Changing Racial Options in Proximal Spaces: The “Earnest Struggle” of Teaching History as a Fight for Justice Now,Not Just Then

Abstract

Teaching the history of systemic racial oppression during a time when racial hatred is explicit in policies and behaviors is traumatic. Learning about the links between enslavement, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration is emotionally draining and triggers helplessness in students and educators. Through Douglass' “Ernest Struggle,” we examine how students and educators often avoid addressing the stress that accompanies learning about hate. Racial literacy is a harm prevention strategy to prepare youth and educators to mindfully track the stressful impact of past racial violence on their thoughts, feelings, and bodies while confronting current proximal discrimination experiences in their daily lives.

Keywords

racial literacy microaggressions systemic oppression mindfulness interventions anti-racist < competence racial stress racial coping self-efficacy emotion regulation White supremacy peculiar arrogance

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.” (Frederick Douglass, 1857, West India Emancipation Speech, Canadaigual, NY, August 3, 1857)

Speaking the truth of American history has been threatening to the leaders of this country since its inception. The ways leaders have hidden their relationships with the wealth accumulation from the free labor and barbarism of enslavement and genocide of Black, Native, and poor people remains disturbing. Teaching the truth of American racism history in schools has become threatening, even as new knowledge links the centuries of public racial violence to the health and wealth of marginalized communities (Nagata et al., 2024). The battle for teaching the truth of history fits squarely within Frederick Douglass's ironic notion of “earnest struggle.” The irony is that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, little of that freedom or bravery is accessible without a fight.

We found both articles as well as the Phillips commentary to be strong pillars for the arguments that (1) understanding the link between America's history of White supremacy, racism, extreme violence, and systemic dehumanization is essential to understanding America's enduring identity flaw with fully repairing the harm from that hate; (2) current political attempts to erase the history of Black and Brown intellectual, sacrificial, and creative contributions to this country's inventions, wealth, and world power are not dissimilar from the cruel strategies used during the Enslavement of Africans; and (3) teaching accurate and accessible racial history knowledge in the most advanced ways within the school classroom remain our best hope to combat systemic and proximal hate and build lasting cross-racial relationships to prepare America's business, education, health, and justice systems for a diverse future. But, without a healing strategy, few or no solutions to combat systemic or proximate hate will work without recognizing that the “earnest struggle” against White supremacy is brutal on health and life, more than liberty or happiness.

We first highlight how these outstanding papers acknowledge White supremacy as a hidden systemic divisive problem in the teaching of history that can have a proximate impact on learners—a dynamic that reflects Douglass' “earnest struggle.” Secondly, we discuss how these denied atrocities are linked to the compromised and present health of Black and Brown youth and families. Finally, we propose racial literacy as a proximal social-emotional learning mindfulness approach to illuminate the denial or “struggle” while also confronting the emotional trauma when these contradictions of freedom, bravery, and dehumanization are experienced in classrooms.

How “Freedom Contradictions” Are Systemic, Proximal, and Uniquely American

What Brundage (2018) has made clear is that we should not assume that violent extremism is antithetical or alien to America's identity or rare in American history. American history is ripe with cycles of prioritizing oppressive policies, creating grand programs to stop the oppression, only to reignite the “new” oppression movement in “old” policy skins later, all under the guise of “freedom.” America espouses the protection of the best of our humanity, and its future in our educational system, yet remains tightly joined at the hip to the architects, theories, finances, and weaponry of dehumanization. Brundage emphasizes that the “Whitewashing” of the language of extremist violence, like “removal” to justify Native American genocide or “crime control” to justify the lynching or race rioting of Black and Brown communities and protests, remains a key narrative flaw in America's commitment to justice. Moreover, he reminds us that each “fringe” hate group justified violence as the best tool to return this country to its original greatness.

