Colorblind Racism - There is no neutral.

*Originally posted to Medium on July 17, 2020

At the start of the 2019 school year, a group of girls at my daughter’s school decided they did not like her because she was Black. My daughter had just started kindergarten.

Sadly, I didn’t hear about this event until late January. After sharing this experience with her teacher, nothing was done. As the teacher explained, they all seemed to be friends now and MJ (that’s the name I call my daughter because she looks just like me, Michelle junior) said she had forgiven them. No harm, no foul, right?

I removed my daughter from that school within the next month. Don’t get me wrong, I expected the transition to be difficult because she was new and many of the students had attended preschool together or at least lived in the surrounding neighborhood. We did not. My decision was based on more than just this single incident; it was based on my daughter not feeling like a valued part of the school and the community. As the only Black girl in her class, she experienced microaggressions from both her teacher and classmates, and for the first time, she begged to have her curly hair straightened. The final decision followed her teacher’s and the entire charter management organization’s choice not to acknowledge Black History month; instead, February was announced as “Attendance Awareness Month.” Giving the benefit of the doubt, I expected that teachers would celebrate within their classrooms, but by the second week of February, I realized this would not be the case in MJ’s class. I emailed the teacher and offered assistance. She responded by explaining that she would not cover Black History Month because she did not have time in her curriculum and that she had covered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in January. She then offered the solution that I could give a mini lesson as part of MJ’s sharing week by sharing something she was interested in. Centuries of Black History and important contributions to civilization by individuals across the entire African Diaspora was reduced to twenty minutes to share something about the interests of a five-year-old.

MJ’s experience is not isolated; it is an experience shared by many students of color in schools across the nation and it affects their academic success (Kumar, Zusho, & Bondie, 2011). The experience is an example of colorblind racism, an ideology quite different from traditional racism. Whereas traditional definitions of racism center on the idea of purposeful, often hateful acts of individuals, colorblind racism is, among other things, centered on the rejection of the salience of race in systems and daily interactions (Harper, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2015). In effect, colorblind racism is a product of the misnomered “post-racial America.” Often signified by phrases such as “I don’t see color,” it ignores the function of race as an oppressive tool in society. In MJ’s case, color-blind racism allowed the entire school district to ignore the need for all students to learn important historical facts about an entire group whose very lives cannot be separated from the tapestry of US history. This negligence was a form of cultural racism in which Black culture was undervalued and in some ways, erased.

By silencing my daughter’s voice and ignoring her culture and its contribution to the world, her value as a student and as a human being was undermined. MJ, and students like her, experience a cultural and academic cost by participating in an educational system that erases their very nature (Kumar et. al, 2011; Schunk, 2020). When a student considers the cost too high, it can affect both the emotional well-being and motivation which negatively impacts educational performance and academic success (Kumar, 2011; Mayer, 2011; Schunk, 2020).

Unfortunately, these academic effects are often misnomered as the academic achievement gap. Past solutions have reduced the complex issue of systemic racism to an issue of education and instruction, effectively removing the responsibility from the teachers, curriculum, and structure of the current education system and placing this responsibility firmly on the student. Such misattribution creates a deficit model of education for Black students and other students of color (Bush & Bush, 2018).

So, what does all this mean? It is simple enough to expect teachers to teach factual history; however, there is no such thing as a race-neutral curriculum. Teachers must purposefully and actively seek facts, even beyond their own education and teacher preparation which has been historically lacking (Gay, 2014; Kumar, et al., 2018). For, most families do not have the luxury or option to remove their children from a harmful educational environment. And, they should not have to.

References Bonilla-Silva, E. (2015). The structure of racism in color-blind, post-racial America. American Behavioral Scientist, 59(11), 1358–1376. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215586826

Gay, G. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching principles, practices, and effects. In H. R. Milner IV & K. Lomotey (Eds.), Handbook of urban education (pp. 353–372). Routledge.

Kumar R., Zusho A., & Bondie, R. (2018) Weaving cultural relevance and achievement motivation into inclusive classroom cultures, Educational Psychologist, 53(2), 78–96 https://doi.org/10.1080/00467520.2018.1432361

Mayer, R. E. (2011). Applying the science of learning. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

Schunk, D. (2020). Learning theories: An educational perspective (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

•