Silencing Racism: Remembering and Forgetting Race and Racism in 11th-Grade U.S. History Classes

Abstract

Background

The continuing significance of race in U.S. society and culture begs the question of what role history and social studies education can and should play in preparing students to critically and constructively address race and racism in contemporary U.S. society and culture. However, research on history and social studies curriculum and practice continues to demonstrate significant problems in meaningfully including and representing race, racism, and racial violence in U.S. history, underscoring the need for additional research to improve how we address race and racism in history and social studies education.

Purpose

I examined how teachers’ understandings of race and racism, which informed their use of curricular materials, and the content, focus, and framing of race and racism in the formal curriculum shaped the inclusion and representation of race and racism in the enacted U.S. history curriculum in their classes.

Research Design

Qualitative methods were used to study U.S. history instruction in three teachers’ classes at a suburban high school. This included daily observations in each teacher's class over a 7-month period, observation of weekly teacher planning meetings, individual interviews with teachers and group interviews with students, and collection of all curricular materials, and samples of student work.

Findings

Race and racism were addressed in lessons on U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s and early 1900s in a U.S. foreign policy unit and in a civil rights unit that focused on the civil rights movement. In both units race remained an elusive concept, for example referencing skin color but also culture and nationality, and racism was represented as shared beliefs in the superiority of whites over nonwhites. However, during the civil rights unit, the representation of racism as an individual psychological phenomenon of prejudice and stereotyping came to be privileged over other representations and, coupled with ambiguous understandings of race, this enabled the decoupling of race from representations of racism. Additionally, race was eventually forgotten in accounts of civil rights movement events as teachers’ use of the formal curriculum deflected attention away from discussions of race and racism.

Conclusions

More robust understandings of race as a process of racialization and representations of racism as structural and systemic would assist teachers in presenting a continuous history of racism in the United States that would better outfit students to constructively engage racism in the present.