Understand Silence as a Response to Racial Stress

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.

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.

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

(Bronson & Merryman, 2009; DiAngelo, 2012; Michael & Bartoli, 2014; Tatum, 1992, 1994, 2017; Vittrup, 2016; Wise, 2012). In contrast, research on racial stress and racial literacy suggests that parents of color tend to have more frequent conversations about race. Howard Stevenson’s (2014) research focuses on how Black parents help their children navigate discrimination and prepare them for anticipated discrimination by engaging in racial socialization, or a teaching about race that develops children’s cognitive abilities to understand the meaning of racial discrimination.

In the classroom, it’s this type of engaged approach to racial socialization that provides students the skills and tools they need to combat racism and form meaningful connections across cultures. Avoidance may reduce the current level of stress, but it does not lead to greater competence over time because the ability to engage is blocked. Howard Stevenson (2014) writes: Without admitting to and managing our fears, we remain unprepared for racial conversations, encounters, or conflicts. Trying to improve race relations and combat racial stereotypes without addressing the stress that is generated by these endeavors is like trying to solve algebraic equations without understanding multiplication or learning to drive a car without lessons. (p. 3)

What is the impact of this discrepancy between how often White parents bring up race as compared to parents of color? What happens when some students come to school well versed in issues of racism, and with a sense of their own racial identity, and others do not?

One possible outcome is that when racial incidents occur in schools, the impact is not experienced equally among families of different racial backgrounds, and students miss out on opportunities for greater growth and understanding.

I’ve experienced this outcome firsthand. In the spring of 2016, during the presidential election cycle, unbeknownst to me and my colleagues, a kindergarten student at my school announced during lunch that there was going to be a war at the White House between White and Black. Following that statement, another student said they should “play the war game” after they were done eating. What ensued was a game of tag that involved some students chasing two Black students around the yard. The chasing group was mixed, some White students, some Asian students, but the targeted students were Black. The teachers on the yard thought the kindergarteners were playing their usual game of tag, until the two girls who were being chased ran to one of the teachers and asked for help.