “Ku Klux Klan Klonkave” at the fairgrounds on Labor Day, 1926. The public festivities included music, sports, a parade, national speakers, and fireworks in the evening. Admission 25 cents. There it was. Indisputable evidence. My grandfather could easily have attended this event, been drawn to the excitement. Then a more dreaded thought came: Was he one of the marchers in the parade wearing a white hooded robe? Oh, no. How much easier it was to imagine him as merely a curious spectator!

My dad was three years old in 1926 when the Klan came to town. Was he carried on his father’s shoulders to see the big parade? I notice I’m relieved to find out that the Klan in Hampton apparently did not lynch anyone or destroy homes or businesses. They “only” practiced intimidation, part of me wants to say, as though cross-burning on a family’s front lawn or tar and feathering could not also traumatize and damage people’s lives.

In Iowa, the American Legion, local farm bureaus, feisty newspaper editors, and others organized to eventually defeat Klan-backed candidates and rid their communities of K.K.K. influence. I wish my grandfather had been one of them. The bottom line is that, in the name of moral righteousness and patriotism – which he probably saw as “goodness”—my grandfather was part of a terrorist organization. And if the Klan had not been stopped by others, how far would he have gone along with them? I’d like to think not far, but I have no way of knowing.

Ad in Hampton Chronicle, 1926 Courtesy of Franklin County Historical Society

As a child, my father was exposed to overt racism, and yet by the time he met my mother in 1946, he felt strongly the need to help “eliminate racial and religious prejudice.” Other experiences in his life had led him to a different view from his father’s. In his generation, racism was still a matter of conscious belief. The ideal was to be colorblind. Nowadays, “unconscious bias” and “white privilege” are becoming part of the mainstream discourse about race. College classes and corporate diversity trainings shed light on this formerly invisible aspect of social conditioning. That means racism isn’t out there, but in all of us, beyond our conscious beliefs and intentions.

As “good white people,” we really want to believe things have changed, and of course, many things have. It’s what hasn’t changed, the conscious and unconscious racism still so entrenched in our culture, that scares and angers me. How would I have related to my Grandpa Carter if he were alive and I discovered this about him? And what can I learn from it now?

One thing I see from looking at the roots of my own unconscious racism, seeing the pre-programmed fears and reactions, is that many white people who espouse racist views, who fear strangers from across the border, across the sea, or across the tracks, are not so different from me. They feel they are protecting something precious. They love their children. They like to dance. However wrongly, they assume they will lose if others gain. They could be family. In fact, they are family. In fact, they are me.

References:

David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke University Press, 1987.

“Cross of Fire….in Franklin County” article in Hampton Chronicle, Feb. 1, 1990, courtesy of Franklin County Historical Society, Hampton, Iowa

Janet Carter is a writer, blogger and educator currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. With founder Robert Horton, she co-directs The UNtraining, a program for healing personal and social oppressions.

This blog was first published June 27, 2012, on her blogsite Good Little White Girl. Reproduced here with permission.

British, maybe? Irish, I think?

Sat, 21 Nov 2015 02:00:00 GMT

In 2009, I took a series of anti-racism workshops for white people through The UNtraining. In the first meeting, they asked us to share our ethnicity. I kind of scrunched up my nose and squinted my eyes and said, “British, maybe? Irish, I think? What does it really matter? I’m white, isn’t that why we’re here?” The facilitator gently encouraged me to look into my ethnicity as a way to connect with my experience as a person with a race and an ethnicity, something many white people in America aren’t aware of. I had a vague understanding of what she meant but didn’t totally understand. Nevertheless, I asked a family member to give me names and birthdates of my great grandparents and away I went on Ancestry.com.

I found that six of my great-great-great-grandparents on my mother’s paternal side were part of a wave of immigrants in the mid-1800s who emigrated from Wales to small Welsh-concentrated towns in upstate New York and Wisconsin. My 4th great grandfather Owen Griffith along with his wife Mary and young children moved from Genesee, Wisconsin to the newly formed “Welsh colony” of Arvonia, Kansas in 1870. Arvonia in Osage County, Kansas was the vision of a small group of Welsh-Americans who bought thousands of acres of land and enticed recent Welsh immigrants to move there.

Thanks to the digitization of several Osage County newspapers, I easily discovered the details of my ancestors’ day-to-day lives. I read that Owen Griffith was badly burned by a prairie fire in 1871 but soon recovered; some of his cattle were infected by rabies; and he and his wife bought a syrup pitcher and bowl for Mr. and Mrs. H.G. Landis’ 25th anniversary party. His family was very musical and participated in the annual Welsh cultural festival of Eistedffod. In fact, he and his son Richard Griffith (my 3rd great grandfather) won a duet singing contest in 1885. That same year, Kansas census records showed that Owen and Richard had adjoining eighty-acre farms complete with horses, cows, pigs, cattle, orchards and a dog. They also made 230 pounds of butter. Reading these details helped me feel connected to my ancestors; I felt the danger of living in a burgeoning town without a fire department and the joys of community building.

