CHAPTER 1

CURRICULAR TOOLS OF WHITENESS

Honey, if you want to clean the house, you have to see the dirt.

—LOUISE HAY

CURRICULAR TOOLS OF WHITENESS

In this chapter, I share examples of curriculum used in K–12 schools that publicly came to light because of the outrage and organizing of parents of Color who came across their children’s assignments and took to social media to share their righteous indignation. As a trigger warning, the examples of curriculum in this chapter are distressing. They range from potentially easy-to-miss examples to violent and traumatic assignments. The majority of the examples in my research are anti-Black in nature and deal with the teaching of enslavement in particular. My goal in sharing these examples is not to re-traumatize BIPOC or to make White people feel bad, but rather to bring to light the breadth and depth of how racism is perpetuated through everyday, real assignments in K–12 schools. This way we can name, disrupt, and change it. As motivational author Louise Hay once said, “Honey, if you want to clean the house, you have to see the dirt.” This chapter is the dirt.

I have been collecting social media posts of racist curricula for years and have organized these examples into a framework for understanding how these are more than random, singular examples of poor judgment by individual “bad apple” teachers. They also aren’t a reflection of the turn toward explicit racism under the forty-fifth US president. Rather, these examples function as what I have named Tools of Whiteness because they use a variety of strategies to socialize students to internalize existing racist ideologies, ensuring that racial hierarchies are maintained through the education system.

In previous work, I lay out a framework of Tools of Whiteness, which reveals scripted responses used to maintain teachers’ investment in White supremacy.1 White supremacy requires certain ideologies to remain in place in order to maintain power. Just as tools allow a job to be done more effectively or efficiently, Tools of Whiteness facilitate the job of maintaining and supporting the thoughts, language, and ways of acting that uphold structures of White supremacy. In other words, Tools of Whiteness function to deny, evade, subvert, or avoid ways of analyzing racism as a form of oppression.

Given that 82 percent of US teachers are White, the very people who have benefitted from racism and have themselves been educated to hold racist ideas are the ones tasked with moving the next generation toward reproduction or resistance of racism.2 Rather than move toward racial justice, some teachers both consciously and unconsciously use curricular Tools of Whiteness to revise the historical record in ways that preserve the idea of Whiteness as good, superior, and ever present. When educators teach in this way, curriculum and instruction become projects in which ideologies of racism are reproduced in the minds of the next generation. While the individual educator using curricular Tools of Whiteness may not intend or be conscious of this role they are playing, the consequences remain the same. The following chart lays out the curricular Tools of Whiteness; the sections that follow provide classroom examples that demonstrate how each tool operates.

CURRICULAR TOOLS OF WHITENESS

CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: WHITE OUT

In order to maintain racial hierarchies with Whiteness at the top, curricula using this tool cement Whiteness as normal, innocent, and ever present. In order for schools to be places of liberation, teachers would have to tell the full picture about the history of whose land the US was founded on and with whose labor. This would require teachers to portray White people as the perpetrators of violence against BIPOC.

Most curricular tools of Whiteness function to avoid teaching the history of the formation of the United States accurately. The White Out tool specifically achieves this by simply not including people of Color at all. When teachers choose this tool, they reinforce Whiteness in three different ways. First, by erasing the history of oppression that BIPOC have faced at the hands of White people, teachers affirm the post-racial idea that all people are on an even playing field. Second, by erasing the sheer existence of BIPOC from the learning experiences of all students, teachers send messages to children about who is deemed valuable or expendable, reinforcing racial hierarchies. Finally, by removing the accomplishments and resistance movements of BIPOC, especially in light of the oppression they faced, teachers block avenues for self-love or pride for students of Color.

Bill Bigelow, teacher and editor of the social justice education journal Rethinking Schools, published an article about his experience with the curricular White Out tool and how he reframed it.3 He told his fifth-grade students about how some presidents had been enslavers, which sparked their curiosity about which presidents specifically. They began to research their question by looking through their dictionaries, social studies textbooks, kid-friendly websites, encyclopedias, and other sources—which, in keeping with the White Out tool, made no mention, or provided little or unclear information, of this aspect of presidential history. This omission of factual information demonstrates how this tool maintains the dominant narrative of the founding fathers as universally good. It also perpetuates the myth that the United States was founded in ways that represent freedom and equality for “all,” despite the very real ways that racial oppression was key to this story.

Rather than allow this White Out tool to go unacknowledged, Bigelow encouraged his students to become “textbook detectives,” which taught them how to identify and critically analyze historical White Outs. As a culmination, he had the students write letters to the textbook companies sharing their research data and demanding that they rewrite their books. When asked why the textbook companies omit this information, Bigelow’s students responded: “They’re stupid”; “They don’t want us kids to know the truth”; “They think we’re too young to know”; and “They don’t know themselves.” While Bigelow was able to support his students to see through and understand why publishers might white this information out, many teachers haven’t been trained to be “textbook detectives” themselves, leaving this tool in play.

As seen in this example, it is often the omissions in textbooks and children’s educational materials that are most heavily implicated in the White Out tool. In 2019, a New York City parent activist group, the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, issued a report called Diverse City, White Curriculum: The Exclusion of People of Color from English Language Arts in NYC Schools.4 Partnered with researchers from New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, the report examined 1,200 books across fifteen commonly used curricula and booklists, from 3-K and pre-K through eighth grade.5 By looking at the racial background of both title characters as well as curricular authors, they found that while only 15 percent of New York City public school students are White, the characters in the most commonly used books are 52 percent White and the book authors are 84 percent White. In fact, they found that elementary books featured more animal characters than Black, Asian, or Latinx characters combined.6 Megan Hester, director of the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative, explained in responding to the report: “Children’s books have traditionally played a role in socialization—teaching children how to think, how to act, and how to feel about themselves, others, and the world. Unfortunately, the erasure, dehumanization, marginalization, and whitewashing of people of Color have been a persistent part of that tradition.”7 When children are exposed to the White Out tool, they are being taught more than early literacy; they also are being presented with messages of both superiority and inferiority.

Children’s and young adult literature play an important role in the development of young people’s understanding of the world. Children’s literature expert Rudine Sims Bishop developed the popular metaphor of windows and mirrors to describe representation in literature.8 Ideally, there should be a mix of books that can serve both as opportunities for children of all racial identities to see their experiences mirrored back to them and as windows to see the world beyond themselves. Without this mix, what does it mean, then, for White children to be hyper-visible to themselves and others and for children of Color to learn in a mirror-less world in which they do not exist? Bishop explains, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.”9 The White Out tool teaches this lesson through the omission of BIPOC from curricular materials.

CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: NO ONE IS TO BLAME

While the White Out tool omitted people of Color, the following tools do portray BIPOC, but in distorted and problematic ways. Similar to the White Out tool, teachers use the No One Is to Blame tool to avoid assigning responsibility to White people for historical atrocities. In this case, teachers build curricula that include BIPOC, but the stories are told with no victims and no perpetrators. This maintains the dominant ideology of White people as benevolent, good, and innocent and paints a picture of an even playing field. This omission of blame encourages students to see atrocious acts as naturally occurring—as just “human nature” in which oppression occurs randomly and without pattern. Teachers use this tool to reframe and justify historical acts by providing explanations that do not involve power, resulting in a false and sanitized version of history that protects the reputation of White people.

Figure 1 is adapted from a textbook that uses the No One Is to Blame tool.11 It is a snapshot taken by Coby Burren, a freshman in a Texas high school, from a McGraw-Hill textbook used in his geography class.12 Under a map labeled “Patterns of Immigration,” the caption reads “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” Coby sent the photo to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, who posted it on Facebook, where it went viral. In her Facebook post, Dean-Burren draws attention to how Africans transported to America against their will are framed as “immigrant workers” rather than as enslaved people. She points out that the textbook indicates that English and European people came as indentured servants to work for little or no pay but makes no similar mention for enslaved Africans, referring to them instead as “workers” or “immigrants.”13

Figure 1. Textbook example of Atlantic slave trade with no slave traders. Source: Teks World Geography Student Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2015).10

The publishers erase the violence of enslavement and how slave traders hunted and stole family members before exporting them from Africa to America, where they were sold as property to Europeans. By using the No One Is to Blame tool, the textbook authors not only misrepresent the forced migration of enslaved Africans as voluntary, but also they frame it so passively as to remove any oppressors. Who brought these “workers” to the agricultural plantations? How? Why? None of that is mentioned in this framing. This glaring omission of the role of Europeans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade reinforces the framing of White people as innocent and good in the American story of progress. This curricular Tool of Whiteness glosses over this historical atrocity, leaving not only no victims, but also no perpetrators.

In a similar use of the No One Is to Blame tool, a Canadian textbook has a section called “Moving Out” that stated: “When the European settlers arrived, they needed land to live on.14 The First Nations people agreed to move to different areas to make room for the new settlements.”15 The book continues: “The First Nations people moved to reserves, where they could live undisturbed by the hustle and bustle of the settlers.” This textbook uses the No One Is to Blame tool to frame colonization as an “agreement” between settlers and Indigenous people, masking the reality of settler colonialism, “which is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing.”16 Instead of naming and grappling with settler colonialism, the textbook authors fictionalize a mutually beneficial arrangement in which settlers received land and First Nations people conceivably continued their way of life peacefully and undisturbed.

As demonstrated throughout this chapter, all of the examples of curricular Tools of Whiteness that I came across in my research, including the two examples above, distort the shared history and experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, and European people. This is not a coincidence, as Indigenous studies and education scholars Eve Tuck and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández explain:

In North America, settler colonialism operates through a triad of relationships, between the (white [but not always]) settlers, the Indigenous inhabitants, and chattel slaves who are removed from their homelands to work stolen land. . . . For settlers to live on and profit from land, they must eliminate Indigenous peoples, and extinguish their historical, epistemological, philosophical, moral and political claims to land. Land, in being settled, becomes property. Settlers must also import chattel slaves, who must be kept landless, and who also become property, to be used, abused, and managed.17

These two textbook examples are implicated in this broader settler colonial project, maintaining White innocence in the story of how land and labor were acquired through “agreements” and “immigration” rather than genocide and enslavement. With no oppressor depicted, students internalize the dominant ideology of the natural order of our highly stratified society. One of my former students, Linda, demonstrated this idea of a natural order of domination when, in claiming why we should not teach about racism in schools, she said, “I think that there is always a group that is going to dominate another group of people. You know, whether it’s Whites over African Americans or Indians over whoever.” Linda framed domination as an aspect of human nature and was able to disconnect Whites from the oppressor position by offering other possibilities of dominant groups (although she could not actually name any other than “whoever”).

Linda’s way of thinking about oppression was likely made possible by her former teachers and their curriculum that also used the No One Is to Blame tool to obscure historical arrangements. As an educator, Linda is now able to continue this broader historical project of maintaining White innocence through curricula like the ones above. Adding insult to injury is the fact that these examples of curricular Tools of Whiteness are literally textbook examples. They passed through multiple editors, writers, review boards, editorial boards, and so on before being printing and distributed. Individual teachers such as Linda do not have to create or question anything; they are handed the curricular Tools of Whiteness that align with their own ideology that they then seamlessly pass on to their students.

Similar to the way that teacher Bill Bigelow taught his students to recognize and analyze instances of White Out, teacher Laura Whooley posted on Facebook to share a similar example of how to educate children to speak back regarding the No One Is to Blame tool.18 Her students were using a McGraw-Hill companion textbook when they came across the following sentence: “As more farmers grew tobacco, they needed more enslaved Africans to do the work.” Rather than read this sentence and move on, Ms. Whooley and her students homed in on the word “needed.” She used this teachable moment to support her students in understanding the dynamics of greed, money, and power in the arrangement of chattel slavery, how framing matters, and how to take action. She had her students write letters to McGraw-Hill sharing their analysis and concerns.

Fourth-grader Caroline wrote, “When it says ‘needed’ I think that is not really correct. When the wealthy people bought enslaved Africans, they didn’t really need it. They wanted it. You see, the white people could’ve done all the work themselves, but they wanted slaves to do it.” Caroline continued with her recommendation to the publisher: “You should replace needed with wanted. It’s more realistic. And because when the 3rd graders come to 4th grade and see THAT, they are gonna think it’s totally fine to enslave people because they NEED it.” Caroline not only understood the power dynamic at play, she also named the role that the textbook plays in indoctrinating children to believe racial oppression.