Frederick Douglass remarked about this split personality of inhumane freedom in his speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. (Douglass, 1852)

The irony was in celebrating “Freedom Day” while four million enslaved men and women were still enslaved in the South, and any formerly enslaved captured in Rochester, where the speech took place, could be kidnaped and returned to the South. To be fair about our current climate of American education, this lens of “inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony” could help us understand the barriers we face to reaching a more just freedom. But how?

The Earnest Struggle of Hoping for Lasting Change to Systemic and Proximal Hate

As the rise of American racial hostility through systemic legal approaches (suppression of voting access, affirmative action, Black history, police reform, and school anti-racism, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-intersectionality curricula) impacts proximal relational interactions (increase of physical and verbal hate violence in person and online), both have undermined more than our political values. Despite America's attempts to respond to racial disparities in police protection after the brutal deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, fatal police shootings of racial and ethnic minorities increased in 2021–2022, as did the rise in hate during the pandemic (Murakawa, 2023).

Systemic and proximal hate combine within institutions to advance adverse current and intergenerational effects on the proximal physical bodies and mental health and wealth of children and families of color (Nagata et al., 2024). Despite advances in civil rights legislation, schooling access, and medical ingenuity, the racial stress and trauma (RST) from cumulative racial disparities in justice, business, education, and health systems impact our future and thus constitute a “wicked problem.” While significant system change and interpersonal emotional intelligence are necessary to buffer the adverse effects of hate, what happens if the teaching of history is so stressful that it cannot be effectively taught or received?

The Mismanagement of Racial Stress in the Classroom for Teachers

In the ideal classroom, youth can examine “all sides” of hate in America's past and make informed decisions about its impact on their lives, their classmates’ lives, and our collective future. As Chism's 2024 presentation at the AERA presidential session on “Understanding and Addressing Racialized History and Violent Extremism across P–12 Systems and Settings” reminded us, the Smithsonian's motto is “Education is a powerful tool for addressing inequality.” However, the stress of teachers in delivering racial history knowledge (and of students and parents in absorbing it) can interfere with how learners engage in critical thinking (Reisman et al., 2020). Similarly, preservice teachers receive little exposure to competent racial stress and coping in their undergraduate and graduate training, leaving them unprepared and “scared” to resolve these issues in the classroom (Bentley-Edwards et al., 2020).

The “Earnest Struggle” for Teachers

Chism (April, 2024) highlighted that in 2021, over 30 states took steps or created laws to “restrict or limit how teachers could discuss racism, sexism, and gender identity in the classroom.” King (2016) found that while pre-service teachers showed greater interest in teaching about race in a history class, they still lacked critical knowledge in teaching about racism. A particularly thorny challenge of teaching the history of racism in the classroom is not just the veriety of racial history facts. The biggest problem may be the stress of discussing historical truths that challenge the political views of students, parents, teachers, or school systems (Coleman-King et al., 2021; Fleming et al, 2024). The Southern Poverty Law Center identified how schoolteachers and leaders felt overwhelmed and ill-equipped to manage or teach about the rise in hate and preferred to avoid topics like enslavement, so as not to trigger racial conflicts (Shuster, 2018). This was particularly true for preservice or veteran White teachers. The dilemma for White teachers is that when sensitive racial debate ignites from Black and Brown students and triggers fears of one's racial competence being questioned, do they use their power to avoid and change the subject?

Reisman et al. (2020) applied different interpretive frames (critical literacy, disciplinary literacy, and racial literacy) to analyze a stressful classroom history lesson on the New Deal and to examine evidence of White privilege in the benefits of recovering from the Depression sooner than Black people. Three questions they raised include: (1) How well do teachers notice when emotionally stressful interactions occur during instruction? (2) How competently are White teachers able to manage their emotional resistance to discuss these issues, and how can they be prepared? (3) What benefits may come from anticipating and practicing how to engage inevitable racial conundrums during racialized history lessons? Reisman and colleagues identified several steps that might describe and resolve this “wicked problem” of mismanaging racial stress by combining the three types of literacy in one's teaching. This work has implications for the stress-management skills of both teachers and students.