As I was doing this research and feeling all glowy about finding these cool details about my family, I also felt a tugging at my heart. My ancestors arrived here with their Welsh-ness fully intact, yet none of this Welsh culture had been passed down beyond the first couple generations. This relinquishing of ethnicity is the price of entry into becoming “American”. We were only able to become assimilated so quickly because we had many of the traits that were accepted by the dominant American culture at that time: white skin, Protestant Christianity, and a strong work ethic.

My Welsh ancestors from the moment they stepped foot in America had access to property, community, and respect at the expense of native people. A December 1869 newspaper article describes Arvonia as “just reclaimed from the untutored hand of the Indian” with “industrious, sober Welshmen and other intelligent citizens…who will grow in everything that makes civilization desirable.”* Reading this description of blatant white supremacy through the denigration of native people juxtaposed with the admiration of Welsh people is difficult for me to reconcile. Not only did becoming American mean we lose our ethnicity but the road to assimilation required the unapologetic taking of native land.

Because The Griffith’s were among the early settlers of Arvonia, they directly displaced the native people who lived there before them. When I first discovered this fact, I felt a strong urge to separate myself from this history and to look for anything that might make my immigrant ancestors less complicit. Yet I couldn’t deny the historical proof that Owen Griffith and his family lived on land that was just a few years before part of the Sac and Fox reservation. The Kansa, Osage, and Kiowa were among the native people who lived in present-day Kansas even before the Sac and Fox were forced there. What is now Osage County was the area the Sac and Fox Indians of the Mississippi band were made to live after they were forced out of Illinois and Iowa in 1844. Just two decades later as white squatters encroached into Kansas, or what was then known as “Indian Territory”, the Sac and Fox were forced to move once again to Oklahoma (the new “Indian Territory”). For twenty years, a small band of Sac and Fox did resist and refuse to leave their home, but by 1886 soldiers were called in to forcibly remove them. My ancestors were able to thrive and grow roots in this land only because the Sac and Fox were forced out as well as the tribes that came before them. The Griffiths directly benefitted from the United States government’s aggressive, manipulative, and genocidal policy of removing native people from their heritage lands.

Dr. Sleeter’s framework for critical family history requires us to look at the raw historical truth. Using just one of her Historical Context Questions – “Who wasn’t around and why?” – helped me begin to understand how my family fits into America’s historical systems of power and privilege. As a white person who has felt ethnicity-less, this research has helped ground me. I feel more connected to the beauty of Welsh culture and the fortitude of their pioneer spirit. At the same time, I feel the loss of my Welsh ethnicity through assimilation and the pain of my complicity in a white supremacist system that dispossessed native people so my ancestors could thrive. Understanding these multiple truths helps me hold myself and my ancestors in all of our complexity. From this place of loss, pain, groundedness, and beauty I can help work towards dismantling white supremacy and making our society more equitable.

Footnote:

*“Homes for the Homeless.” The Osage City Free Press (Osage City, Kansas). 18 Dec. 1869. Newspapers.com, p. 4.

But Aren’t We Good White People?

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 02:00:00 GMT

My white family history is, perhaps, somewhat unique—I never heard my parents use a racial epithet, and I was taught that being good white people meant we (including I) should never use one either. My white family history is also very usual—I still learned racism, to be racist, and to protect my white privilege. Reconciling the unique and the usual in my white family history has, and continues to be, a necessarily uncomfortable journey. Herein I examine the role of discomfort in this journey.

In the movie The Prince of Tides, a Southern, white mother and her daughter and younger son are home, going about their early evening routine, when three violent, white male escaped convicts happen upon their house. The men force their way in and proceed to brutally rape all three of them in eyesight of one another. As the rapes are occurring, the older brother arrives to the house, sees what is happening through a window, and enters with a shotgun with which he kills two of the men, while his mother stabs the third. Immediately thereafter, the mother directs the children to “clean up” the house and dispose of the bodies while proclaiming, “this never happened.” From that point forward, none of the four of them ever speak about the incident—to one another, or to others.

Christine Clark

Some twenty years later, the older brother is killed, triggering the sister to attempt suicide. As a result of the suicide attempt, the viewer learns that the sister had been in therapy with a Jewish psychiatrist to whom she had presented herself as the child of Jewish Holocaust survivors. The psychiatrist explains to the surviving brother that she immediately knew the sister was not Jewish, but wondered why she would choose to portray herself as the child of parents who had suffered such great tragedy.

