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C H A N G E S TA R T S W I T H M E
In this chapter, we’ll start by examining why people often retreat into silence in response to racial tension and how that silence is a response to racial stress. I’ll discuss how teachers can learn to manage racial stress so they can respond to racial conflict by speaking up instead of staying silent. We’ll explore how to lay foundational knowledge your students need to engage in conversations about race, consider two sample classroom activities, and discover how to set the tone for dialogue about race.
Understand Silence as a Response to Racial Stress
Research suggests that White parents and guardians, in particular, respond to racial stress by adopting color-blind attitudes and teaching their children to do the same. Researchers Jamie Abaied and Sylvia Perry (2021) studied a sample of 165 White parents following the deadly Charleston church shooting in 2015, finding that White parents tend to avoid conversations about race and racism with their children. Even when these conversations increased in 2020, following George Floyd’s death, White parents tended to adopt a color-blind approach when talking to their children about race, or waited to have these conversations until their children were older (Abaied & Perry, 2021). In a 2016 study of 107 White mothers of children ages four to seven, 81 percent reported it was important to have conversations about race, while only 62 percent reported having them. Of these, 70 percent displayed a color-blind approach (Vittrup, 2016). Researchers Ali Michael and Eleonora Bartoli (2014) write about why White families perpetuate color blindness:
Most of the white families [opt] to socialize their children by telling them not to be racist, not to talk about race, not to use the word “black,” and not to notice racial differences. They [want] their children to believe that all people are the same and that racism is bad. The idea that by not talking about or seeing race White parents will raise “natural” nonracists, and conversely, that bringing up race somehow contributes to racism, is a common theme among White parents and educators, as well as children
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
Psychologist Howard Stevenson (2014) calls experiences like the one I had with my daughter moments of racial stress. Racial stress is the overwhelming feeling of dealing with racial encounters, which affects people of all races and impairs an individual’s thoughts, behaviors, emotions, and relationships. In Stevenson’s (2014) view, the desire to remain silent when faced with racial stress is an avoidance coping strategy that arises out of a deep fear of engagement.