Facing History, Facing Ourselves, and an SEL-grounded social studies instructional program that deals with difficult issues addresses these conundrums through its “Pedagogical Triangle” curriculum, which emphasizes practicing informed civic responsibility using critical learning and thinking skills of intellectual rigor, ethical reflection, and emotional engagement (Facing History, Facing Ourselves). In a randomized controlled study investigating middle schoolers exposed to this curriculum, they found higher “levels of empathy, prosocial behavior, and stronger participatory citizen beliefs” (Domitrovich et al., 2022, p. 426). This program acknowledges the tension in teaching the truth of racial history, where students could feel negatively about US institutions, yet learn about the bravery of freedom fighters.

The Impact of Mismanaged Racial Stress on the Health of Families and Children

Mismanaging the racial stress in the classroom does not just undermine teaching and learning; it is detrimental to the mental, emotional, and physical health of children and their families. Individuals, families, and educators must successfully recognize and regulate the stress of experiencing or witnessing systemic or proximal racism to reduce racial disparities (Stevenson, 2014). Being unprepared to competently resolve the emotional tension of proximal stressful racial conflicts (unintentional misunderstandings, offensive statements, or microaggressions) may not only be traumatizing for students but also decrease student and teacher productivity as relationships and climates are perceived and experienced as untrusting and inequitable. Nevertheless, the pressure of mismanagement stress also falls on parents of color.

The Earnest Struggle for Parents

Parents of children of color are cognizant of the irrational and mismanaged racial fear of White educators, and this influences their racial socialization strategies—in particular, the suppression and minimization of their children's negative emotions in public (Dunbar et al., 2022). Dunbar and her colleagues found that sometimes, when Black parents suppress their children's expression of negative feelings to protect them from White teachers’ stereotyping, this can undermine their children's academic productivity. Although meant to be protective, evidence in both experimental and survey studies supports these parental fears and their link to punitive parenting to suppress the expression of negative emotions in the presence of White people (Gilliam et al., 2016). In contrast, Asian parents became more open to racial socialization with the increase of hate attacks on Asian people in the United States during the pandemic (Kiang et al., 2023).

The Earnest Struggle for Children

When Black children express their feelings, play without restriction, and misbehave within normal child expectations, they are perceived as “more hostile and threatening and punished more harshly by teachers” compared to their White peers (Côté-Lussier, 2013; Goff et al., 2014; Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015). These studies reflect proximal interactions between parents, teachers, and students of different backgrounds that highlight the mismanagement of racial stress in the context of learning, where academic productivity can be hampered.

Both short-term and lifespan exposure to discrimination (Wilson & Gentzler, 2021) contributed to the instigation of youth internalizing and externalizing behaviors with short- and long-term life consequences (Benner et al., 2018; Bernard et al., 2022; Trawalter et al., 2012; Woody et al., 2022). Black youth report experiencing up to five incidents of online and offline discrimination daily (English et al., 2020; Tao & Fisher, 2022). Black youth are more likely to be negatively harmed by microaggressions (Liu et al., 2016) compared to White youth and suffer from hate vicariously by witnessing loved ones’ experiences (Heard-Garris et al., 2018).

Microaggressions are perceived and experienced as blatant and subtle slights that link to depression, anxiety, somatic symptoms, and physical illness among youth of color (Bernard et al., 2022; Woody et al., 2022). Over a third of LGBTQIA + students who experience microaggressions report racial stress and trauma undermine youth productivity when they internalize inferiority stereotypes that debilitate their sense of self and societal acceptance (Goffman, 1959; Steele, 1988). As self-doubt and shame creep in, negative ruminations or dehumanizing self-talk heighten vigilance that spills over into other aspects of daily life. Racial vigilance involves heightened alertness to shame that anticipates and fears unjust stereotyping or false accusations of wrongful behavior (Woody et al., 2022). This can lead to isolation.

