Mommy, Why Did He Call Me White?

Goddard College, Fall 2019

Emma Redden

September 9 - October 31

3 Graduate Credits

Syllabus

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Week Begins: September 9th

Work Due: September 15th

Hi Everyone! I’m so glad we are collaborating on this important work together!

NOTE: Any written work you are doing, please create it in a Google Doc that you share with me, so I can make comments and we can be in dialogue about your work. It is easiest for me if you keep everything in one single document, but if multiples work better for you, that’s fine!

Topic: Who (are you)

Watch

*intro video

* video about communication modalities

*Please submit all work by emailing me at emma.redden@goddard.edu with the assignment(s) in the subject*

Record

*record an introduction video of yourself

Read

I’ve organized the class by units, and I decided to assign each unit a week.

Who (are you), What (are we talking about), Why (should we talk about this with young people), How (can we do it structurally), How (can we do it with language), How (can we practice), Create! (your final project).

That being said, some weeks are more work heavy than others. For example week two, What, is very work heavy but some of the How weeks are much less. What is important to me is the sequence, not when you get the work to me. I created a spreadsheet that you can duplicate and then use to track your work, if it helps. I added each assignment just to keep easy track, I know there are quite a few, I many of them probably won’t be too time intensive.

This is a pass/fail class.

Write/communicate

*Read syllabus and email (emma.redden@goddard.edu) or call me (802-380-5167) with any questions you have. Reflect on work load. If you feel like your life may not match up well in a particular week to the work assigned, make another schedule with me, to hand in that work earlier or later to better accommodate your other work. There is a lot of flexibility and I recognize that most or all of you are full time teachers as well as participants in this class. I would like you do move sequentially through the material, but the speed you move through is flexible. Additionally, if there is material in here you feel very fluent in, and would like to spend some of that time focusing more on other materials you are less familiar with, that is an option as well. In the next week or two you all will need to submit a learning contract on the Goddard SIS system. You will get more information about this from Goddard soon. All the information on that contract will be derived from the syllabus as it is, or the syllabus that you revise. So if you are revising the syllabus, actually create a document with the revised dates or revised assignments, as you will need this to create your learning contract.

*Design your own assessment tool that you will use at the end to assess your own learning and process. Some things to keep in mind when creating it:

What are your goals for the class? How will you determine if you meet them?

In what areas (in terms of thinking, practice, self knowledge, self reflection, etc) do you want or need to grow?

What areas do you feel like you don’t need growth? Why?

Do you have any thoughts yet about a final project?

*Identify and share Learning and Communication Styles

Do you have a preferred mode/style of learning? (Reading, listening, watching, etc)

Do you have a preferred mode of communicating ideas? (Writing, speaking, visual art, music, movie, etc.)

Do you have ideas about if you plan to use other modalities other than writing to submit work in this class?

Do you have concerns about this class making it harder to get certain needs met?

Is there something about school or taking classes in the past that has been difficult you would like to change?

Is there something about school in the past that has made it wonderful you would love to replicate?

*Racial and Ethnic Identity Reflection please try to answer all the questions below in your reflection

What is your race?

What is your ethnicity? If you don’t know, why do you think that is?

Do you identify with these parts of your identity?

Why or why not?

If you are not indigenous to this land, what did your people experienced before they came here? How did they get here?

If all your family is indigenous to what is now called North America, what happened to your people when settlers came?

If you don’t know the answers to these prompts, and have safe access to people in your family who may know some of this history, ask your family. Or, research generally. For example, if you know some parts of your family left Hungary in the late 1800s, research what the socio-political conditions were in that place when folks left.

*Do you identify as having racialized trauma? (If this is new language to you, please just reflect based on your intuitive guess of what this might mean. You will read more about this in the next assignment)

Why or why not?

Read

My Grandmothers Hands by Resmaa Menakem, chapter 1 & chapter 3-7

(I scanned my own book, I hope my own notes aren’t distracting. Also, if you love this work and are interested in learning more, he has a free E-course online.

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Week Begins: September 16th

Work Due: September 22nd

Topic: What (are we talking about)

Write/communicate

*With regards to interactions/experiences/conversations specifically around race:

Can you think of a time(s) you have been in your lizard brain?

Did you fight, flee, freeze or annihilate?

Can you think of things that happened before you went to your lizard brain?

Do you think you felt fear because of a story/cultural narrative or because of lived experience?

