How I Came to Understand My Silence

I wasn’t proud of this strategy. It didn’t match with the kind of teacher I thought I was and with what I valued about teaching. I dreamed of creating respectful, inclusive classroom communities. I was committed to helping my students learn how to listen to one another, solve problems peacefully, and care deeply about one another and the larger community. They are the reasons I became an elementary school teacher in the first place.

My college self would not have recognized myself years later, sitting in front of a group of young students, closing a book before finishing it. My college classes hadn’t prepared me for this moment; none of the books I’d read on teaching had described what I was feeling. Yet, I knew that keeping my students from talking about a subject because of my own discomfort with it was not good teaching.

In this introduction, I’ll tell you a bit about my upbringing and explain how I came to understand my silence. As I confronted uncomfortable truths about myself, I learned to speak up about race in my personal life. I also recognized that teaching young students about race and racism is essential for cultivating respect and care in the elementary classroom. Of course, that is challenging work for many reasons, perhaps most of all because cultural attitudes about race and systemic racism inform our experience as teachers, both individually and collectively. Finally, I’ll give you an overview of the book before we dive into part one.

I grew up in Berkeley, California, in the 1980s, in a household where we talked openly about politics and how to create a more just and better world. I attended public schools in Berkeley, one of the first cities in the United States to desegregate their schools with two-way busing. All my elementary school classrooms were diverse. I was politically active as a teenager—I canvassed for local politicians and organized a teach-in at my high school during the Gulf War of 1990. My education hero was Paulo Freire (2000), author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, who champions transformative education and giving people the skills and tools necessary to change their lives for the better. For all these reasons, I thought I would be good at leading conversations about racism with young students. Realizing that I was, in fact, unprepared to do so shook me.

I realized that speaking about racism is not a natural ability or a skill gained from one’s environment; I had not yet built the competencies needed to engage in difficult conversations about race. How might my experience have been different if my kindergarten teacher or my parents had engaged in conversations with

me about race and racism, and what it means to be White? Though most of my teachers were White, I don’t remember any of them talking about their race, about the diversity in our classrooms, or how to understand and respect each other’s differences. I did not have conversations with my family about race specifically, or what it meant to be White. When I discovered later that my father, a political science professor at UC Berkeley, devoted much of his work to issues around White supremacy and its inextricable ties to U.S. presidents, I marveled that the subject didn’t come up in family conversations.

As I thought about my own discomfort around talking about race and racism with my students, I began to examine the conversations I had about race with my daughters, aged six and four at the time, who are biracial—I am White, and their father is Black Ghanaian. We had books in their bedroom library about skin color, including The Skin You Live In by Michael Tyler (2005), All the Colors of the Earth by Sheila Hamanaka (1999), and The Colors of Us by Karen Katz (2002). We had also intentionally bought dolls with brown skin and often talked about our different skin colors. (When they were very young, they had named my skin vanilla, their dad’s skin chocolate, and their own skin milk chocolate.) However, I had not yet talked to them explicitly about racism.

One day, my older daughter brought home a picture book from school about Florence Mills, a Black singer in the 1920s, titled Harlem’s Little Blackbird by Renée Watson (2012). As we read the book together, she stopped at a page that showed a group of White people holding signs that read “Whites Only.” She looked up at me and said, “It was people with your skin who did this.”

I froze, wanting to say something like, “No, no, my ancestors are Jewish, and they weren’t even there!” But I knew I couldn’t dismiss or deny the connections she was making about skin color, race, and privilege. I suddenly came face to face with my discomfort. I simultaneously realized why it is so hard for White people to have conversations about racism; feelings of guilt and discomfort can overwhelm and silence us. I eventually said something like, “Yes, and it was unjust and unfair.”

She responded, “You’re lucky because you could have gone into that theater.”

By then I had taken enough deep breaths to be able to say, “But it wouldn’t have been right to go in there or anywhere else where people with brown skin couldn’t go.”

As we read the rest of the book together, I paused at the photos of people who protested segregation, pointing out the array of skin colors of the protesters, and