Using Students' Racial Memories to Teach about Racial Inequality

As teachers, our lessons about contemporary racial inequality are complicated and contradicted by the rhetoric of color-blindness—the belief that race no longer matters for determining life chances—entrenched in our culture. Students remain attracted to notions of racism as a problem of the past and often reject the idea that racism is still a major problem today. In this paper we describe an effective classroom exercise, adapted from bell hooks, that we use to overcome these challenges by helping students learn about the persistence of contemporary racial inequality. We ask students to reflect on their own racial memories, and by integrating their own experiences with scholarly readings about race, power, and privilege, students learn to connect their racial memories to broader patterns of racial inequality. This exercise meets a key pedagogical goal of both feminist teachers and sociologists, which is to help students understand how their personal experiences are connected to broader social arrangements and patterns of inequality. We discuss both successes and challenges of the exercise in this article.

Introduction

Teaching about racial inequality is challenging, especially at predominately white and politically conservative schools in the South. It is challenging, in part, because students are not usually taught to think critically about racial inequality. The majority of teachers, in alliance with the standard U.S. history textbook authors, teach students that racial oppression is a concern of the past (Loewen). Although students learn about historical racism, these lessons distort the continuing significance of these historical processes for both people of color and whites.

Most students lack a basic—let alone critical—understanding of how contemporary racism persists. Particularly for white students, discussions of race (if they exist at all) are often laden with the rhetoric that "race doesn't matter anymore"—what sociologists call the color-blind ideology (cf. Bonilla-Silva; Gallagher). The color-blind ideology is appealing for whites because it encourages the belief that the cruel racism of the past is behind us and that racial equality has replaced the bigotry and inequality of the pre-Civil Rights era.

The failure of schools to teach critically about race is evident when we face our college students, who for years have mis-learned critical information about our nation's historical and current dealings of race and racism. While the class activity described here does not repeal all the years of confusion, silence, and misguided learning, it can help generate open and honest conversations about race, inequality, and privilege pulled directly from students' own lives.

Teaching about Inequality in the Feminist Classroom

Paulo Freire argued that reflection on personal experience is the heart of learning. Yet teachers often fail to ask students to share their personal experiences. Feminist teacher bell hooks describes the value of using students' personal experiences to teach about oppression. She writes, "This pedagogical strategy is rooted in the assumption that we all bring to the classroom experiential knowledge [and] this knowledge can indeed enhance our learning experience" (84). Contrasted with a traditional lecture-based model, asking students to share their early racial memories makes personal experience central to student learning, which in turn can make the content more meaningful to students.

As feminist teachers, we embrace the principle that "the personal is political," and we apply this principle to our teaching about social inequality. Similarly, as sociologists we study social life as the interplay of "private troubles and public issues" (Mills 8). Students' personal experiences are valuable because they reflect how the social world works in patterned ways. In short, we aim to help students recognize how their personal experiences reflect larger socio-historical patterns of racial inequality, power, and privilege.

The exercise we describe is consistent with the core principles of feminist pedagogy outlined by Durfee and Rosenberg (106). Throughout the paper we identify how these principles are addressed by the exercise. We also list them below:

1. 1. Recognition that social inequalities exist in society: Students recognize that racial inequality exists and learn how to connect their racial memories with sociological vocabulary to name and redefine their experiences.

2. 2. Empowerment of the...