Hurry Up, But Don’t Go Rushing In: Preparing to Do Effective Anti-Racist Work in English Classrooms

by Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides & Carlin Borsheim-Black, authors of Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students

Right now, both of us are hearing from a lot of people in our lives, including local teachers and former teacher candidates, asking us what they can do to get started with antiracist work in their English classrooms. Some are sharing that their districts or states are telling them that they are expected to do antiracist work come fall. 

Had this requirement been handed down to us before doing the work to write our book, we would have been terrified. 

Not because we didn’t want to do it. We were burning to do antiracist work, especially in our white-dominant teaching institutions. But we hadn’t figured out a way to do it yet, to show budding English teachers what it could look like to teach literature with antiracist goals. And we understood that attempting this work and getting it wrong could blow up (see Sassi & Thomas, 2008), potentially causing more harm than good.

To be clear, we want English teachers to take on the challenge of designing curriculum and practicing pedagogies with clear antiracist goals. And we urge English teachers to get to work to put such curriculum in place as soon as possible as the stakes for all of this has been high for generations, especially for students of color. Yet, we also want to offer some suggestions for doing so to better ensure that we all do more good than harm. We are offering these suggestions and pacing knowing that it is June and that teachers might get a chance to get some reading done before fall.

1. Learn more about how racism works. For both of us, in our early attempts to “address race,” we were limited by our own shallow knowledge about racism. What else is there to say with students when reading books like A Raisin in the Sun or Beloved besides, “Isn’t this terrible?” Together, we committed to reading together, to dialoguing, to joining others in book groups for teachers, for parents, for community members focused on antiracism. You might pick up titles like Kendi’s How To Be an Antiracist or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and The Origin of Others have been particularly life changing for our work as English teachers. Watch films like DuVernay’s 13th or Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. Doing this research will expand teachers’ knowledge of how racism works so that they grow their vocabulary for key ideas, key concepts, key themes that will help with curriculum design for literature instruction.
2. Read more literature by and about people of color. In her recent article in The Horn Book, “Our Modern Minstrelsy,”  award-winning, African-American novelist, Kekla Magoon, critiques the publishing industry for its minstrelsy—its painted on “blackface” meant to represent a world of lives and experiences of black people as though they can be represented within a narrow band of stereotypes. One lesson we take from Magoon’s work for our antiracist teaching is that our potential for interrupting whiteness is thwarted when we continue to rely on commonly-taught canonical books about racism written by white authors (e.g., Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird). Following the suggestions of African-American English Education scholar, Tamara Butler, in her article, “#Say[ing]HerName as Critical Demand,” we both read Assata Shakur: An Autobiography, the story of a black woman exiled because of her history as a Black Panther. Never before had we heard this distinct voice around racism: bold, unapologetic, not written with a white readership in mind. Other titles we have loved include Octavia Butler’s Kindred, The Book of Night Women by Marlon James, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. We need to immerse ourselves in the voices and experiences of people of color to begin to address the immersion white people have experienced across a lifetime of education without these voices. This process has no end.
3. Read about antiracist strategies that work. For a long time, understandably, much of the research on doing antiracist work has focused on what hasn’t worked. We all need to know about what doesn’t work to avoid re-stigmatizing vulnerable students and alienating students whom we might otherwise be able to reach. So, for example, we are seeing a lot of resource lists featuring a focus on unpacking white privilege, perhaps even staging an exercise with students like the privilege walk. These exercises can be important for exposing white privilege and helping white students understand the unearned ways in which their lives are so much easier than those of people of color without having to do a thing for them. However, much can— and often does—go wrong with activities such as these (see Leonardo, 2004; Lensmire et al., 2013; and Grinage, 2019). And ultimately, they have also been exposed by scholars as focusing too much on passively-constructed effects of racism (e.g., white privilege), without pointing to the ways many white people daily continue to act in ways that continue to uphold and bolster white supremacy (Leonardo, 2004). So locate strategies that have been shown to work. We have found helpful resources through Teaching Tolerance; NCTE; Baker-Bell, 2020, and, of course, our recent book Letting Go of Literary Whiteness. 
4. Frame racism as systemic, rather than interpersonal. When engaging in antiracist literature instruction, it has notbeen helpful for us, for example, to simply raise discussion and solicit multiple perspectives on complex race topics that students may or may not know much about. In our experiences, these classroom discussions often remain on the surface level, with individual students sharing their personal opinions and beliefs. To really stretch students beyond what they already know or believe–and to take discussions about racism beyond the surface level, we have learned to frame systemic racism as a concept to be learned, rather than a belief to be changed. Accordingly, we articulate specific objectives that guide our teaching, scaffolding, and assessing of students’ understanding and growth. This one shift has been a game changer in our teaching about racism, especially in predominantly white contexts.
5. Read and journal about your own racial identity/ies. For the majority of the teaching force, 84% of which is white, the dominant racial ideology of whiteness has meant that many of us have not felt compelled to examine our own white racial identities. Yet, we have to. We need to understand what whiteness is, how it operates, across contexts, whether we are (fully) racially conscious of it or not. Find an ally, organize a reading and dialogue group, one built around trust, and start this process. Texts on the topic of whiteness that have resonated deeply for us include: Thandeka’s Learning To Be White, Lensmire’s White Folks, Thompson’s “Tiffany, Friend of People of Color”, and Saad’s Me & White Supremacy.

And if you’re going to do antiracist work, we highly recommend finding at least one ally, ideally at your school, but it can be remote, too. We couldn’t have done any of this without having each other to call, to write to, with whom to share student work and progress. You will need it, too.

Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides is professor & coordinator of English Education in the English department at Westfield State University in Western Massachusetts where she teaches courses on young adult literature, English methods, and the role of race in the ELA classroom. Her research and scholarship focus on antiracist teaching strategies and the role of conceptions of adolescence in young adult literature and in teacher thinking.

Carlin Borsheim-Black is associate professor of English Education at Central Michigan University (CMU), where she teaches English methods and young adult literature. Her research and teaching prioritize  antiracist literature instruction, with a particular focus on challenges and possibilities for antiracism in predominantly White teaching contexts.