The psychiatrist’s wondering got me wondering about how all family members tell their histories and why, and, more specifically, why my white parents had told me my white family’s history through a social justice lens.

In 1923, my father’s father, the Reverend Edward Oliver Clark, organized what, in 1924, became the Chevy Chase Baptist Church, situated in Northwest Washington, D.C., just outside Chevy Chase, Maryland. He pastored that church from 1924 to 1956. It is of note that the church proclaims to have “restarted” its mission in 1998, and my grandfather’s founding role is no longer mentioned. Next time I am in D.C., I will stop by to see if the bronze plaque of him that was affixed to the outside of the church for as long as I can remember is still there.

From my father, I was taught to understand my grandfather’s pastoral commitments as forward thinking. The main story that my father told and retold during my childhood and into my adulthood as illustrative of this thinking was about how my grandfather taught theology for a year at Howard University, an HBCU, during the “Great Depression,” and did so without compensation. As a result of this role, my grandfather had occasion to invite one or more Howard University students to his home during holidays, ostensibly because these students’ could not afford to travel to their own homes during these periods.

My father describes his engagement with these students as having had a profound impact on his own consciousness regarding race and racism. I am eternally grateful for that because I surely benefitted from it—I am a different person today than I would have been had he not been so impacted. Elsewhere (1999) I have written about how I was raised to be antiracist, largely because of my parents’ progressive Christian values that, though Protestant and Presbyterian, are best described as Liberation Theology-like in the vein attributed to the Catholic Jesuit tradition originating in Latin America. But in critically reconsidering my parents’ intentional antiracist teaching, I discovered a racist element in their teaching me to become only antiracist, and not also what I coin as “antiracist racist.” While these two things may look very similar at a superficial level, the difference between them is vast and significant. Both confront injustice, but antiracists avoid confronting their own privilege when such confrontation calls them into question ‘where they live’ so to speak; when it costs them something, perhaps too much, personally.

Employing an antiracist racist lens, I wonder how those Howard University students experienced my grandfather’s invitation to share the holidays with his family. Could they have said no? If they had, what might have been the consequences? Further, what were their experiences of being in his home and with my father? Was it even true that they were not in their own homes for the holidays for financial reasons, or was this just assumed because of the Depression context, or the general relationship between racism and classism, without regard for the particular economic circumstances of these students (i.e., as, perhaps, from families that were more well off than a minister’s family—black or white)? I also wonder why my grandfather taught at Howard for only a single year. Was that the pre-established term of this appointment, as unpaid “service”? Or, could he have been asked or, at least, encouraged to leave because, though forward thinking, antiracist even, his theological teachings were not yet liberated enough—still too uncritically white—to meaningfully affirm his black students?

I also wonder why no one in my family, myself included, ever asked these questions of my grandfather, my grandmother, my father and/or his sisters, my mother, or simply of ourselves. I wonder why I have yet to take a trip to the Howard University library (despite having previously lived in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area for eight years, and despite still traveling there quite regularly in the eight years since leaving).

While I do intend to make that trek to Howard’s archives to see what actual truths I can uncover about my grandfather’s time there, I am also interested in critically re-considering what my grandfather’s story, exactly as it has been told and retold to me all my life, can teach me—what purpose it serves in my white family history. Returning to the sister in the Prince of Tides, the viewer comes to understand that claiming to be the child of holocaust survivors was her way of coping with the rape while maintaining fidelity to her mother’s insistence that she deny the rape ever happened—she could, in essence, talk about it without actually talking about it. Accordingly, in addition to challenging my grandfather’s story in order to reveal its impact on “the racial other,” I am also interested in leaning into the intent of the story as told to discern its impact on me as “the white one.”

It is clear to me from my growing up, that my grandfather’s story was but one of several similar stories told to construct an overarching narrative of my family, over at least five generations, as more forward than backward thinking in the most general sense. I was to understand myself, and my family as, basically, good people, even good white folk, who though we were limited by our generation (e.g., my mother’s great-, and great-great-grandmother’s families enslaved Africans), we strove, in some way, to think the right thing, and, if possible—if it did not cost us too much personally—to do the right thing. It is also clear to me from my growing up, that this overarching narrative was at least as much aspirational as it was actual—we were not as good, and I am not as good, as we/I have aspired/still aspire to be. So why can’t we just face that history and ourselves? Wouldn’t doing so actually make us, in fact, more good or good in more realized, less solely aspirational ways? Of course it would.

