How racism occurs in the classroom and how you may be perpetuating it

Madison Brockbank; Renata Hall

18 How racism occurs in the classroom and how you may be perpetuating it

racism in the classroom

Instructors may be active contributors to establishing the classroom climate.

How racism happens in the classroom (and the role you play!)

Prelude: Embrace Discomfort!

While it can be difficult to accept, it is very likely that we, as non-racialized people, perpetrate, uphold, excuse, and/or benefit from racism in our daily lives. As racism is built into the fabric of the institutions and spaces that we live and work within, we often reap the benefits of these systems, practices, policies, and structures. For example, when western academia is predicated on Eurocentric epistemologies, when our university’s upper administration is predominantly comprised of white folks, and when research has proven the ways in which white candidates are more likely to be hired in a workplace compared to their racialized counterparts, white people are afforded privileges, liberties, advantages, and opportunities that racialized folks are not. Furthermore, because the systems we operate within are built on racist beliefs and ideologies, much of what we have learned through socialization, education, and upbringing and what we value, believe, and communicate might uphold, perpetuate, and/or justify foundational and historical racism. For example, elementary and secondary school education in Canada often fails to accurately describe the colonial violence perpetrated by settlers against Indigenous peoples and, instead, euphemizes the “discovery” and “creation” of Canada as a “peaceful” relationship between white settlers and Indigenous communities, which is still reflected in popular and patriotic discourses of Canada as a “multicultural” and “peacekeeping” nation.

This realization that we may have committed or contributed to racism can be deeply uncomfortable, distressing, and challenging as it may disrupt what we know and/or believe about ourselves, our identities, and the spaces we live in. Especially for instructors and TAs, it can be incredibly troubling to explore and examine the power that we hold in classrooms and how the ways that we teach might further exclusive, Eurocentric rhetoric. Many white folks have the urge to proclaim “I’m not racist!” when confronted with the historical and temporal realities of white supremacy, racism, and violence. However, we urge you to sit in the discomfort of knowing that racism is inextricably linked to whiteness and power. This is not in an effort to shame or blame you; rather, it’s an entry point to better understanding the origins of these issues and how we contribute to them as this will form the basis of understanding how we can challenge and change things. In other words, we cannot pursue change without fully appreciating the complexities and nuances of these issues. While you may have the urge to skip sections and get to the tangible recommendations, we ask that you engage fully with the content we have prepared and sit with the emotions that it may evoke.

Racism can happen in many ways in the classroom.

As this is a space where students, TAs, and instructors gather to discuss and examine complex social issues, the classroom is reflective of our lived experiences outside of school. In other words, dynamics in the classroom are not siloed from experiences in the greater community; rather, the classroom simulates, recreates, and reifies social and societal dynamics. In this way, racism can be replicated in discussions, course content, and class structure, where racialized students may feel silenced, dismissed, scrutinized, excluded, and/or violated in ways that are similar to their experiences outside of the classroom. Conversely, white students may hold power, privilege, freedom, and control in class dynamics where, similar to dynamics in the community, their ideas, contributions, and participation are valued and celebrated at the expense of racialized folks in the room.

Additionally, white students’ learning is often prioritized, regardless of the potential impacts it might have on racialized students. What a white student sees as a “great learning experience” might have been perceived by a student of colour as something that was unsafe, harmful, and unsettling. While the white student leaves class feeling empowered and excited by the new knowledge they acquired through a discussion or debate, the student of colour leaves class feeling angry, upset, unsafe, and isolated. Similarly, white instructors may exit lively class discussions and feel like they did a great job in eliciting participation and engagement, despite the fact that the conversation may have been very distressing and harmful to racialized students (and racialized TAs) in the room. It is important to understand that it can be draining, intimidating, and incredibly challenging for racialized students to educate others, defend themselves, and/or participate actively in a discussion about racism, power, oppression, and the topics that intersect with these issues, even when you feel like it’s an interesting and engaging dialogue. When a racialized student identifies these concerns in dialogue with you (either publicly or privately), you should not see it as a disruption, a threat, or an effort to derail the conversation. Rather, it should be seen as an opportunity for you to facilitate, model, and uphold accountable practices that seek to redress and prevent these issues from happening again. It shouldn’t be a burden — it’s an opportunity!

Here, we see class dynamics as playing out very differently depending on your identities and lived experiences. We can also appreciate that the power instructors and TAs hold can go unchecked and can contribute to a lack of safety in the classroom, regardless of your intention to bolster student learning.

<h2″>The most common form of racism that students of colour identify as happening actively in the classroom are microaggressions.

Microaggressions are commonplace, daily, implicit, and explicit verbal, behavioural, and/or environmental expressions of harm that are hostile, derogatory, and negative in nature toward a person or group of people. They are the most cited “type” of racist behaviour and interaction that occurs in social settings, such as the classroom. Microaggressions can be perpetrated intentionally and/or unintentionally. Microaggressions take on various forms, ranging from allegedly “well-meaning” comments about racialized students’ intellect, identity, and appearance to “straight-up aggression.” They maintain similar impacts on racialized students, including feeling embarrassed, angry, distressed, and unsafe.