Another student, Laurel, compellingly added, “1. No one needs slaves in this world. 2. Plantation owners could have done the work themselves instead of sitting on their lazy butts. 3. If they need slaves, I need a pet panda.” By calling to attention one simple verb—needed—in a companion textbook, Ms. Whooley interrupted the transmission of the idea that the enslavement of Africans was a logical and necessary solution to European economic desires. By teaching her students that in fact, someone was to blame, she provided a significant example of the power teachers have to transform, rather than reproduce, racist ideology.

CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: NOT THAT BAD

When teachers use the Not That Bad tool, they aim to downplay the horrific nature of past oppressions by promoting a sanitized picture of history, thereby maintaining White innocence. By convincing students that events like slavery or colonization were Not That Bad, teachers propagate a false narrative of what it means to live under oppressive circumstances, masking children’s ability to understand current inequality. Minimizing the reality of how White people inflicted racial violence on Black people under the institution of slavery enables White people to claim that Black people and other people of Color are playing the race card by obscuring the reality of how racism operates to maintain the suffering of BIPOC.

In 2015, children’s literature authors using this tool released two different books that both tell happy stories of enslaved cooks. A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins, published by Schwartz & Wade, and A Birthday Cake for George Washington by Ramin Ganeshram, published by Scholastic, both depicted happy Black cooks joyfully making sweets for their enslavers. An illustration from A Birthday Cake for George Washington portrays six smiling, animated, intergenerational African Americans prepping, cooking, and serving a huge feast. A toddler is gleefully lifting a rag in one hand while swinging an overflowing bucket of bubbly mop water, so thrilled to be cleaning the floor for the upcoming festivities to which he would receive no invitation. A little girl, smiling eyes widened with anticipation, arms eagerly held up, takes in the delicious smell of the baking dessert wafting from the kitchen, a cake from which she would be offered no slice. The book centers on an enslaved chef named Hercules who attempts to make the birthday cake, but misadventure ensues when he finds there is no sugar in the house.

While slavery is depicted more subtly in A Fine Dessert, an enslaved mother and daughter still are seen smiling as they prepare a blackberry dish. After they serve the dessert to “the master and his family,” they hide in a closet, kneeling in the dark to furtively lick the bowl. Rather than explain to the reader why the little girl has to work and hide, the text states “Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Mmmmm. What a fine dessert!” By representing the small joys Black people created for themselves absent the abuse, brutality, and cruelty of White enslavers, these books sell the story that the institution of slavery was Not That Bad.

The public reaction to the Not That Bad tool depicted in these books called atention to what was left out of the actual reality of slavery. Online backlash from parents and progressive education organizations was swift when the hashtag #SlaveryWithASmile started trending and think pieces circulated online about these books.19 A coalition of #BlackLivesMatter activists, school librarians, and social justice groups circulated a petition that went viral demanding that Scholastic and the Children’s Book Council “Stop promoting Racist, ‘Happy Slave’ Book to Children.” Two prominent trade journals cautioned against the Scholastic book: the School Library Journal called it “highly problematic” and Kirkus Reviews expressed that it had “an incomplete, even dishonest treatment of slavery.” After facing the online backlash, the author of A Fine Dessert apologized and donated her profits to the We Need Diverse Books campaign. Scholastic recalled A Birthday Cake for George Washington, explaining, “We believe that, without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves and therefore should be withdrawn.”20

The Not That Bad tool is present in textbooks as well. In 2018, parent Eileen Curtright tweeted a photo from her daughter’s Prentice Hall textbook that claimed:

But the “peculiar institution,” as Southerners came to call it, like all human institutions should not be oversimplified. While there were cruel masters who maimed or even killed their slaves (although killing and maiming were against the law in every state), there were also kind and generous owners. The institution was as complex as the people involved. Though most slaves were whipped at some point in their lives, a few never felt the lash. Nor did all slaves work in the fields, some were house servants or skilled artisans. Many may not have even been terribly unhappy with their lot, for they knew no other.21

By teaching students that enslaved people were too ignorant to be “terribly unhappy” and that there were “kind and generous owners,” teachers are actively perpetuating the inaccurate idea that racism is Not That Bad for most people.

In a 2014 study, history education researchers John H. Bickford and Cynthia W. Rich examined over forty children’s books about slavery and highlighted a plethora of ways that the narratives, like the examples above, distort its inhumanity. They highlight tactics used in literature such as heroification, omission, and exceptionalism—often resulting in happy endings of American progress.22 As they explain, “To be blunt, a Holocaust story likely cannot be told without someone making someone die. A story about American slavery cannot likely be told without some violence, family separation, and little hope for freedom. . . . In short, such brutalities cannot be eliminated from the story while maintaining historicity.”23

Teachers may be selecting books that tell a happy story in an attempt to be developmentally appropriate and to avoid traumatizing students. However, historian Blair Imani contends that if children who are BIPOC are old enough to experience racism, then it should therefore follow that White children are old enough to learn about it. As long as students who are BIPOC remain targets of racism, attempts to whitewash history do not protect children of Color; rather, they protect Whiteness. White supremacy requires this lack of historicity in order to falsely maintain the dominant narrative of Whiteness as good and innocent. Ohio State University historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries explained in a report on the way teachers misrepresent slavery: “Although we teach them that slavery happened, we fail to provide the detail or historical context they need to make sense of its origin, evolution, demise and legacy. . . . And in some cases, we minimize slavery’s significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential.”24 By creating or using premade curricula that convinces students that slavery was Not That Bad, teachers protect White innocence at the expense of Black resistance.

By claiming that historical racism is Not That Bad, teachers also imply that past oppression should have no consequence on the current status quo—in turn telling students that everything is now equal. This messaging has been shown to have negative consequences for students experiencing inequality. When students are socialized to believe that things are fair but then experience discrimination, they can’t look to the system for blame—instead, they fault themselves. A 2017 study by Erin B. Godfrey, Carlos E. Santos, and Esther Burson found that “traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years.”25 The findings from this study indicate that the use of tools such as Not That Bad that paint a false narrative of equality undermine the well-being of marginalized youth.

CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL

In order to maintain racial hierarchies, Whiteness requires us to buy into the false narrative that all things are equal. To admit that historical oppression has consequences on today’s racial inequality would require conversations and actions such as affirmative action, reparations, and other equalizing measures that those who benefit from current arrangements aggressively resist. The tool of All Things Being Equal skews reality by collapsing the complexity of history in order to present, as Fox News would say, a “fair and balanced” perspective. When using this tool, teachers dismiss context, power, motivation, or outcomes by pretending that apples and oranges are the same fruit.