But good is a problem. Writing in the book Occupying the Academy, Juárez and Hayes (2012) define the problem of good in this way:

Good, as a problem, is exemplified by the actions of the eight white clergymen in Alabama who openly opposed, and actively worked against, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Birmingham street demonstrations of 1963, all the while enunciating ideals of common brotherhood, community, and understanding (Carpenter, Durick, Grafman, Hardin, Harmon, Murray, Ramage, & Stallings, 1963). When individuals and groups who profess commitment to goodwill and the democratic ideals of social justice, yet simultaneously do everything within their power to ensure that such commitment and ideals are never realized, the problem of good becomes visible.
We define the problem of good as the insidious paternalism embedded within white liberalism, its privileging of the collective histories, characteristics, and interests of Whites, and its emphasis “on the individual to the exclusion of the group, on liberty instead of equality, [and] on gradual rather than precipitous changes” (L. Bennett, p. 84 in The Negro Mood and Other Essays, published in 1964 by Johnson Publishing Company of Chicago).

Good is antiracist, the problem of good is that it is not also antiracist racist. So while facing our history and ourselves, would make my family and me more good, it would also cost us something—in a word, comfort. Challenging white privilege in everyday life, even in small ways, disrupts comfort—one’s own and that of others, even of racial others. We are all conditioned to protect the comfort that comes from being good in thought and action. When we are not good, we, and most everyone around us, become uncomfortable. But until we become comfortable with being uncomfortable, with being not good, we cannot become really, truly, good.

Dr. Christine Clark, EdD. is Professor & Senior Scholar in Multicultural Education, and Founding Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion in the Department of Teaching and Learning, College of Education, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

How not to do family history

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 02:00:00 GMT

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Last week, while scrolling through Twitter, this image jumped out at me. Oh my god, this is exactly how NOT to do family history in the classroom. Apparently the sixth grade teacher had not thought very clearly about the histories of her diverse students, or the purpose family history might serve in her classroom.

Writing about the mother’s reaction to her daughter’s assignment, Lopez zeros in on how it reflects the teacher’s ignorance of U.S. history. The wording reflects her unchecked assumptions that 1) everyone in the U.S. descends from people who immigrated voluntarily from somewhere else or were not already here; 2) everyone has family success stories that resulted from immigration; and 3) children who were adopted or live in blended families know how to interpret “each side of your family.”

The question also assumed fairly recent immigration, traceable to one or two countries on each side. Left out of these assumptions entirely are African Americans, American Indians, Native Alaskans, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and descendants of Mexicans who already lived in the Southwest prior to U.S. colonization. Undocumented immigrant families would also find the questions uncomfortably intrusive.

Years ago, I witnessed a similar framing in a middle school classroom. The students were about to read a short story set in Puerto Rico, and the White teacher wanted them to think about it in terms of culture. (One may well ask why she didn’t frame stories with White characters in terms of culture.) She began by asking students about their “nationality.” (As U.S. citizens, they could have simply replied that their nationality was American.) While the White students replied with national origins such as Scotland and France, the Black students, sensing the minefield reflected in the image above, shouted out countries they obviously did not come from such as China, thereby ending the discussion.

Should a teacher just avoid family history altogether? No. The suggestions below can help.

1. Become familiar enough with the backgrounds of your students that you can anticipate what digging into family history might reveal, not for purposes of avoiding painful issues, but rather to prepare yourself and the students for what might emerge. In the example above, the teacher apparently did not stop and think about the fact that Africans historically did not “immigrate” to the U.S., or that some of her White students could descend from slave owners. (For help addressing this possibility, see the work of the Tracing Center. Elsewhere are suggestions for children from adopted or blended families. Also anticipate some students not knowing much about their family background at all. Families sometimes hide painful information from children, such as mental illness, alcoholism, or being shamed about their ethnic identity.

2. If you aren’t sure what you might open up, talk with a few parents first, or someone who will be able to advise you. For example, if some of your students are children of refugees, how comfortable or helpful will it be for them to find out more about their family’s refugee experience? Sometimes family history interviews open up conversations about extreme difficulties parents or grandparents have experienced in a way that is healthy, but other times they do not. For example, Pang Xlub Xiong, an elementary teacher of Hmong descent in Minnesota, taught her Hmong students about the brutal escape of Hmong people from Vietnam during the war. In that context, she had the students interview their grandparents, and told me that for many of them, this was the first time the grandparents told their grandchildren what they had been through. Pang was able to open up communication about this painful experience because she gave the students background, and couched her work in terms of respect for elders. If you aren’t sure what to do, ask someone who is knowledgeable, and if possible, talk with some parents.

3. Be clear in your own mind what you want your students to gain from investigating family history, so you can offer adaptations that enable everyone to participate.