Do you know what your ‘triggers’ are generally around race that send you into a flight/flee/freeze response?

*I hesitate a little to use the language of ‘trigger’ because of how the term is now often used by people with power, when really the appropriate word is actually ‘made uncomfortable’ or ‘feel fear about own inadequacies’ instead of actually being ‘triggered’. Despite hesitation I will use the word not as a mental health term, as it is used sometimes around PTSD (someone being triggered because of the effects of trauma) but I will use it as it is defined in the dictionary “cause (an event or situation) to happen or exist.”

Read

*My Grandmothers Hands by Resmaa Menakem, chapters 10-12

Practice

*Try a few of the settling practices

Write/communicate

*Which did you like best?

*Do you think you could actually do these in your life?

*If not, what stories (narratives you have in your head that may or may not be grounded in reality) are preventing you? (I would look silly, they don’t work, etc)

Listen or read

*Scene on Radio Seeing White: transcripts or podcast audio, you can download and listen on podcast apps on smartphones or read the transcripts of the podcast episodes at the link above

episode 1-4, 8, 10, 13, 14

(If you have a long commute to work, or can listen to podcast episodes while exercising or doing some other part of your life, perhaps listening to 8 podcast episodes won’t be overwhelming. If for any reason that is not how you best or most effectively absorb information, and 8 episodes feels like a lot of time in a week, that makes lot of sense to me, and feel free to spread these out over the next couple weeks!)

Read/look at

*White Supremacy Culture infographic

*Institutional Racism infographic

*White Supremacy Culture Chutes and Ladders drawn by Michelle Sayles

*White Supremacy Culture in a workplace

*https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/aave-is-not-se-with-mistakes.pdf or https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Write/communicate

*How does white supremacy culture show up in your classroom? Consider race, ethnicity, language and socio-economic class. Even if most or all your students are white, think about class. White supremacy is created to protect and empower wealthy white people to control and exploit white folks with little access to economic resources.

Who “gets in trouble” the most?

Do you interact differently with children who closely comply to white supremacist notions of obedience, compared to your interactions with children who seek attention in creative ways, often try to be heard, move their bodies a lot, or still remember how to say “no"?

Consider how your students relate to each other. Do some children try to control, manipulate, punish other children for not adhering to white cultural norms?

Which parents do you communicate with the most? Is your style or level of communication impacted by how often the parents reach out to you, what their trust is like with schools in general, the language or dialect of English they speak, etc?

Part of the “whitelash” from the civil rights movement was white folks creating a false binary around racism—”good white people” aren’t racist and “bad white people” are. This framing conflates human decency with racism in a way that can compound deep defensiveness for many white folks—making it that much more emotionally difficult for us to name and identify our own racism. I encourage myself, as well as those of you who identify as white, to disentangle your intention as well as your capacity to be inherently “good” from the reality that anyone who has been raised in the United States, and most acutely white folks, have been deeply indoctrinated, in very insidious and sneaky ways, into world views and belief systems governed by the logics of anti-Blackness, racism, and white supremacy. Therefore, most likely, due to deep conditioning we have received our entire lives, white supremacy culture does show up in most of our classrooms, in some ways. Our work is to investigate how these belief systems have infiltrated our perceptions of ourself and others, as well as, as Resmaa Menakem argues, how it has infiltrated our amygdala(s) and our body’s sense of felt safety.

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Week Begins: September 23th

Work Due: September 29th

Topic: Why (should we talk about this with young people)

Interview and record

*Find someone in your life to informally interview. Ask them “do you talk with young children about race? Why or why not?

Record your answers in some way.

Write/communicate

*Think of a time you have tried to talk about race, answer a question, intervene in a situation involving race and young people. Answer the following questions:

*Why were are dysregulated (or) what are you afraid of?

*What would happen if that fear came true?

*Do you think you could handle the consequences?

*Why or why not?

Read

While reading consider: Does this challenge or change any beliefs you have been holding onto? How does your body feel reading it?

*The First R (chapter 1, 6, 7) by Debra Van Ausdale and Joe Feagin

*Children are Not Colorblind by Erin Winkler

Write/create

*Write/create a dialogue between two people who disagree about why it is effective and important to talk with young children about race. If you haven’t read this yet, bell hooks writes in this form, an interview with herself. It’s Chapter Four in her incredible book Teaching to Transgress. It begins on page 45.

