DIVERSITY BOOK CLUB #3: BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

“I’m not a thing; I’m a net of interactions with the world around me, with the people who know me, who love me. It’s a more powerful way of trying to grasp reality by focusing on what interacts with what and how…. The world is complicated. It’s immensely complicated….  But if you look from the outside, you always miss something, which is the perspective from the inside…..” 
(Dr. Carlo Rovelli, physicist, On Being interview, March 16, 2017)

“It is a very personal story. It's a horror movie that is from an African American's perspective….  I think what interested me most about this movie was dealing with racism, really everything from the subtle racism that many people may not know exists on a day to day basis, or for a lot of people….” (Jordan Peele, director of Get Out, Forbes interview, October 5, 2016)

“… I argue in this book that the plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road — it is, in fact, the road itself….  Struggle is important, whether success is assured or not.” 
(Ta-Nehisi Coates, author, The Daily Show interview, July 23, 2015)

Let’s resume our virtual Diversity Book Club.  In previous and upcoming posts, I summarize books and provide classroom applications and resources for teachers interested in building welcoming and inclusive environments in their classrooms and schools.  We continue with Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel and Grau, 2015).

Summary:
At my own son’s suggestion, I read and re-read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Letter to My Son when it appeared in The Atlantic Magazine.  When my son later gave me the book, Between the World and Me (from which the article was excerpted), I was able to further delve into the book that searingly illuminates Black experience in the United States.  I commend it to teachers and to students from middle and high school onward. 

Physicist Carlo Rovelli emphasizes the importance of interaction in the universe, and the importance of understanding the perspective of others when trying to understand the complex world around us.  Ta-Nehisi Coates takes the complexity of his lived experience in the world as a human being in a Black body and shares his perspective.  It is joyful and painful, vivid and important.  Indeed, Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison advises, “This is required reading.”

Reading this father’s anguish, owning it as our responsibility, and teaching our students of all backgrounds how racism’s roots pervade United States history are moral imperatives for culturally competent and compassionate teachers. 

In the book full of personal reflection and experience, Coates writes about the connection of White on Black violence in the context of U.S. history, “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth $3 billion, more than all of American industry, all American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies—cotton—was America’s primary export…. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents….”   

Coates continues, “Here is what I would like for you to know: in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”

Chapters include Coates’s recollection of walking to school, fists, head, pace, posture—all “just so.”  Just so someone would not challenge him for being offensive in a stiflingly fear-based Black community.  He remembers coming close to death as a peer slowly drew a gun out of a coat pocket to point at him.  Why?  No reason Coates could discern.

He recounts the death by police shooting in Maryland of a college acquaintance, driving his own Jeep, on his way to his fiancée’s home.  This college graduate, doctor’s son, and rising professional seemed to “have it all.”  But having Black skin that made him a mistaken identity target to (ironically) a Black off-duty police officer who killed him during a traffic stop.

 

Applications in school/classroom:

1.    Read the passages of Coates describing his caution on the streets of Baltimore, walking to school, and reacting to school.  (See pages 20-26). 

a.    “When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with whom I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, whom or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body….”

b.    Ask students to write about their approach to the school/classroom.   Have them note similarities and differences.

For example, I share my personal recollection with my students: “As a White high school student, I walked with my own fists, head, pace, posture—all ‘just so’—to avoid calling attention to myself as an intruder in a predominantly Black high school.”

c.    Do our students each see themselves as some kind of intruder?  Do they experience some kind of stereotype threat, as Claude Steele articulates in Whistling Vivaldi?  Finding common ground is a way to use Coates’s experience to build ties across boundaries.

2.    Research the economic history Coates explores.  The slave trade benefitted many Americans.  How could White “Christians” treat enslaved Africans so cruelly?  Follow the money. Why didn’t people of conscience stop it sooner?  Follow the money. 

a.    Among other resources, find “Key Distinctions for Understanding Race and Racism” at The Tracing Center www.tracingcenter.org developed by filmmaker Katrina Browne. Browne made the film Traces of the Trade in response to learning about her White Rhode Island family’s deep involvement in America’s trans-Atlantic slave trade.  She has uncovered the connections between her family history and her White privileges compared to families of enslaved Africans, for example. (Her yarn-web exercise demonstrating a small town and all craftspeople and gardeners supplying slave ships is useful to students).

3.    Investigate police interactions with Black motorists.  Using this NPR Code Switch article, high school and college students can research numerous links in the article to statistics, police department policies for body cameras, and court rulings.  “Some Key Facts We’ve Learned About Police Shootings Over the Past Year (April 13, 2015)” http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399314868/some-key-facts-weve-learned-about-police-shootings-over-the-past-year

a.    Examine this quotation as a way into the lesson: "There are racial disparities in police stops — blacks are stopped twice as often as whites — but they aren't related to traffic safety offenses, in which cops exercise a little less discretion and violations are equal within groups. Where we see a difference — even after we adjust for driving time (on average, blacks drive more and longer than whites) — is in investigatory stops. In these, drivers are stopped for exceedingly minor violations — driving too slowly, malfunctioning lights, failure to signal — which are used as pretext for investigations of the driver and the vehicle….”