Are you attempting to link their experiences with a concept in the curriculum? For example, an elementary teacher I know was teaching a unit about immigration in a school with a high proportion of immigrant students. She wanted students to interview a family member about their immigration experience, but since immigration was not a recent experience of all families, she broadened the question to include the experience of moving from one place to another.

Do you want to delve into history in a way that is more personalized than simply following a textbook? This is something I enjoy a good deal, but doing so requires familiarizing oneself with history told from multiple viewpoints. For example, how do Mexican Americans tell U.S. history? How do Japanese Americans tell U.S. history? Be prepared for multiple, even conflicting, viewpoints that can emerge from multiple family experiences.

Are you developing a writing assignment and want to use family history as the focus? If so, students might have the option of researching someone in their own family, or in someone else’s, such as a neighbor or community elder. One of my students, for example, chose to research the family of the political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky, rather than his own family.

Are you attempting to prompt students to get to know each other better? If so, you might invite everyone to bring a story or recipe from home, and to find out as much as they can about its origin or significance in their own family.

4. Finally, since many excellent family history books for kids are available, get one or two you can draw on for ideas, especially if you haven’t worked with family history before.

Locating Jewish Family Roots

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 03:00:00 GMT

There is a common perception that the persecution of Jewish people makes locating Jewish family roots difficult, if not impossible. In many families, Jewish ancestry has simply been hidden to avoid persecution. Recently I was talking with someone who had not known until reaching adulthood that she had Jewish ancestry. One of my guest bloggers from New Zealand — Esther Fitzpatrick – writes about her search for an adopted ancestor who had been known as “the little Jewish girl.” The Holocaust wiped out not only six million Jewish people, but also many of the records of who they were and who their families were.

Nonetheless, a rich array of tools and resources exists for Jewish family historians. Here I will direct you to some of them. But before you plunge in, as Judaism 101 points out, you should know that the main websites about Jewish family history recommend beginning with the same steps as for any family history:

Gather as much information as you can from family members by talking informally or interviewin g , even if they don’t think they know anything about the family’s history. Get names of family members, any information you can about births and deaths, and where people came from. If you can, get social security numbers as well.
Use the census of the U.S. or of any other country where your family has lived, to trace as many people as you can, working backward from the present. To the extent possible, use other kinds of records described in this blogsite.

Currently the main database people are going to for Jewish families is JewishGen , which is an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage. JewishGen is loaded with information and databases . The one that I would probably go to first if I were Jewish (I’m not) is the JewishGen Family Finder , a “crowd sourced” compilation of family surnames and towns (submitted by Jewish family historians like you), that is free to use. Initially it was begun in 1982, then put online in 1996, and has expanded rapidly since then. At present, the database contains over a half million entries submitted by genealogists around the world. You can check out what proportion of the entries are from which countries. JewishGen also has a Holocaust database , a burial registry , and other searchable databases.

The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) collects and disseminates information about Jewish genealogy, and assists with the process of researching Jewish genealogy. This organization also holds an International conference on Jewish genealogy annually. Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database , a service of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers a searchable database for individual names, and lists of documents such as death lists, concentration camp lists.

If you are a member of Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.Org , you can access help pages for Jewish Genealogy. The page on FamlySearch.org looks particularly useful because of the various tools it offers such as lists of organizations, and Jewish population maps . There are additional websites online, but these are good ones to start with.

In addition, there are “brick and mortar” places to visit that house archives. One such place is the Family History Collection of the Center for Jewish History in New York. There, you will find many collections that can be searched by visiting the center, such as marriage records, New York court records, Jewish immigration records.

In short, Jewish family historians will find a wealth of records and databases that make locating Jewish family roots much more possible now than even a decade ago.

Family History in the Elementary Classroom

Wed, 02 Sep 2015 03:00:00 GMT

Teachers sometimes ask what advice I would give for family history projects with students. Since I was asked this question most recently by an elementary classroom teacher, and since developmental age of children does matter when deciding what is appropriate, I decided to devote this blog to teaching critical family history in the elementary classroom.

For those of you who are new to my blogs, why the term “critical”? This question really asks a teacher to think about the purpose for engaging students with family history. In many classrooms, teachers use family history for students to get to know themselves and their peers better, the focus being mainly on the individuality of children in the classroom. Adding the concept of “critical,” as I use it in this blog, suggests situating one’s family within a wider context of relationships among socio-cultural groups.