Read

*Why Talk with Young Children (about race): section of my graduate thesis entitled Power Means Who the Police Believe

Talk and document

*Go back to one of the people you interviewed who said they don’t talk with young children about race, or who do but have hesitations or concerns about it, and try to have a conversation with them incorporating any of the new information you’ve read. Document this in some way.

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Week Begins: Sept 30th

Work Due: Oct 6th

Topic: How (can we do this structurally)

We have begun to explore the What (what is racism and white supremacy) and the Why (why should we talk with young people about these systems and structures). We are now exploring the How—how do we do that. In my understanding of this work, the how has two pieces—the structural piece and the language piece. It is very difficult to effectively use language that attempts to undermine dynamics of domination with regards to race, if our classrooms or relationships with young children rely on dynamics of domination with regards to age. Said in a different way, using words to help kids not use language to attempt to dominate or assert control over other people falls flat if we as adults are attempting to dominate or assert control over our students. The resources below offer some different frameworks that may support creating power with instead of power over relationships in the classroom.

Read/listen

*Read this interview or listen to this podcast with Carla Shalaby the author of the (INCREDIBLE) book Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School.

*Read Abolitionist classroom management inspired by Carla Shalaby, expanded by Emma and Lindsay Bradley.

*Read overview of Nonviolent Communication created by Marshall Rosenberg. Click following links for individual feelings inventory and needs inventory. All my ‘discipline’ and ‘classroom management’ relies on restorative practice and tons of 1:1 conferencing using feelings and needs.

* Social Discipline window
* Read Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn or part of book

Write/communicate

*Write about a time when you were in each of the four panes of the social discipline window as a teacher. Do you relate to some students more heavily in one pane of the window, but others more in another. For example, do you find yourself in the TO pane with some kids more than others? What are some characteristics of those students? Consider your power relationship. Do you share race, class, language, gender identities with them?

*Reflect on the needs inventory. Which needs does white supremacy culture (a society built on the lie that whiteness is more valuable and more worthy of safety and choice) undermine, or make difficult to be met? For people of color? For white people? Are those needs the same or different?

Create/draw/diagram

*Draw a power map. It can look however it makes sense to you. Consider multiple identities including, but not limited to, race, gender, class and age.

Write

*Write a teacher value statement that includes what your values are—who your ideal teacher self is. Ideally it will be a document you can use to remind yourself, or articulate to co-workers or parents, why you make anti-racist decisions. This is meant to both be a declaration of who are you and why you are doing this work.

*Write a supporting vulnerability statement that includes what makes you vulnerable to cause harm or assert power over your students. Consider sensory experiences (a lot of noise or movement for example) or actions/behaviors that trigger you to become dysregulated or prone to do what we are all encouraged to do—control children and their noise, movement, joy, and anger. Include what you will do to mitigate the conditions that encourage you to assert power over, instead of hold ‘power with’ students.

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Week Begins: October 7th

Work Due: October 13th

Topic: How (can we do this with language)

Just as the structures and relationships in our classrooms must challenge abuses of power around age, as well as race, gender, class, ability, and many others, our language must also challenge abuses of power as well. As this class is focused specifically about talking about race, we are working to develop an emotional relationship to talking about race that enables us to do clear and meaningful thinking, speaking, and listening.

I understand the language aspect to require two distinct skills.

ability to stay regulated and settled enough
to translate very complex structures, policy, belief systems, etc into clear, concise language that is accessible to children

Read

*Re-read the self assessment you did the week of September 23rd about why you were dysregulated talking about race with a young child

Write

*Revise and/or add to that assessment if you feel like there is any more insight you have now about what your fears were. Look at the needs inventory and answer the following questions, about that same scenario.

*Were you afraid some of your basic needs wouldn’t be met?

*What was the story you were telling yourself about that situation? (for example, if you answered truthfully and the parent got be mad you could get fired)

*When you reflect, do you think that story is grounded in reality?

Read

*Chapter 3: Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria

*Chose two articles from Raising Race Conscious Children

*All of these readings below are found here

*Sequencing pyramids for race and colonialism

*Working dictionary

*Grounding in five senses

*Sentence frames

*Praxis wheels

Listen

*This American Life: Birds & Bees (all of it is good and the first one is about talking to kids about race but the one I’m especially hoping you listen to part three about Jill MacFarlane talking to young children about dying. Her work talking to young children about suicide has supported my thinking enormously.) If you are interested in hear her talk more (I’m sorta obsessed with Jill) you can read an interview I did with her.

