Opinion: Why Do We Fall Short When We Teach About Racism?

Efforts to start from a neutral and unbiased conversation about racism misses the point about racial discrimination being everything but neutral and unbiased.

“We’re all the equal,” “skin color doesn’t matter,” “race doesn’t matter,” “only one race exists, the human race.” These are ideas we have heard repeatedly in classrooms throughout our lives. In theory, these ideas sound just, ideal, a perfect reflection of what ought to be. However, are they real facts? Verifiable?

When we talk about cases like those of George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Maxene Andre, Allen Locke, and Ramona Bennet, among others, there is a common denominator among those who exercised violence against them. None of the aggressors were blind to the fact that the skin color of the victims placed them in a social minority. The situation that led to the deaths of these people might have been very different if they had belonged to a diverse social group; perhaps, such a thing would not have happened. Belonging to the social group that put them in the position of being killed was determined solely by the color of skin and physical characteristics associated with their ethnic group or nationality.

African American, Haitian, Native American… If we can understand that skin color and ethnicity are the triggers for various instances of social injustice, why do we still think that educating children to be “blind to skin color” will make them capable of seeing social injustices linked to this attribute, or that this kind of teaching will play an essential role in dismantling systemic racism?

We are seeking to educate to eradicate racism, but we are removing from the conversation the essential element that generates it: the color of the skin. By the time that the student graduates from primary education, he or she may know that racism exists and that it is wrong to exercise it, but the student does not have the tools to understand the basis on which it is sustained.

A history of racism and science

It is challenging to teach about racism when we do not have openness and freedom in the classroom to talk about its history. As teachers, we denounce racism as wrong and without a scientific basis, but we leave to the side all the work done over the centuries that tried to sustain racial differences using science.

Learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution is fundamental in natural sciences and biology classes. However, all the educational content and resources cut off before teaching how Darwinist approaches were the bases of the works of academicians such as Arthur de Gobineau, Herbert Hope Risley, and Ernst Haeckel, three of the most influential authors who promoted scientific racism.

This group of academicians defended the idea that skin color was linked to hierarchical physical and intellectual characteristics. They argued what we see today as absurd, saying, for example, that black people were closer to apes in an evolutionary aspect because their toes were strong, which was reminiscent of the physical structure of the monkey, who required strong feet to swing in the trees. Scientists also measured the sizes of the skulls of people in India to measure their intelligence and place them in castes.

These theories were refuted and ruled out in the scientific repository by authors such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria Boas, and Ruth Benedict. They sustained that no structural differences exist that affect the physical or intellectual abilities of any person based on race. However, the damage was already done. The idea of race and racial common sense was already embedded in collective thinking. When these ideas no longer had a scientific basis on which to hold, they moved to an area where it would be even more difficult to erase them: the social arena.

The oxymoron of culture and race

Science played an important role in cementing the concept of race, and even after scientific racism was expelled from the academic community, thousands of anthropologists, philosophers, sociologists, and cultural experts continued to combat the effects of the migration of scientific racism to the soft sciences. As Antony Peterson, adjunct professor at the Nazarene University of Trevecca, explains, “There is no culture in color, there are no muscular or mental abilities connected to melanin, there are no character traits, no virtues, no vices, no values connected to skin color.”

“Race does not exist, but, yes, it does matter.”

Peterson upends the foundations on why education for racial justice does not address the roots or problems caused by racism. He argues that in schools, children are taught that race exists, but that it does not matter, yet, in real life, there is overwhelming evidence that it is the other way around. Race does not exist, but it does matter.

Professionals in education are prisoners of the belief that mere mention of the topic of race has high potential to exaggerate differences among the students of various ethnic groups, as well as to minimize the similarities, exacerbate interracial problems, and generate unnecessary conflict.

This leads us to a false and limited narrative that denies teachers and students the opportunity to reflect on how these cultural differences were created as policies imposed to subject ethnic groups. The key is not to remain only on the surface of these cultural assumptions. For example, why in the United States, there are so many black people who cannot swim? Rather than assuming this is because they have fewer physical skills, we need to call for a serious conversation about the history of the public swimming pools and the racial segregation that kept the African-American community out of swimming pools and swimming lessons for decades.

Everything we understand as a racial difference has historical roots that are important to analyze to comprehend the variables that generate social injustice based on race. Science may have already confirmed that “race” does not exist, but taking that scientific truth as the only rational argument to combat racism ignores one universal fact. Millions of people are devalued daily by a concept without scientif
ic validity but with a social weight so heavy that it divides humanity over one criterion as absurd as it is absolute: the color of the skin.

Disclaimer: This is an opinion article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0