In the classroom, this tool looks similar to teaching through multiple perspectives, a popular strategy in multicultural education that encourages students to see situations from several sides. However, in contrast, when teachers use this tool, they are attempting to create a false equivalency and a seemingly neutral, even playing field, as if all sides have equal weight and circumstances. When subjected to this tool, students come to think that all opinions are equally valid, allowing for anyone to claim “fake news” if they disagree with a particular perspective. Two teacher-created worksheets from 2018 demonstrate the All Things Being Equal tool.

The first example was posted online by Roberto Livar, the father of Manú, an eighth grader in San Antonio, Texas.26 It was a worksheet titled “Slavery: A Balanced View” with a blank chart in which students were expected to list examples of both negative and positive aspects of slavery. In his post, Mr. Livar asked, “What the hell is this revisionist history lesson trying to achieve here!?!?”27 The second worksheet was posted on Facebook by Trameka Brown-Berry, a mother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.28 The worksheet asked students to “Give 3 ‘good’ reasons for slavery and 3 bad reasons. Make notes and then put them in complete sentences on a separate sheet to prepare for making an argument.” There were blank spaces under the directions marked “Good” and “Bad.” Next to the photo of the assignment, she asked, “Does anyone else find my 4th grader’s homework offensive?” Over two thousand respondents found it to be so.29

Both of these 2018 examples focused on the study of enslavement, the topic that is most heavily represented in curricular Tools of Whiteness, and both asked students to identify good/positive aspects of slavery. By using the tool All Sides Being Equal, these teachers created curricula that set up the false idea that one of the biggest atrocities in history can be casually debated as if both sides were equal. In addition to the moral reprehensibility of this tool, it also denies any emotional anguish that it might create for students, particularly Black students, to argue for the “goodness” of enslavement.

To successfully complete these assignments, students were expected to fill out attributes on both sides. Fortunately, the children whose parents posted the assignments rejected this indoctrination and called out the teachers for trying to turn them into slavery apologists. Manú, the student in the first example, refused to provide good reasons for slavery, writing “N/A” in that column. In the “negative” column, he responded with bullet points: “forced strenuous labor, rape, forced religion, forced sex between slaves, stolen culture, no payment, occasional torture, hardly were fed, if not being physically abused, they were verbally abused.” He explained his response to receiving this assignment: “When I first read it, I thought it was B.S.” Manú went on to explain that the teacher told them to respond using the textbook as well as “the stuff that we could think of off the top of our head.”30 What exactly did this teacher imagine was in their students’ heads?

In the second example, fourth-grader Jerome answered: “Good? I feel there is no good reason for slavery. That’s why I did not write it. BAD: Biting them. Splitting them up from family members, making them do your chores and work when it’s your job to do that, and punishing them, and I am proud to be black because we are strong and brave.” While it is incredibly heartening to see these young people clap back at their teachers, it is not the responsibility of students of Color to hold educators accountable for their racist curriculum.

We saw the All Sides Being Equal tool of creating false equivalents used by the forty-fifth president of the United States after the Unite the Right rally on April 11, 2017, during which White supremacists, Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and other members of the alt-right marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville, shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” The next day, a member of this group plowed his car into counter-protesters, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of a young White woman named Heather Heyer. Donald Trump commented on the incident, and instead of expressing condemnation for the murder, he claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides.” When a reporter asked if he was equating the moral plane of the counter-protestors with that of the White supremacists, he responded:

Yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. If you look at both sides—I think there’s blame on both sides. But you had a lot of people in that group [alt-right] that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know, I don’t know if you know, but they had a permit. The other group [the counter-protestors] didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story.31

Trump equated two “wrongdoings”: (1) protesting without a permit and (2) first-degree murder. This tactic skews the reality of the “two sides of the story” while wrongly leaving blame up for debate. The tool of equating two unequal events allows him to keep significant points out of the conversation and chalk up people’s outrage to a difference of opinion, or “fake news.”

The All Things Being Equal tool is appealing for many teachers because they often feel pressured to present an unbiased perspective, which they equate with not taking a stance or not assigning blame. As a teacher educator, my students often raise the concern of teacher objectivity, having been socialized to believe that classrooms should be apolitical places of knowledge transmission. Without fail, this concern always comes up in a class I lead on complicating the narrative of Christopher Columbus in elementary classrooms. Using Rethinking Schools’ classic trial activity from Rethinking Columbus, participants explore who is guilty for the crimes against the Taino Indians by examining primary documents.32 While the role-play asks students to consider multiple perspectives, the activity concludes by assigning blame—the key piece missing in the All Things Being Equal tool.

After the activity, we engage in a discussion of how the teachers will now teach Columbus to their students. Preservice teachers are often hesitant to stray from the traditional “Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue” version. They fear the backlash from imaginary parents who, when pressed, they realize they have pictured as White. They see moving from the official version as potential “indoctrination” but don’t recognize that teaching the “Niña, Pinta, and Santa María” version is biased as well—that it is teaching the glory of imperialism. Somehow, they don’t fear a corresponding potential backlash from Indigenous parents, demonstrating the power that even non-present, imaginary Whiteness has on teachers’ decision-making. The problem with the All Things Being Equal tool is not the examination of multiple perspectives or viewpoints, it’s the false pretense that both sides are coming to the table from the same place.

Not surprisingly, this tool is generally reserved for when people of Color are targets of oppression. When White people are the primary perceived victims of atrocities, such as in the September 11th attacks, students are typically taught that evildoers perpetrated the violence. As Trameka Brown-Berry, the mother of fourth-grader Jerome, commented about the assignment asking her child to identify “three good reasons for slavery”: “You wouldn’t ask someone to list three good reasons for rape or three good reasons for the Holocaust.”33 So why is it deemed acceptable to ask students to use this line of reasoning when thinking of slavery or colonization? Again, the insidious reach of Whiteness is at play.

CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: WHITE GAZE

Another way that Whiteness is maintained is by masking itself and attempting to collapse everyone into seeing the world through a particular perspective—the perspective of White people. Teachers achieve this through the use of a tool that Toni Morrison referred to as the White Gaze.34 The White Gaze is set up to view people of Color, particularly Black people, through the lens of Whiteness, and it ultimately “traps black people in white imaginations.”35 With this tool, teachers use curricula that are written either explicitly or implicitly from a White perspective, asking all students to develop White sensibilities. This White Gaze tool teaches students to think like those in power, in turn preparing students to empathize with oppressors rather than those marginalized by power. This tool also trains students to problem solve to maintain inequality rather than teaching them how to dismantle it. Take the following two instances, which, in keeping with previous examples, distort the interwoven history of settler colonialism and enslavement.