This cycle of Discrimination →Rumination → Vigilance→ Isolation (DRVI) is one way to cope with exhausting microaggressions that drains youth's persistence and determination in learning. Higher rates of racial vigilance can predict violent offending (Isom, 2016; Williams et al., 2014) or academic underachievement in Black and Latinx youth. We believe we can block that hate drain by disrupting racial rumination by building racial literacy, mindfulness, self-efficacy, and coping skills.

While systemic change is necessary to eradicate future racism, youth face daily interpersonal microaggressions that disrupt their lives now. In institutions of education, health, justice, and recreation where the support for diversity has diminished, leaders are more likely to fail or struggle to challenge inequitable policies and practices. Marginalized youth will need in-the-moment, interpersonal, intersectional, and confidence-building coping skills to face interpersonal and discriminatory microaggressions.

Resolving the “Earnest Struggle”: Racial Socialization as Active, Not Passive Learning

Over the past four decades, parental communication or psychological intervention, racial socialization (RS) has been the most consistent protective factor for families of color to prepare their children for systemic and proximal discrimination and prevent long-term harm to their health and wellbeing (Hughes et al., 2006; Stevenson, 2014). This also applies to educators who provide RS that prepares children for bias, highlights the significance of their cultural histories and practices, and fosters cultural pride to combat discrimination (Del Toro et al., 2024; Stevenson, 1997).

Positive mental health benefits of RS for Black youth include links to strengthening racial identity (Huguley et al., 2019; Neblett Jr et al., 2009; Stevenson & Arrington, 2009), greater self-esteem and emotional wellbeing (Boykin et al., 2005), lower depression (Davis and Stevenson, 2006), and anger management (Stevenson, 2003). Positive behavioral and coping benefits include youth racial conflict resolution self-efficacy and engagement coping (Collins & Stevenson 2023; Wang et al., 2020), enhanced parenting racial stress management (Anderson et al., 2021; Coard et al., 2007), better protection against Black elementary schoolers’ sleep problems (Conway et al., 2021), and young adult Black male violence retaliation restraint (Stevenson et al., 2021). Positive RS academic outcomes include positive teacher perceptions of Black youth (Thomas et al., 2009), greater academic engagement and achievement (Wang et al., 2020), and improved cognitive competence in children (O’Brien-Caughy et al., 2011). Moreover, Black, Latinx, and Asian American children with greater exposure to school-based RS lessons showed lower negative affect and emotions related to ethnic/racial discrimination (Del Toro et al., 2024).

Unfortunately, several research gaps in the field of racial socialization RS include limited (1) theory and measurement on how RS buffers racial stress and trauma; (2) recognition that parental RS conversations are unplanned and often initiated after a microaggression; (3) regard for the stress and competency demands of RS for parents and children; (4) attention to factors that mediate and moderate RS; (4) evidence that links parent–child RS to youth microaggression coping effectiveness (Stevenson, 2014); and (5) RS-based interventions to improve stress buffering. It is because RS might buffer racial trauma that expanding its capacity to promote healing is so important. Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory (RECAST) was developed to explain these gaps and to foster racial literacy to address them.

RECAST redefines RS by suggesting it buffers stress and trauma harm by providing in-the-moment rebuttal strategies, improving self-efficacy, reducing avoidant coping, and framing the caretaker/child relationship as most protective when bidirectional, skills-focused, and competency-driven (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019, Jones et al., 2021; Stevenson, 2014). RS is redefined as the reciprocal transmission and acquisition of intellectual, emotional, and behavioral skills between caregivers and youth. These skills are expected to (1) grow and affirm parents’ and children's racial coping self-efficacy (RCSE), (2) reframe seemingly impossible microaggressions into manageable ones, and (3) trigger socially just decision making on how to resolve hate conflicts. Finally, RECAST theory proposes that RS improves confidence to regulate under- (avoidance, suppression, and denial) or over-reactive (fight, fright, and flight) coping responses.