This consideration leads to what I think is an important question for any teacher to ask about doing family history in the classroom: Why are we doing this, what kinds of questions are developmentally appropriate for your students, and how does family history relate to the curriculum? Whether you will encourage the children to think about a wider context of relationships or not, family history by itself may open up sensitive questions that the teacher must be prepared to deal with. For example, what should children who were adopted do? What about children of refugee families who may be reluctant to talk about a painful past? What about children whose parents feel this activity probes too much into private matters?

So I believe it is important to begin by thinking about how family history will relate to the curriculum. For example, several years ago I spent time in a fifth grade classroom in which the teacher was teaching a unit on immigration. About two-third of her students were from immigrant families. She wanted to start the unit by having her students investigate their own family experiences with immigration, so the first assignment was to interview someone in the family, preferably an older person, about the family’s experience with immigration or with moving. Note the flexibility she built in here: students had a choice in who to interview, and the focus of the interview could be immigration and/or moving from one place to another. Before students did their interviews, the class brainstormed interview questions, and she showed them how to take notes, so the children would be prepared. When they came back to the classroom with their notes, she showed them how to write their notes up into a story, linking this part of the activity with the writing curriculum. Students posted their write-ups, then read each other’s. As the unit on immigration unfolded, their family stories became an important part of the larger unit. Because of her preparation, her linking with the curriculum, and flexibility in what the children could do, the family history work turned out very well.

Teachers can help children, even very young children, uncover painful or sensitive issues in their pasts, but I don’t recommend attempting to do so without knowing what you are doing. One of the best examples I have seen of a teacher doing this is third grade teacher Pang Hlub Xiong’s work with Hmong students in her school. Pang is a daughter of Hmong refugees, and because of her own family experience, is aware of the painful experiences Hmong families have endured. She created an informal club, Hmong Club, in her school to provide a place where Hmong students could come together to learn more about what it means to be Hmong. As she explains here, as she became aware of how little her elementary students knew of Hmong history, she decided to have them interview their grandparents. She explains that for many of them, this interview provided the first time the grandparents opened up to their grandchildren about what they had been through. Like the teacher above, Pang prepared the children with open-ended, flexible questions that allowed relatives to share what they were comfortable sharing. Doing so encouraged very rich conversations between grandparents and their grandchildren, but the grandparents did not have to share anything they preferred not to share. By constructing the interviews flexibly, Pang opened the door to communication but did not impose requirements on what should be shared or discussed.

Many good books are available for working with children on family history; elsewhere I have reviewed three of family history books for kids . There are helpful family tree templates available that allow for all kinds of family structures; Family Tree Templates.net is a great resource. There are also helpful lists of interview questions children can ask family members, such as this list in Family Tree Magazine .

In other words, a lot of help is available for how to do family history. Why you want your students to work on their family history, and what is appropriate for your students to look into, are questions other people cannot answer for you. If some of your students would rather not look into their own history, would it work to explore the family history of someone else in the community or of someone famous? I have seen teachers provide both these options when the project is linked to history or to story-writing. If very little information is available beyond interviews with parents or grandparents, or if a parent objects, is there something else the students can research that contributes to the purpose of this classroom project? As students are learning about their families’ histories, how might you build on this rich experience, so that it isn’t an isolated activity? And finally, since family history is a popular activity, have your students already done a family history project in a previous grade? If so, how might you build on, rather than duplicating that earlier work?

I invite comments to this blog, especially comments by teachers who have worked with family history in the classroom, or teachers who are considering doing so but have questions.

Learning what it Means to be an Immigrant

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 03:00:00 GMT

I teach a multicultural education course that is required for all Education majors at the University of Maine. Where some of my students come from, Somali refugees have settled recently. Can my students draw from their backgrounds to learn what it means to be an immigrant?

The conceptual framework for my course is the multicultural curriculum process developed by Gary Howard. Gary argues that before you can get very far in understanding people whose backgrounds are different from your own, you need to develop personal and cultural self-awareness. One of the first activities in this course is writing an “I am from” poem, in which every line begins with those three words. In this poem, students identify some of the influences that have made them who they are today, including family heritage, experiences, and values, the values of the community(ies) where they grew up, the activities (e.g., music, sports) that have been important in one’s life, etc. I provide my own “I am from” poem as a model, and I start with the line, “I am from England and Germany and Latvia”. I have other family lines as well, including “I am from my father, who wanted to be an unhyphenated American” and “I am from my maternal grandmother, who was widowed with four children and a fifth child on the way.”

John Maddaus

Most students come up with some kind of ethnic heritage in their poems, such as “I am from Franco-Americans” (French Canadians). Or “I am from an Italian-American father and an Irish-American mother.” After reading White Bread, I plan to try digging a little deeper next semester into what these ethnic identities really mean to them.