The first example was an assignment that I initially saw on a fellow academic’s Facebook page. It read:

Poster Assignment

You are a wealthy Southern plantation owner who had several slaves escape and head to the North. This is severely hurting your profits. Make a poster advertising for slave catchers to go find your runaway slaves. Be persuasive, make your poster stand out, and be sure to put in an incentive.

Things to remember:

Who is your audience?

What will they receive if they return with slaves?

Where will they need to travel?

When do they have to return? Is there a time limit?

Why should they do this job? Will you pay them? How much?

While I don’t have information about this assignment, since it was posted without identifying information, the following diary-writing exercise was assigned in an elementary school in Edmunds, Washington. This assignment went viral after the mother of Blaine Gallagher, a Native American student of the Klamath Tribe, saw her eleven-year-old’s homework. While assigned in 2018, it came from a supplemental curriculum originally published in 1971.36

Diary Situation 2

Since your ships’ first landing in the New World, you have had constant contact with various Indian tribes. The first Indians were generally friendly. They often were very helpful. They came to your aid during that first winter. Without them, you probably would not have survived. You have welcomed them into your homes and have often shared your meals, your good times, and your sorrows.

Now tragedy has struck. Last Friday a well-organized Indian attack was launched across your colony. Several dozen colonists—men, women, and children—were slaughtered with their own guns. Many of these colonists were killed at their dinner table as they shared their meal with their “friends.” This attack came as a total surprise and shock.

Write a diary account of the attack.

1. Explain exactly what happened as you viewed it.

2. Express your conflicting feelings toward the Indians.

3. Include in your account some of your past experiences with the Indians and your plans for how you will deal with them in the future.

4. Strive for verisimilitude. This word means “the quality of seeming real.” To make your descriptions real, use descriptive words which create pictures in your reader’s mind.

These two assignments exemplify the White Gaze tool. The teachers who used the tool forced students to take on a role—the first as a wealthy Southern plantation owner and the second as a colonist in the New World. While neither explicitly tells the student they should imagine themselves as White, a White identity is assumed in both these roles. Both assignments view Black and Indigenous people as the “White man’s burden,” requiring students to problem solve in order to “deal” with enslaved Africans who are ruining their “profit” by running away from slavery or to handle Native people who are launching a “shocking” attack for no apparent reason. This requires students to learn how to maintain oppression by either scheming to protect profits by catching troublemaking slaves or dealing with those violent Indians who have hurt their feelings. Both distort the brutality of enslavement and colonization, positioning White people as the victims under those systems.

A similar White Gaze assignment was posted to Facebook in December 2019 from a fifth-grade social studies class in Missouri.

You own a plantation or farm and therefore need more workers. You begin to get involved in the slave trade industry and have slaves work on your farm. Your product to trade is slaves. Set your price for a slave____. These could be worth a lot. You can trade for any items you’d like.

According to the school, this assignment was part of an activity that had “attempted to address market practices.” The district justified the assignment, claiming, “Students were learning about having goods, needing goods and obtaining goods and how that influenced early settlement in America.”37 The activity was a role-play in which students were assigned a variety of roles, including slave owner. A biracial student, who was given this role, showed his completed worksheet to his mother, Angie Walker, who posted it online. Also an elementary teacher, Ms. Walker expressed, “For me, for my biracial son to come home, and to see ‘$5 for two slaves,’ I was shocked.” Her son told her that the assignment was meant to be “a game” to see which student could amass the most wealth through free trade. “First of all, the slave trade industry is never a game,” Walker denounced. “The teacher could have gotten the lesson across perfectly fine without using slavery. It could have been a teachable moment, and things like this in 2019 should not be occurring. We can all learn from this and do better.” Ms. Walker calls attention to the emotional impact the White Gaze tool has on Black students, as well as the disturbing use of the Not That Bad tool that turns slavery into a casual game.

This dehumanizing tool forces children of Color to develop the White Gaze by going outside themselves to see their own people as problems and to empathize with, identify with, and think like the very people responsible for their oppression. Assignments shaped by the White Gaze force children who are BIPOC to see themselves through the violent and deficit lens of Whiteness. As Blaine, the only Native student in the class that received the diary assignment, said, “It was upsetting. I didn’t want to read it because it told me about slaughtering by my own people.”38

Fortunately, Blaine was able to identify the problem with being asked to see his people through the eyes of his oppressors, but not all students are able to avoid this racial internalization. In such cases, the White Gaze tool puts a psychological burden on students who are BIPOC, potentially jeopardizing their academic success when confronted with such assignments. Take for example a question on a Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam based on Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad. During this high-stakes exam, tenth graders from across the state were confronted with a passage that required them to identify with the perspective of a character named Ethel, a racist White Southern woman, in order to correctly answer the question.39 The vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association reported how disturbed students were by the question: “They really felt like they were being asked to basically write creative racist thoughts and put them into words for this character. . . . This seemed like a disturbing thing to ask students—especially students of color—to do.”40

While White students might be able to answer this question and move on, Black students are forced to experience the racial trauma of thinking about themselves through a White racist lens in order to achieve academically on a test that has implications for their future. In what ways does this take them out of the testing mindset and impact their psychological well-being and academic success? Thanks to public uproar and demands from the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Boston Teachers Union, the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance, and the New England Area Conference of the NAACP, this question was removed.41 This situation begs the question: How many other assignments like this have been created by the tool of White Gaze that have been left unaddressed?

For White children, this tool reinforces mainstream ideology about racial superiority. It socializes White children to see themselves as the ones in power and to develop paternalistic mindsets, strategies, and policies to interact with and ultimately control BIPOC. This 2019 example from a school outside Chicago demonstrates the potential outcome when White students internalize these messages. A White high school student took a picture of his Black classmate. He posted the photo on Craigslist with the headline, “Slave for Sale.” The White student described his peer as a “hardworkin thick n—— slave.”42 Someone might try to assign blame for this ignorance to the single student himself or even ask where someone could learn such behavior. By enticing students into the White Gaze through curriculum, schools should not be surprised when children internalize these messages and act accordingly.