White children and parents are more likely to underestimate their racial biases (Scott et al., 2023) and hold biases disfavoring Black and favoring non-Black people in early childhood (Marcelo & Yates, 2019) that can lead them to withdraw from interracial interactions. Without racial socialization, White parents are more likely to promote colorblindness, while White youth are less likely to develop the stress regulation skills to confront discrimination (Abaied et al., 2022; Bartoli et al., 2016; Freeman et al., 2022; Neville et al., 2013).

Conversely, the aforementioned RS coping benefits extend to White children’s and families’ capacity to recognize racism accurately in daily life and to confront it (Wong Chin et al., 2021). Research supports the fact that White children as young as 8 years old can confront racist behaviors of their peers in school (Scott et al., 2023), and adult White bystanders can be taught to challenge microaggressions (Hurd et al., 2022). The bottom line is that discussing racism with children can decrease discrimination (Griffiths & Sullivan, 2022). These findings are related to encouragement of racial socialization scholars to encourage, if you “see something racist happening, say something.”

While racial socialization research has identified the protective benefits of talking about these openly, the level of preparation varies based on parental and child competent management of the stressfulness and trauma of these encounters (Jones et al., 2021). RECAST Theory posits that racial socialization competency is essential to improving recognition of the in-the-moment harm of hate to one's wellbeing, so one's autonomy of voice can be engaged to resolve rejections, also in the moment. The theory posits that confronting microaggressions reduces rumination and promotes agency through confrontation, even if remains internal (Stevenson, 2014). While the research demands measuring how well parents/caretakers/educators negotiate the stress, confidence, and skillfulness of teaching children to buffer hate's sting (Racial Socialization Competency Scale, Anderson et al., 2021), resolving the encounter is paramount. Racial literacy is the applied intervention focus of racial socialization competency (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019; Stevenson, 2014) and brings more skills-based practice and rehearsal, in-the-moment emotion regulation, self-efficacy enhancement, prejudice confrontation, mindfulness, and a trauma healing focus for parents, caretakers, leaders, professionals, and the children and youth they serve.

Teaching “Healthy”: Confronting the Erasure of Hate and History in Schools and Bodies

Many teaching approaches of the history of hate emphasize information sharing, retention, and demonstrating knowledge acquisition, as is the case for the Smithsonian lessons. Though fundamental, these strategies may neglect how the history of public violence, extremism, and hate is cyclical, not linear, present, not past, and proximal, not distant. Youth must navigate and resolve public political and racial conflicts in peer, teacher, and school climate interactions (Collins & Stevenson, 2023). What is missing in our competent teaching and learning of historical racial violence is the recognition and remediation of the emotional struggle of living in a world that is so hostile.

While avoidant coping can be helpful when facing relentless violence, the trauma from that violence lingers and grows within us. Coping can be both protective and disruptive. Active coping reflects a refusal to accept the inhumanity of a hateful encounter and to heal any lingering trauma. Still, all these proximal conflicts happen when teaching racial history and are observed as physically and emotionally stressful while simultaneously being avoided by teachers, parents, and students. Should we comment about it, this dance, this elephant in the classroom, courtroom, and the emergency room? Is this the earnest struggle (Baldwin, 1963; Stevenson, 2016)?

Racial Literacy Interventions That Teach Healthy Confrontation

Racial literacy involves reading, recasting, and resolving stressful racial encounters (Stevenson, 2014, 2024). Using trauma-focused, cognitive-behavioral therapeutic (TF-CBT) tactics to improve microaggression mindfulness and physiological recognition (Metzger et al., 2020), participants demonstrate self-care through skills mastery of emotion regulation flexibility, mindfulness relaxation, threat reappraisal, racial self-affirmation, and prejudice confrontation during microaggression simulations, roleplays, and via chronicling of weekly encounters at school. Culturally responsive aspects include telling and processing youths’ unique racial (and/or LGBQT or immigrant harassment) stories (Metzger et al., 2020).