I’m writing from Riga, Latvia, where I’m on a two-week trip with my brother, Charles, and other family members, learning about the city and country where out paternal grandfather, Ingo Maddaus Sr. (1879-1958) was born. Thanks to Charles, who has done extensive family history research in Latvia in seven previous trips here, I now know a lot more about my father’s family history than I did when I interviewed my father, Ingo Maddaus Jr. (1909-2005) for a family history I wrote in 1995.

Ingo Sr. emigrated from Latvia to New York City (specifically to the borough of Brooklyn) with his parents and five siblings in 1884. My great-grandparents, Oscar Maddaus (1844-1896) and Augusta (Ratminders) Maddaus (1850-1937) were ethnic German and ethnic Latvian, respectively. My father grew up in an extended family that included Augusta and five aunts and uncles. Augusta was bilingual in Latvian and German, and read German-language newspapers right up to the time of her death. Despite living in the United States for over 50 years, she never became fluent in English. Ingo Sr. was bilingual in German and English. Ingo Jr., on the other hand, spoke only English, and couldn’t communicate well with his own grandmother. In two generations, my family lost two languages, first Latvian, then German, and we became monolingual Americans, speaking only English.

In White Bread, Christine reports that her mid-western German-American ancestors dropped the use of German language, culture, and religious identity abruptly during and immediately after World War I, as a response to anti-German feeling during that war, when Germany was on the opposing side. The adults sought to shield themselves and their children from the hostility that might arise from being identified as German-American. In my father’s family, the process of Americanization and language loss seems to have taken longer, perhaps because Brooklyn at that time had a large German-American community. Or perhaps it was because my grandfather (Ingo Sr.) was a businessman, importing German machine tools and speaking German in his work with representatives of German industries.

In any case, my father (Ingo Jr.) was an active agent in his own Americanization, determined, as he put it, to be an “unhyphenated American.” For starters, he denied that we had any Latvian ancestry, insisting that Augusta was German. He resisted learning to speak German, and struggled when required to take a course in reading technical German while a Mathematics major at Columbia University (1927-1932). He was critical of Augusta and Ingo Sr. for what he perceived to be anti-Semitism in the 1930s. As a boy, I remember his complaints when Ingo Sr. wanted to drink beer (which Dad identified as a German drink) when visiting our home in the 1950s. In short, his effort to be “white bread” American came with costs, not just in language loss, but also in denying and disowning his heritage, and in the quality of his relationships with his father and grandmother.

I suspect that there are losses as well in the lives of my students and their families. Many of them are descendants of French-Canadians who moved from Quebec to Maine in the late 1800s and early 1900s to work in the lumber, paper, shoe, and textile mills that were scattered across Maine until the de-industrialization of the late 20th century. Few if any of my Franco-American students speak French, partly because their grandparents or great-grandparents were punished for speaking their French in Maine schools, and partly because Quebecois French was regarded as inferior to Parisian French, which was taught as a “foreign” language in many Maine high schools. Also, as mill workers or their family members, my students’ ancestors were looked down on as working class and uneducated. In the early decades of French-Canadian immigration, the Protestant majority in Maine often viewed Roman Catholic religion as a threat. In the 1920s, Maine had a very active KKK organization that was influential in Maine elections, and whose primary target was Catholics, NOT African-Americans (of whom there are very few in Maine). Even within the Catholic church, Franco-Americans were looked down on by the Irish Catholics who dominated the church hierarchy and priesthood. In some towns, there used to be an Irish Catholic church and, just down the street, a French Catholic church. Small wonder, then, that many Franco-Americans tried to put their immigrant backgrounds behind them.

I find it very interesting to listen to how my students with French-Canadian heritage process our discussions about the thousands of Somali refugees who have settled in the former textile mill towns of Lewiston and Auburn, Maine. Some of my students live in or near those two cities, and have had personal contacts with Somali students in their schools. Others have only observed the newcomers from a distance. These Somali refugees are black Africans of the Muslim faith. They usually arrive speaking Somali, Swahili, Arabic, and/or other languages, but very little English. Like the French-Canadian immigrants of a century ago, they tend to have large families. They wear traditional clothes, including the hijab (head scarf) for women and even for small girls. They have opened a number of businesses on Lewiston’s main downtown street. Some long-time residents of the Lewiston area perceive the Somalis as outsiders and even as a threat in formerly mostly-white and Christian towns. Two thousand Somali refugees arrived in Lewiston, a city of 35,000 people, in 2002-2004 as secondary migrants, from larger cities where they had initially been settled in African-American communities. Soon afterwards, Lewiston’s mayor complained that Somalis were taxing the city’s resources and the city should discourage other Somalis from joining them. Then a white supremacist group from out of state tried to organize an anti-immigrant rally, which was poorly attended, while thousands of Mainers (including myself) joined a counter rally in another part of the city.