In addition, microaggressions:

precipitate “difficult dialogues” in the classroom about identity, racism, and power,
involve various responses from racialized students that can be cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioural, which are shaped by both student peers’ and instructors’ traits and identities (e.g. can be exacerbated by racialized students feeling alone, isolated and/or underrepresented in the classroom and its curriculum),
rely upon and communicate stereotypes and assumptions about specific groups of people or racialized communities more broadly, regardless of delivery and intent,
implicitly and explicitly demand that racialized students educate others about their identities and experiences through disclosure, tokenization, and being ‘put on the spot’ (e.g. asking a racialized student a question about their identity and expecting them to answer on behalf of that identity marker),
bemoan the “racial agenda” and assume that racialized students’ accounts are untrue (e.g. “why are they always playing the race card?”),
facilitate unchallenged surveillance, scrutiny, and questioning of racialized students (e.g. commenting on and making judgments about racialized students’ responses and reactions to things happening in the classroom),
are imbued within curriculum, pedagogy, and the classroom structure, and result in cultural misrepresentation, misappropriation, and erasure,
are often met with (white) instructors’ and student peers’ silence and complicity in failing to intervene,
seek to dismiss and invalidate racialized students’ reactions to them, and
operate to further isolate and marginalize racialized students and facilitate poor physical, mental, cultural, and social health outcomes

White instructors, TAs, and students may inadvertently or purposefully communicate microaggressions while participating in or facilitating their classes. It can be an uncomfortable realization; however, recognizing what microaggressions look like and their impacts on racialized students are significant first steps toward challenging and changing these practices in meaningful ways.

As it pertains to the instructor’s role, microaggressions can also look like:

Failing to intervene when something harmful happens in the classroom, which is often justified as an attempt to let learning happen naturally and/or on the basis that white instructors are ill-equipped to intervene (e.g. “as a white person, I don’t know enough about this to intervene or comment”).
Perpetuating the burden of uncompensated and unrecognized labour that racialized students are often forced to undertake, which might include asking them to consult on courses, not paying them for this work, not crediting their suggestions, making them come up with solutions, etc.
Not listening to or considering racialized students’ feedback, concerns, or ideas, which involves not looking into better readings/content, including the same harmful content, and/or facilitating class dialogues in the same way.
Dodging accountability and responding defensively to racialized students’ feedback about your teaching or content, which might include refusing to apologize, not responding to emails, seeing students as “too sensitive,” and/or accusing students of being disruptive.
Framing racialized students who frequently speak out or challenge them as “disruptive,” “aggressive,” and/or “distracting.” This can happen both during class discussions, in conversations with others, and/or in assessment of their work.
Sitting in discomfort when something harmful happens and failing to mobilize into action, which might entail refusing to acknowledge the harm retroactively or in the moment.
Centering your own feelings, reactions, ideas, and experiences when racialized students call for action or identify harm, which includes white fragility, white guilt, white rage, and white tears.

White Fragility, White Rage, and White Victimhood

As we briefly mentioned before, many white folks often have the urge to distance themselves from racism and may fear being labeled “racist.” Here, the term “racist” is frequently framed as a slur against white folks and as something that can damage one’s self-image or social reputation. The difficult truth is that, by virtue of one’s proximity to the material, historical, and temporal system of whiteness, white folks contribute to and benefit from institutionalized, systemic, and structural racism, which often becomes identifiable in interpersonal interactions. However, many white folks can deploy strategies of attempting to rebuke, dismiss, manage, or cope with the realities of their own racism and/or their links to racism. For example, terms like “white fragility” have been used to describe white folks’ emotional, defensive, angry, and dismissive reactions to being called out or called in for engaging in racist practices. You may have also heard the term “white tears” or “white guilt,” which allude to the ways in which white folks (re)centre their own emotions, cling to a sense of victimhood, and burden racialized folks with responding to and/or absolving their own guilt for historical and contemporary racism. What we particularly want to emphasize is the importance of “white rage”: while many white folks prefer to identify with passive terms that centre emotion, guilt, and conscience, the realities of white supremacy and its violence indicate that most reactions to being called out for racism reify and perpetuate racism through anger and defensiveness resembling violence or threats of violence. Only focusing on “fragility” and “guilt” might distract from the tangible, material, and lived implications of “white rage.”

Rather than quickly, swiftly, and decisively denying our own racist beliefs, prejudices, and practices or cling to what Razack calls “flights/moves to innocence” (e.g. attempts to excuse racist beliefs and actions), we should consider sitting in the discomfort of our roles in recreating and protecting racism. From there, we can then think about tangible ways to change these beliefs and behaviours. For instructors, this is especially important as modeling these reflections and actively embracing them in the classroom might support white students in doing the same, which could greatly enhance general classroom safety.