There are two key strategies for resolving interpersonal conflict taught within several different racial literacy interventions targeting leaders, youth, and families in schools and neighborhoods (Anderson et al., 2019; Stevenson, 2003, 2014; Stevenson et al., 2021). The first strategy is to teach mindfulness, Calculate, Locate, Communicate, Breathe, Exhale (CLCBE). CLCBE helps to increase one's recognition of the harm of the hateful moments to one's thoughts, feelings, body, and energy. These interventions use in vivo cognitive-behavioral racial mindfulness (CLCBE) to improve racial literacy skills in reading (microaggression awareness and knowledge), recasting (microaggression mindful stress regulation), and resolving (microaggression competent engagement, assertiveness, and decision making) stressful encounters. Calculate involves noticing and rating the intensity (on a scale of 1–10) of those feelings. Locate involves specifying in detail the location on one's body where he or she feels stress or whatever feeling is identified. Communicate involves noticing the self-talk or imagery that comes to one's mind during the encounter. Breathing and exhaling bring oxygen to the brain, enhancing peripheral vision and hearing for better decision making. These skills collectively promote improvement in self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-efficacy, and decision making. The more accurate and specific participants become at mastering these skills, the better decisions they can make before, during, and after microaggressions occur.

The second strategy involves teaching healthy comeback lines (HCL). The healthy comeback lines require role-playing the students’ most pressing microaggressions that recur in their daily struggles. The best comeback lines are those in which the student has used CLCBE to track the level of harm and has practiced comebacks that most suit their style and identity, such that their resolution-joy experience matches or surpasses their harm score. When the best comeback line's relief score is higher than the harm score of the microaggression, then it is usable. While finding the best comeback lines can be healing, there is no requirement to use them, as one's safety is paramount. However, the opportunity to choose how or whether to confront is the key lesson. Racial literacy preparation can be healing in and of itself, helping prevent the impact of hate and promoting restraint from retaliation and violence (Stevenson, 2014; Stevenson et al., 2021).

The CROPS (Changing Racial Options in Proximal Spaces) Project within the Resilience Empowerment Collaborative at the University of Pennsylvania has integrated these racial literacy intervention components to help middle and high school youth recognize the harm of identity-based hate and, if they choose, confront it (Stevenson, 2024). Upon completing the Racial Literacy Healing module, participants understand how practicing in-the-moment distress and threat reduction, as well as effective coping strategies, can enhance their ability to identify and reduce rumination, vigilance, and threat reactions. This racial literacy development encourages a shift in the ways people from different and same-ethnic and cultural groups view, interact with, and treat one another in daily life. Our focus now is not on whether we can promote this change in the larger societal community, but on smaller, proximal local communities (dormitories, roommates, colleagues, classrooms, partner relationships, sports teams, etc.).

Racial literacy tactics involve (1) competency rehearsing mindfulness coping strategies to notice and count the cost and harm of hate on the body, heart, mind, and spirit; (2) constructing one's story to build the courage to heal from hate by recasting its calamity into opportunity; and (3) skillfully applying the skills to confront hate encounters in systems, classrooms, relationships, or online. All of this is considered essential before, during, and after learning the truth of American history.

Summary: If You Give a Bully a Cookie

As America's original sin, racism remains a hidden, barbaric truth in our national identity. As much as refusing to teach the truth of hate in American history undermines the goals of this democracy, hate and violence persist, just as symbolically American as the flag. This obsession to lie about the Enslavement origin story remains a threat to our freedom and health as it disrupts the functioning within our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits. To acquiesce to the denial of this history, or to act as if it is true, but does not matter, are unhealthy delusions. Perhaps stress is not the biggest challenge in eradicating racial hate. It is shame. The national shame of facing and changing this history leads to suppression, avoidance, and erasure. But is it not true that sometimes shame comes from truth-telling that, if heard and faced, can potentially reframe trauma towards healing?