4.    Use my September 2015 blog to further explore these issues: “Preparing our Multicultural Selves to Teach/Reach All of our Children in the Era of Black Lives Matter” http://thinkcareact.blogspot.com/2015/09/preparing-our-multicultural-selves-to.html

5.    Have students explore their own implicit biases by visiting Project Implicit (www.implicit.harvard.edu) and taking the race (and other) Implicit Association Test [IAT], developed and explained by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald in Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. 

a.    Use the book Blindspot to help students put their (likely) racially biased test results into perspective.  Explore other ‘isms with them: gender bias, ageism, size bias, etc.

b.    See my blog on the book for more information: http://thinkcareact.blogspot.com/ 

6.    How can we build caring classroom environments in which students feel safe to tackle unsafe topics? To make our class environment a caring place for daring conversations I use the “Circles of Culture” exercise explained in my blog.  Taking time to create a caring place for daring conversations makes all the difference in the student (and teacher) experience and forges our bonds as a community of readers, writers, and upstanders, ready to build a welcoming and inclusive community in and out of school…. This is relevant teaching and learning: today and every day.

a.    (Sample questions: In which of your circles of culture do you find safety/refuge?  Why?  In which of your circles of culture do you find discomfort or lack of safety?  Why?)  Read more: http://thinkcareact.blogspot.com/2016/07/creating-caring-classroom-community_6.html

7.    Students can read The Atlantic article “Letter to My Son” as an entry to the book.  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/

a.    Invite students to write their own letters to Ta-Nehesi Coates and/or his son.  What is the hope they hold for a welcoming and inclusive world?  What will they do to make their classrooms, locker rooms, cafeterias, and communities safe for people of all backgrounds?  What is the future of race relations in the US?  What is their role?

8.    Older students (high school and college) can use Jordan Peele’s social horror film to further explore issues raised by Coates. 

a.    Students can listen to Peele’s interviews on the film on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  Read excerpts from the interview: “ ‘Get Out’ Sprang From An Effort To Master Fear, Says Director Jordan Peele” http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/03/15/520130162/get-out-sprung-from-an-effort-to-master-fear-says-director-jordan-peele  

b.    Read the Forbes interview with filmmaker Jordan Peele: “Jordan Peele Talks 'Get Out' And His Love For Horror Movies.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2016/10/05/interview-jordan-peele-discusses-get-out-and-his-love-for-the-horror-genre/#77580e9c187e

9.    Older students (high school and college) can continue to explore the economics of enslavement and the Civil War with this reference article by Roger L. Ransom, University of California, Riverside: “The Economics of the Civil War” https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/

10. Watch Ta-Nehisi Coates’s July 2015 interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show  http://www.cc.com/video-clips/yy2dzc/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-ta-nehisi-coates

In the Daily Show interview, Coates reveals that his book, Between the World and Me, reflects his ongoing fearful conversation with his Black teenaged son.  Jon Stewart feels Coates is offering “an opening to a conversation” for the wider society, and I think teachers would be wise to participate.  In spite of daunting times, I agree with Coates, who affirms “Struggle is important, whether success is assured or not.”

Susan Gelber Cannon, March 2017

DIVERSITY BOOK CLUB: WHISTLING VIVALDI-HOW STEREOTYPES AFFECT US AND WHAT WE CAN DO

“[T]he stereotype threat that goes with certain social identities in school and on tests can dramatically affect intellectual performance….” (p. 67)

The benefits [of reducing stereotype threat] are sizable, reliable, and often long-lasting.  And the interventions themselves are low cost and relatively easy to do…. establishing trust through demanding but supportive relationships, fostering hopeful narratives about belonging in the setting, arranging informal cross-group conversations…, representing critical abilities as learnable, and using child-centered teaching techniques.” (p. 181)

“[P]eople have to be able to trust that, despite the relevance of a bad stereotype about their group, they won’t be judged by it, that their goodness as human beings will be seen.  Trust like that is hard to come by…. When interactions between people from different backgrounds have learning from each other as a goal, it eases the potential tension between them, giving missteps less significance.  Trust is fostered.” (p. 209)

Join me in a virtual Diversity Book Club.  In this and upcoming posts, I’ll summarize books and provide classroom applications and resources for teachers interested in building welcoming and inclusive environments in their classrooms and schools.  We begin with Claude M. Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Norton, 2010).

Summary
Readable and recognizable, Claude M. Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi illuminates a human condition people encounter in any diverse society: stereotype threat. 

·      We know (and worry about) what others will think about us based on what groups we belong to or identities we have such as racial, economic, gender, age, nationality, religious, and more. 

·      Our concern about what others may think about us and whether we will confirm their negative stereotypes about “our type of person” affects what we do and often detracts from our performance. 

In school settings, with which we are most concerned, we may see female students drop out of advanced math classes, Black students in predominantly White classrooms may do poorly on standardized tests, and White students in predominantly Black environments offer opinions they think are expected rather than sincerely held, for example.