So are Somali refugees a threat, or are they folks like us, just the latest in a succession of waves of immigrants settling in Maine? In my class, we explore differences and similarities by hosting a group of Somali high school students on a visit to our campus for small group discussions of culture. We also visit the multi-ethnic mosque that opened about five years ago just off campus. In my students’ reflections on these and other activities, they indicate a growing appreciation of Somali people, about whom some of them knew very little, and about whom they may have harbored negative stereotypes. A few sign up for the optional courses in teaching English as a Second Language.

Reading White Bread challenges me to do more: to find better ways of talking about our heritages, what it means to be an immigrant, what teachers can do to better support immigrant children in their classrooms and schools, and how to become allies. Would White Bread be an appropriate text for this course? It’s something I’ll consider, in consultation with my colleagues who teach other sections of this same course. For starters, I’m planning to organize a book group for faculty, staff, and graduate students to read and discuss White Bread and related readings.

Christine Sleeter

New Blog Location

Defending Ethnic Studies

Playbook for Obscuring Truth

State-Sponsored Ignorance

State-Sponsored Ignorance

Book Bans

Messaging

Upending Gag Order Legislation

Confronting Whiteness with Critical Family History

Now is the Time to Rethink Schooling

Now is the Time to Rethink Schooling

Kappa Delta Pi Laureates

Critical Family History - a way around prohibitions on teaching

Critical Race Theory

Facing Injustices Head-on through Critical Family History

Debates about Ethnic Studies

Two Novels on their Way

Online Education during COVID

Protests and White Supremacy

Voice in Novel's History Stories

Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools released!

Welcome to new website

Critical Family History Book Review: Bella’s Legacy

Esoteric Clues: It’s no secret that slave-owners fathered children with their slaves

The claimant’s mother’s name was Clora, and since you ask me I will tell you that Overton, her owner was the father of the claimant. “I will tell you everything you ask me.” — Testimony of former slave Nancy Hawkins, in the Civil War pension file of Henry Jones (March 12, 1920)

An Affecting Scene in Kentucky

Seeing/Eye Coordination

Anderson and Laura Johnson, 1870 Lewis County Missouri

Clory Munday, Virginia and Nancy Overton, Serilda and Willis Johnson

Forest Cemetery, Section D: Mace Wilson family burials

Mason Wilson burial, Black, died August 1904

Mace Wilson enumerated with Serilda Johnson 1900 Adair County Missouri

Mary Anderson with her sons Amos and Hazel; and mother Serilda Johnson 1900 Adair County, Missouri

Anderson and Nancy Overton Johnson with children and Clory Munday, 1880 Knox County, Missouri

Serilda is aka Dorcas, with Willis Johnson, 1880 Lewis County, Missouri

Claiming the Legacy of Oppression through Art

Immigration and White People’s History

Repatriation of Land to Tribes

Butler, a white man taking a stand against slavery

Who was Benjamin Franklin Butler, and why would anyone care?

Genealogy and Anti-Racism: A Resource for White People

Critical Family History Book Review: Before we were Yours

Confronting Racism at Home

The Beginning of a Journey Toward Critical Family History: Meet “Pop”

Dr. Christina Berchini, Guest Writer

A Sense of “Place”: Revisiting Jamaica, Queens

“Pop”

Jamaica, Queens – courtesy of Google Maps

Pop’s Jamaica Avenue shoe-shining location on Jamaica Avenue

Critical Family History, Silence, and Future Plans

References

Returning What was Stolen

Homesteading: White settlers and Indigenous land

Connecting homesteading and family wealth with land theft

Returning what was stolen

The First Step Towards Healing

Life History – My Inspiration

Life History – Participant’s Dedication

A Healing Summary

References

Critical Family History Book Review: Homegoing

Impact of Ethnic Studies on Attitudes

White people in Ethnic Studies

Roots too?

The conundrum of culture

White people in Ethnic Studies

Theft of Indigenous Peoples’ Land

Critical Family History Book Review: Women of the Dawn

Women of the Dawn

Four Generations of One Family’s Perspectives on Racism

References:

Imah’s Legacy to a Science Educator

Tara Nkrumah

Imah’s Life and Education

Imah, in Chicago, 1970s

Imah, Summer 1972, Chicago Polish Community

My Education

The Epiphany

Imah in Ghana, 2014

The claimant’s mother’s name was Clora, and since you ask me I will tell you that Overton, her owner was the father of the claimant. “I will tell you everything you ask me.”

— Testimony of former slave Nancy Hawkins, in the Civil War pension file of Henry Jones (March 12, 1920)