Reading, Writing, and Racism: Disrupting Whiteness in Teacher Education and in the Classroom

Picower (What’s Race Got to Do with It?), an education professor at Montclair State University, delivers an impassioned and well-documented look at how racism becomes embedded in American classrooms, and what can be done to root it out. Assignments that ask students to “identify the positive and negative aspects of slavery” and textbooks that remove references to Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan are not “random, singular examples of poor judgment,” Picower writes, but evidence of a “broader system of racism” in U.S. schools that actively harms students of color. She explains how standard curricula upholds white supremacy by erasing the actual history of slavery and oppression, and “paint[ing] a false narrative of equality”; she then presents case studies of white student teachers learning to “reframe their understandings about race” and become active “co-conspirators” in the project of “dismantling Whiteness.” Picower also discusses how to handle “White fragility,” and notes the harm white people can do while “bumbling through learning about racism in cross-racial groups.” She skillfully combines theory and practice, and draws on firsthand testimony and expert evidence to bolster her case. Education scholars, classroom teachers, and school administrators will heed this urgent call to dedicate themselves to racial justice. (Jan.)