Chism's (2024) call for museum education is compelling, as it has the potential to increase access to knowledge about the beauty of a museum education. The capacity to expand students’ and educators’ imaginations and understandings of how racism is global and remediable. A key barrier to this practice, however, is when the federal government restricts the content or withholds access and funding to museums that focus on the history of racial injustice. Unfortunately, with book banning and the blocking of lessons on privilege, the truth about the history of inequality has become less accessible in public and private schooling. This effort appears to be not only aggressively rejecting the truths of racial history but advocating for changing the knowledge of racism in America, and the facts as well.

What we have learned from the important work of Brundage, Skiba, and Phillips is that the road to telling the truth of America's racial history is fraught with potholes and opportunities. Nevertheless, we cannot discount the benefits of school-based policies, protests, and racial literacy practices in ensuring that we continue to tell these stories truthfully and in multiple ways, allowing children to learn (Sealey-Ruiz, 2021).

This struggle reveals a particular set of inferiority dynamics in the American identity of White supremacy, however, which consistently requires a resistance to the (1) overreactive but projected disgust of being perceived as the “Bad Guys” that ironically justifies the history of racial violence; (2) recurrent strategy of lying about while erasing the history and truth of present-day racial dehumanization; and (3) justifying the persistent use of violence to “protect” the public, thus establishing the leaders of White supremacy as the only “Good Guys.” Beyond being a hidden yet fundamental pillar of American history, we believe that the centuries’ long freedom journey will always require this recurring dance of Good Supremacy–Bad Supremacy. And maybe resistance to this dance is our “earnest struggle” (Jones et al., 2021).

When Brown v. Board of Education was instituted in 1954, many White parents in the South took their children out of school or closed schools down, leaving a scorched-earth message that if “our children have to learn next to Black people, then nobody gets to have school.” James Baldwin's “Talk to Teachers” is brilliantly relevant for challenging this unfortunate American acquiescence to the delusive battle of hate. In his book, “Fire Next Time,” he uses the term “moral monsters” as bullies parading as saints who forget the myths they told to justify the oppression of others.

Asante (1987) asserted that while White supremacy as a model of communication acknowledged the existence of other epistemological models, it believed itself to be the best and only relevant epistemology. Asante described this as a peculiar arrogance or “the arrogance of not knowing what it is that they do not know, yet they speak as if they know what all of us need to know.” The implication of CROPS, or changing racial options in proximal spaces, is how essential resistance is for healing from hate. That schools, neighborhoods, educators, families and youth all need to practice resistance to hate is a testament to the fundamental pillars of a just democracy—for wellbeing, for better teaching, for better protests, and for better social change But, the “earnest struggle” against hate means we must never coddle but notice the harm to our health before we resist and confront the peculiar arrogance of White supremacy in all forms—kind, benign, free, clueless, narcissistic, brave, or violent—always.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Office of Social Equity and Community -University of Pennsylvania (grant number Office of Social Equity and Community Award).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Howard Stevenson

Author Biographies

Howard Stevenson is a clinical psychologist and professor in Applied Psychology and Human Development. His research involves developing racial literacy interventions to prevent mental and physical health decline for families and youth.

Sasha Mejia-Bradford, PhD, is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on assessing and disrupting the daily identity-based stressors affecting Latinx young adults' mental well-being using cultural resources and wearable technology.

K J Mosley is a PhD student in the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Program in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the effects of arts-based coping on advocacy burnout and the healing of Sexual and Gender Minority adults.

Jai Smith, BA, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, is an aspiring Sports Psychologist seeking to improve the mental health of athletes as well as early detection, prevention, and treatment of childhood mental health disorders.

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