Why Teaching Young Students About Race and Racism Matters

told her that’s where many mothers with my skin color had been—standing up against the injustice of these laws.

That was the pivotal moment when I learned that it was impossible to teach my daughter—or my students—about who Dr. King was without also telling the ugly truth about racism. My daughter was asking me to help her make sense of this story. To support her development, I would have to engage in conversations about racism.

As teachers, we tend to assume that students have sufficient foundational knowledge about race that allows them to grasp more complex topics around racism and societal injustices and engage in respectful conversations with their peers (Derman-Sparks & Edwards, 2020). Imagine if we made these same assumptions in our approach to teaching mathematics. What if we assumed that students had basic number sense and plowed ahead with algebra or geometry without first finding out what students already knew about numbers? We know better than that; we know the confusion that arises when we don’t check for understanding, scaffold the learning, and provide appropriate supports. And yet, when it comes to the topic of race and racism, teachers often dive deep without doing any preassessments, with little or no sense of what students know or don’t know. It’s OK and appropriate to begin with the basics—including where skin color comes from and what race is and what it isn’t—no matter the student’s age.

In addition to offering students the foundational knowledge they’ll need to navigate social justice issues, talking about race and racism creates a classroom culture where everyone works together to cultivate respect and mutual care. Educators Dorothy M. Steele and Becki Cohn-Vargas (2013) demonstrate that students thrive in school when they feel known and when their voices are valued. Only when students are allowed to take risks, challenge themselves, and learn to think critically about the world will the classroom become the safe space they need to thrive (Rogin, 2013). The social experience of the classroom plays a critical role in students’ learning. According to Vygotsky’s social development theory, knowledge is the product of the interaction between an individual and the environment, and understanding is social and cultural (Vygotsky, 1978). I wrote about this in an article called “How to Talk to Kindergarteners about Race” (Rogin, 2013):

To this end, many schools have become devoted to . . . curriculum and schoolwide experiences that take into consideration the social and emotional lives of children—and how to help them navigate through conflicts, learn language to be inclusive with one another, and name and regulate difficult emotions that arise. Often this work on social and emotional health does not include explicit teaching about race, skin color differences, and racism. Too often we assume that, in our general teaching of how to be inclusive, our students will know how to communicate effectively across racial and ethnic differences.

Social-emotional learning is essential, but it doesn’t go far enough to address racism. It turns out just teaching children to be polite or kind does not teach them the specific skills they need to communicate respectfully across differences (DermanSparks & Ramsey, 2011). For example, I used to notice a pattern of White students touching Black students’ hair, which is a microaggression (Asare, 2020). I saw it in my classroom, learned it had happened to my daughter more than once, and heard about it from Black parents.

One of the skills in our social-emotional learning program is the personal space tool, teaching students to discern when and how to give their friends space. But this lesson on personal space did not stop the White students from touching the Black students’ hair. At that point, I decided to teach students explicitly about different textures of hair. I explained that certain textures can be damaged from the oil on our hands. Together, we imagined how it feels to spend time on your hair only to have it messed up by someone else’s fingers, and we brainstormed what they could do instead of touching. We also talked about how the behavior itself is disrespectful. Only then did my White students give Black students personal space around their hair. Helping my students learn how to respect one another required this explicit teaching about difference.

The goal of this teaching and learning, ultimately, is to disrupt patterns of bias, prejudice, and exclusion. It seeks to create classroom conversations and communities that are more cohesive, respectful, and inclusive by breaking silences that have led to ignorance and incompetence regarding race that would be unacceptable in reading, mathematics, or any of our other core academic subjects.