Steele offers numerous examples of the research that identified and named stereotype threat.  He also offers practical suggestions, some of them mediated by the work of his colleague Carol Dweck, whose book Mindset, I heartily recommend.  Dweck’s work centers on growth versus fixed mindsets: learning to learn from our mistakes and/or relative weaknesses rather than seeing them as fixed and unchangeable liabilities.   

Classroom & School Applications & Resources:
After his account of numerous experiments identifying and attempting to ameliorate stereotype threat, Steele offers numerous practical recommendations to which I have added suggestions and resources for classroom teachers:

1.    Demand high standards from all students and tell them you expect them to meet these expectations.  This can diminish the stereotype threat some students experience by interrupting their own negative narrative that teacher/peers deem them less able than students of different groups.  (See discussion, p. 163.)

2.    Affect the negative narrative or feeling of stereotype threat by sharing a different narrative.  One example is that of junior and senior class students at an elite university sharing their feelings of being frustrated, unworthy, inept, and unwelcome during their freshman year.  They explain to incoming freshmen that they have overcome these feelings, achieved at a high level, made friends, and used the resources at the school to good purpose.  In an independent school in which students from underserved communities may experience stereotype threat, for example, fostering a mentorship relationship of upper level students with middle and lower school students might be helpful.  (See pages 165-166.)

3.    Affect negative narratives by fostering discussions among many different kinds of students in which they share their fears and hopes.  In this way, all students see that everyone feels nervous at a new school, that some people share some of the same values, and that many people share the same hopes.  (See p. 167.)

4.    Teach all students, and particularly those facing stereotype threat (Black students in predominantly White classrooms, for example) that human intelligence is expandable and that we learn, grow, and build our intellectual skills by learning from our mistakes and failures.  One experiment invited Stanford students to write letters with such information to “ostensible minority elementary students.”   Students in upper grades in independent schools could write real letters to students in lower grades, or sixth graders could write to rising fifth graders, for example.  (See pages 168-169.)

5.    Invite students to affirm their most important personal or family values and explain their importance.  This exercise was part of an experiment in a seventh grade classroom.  Black students who affirmed their values showed continued improvement in academic performance over Black students who did not do this exercise.  Students in our sixth grade English classes write about personal and family values, and we see benefit for all students as they contribute to building of a caring, warm, and supportive environment.  (See details on pages 174-175.)
 

6.    Make the classroom a mistake-making, growth-oriented place.  Overtly discuss growth versus fixed mindsets.  Learning is the goal that brings all students together and mitigates students’ perceptions of stereotype threat. “When interactions between people from different backgrounds have learning from each other as a goal, it eases the potential tension between them, giving missteps less significance.  Trust is fostered.” (See p. 209).  Doing this early in the year and as I begin each new project, I attempt to foster just such an environment of encouragement, risk, and learning with each other.  Further, after we complete long-term projects, we openly discuss our obstacles and how we faced them.

7.    Make the school/classroom a safe place for all by fostering: “positive relationships with students; more child-centered teaching; use of [our] diversity as a classroom resource rather than following a strict strategy of colorblindness; teacher skill, warmth, and availability…”  (See page 180.)  To assist this process, teachers can share their identity-related experiences of facing stereotypes, for example, thus allowing students to see us as human and like them.  Read Shane Safir’s post about identity workshops to foster identity-safe classrooms: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/fostering-identity-safety-in-classroom-shane-safir.  It includes a terrific workshop tool!    

8.    To help students feel safe to tackle unsafe topics I use the “Circles of Culture” exercise explained in a previous blog.  Taking time to create a caring place for daring conversations makes all the difference in the student (and teacher) experience and forges our bonds as a community of readers, writers, and upstanders, ready to build a welcoming and inclusive community in and out of school. This is relevant teaching and learning: today and every day. (Sample questions: In which of your circles of culture do you find safety/refuge?  Why?  In which of your circles of culture do you find discomfort or lack of safety?  Why?)  Read more: http://thinkcareact.blogspot.com/2016/07/creating-caring-classroom-community_6.html 

9. Teachers in early childhood and elementary grades may find Michele Borba’s Unselfie a useful resource.  Read a summary and find classroom applications in my August 2016 post: http://thinkcareact.blogspot.com/2016/08/teaching-empathy-book-review-of.html

10.    Have a study group read Whisling Vivaldi at your school.  Use chapter discussion questions prepared Deb Hoskins, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at La Crosse: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P5jUtn461RgPra1sN0UkOj9LzfaSqpYKNw4JvGcubgc/edit

11. For an academic reference for your work on reducing stereotype threat utilize the website created by two social science professors, Steve Stroessner and Catherine Good: http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org 

12. Host a showing and discussion of the movie Hidden Figures at your school, or read and discuss the book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians who Helped Win the Space Race: (Background story and movie trailer here) http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a24429/hidden-figures-real-story-nasa-women-computers/

Dr. King’s vision is oft-quoted, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But the reality is that people do judge others based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, and other features.  And fear of such judgement does affect performance.  Stereotype threat is a real force to reckon with in our classrooms.  We can use such resources as Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi to make our classrooms ones in which each student—and teacher—thrives.

Susan Gelber Cannon, January 2017