Teaching Our Own Racism

Abstract

Anti-racist pedagogy typically focuses on helping learners identify and counter racist ideas and actions they detect in themselves and others. Sympathetically and skillfully, the leader of this activity is charged with helping people detect subtle racism as evident in racial micro-aggressions and aversive racism. This pedagogic process is crucial and valuable, but risks avoiding a powerful dynamic of how educators can use their own personal, autobiographical experience to model how they themselves struggle to detect and immobilize (as much as that is possible) racist instincts in themselves. If racism is understood as a learned ideology, then it is reasonable to expect that even adult educators committed to dismantling racism have internalized aspects of this ideology. Instead of trying to purge themselves of these, conceal, or damp them down, an alternative educational approach is to make these racist inclinations public and to engage learners in a consideration of how to recognize and challenge these.