While the White student in this example used the White Gaze tool to internalize racial superiority, this tool also results in children of Color trying to avoid their identities because of the violence perpetuated upon them. An article in The Guardian cited how children are responding to growing racial hate crimes in the UK. The piece reported an increase in students of Color attempting to change their appearances to look more White as a way to avoid this racist bullying. As one eleven-year-old Chinese girl lamented, “I hate the way I look so much, I think if I looked different everyone would stop being mean to me and I’d fit in.” A ten-year-old stated, “I’ve tried to make my face whiter before using makeup so that I can fit in.”43 Rather than being able to recognize the perpetrators of the bullying as racist, these children are heartbreakingly internalizing the pressure of the White Gaze tool by attempting to fit in to White standards of beauty.

CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: EMBEDDED STEREOTYPES

Similar to the White Gaze, White supremacy benefits when people of Color are dehumanized and stereotyped. Teachers can consciously or unconsciously enact Whiteness by using the Embedded Stereotype tool. This tool relies on a hidden curriculum to socialize students to develop racial stereotypes by camouflaging them in lessons on unrelated academic skills—for example, math or literacy. The teacher may be teaching a lesson that appears to be on a neutral skill, like addition or rhyming, but the content relies on mainstream or historical stereotypes. In other words, the lesson isn’t about the offending stereotype—the teaching of the stereotype is a secondary effect.

An egregious example of the Embedded Stereotype tool came from a reading series called Little Books from Reading Horizons, a curriculum purchased in 2015 for $1.2 million by the Minneapolis Public School District.44 One Little Book page is an illustration of an African girl running out of a hut in a simple orange dress. The title of this story is “Lazy Lucy.” The other page shows a dark-skinned, smiling runner, arms lifted in triumph. The text reads:

People in Kenya are very active in sports. They play rugby and soccer. They also like boxing. Most people are aware that Kenyans are able to run very fast. They can run for a long time. Kenyans have won many races. Some Kenyans run with bare feet! As you can tell, Kenya is a pretty great place.45

The district purchased this curriculum filled with essentializing stereotypes as part of its Acceleration 2020 initiative, specifically aimed at closing the “performance gap between white students and students of color.” In keeping with how this tool functions, the content about Kenyans being lazy or running fast wasn’t the goal of the lesson; literacy development using decoding skills was the intended lesson objective. Socializing students to develop stereotypical thinking that maintains racial hierarchies was the embedded curriculum of racism.

While the above examples are from literacy curriculum, the Embedded Stereotypes tool shows up frequently in mathematic lessons as well. The following examples demonstrate the tool in use when teachers integrate race into math problems.

Mathematics Example 1

The master needed 192 slaves to work on the plantation in the cotton fields. The fields could fill 75 bags of cotton. Only 96 slaves were able to pick cotton for that day. The missus needed them in the Big House to prepare for the Annual Picnic. How many more slaves are needed in the cotton fields?

Note: Follow the three reads protocol to identify what you understand, what you know, your plan and how to solve.

Picture (Show your work)46

Mathematics Example 2

If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week? 2 weeks?

Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?

Frederick had 6 baskets filled with cotton. If each basket held 5 pounds, how many pounds did he have all together? 47

Mathematics Example 3

In a slave ship, there can be 3,799 slaves. One day, the slaves took over the ship. 1,897 are dead. How many slaves are alive?

One slave got whipped five times a day. How many times did he get whipped in a month (31 days)? Another slave got whipped nine times a day. How many times did he get whipped in a month? How many times did the two slaves get whipped together in one month? 48

These three assignments are explicitly mathematics problems, but implicitly they reduce Black people to the role of slaves who are either working for master and missus or are being violently beaten, whipped, or killed. Some might argue that these teachers were trying to strengthen their curriculum by integrating social studies content into their mathematical lessons. However, their problematic racial ideology was revealed through their application of the tool of Embedded Stereotypes.

Another horrific example of the Embedded Stereotype tool comes from a Burns Middle School teacher in Alabama, who passed out a quiz that included these questions:

This quiz, floating around online as a piece of “satire” for over a decade, had already caused teachers in California, Texas, and New Mexico to be disciplined.50 In the Alabama case, the teacher told the students that it was not meant as a joke and they had to complete it and turn it in.51 Perhaps some teachers are using this tool in an attempt to be “down” or culturally relevant, but because their understandings of race are rife with deficit thinking, the result is reproducing deeply problematic stereotypes. In writing about this specific assignment, mathematics scholars Julius Davis and Christopher C. Jett explain, “These kinds of examples . . . contribute to stereotypical, deficit constructions of Black people and reflect what Blackness often means in the White imagination.”52

While the stereotypes in the prior examples are explicitly stated, the following examples illustrate how the Embedded Stereotype tool can also covertly promote the socialization of implicit bias. Observed in children as young as six years old, implicit bias is the unconscious, involuntary racist attitude that individuals have about groups outside of their personal experience.53 When teachers use curricula that embed false, negative assumptions about different groups, this socializes students to develop implicit bias and negative associations from an early age. The materials teachers create using this tool do not explicitly focus on racist content; rather, they cunningly reinforce racism through a more hidden curriculum.54

An example of this tool is a worksheet posted online by Aqkhira S-Aungkh, who found it in a K–1 vocabulary workbook published in 2009 by Carson Dellosa. 55 The assignment had four children with no facial expressions with a traced emotion word underneath each child. The instructions were to trace the word and then to draw the child’s face to match the feeling. Of the four children, two were White and two were Black. The White girl, wearing a party hat, is “happy,” and the White boy, wearing a first-place ribbon, is “proud.” In contrast, the Black boy, who has a popped balloon, is “sad,” and the Black girl, whose dog ate her homework, is “angry.” This worksheet, aimed at teaching five-year-olds how to name their feelings, taught an additional hidden lesson in assigning racialized emotions that reinforce existing stereotypes such as that of the angry Black woman and that of White men as the most advanced.

Aqkhira S-Aungkh captioned the photo, “It’s the subtle, subliminal messages that we have to watch out for. Those images that seep into our children’s sub conscience and derail their confidence. Not on my watch! Not my brilliant babies!”56 Here S-Aungkh recognizes and uncovers the tool of Embedded Stereotypes. The post was picked up by a number of media outlets, prompting the publisher to apologize: “It has been brought to our attention that our Homework Helpers Vocabulary Development Workbook features an occurrence of implied racism.”57 While the embedded racism was addressed in this example, in many assignments, it goes unnoticed and is therefore easily internalized by students.

