I Don't Know by Leah Hager Cohen

Author:Leah Hager Cohen [Cohen, Leah Hager]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

I want black children to have the opportunity to have teachers who understand their culture, their intellectual legacy, their communities, the best ways to teach them, the best ways to motivate them, the best ways to connect to their parents, etc. Those people can be of any color. It is not the color that matters as much as the connections. While many black teachers have an easier time connecting, I have seen black teachers who cannot connect with certain black children because their backgrounds were so different. I have seen many white teachers who can connect because they have been humble enough to know that they have to learn a great deal about their students to be good teachers.

Some people embrace the idea that the solution to racism is willed blindness. If we “overlook” differences, the problems will go away. This is a lot like treating ignorance with ignorance: What I don’t know about you won’t hurt, so long as we both pretend not to notice the gap. This practice might work out pretty well for those with power, less so for the disenfranchised—and for anyone interested in increasing the opportunities for and caliber of connections between people. When we strive for “color blindness,” we foreclose not only on the examination of our own unconscious biases, but also on the possibility of knowing others in all their nuanced complexity.

Christine Sleeter, an education reformer and antiracism activist, describes in an interview with Rethinking Schools magazine why this may be particularly problematic in the classroom:

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