Brainstorm and write/communicate

*Possible final projects—these projects ideally will be your planning and prep work for a project or thread you will do with your students.

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Week Begins: October 14th

Work Due: October 20th

Topic: How (practice!)

Brainstorm and write

*Write down any scenarios you can think of that you have experienced with a child related to race. If you have trouble thinking of your own, ask people in your life. Try to get to 10. If you don’t have 10 from your own life, use the following ones for practice:

*you are standing in line at the grocery store child asks you, “why does she have brown skin?” referring to someone in line next to you

*a white child sees a picture of a child of color and says “they are bad!”

*a kid sees a Nepali person and thinks it’s another Nepali person

*you are reading a book with a child and all the people in the book are white

*you are walking through the hospital with a child and all the doctors are white and the janitors are black and brown

*you are playing with children and plastic babies with different skin tones in dramatic play

*you drive by a police officer pulling over a person of color and you pull over to watch, to create more accountability for officer—child asks why you are doing that

*you drive down the street and folks are in the street with signs that say NO WALL

*child says n-word, not directed at a Black person

*your co-teacher says to you “I don’t think we need to talk about race with the kids. They are so innocent, they don’t see color.”

*you overhear another teacher handle a racist incident between children without addressing the racism, just saying “thats not nice”

Extended Recorded Role Play

*Choose two scenarios you find especially challenging to imagine answering or engaging with.

*Find a partner (if you are taking the class with other people you know, please try to do this with them). Role play the first scenario. Try to stay in character. It can be tempting to get out of character and start reflecting on how you are feeling it is going, but really try to stay in the scene. If you are doing this with another person in the class, switch off playing both the child and the grownup. If you are doing this with someone who isn’t in the class, feel free to just play the adult. Encourage the person playing the child to ask a lot of questions, pretend to misunderstand, etc, to allow you the practice to respond no matter where the conversation goes. Role play your scenario for at least 4 minutes. Stay in character for the full 4 minutes!! (I know role playing can feel awkward at first. I have done tons of workshops on this topic and folks always say the role play was the most helpful part!)

*Record yourself doing the first scenario. Listen back. Review the praxis wheel.

Write/communicate

*Complete the following prompts based on your first scenario you recorded and listened to.

*Identify what you need to understand with more nuance (often a historical) to better give an accurate and clear response. Do some research to try to learn more about that.

*With the new information, prepare for your revised conversation with that imaginary child. You could write down what you want to say, record yourself saying it, etc.

*Make a plan about when you will bring this conversation up again. Think practically about your life with young people, when you have opportunities to initiate conversation with them. Will you sit next to them at lunch and bring it up? Will you find a book and ask if they would like to read it with you during a time in the day where students have some flexibility? Will you do a lesson for the whole class—address that you wanted to clarify or revise something you had said the previous day to a student. Could you have the conversation at free play? (I don’t know what the high school version of free play is …study hall!?)

*Go back to the person you were role playing with and say your revised answer/reflection.

DO THIS FOR 2 SCENARIOS!

Write

*Submit your plan for your final project.

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Week Begins: October 21st

Work Due: October 31st

(Note: instead of this being Monday-Sunday, this is a longer chunk of time—Monday to the following Thursday)

Quick Role Plays

DO THIS FOR THE OTHER 8 SCENARIOS (at least!)

*Find a partner. If it is another student in the class, switch off each being the child and each being the grownup. If it is not another student, at least play the grown up. Chose a scenario. Set a timer for 4 minutes. Maintain your role as the grownup in the role play for at least 4 minutes per scenario.

Write/communicate

*Reflect, in any way and about any part of the role play you want.

*Return to the question, do you have racialized trauma? Resmaa Menakem talks about the psychic experience for white folks to directly or indirectly inflict racial violence on people of color. Consider the psychic experience of watching someone who looks like you kill an unarmed child in the park, and then a jury of people who look like you not convicting him. What is the psychic experience, the emotional experience, of not doing anything about that horrible violence and lack of justice, or trying to do something and it not change the outcome. Consider a more local experience. What is the emotional and psychic experience of working or living in Craftsbury, that is 97% white? It isn’t a coincidence almost no people of color live there. What is the emotional, spiritual, psychic toll to be white in America, for you? If guilt is one of the feelings, please write through that, and see if there is something beyond, or under, that guilt.