Another example, while not a piece of classroom curriculum, is an instructional poster called “Be Cool, Follow the Rules,” put out in 2014 by the American Red Cross as part of a safe swimming campaign.58 It portrays a number of diverse children engaged in poolside activities labeled as either “cool” or “not cool.” The two characters engaged in “cool” activities are White, while four out of the five characters engaging in dangerous or violent activities identified with “not cool” arrows are children of Color. Because the “cool” children are White and the “not cool” children are people of Color, this tool of Embedded Stereotypes is sending racialized messages of validation and inferiority. Fortunately, people noticed this embedded racism and pushed back. Swimmer Margaret Sawyer saw the poster at a few local pools, complained about the racist portrayal, and posted it online. In an article in the Washington Post about the poster, Ebony Rosemond, who heads an organization called Black Kids Swim, connected the poster to both historical and current lack of swimming resources for Black children and stated, “The current state of affairs is unfortunate, and images like the one created and circulated by the Red Cross make things worse.” Rosemond continued, “In connection with the lack of images showing African Americans excelling in swimming, the poster doesn’t make you feel welcome—it suggests to a Black child that you’re not welcome here.”59

The viral backlash prompted the American Red Cross to apologize and remove the poster. While a kindergartener is likely unaware of the racist legacy of segregated swimming pools, the American Red Cross poster still teaches them the lesson that pools are not cool for Black children. As with other instances of the Embedded Stereotype tool, these visuals educate generations that might not know the history behind these images to still hold the same stereotypical beliefs as generations before. The workbook and the poster exemplify implicitly Embedded Stereotypes—the lessons are explicitly on safety and feelings, but the images reinforce racialized assignments of value and emotions. In concert, the wide range of assignments in this tool work powerfully to inculcate students into learning mainstream stereotypes while camouflaging them within lessons on unrelated academic skills.

CURRICULAR TOOL OF WHITENESS: RACIST REPRODUCTION

Over the last decade, no other tool has been responsible for more examples of viral curriculum than the Racist Reproduction tool. In my research, I came across over twenty viral examples in which teachers forced Black children to role-play slaves in reenactments of different aspects of enslavement. While the other tools work to shape students’ ideology so that they think in ways that keep racial hierarchies in place, teachers using the Racist Reproduction tool provide actual practice in reenacting historical racism through role-plays, skits, games, and simulations.

One example is from 2018 in Westchester, New York, in which a White fifth-grade teacher stood in front of her class and asked her students, “Who is Black?” She then made the Black children who raised their hands line up outside in the hallway. She “pretended to place them in shackles” and then brought them back inside the classroom, where she lined them up against the wall. Playing the role of slave auctioneer, she instructed the White students to bid on them.60

The Racist Reproduction tool is particularly insidious because it gives teachers the opportunity to appear to be educating students about racism, which is a good thing, while in actuality they re-create racial hierarchies in ways that traumatize Black children. In other words, they are enacting racism in the name of anti-racism. The prevalence of this tool is astounding—the headlines below are from 2019 alone:

“Teacher on Leave and Under Investigation; Parents Claim Teacher Held ‘Mock Slave Auction’” (Watertown, NY)

“5th Grade Teacher Tells White Students to Bid on Black Classmates in Mock Slave Auction” (Bronxville, NY)

“Wisconsin Teacher Reportedly Asks 7th Graders to Create ‘Slave Games’” (Shorewood, WI)

“‘Monopoly-Like’ Slavery Game Played by Fourth-Grade NC Class Outrages African-American Grandmother” (Wilmington, NC)

“For Black History Month, This Loudoun County Elementary School Played a Runaway Slave ‘Game’ in Gym Class” (Brambleton, VA)

“Indiana Middle School Cancels ‘Slave Ship’ Role-Play Lesson After Parents Raise Concerns” (Russiaville, IN)

“South Carolina Mom Outraged After Kids Told to Pick Cotton, Sing Slave Song as ‘Game’” (Rock Hill, SC) 61

The sheer number of times this Racist Reproduction happens begs the question: What is it about enslavement that makes this the topic teachers are most committed to reenacting? Historian Carol Anderson, in her seminal book White Rage, demonstrates that for every advancement made by African Americans in the United States, White people have relentlessly pushed back against these hard-fought gains.62 Because slavery has been legally abolished, perhaps White teachers are enacting this White rage by using their limited classroom power to force students into explicitly anti-Black oppression under the pretense of learning.

While the use of this tool is prevalent, so, too, is the backlash by those who see the racist implications of these activities. It is no surprise that the majority of the headlines charted above center the outrage of Black families. Mother Nicole Dayes described a mock slave auction that her ten-year-old son’s teacher in Watertown engaged in:

He and another African American child were put up in the middle of the class and told they were now slaves. The teacher then started the “bidding.” . . . After the winning bid was placed, my son was then told how slaves would take the slave owners’ last name and what he was to call the slave owner by. Then my son and the other “slave” were instructed to call the Caucasian child by “master” and the child’s last name.63

In South Carolina, parents were outraged when fifth graders were brought on a field trip to a cotton field. With no explanation of slavery or the significance of forced labor, they were instructed to play a “game” in which they had to race to pick cotton while singing the following song lyrics: “I like it when you fill the sack. I like it when you don’t talk back. Make money for me.”64 By turning slavery into a game, the Racist Reproduction tool works in concert with the Not That Bad tool by obscuring the atrocities of enslavement.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report on the inadequacy of how slavery is taught in schools.65 The report was highly critical of the use of these kinds of simulations, arguing that they “‘can harm vulnerable children’ and that the trauma of such lessons is compounded for black students.” While the teachers in these examples may have been teaching about historical events, they ultimately set their students up to experience the very same conditions they were teaching about—racial hierarchies with Black students on the bottom and White students on the top. Through the Racist Reproduction tool, teachers commit educational malpractice, using their position of power to enact traumatic events that carry very real health and psychological consequences for Black students.

CURRICULUM VIOLENCE

Each of the examples in this chapter function as curriculum violence, a term coined by Erhabor Ighodaro, which he defines as the “deliberate manipulation of academic programming in a manner that ignores or compromises the intellectual and psychological well-being of learners.”66 This form of violence perpetuated by educators includes both the omission as well as the falsification of the history, culture, and representation of people of Color.67 The result of this curricular violence is the socialization of racist beliefs in students and the traumatization of children of Color.

While the viral nature of current examples might make it appear that curriculum violence is something new, there is a long legacy of teachers using education as a way to transmit White supremacy. In 1933, Carter G. Woodson explained, “To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that the struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. . . . This crusade [against propaganda in school] is much more important than the anti-lynching movement because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”68 Here, Woodson connects curriculum to physical violence, demonstrating how both serve an explicit purpose of maintaining power and control.

In contrast to the immediate terror of murder, however, such “schoolroom lynching” serves instead as a form of slow violence, which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”69 Rob Nixon explains that this kind of slow violence “is typically not viewed as violence at all . . . a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive.”70

EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICE

Like traditional notions of violence, slow violence has a tangible impact on health. A 2019 national report from American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) explained how Black children suffer significantly from racism and named racism as a social determinant of health that “has a profound impact on the health status of children, adolescents, emerging adults, and their families.” Referring to racism as a “socially transmitted disease passed down through generations,” the AAP acknowledged that children who are the targets of racism have the most significant health impacts.71

One way that the health field measures the impact of trauma is through the Adverse Childhood Experiences score, or ACE score. An ACE score refers to the multiple factors of stress, abuse, and neglect that children can face that impact their later health outcomes. Examples include psychological, physical, and sexual abuse; exposure in the home to substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide; incarceration or violence; physical and emotional neglect; parental separation and divorce; exposure to violence outside of the home; living in unsafe neighborhoods; homelessness; bullying; discrimination based on race or ethnicity; and experience of income insecurity.72

According to the AAP report, when an individual is exposed to discrimination, or even anticipates discrimination, they experience stress responses including “feelings of intense fear, terror, and helplessness.”73 As a result, hormones such as cortisol flood the body, which can lead to inflammation, ultimately making the body more open to chronic diseases.74 Health officials warn that: “When activated repeatedly or over a prolonged period of time (especially in the absence of protective factors), toxic levels of stress hormones can interrupt normal physical and mental development and can even change the brain’s architecture.”75 The more ACE factors children experience, the more likely they are to be linked to some of the negative outcomes associated with high ACE scores, such as depression, suicide, poor physical health, obesity, lower educational attainment, unemployment, and poverty.76

Children’s ACE scores are not race neutral. According to a 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), 61 percent of Black children and 51 percent of Latinx children have experienced at least one ACE factor compared with 40 percent of White children and 23 percent of Asian children.77 The trauma connected with health determinants is often associated with what children carry into schools from their outside lives.78 However, these already elevated ACE scores that Black and Latinx students experience outside of school are compounded when they experience additional stressors, such as racism, inside schools.

Through curricular Tools of Whiteness, it is teachers and their curriculum that become the active source of trauma for children of Color. When students experience stress reactions to the racism exposed through #CurriculumSoWhite, it can be inferred that it will also impact “how the brain and body respond to stress, resulting in short- and long-term health impacts on achievement and mental and physical health.”79 Given that Black and Latinx children already experience more ACE factors than White children do because of an interconnected web of health determinants, curricular Tools of Whiteness re-traumatize them in classrooms that should ideally be set up to support them. Taken as a whole, then, curricular Tools of Whiteness are more than problematic assignments; rather, they are issues of serious health concerns, particularly for Black students who already have the highest ACE scores and are subjected to the most frequent racism through #CurriculumSoWhite. Teachers using Tools of Whiteness add to the ACE scores of children of Color through the racial trauma they induce by exposing their students to this kind of educational malpractice.

RESPONSE CYCLE: THE WRONG I

The life cycle of #CurriculumSoWhite appears to follow a pattern—at least as the media that reports on it would have us believe. First, a racist assignment is given to a student. The student, typically a student of Color, shares the offending assignment with a family member who recognizes the racist nature of the activity. They post it on social media, eliciting a viral response from an outraged online community. In a defensive move, the school or school district suspends, disciplines, or removes the teacher and offers a public apology. Things settle down. Until it happens again.

Figure 2. Typical response cycle to #CurriculumSoWhite

As I was writing this chapter, this same response cycle was once again in the news. Following the typical pattern, a teacher in Freeport, New York, gave her eighth graders an assignment to create captions for black-and-white photographs from after the Civil War of Black sharecroppers working in a field. Instead of focusing on the import of these rarely seen primary documents from the era, the teacher instructed students to “make it funny,” adding, “Don’t bore me.”80 A student told her grandmother about the assignment, who posted it on her Facebook page where it went viral. The image of the completed worksheet showed how students resisted the racism of this assignment, filling it out with phrases such as “I HATE THIS,” “#BlackGirlMagic,” and “Us Black people need to GET OUT!”

The next day, the teacher offered an apology, recognizing that she must “work hard to rebuild trust from my students, colleagues, and the community.” The superintendent issued a public statement claiming, “Our investigation has determined that this lesson was poorly conceived and executed . . . Aside from the fact that this is a poor lesson, it is an insensitive trivialization of a deeply painful era for African Americans in this country, and it is unacceptable.” While this accountability and apology are important, this typical response cycle is incapable of interrupting the ongoing onslaught of #CurriculumSoWhite. Part of the reason goes back to the Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage: this response isolates only one of the I’s and operates solely on the interpersonal level by assigning blame to an individual “racist” teacher, treating them like a bad apple that, if isolated and dealt with, will make the problem go away.

The truth is that a more complicated response is required. While there does need to be a change in the racial understandings of individual teachers, it cannot be done in a piecemeal, case-by-case manner after the offending curriculum has done its damage. In order to effectively mitigate curricular Tools of Whiteness, all Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage—interpersonal, ideological, institutional, and internalized—must be addressed. Understanding how the Four I’s are implicated in the problem also points us toward a solution. There must be an institutional attempt to transform the interpersonal and internalized ideology of educators.

Teacher education is one such institution that has the capacity to disrupt the racial ideology of large numbers of teachers before they enter the field poised to cause damage. The following chapter digs deeper into how focusing teacher education on racial literacy can transform the deeply held racial beliefs of White teachers and how that impacts their curricular choices. By understanding the relationship between teachers’ ideology and curriculum, the response cycle can move from the interpersonal level to working at the institutional level to admit, transform, and graduate teachers who recognize Whiteness and actively seek to interrupt it.