Race and Ethnicity

Feast for 10, a children’s book by Cathryn Falwell, recently found its way into a lesson at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Cooperative Nursery School. The book, focusing on counting skills, follows a family through the relatively mundane task of grocery shopping and preparing a meal—from one grocery cart to 10 hungry people.

But when the group of predominantly white 3-year-olds listened to and asked questions about the story, none commented that the family in the book was black.

Is this seemingly color-blind attitude a good thing? Not necessarily. 

Recently my family stopped at the Civil War battlefield at Vicksburg, Miss., to take a walk and soak in some history. Near the monument to Louisiana’s troops stood a young boy, about 8 or 9, with his mom and dad. The boy was dressed up as a gray-clad Confederate soldier. The combination of the outfit and the Confederate flag sticker on his family’s car told me something important about this boy.

It told me that he was a lot like me at that age.

The Pew Hispanic Center's dry factual reports hide a world in every statement. Each sentence, like a highly concentrated brew, is the end result of months of interviews and research. Consider the following from an October 7, 2009, report on a national survey of Latino youth:

The biggest reason for the gap between the high value Latinos place on education and their more modest aspirations to finish college appears to come from financial pressure to support a family, the survey finds.

I walked down the newly plowed row with my grandpa, feeling the warm, red clay on the soles of my bare feet and listened to his stories and words of advice. I held a tomato plant in my hands, the rich, black potting soil falling off of the small, vulnerable roots, as he knelt and dug a place for it in the garden. “Hey,” he’d often start, “here's something my daddy told me when I was little. ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth because He wants you to listen twice as much as you speak. If you do that, you'll learn something. If you don't, you won't.’”

Closing out our unit on the L.A. Riots, I asked my students to reflect on whether they thought a similar incident could happen in Oakland. Student opinion revealed an even split.

Here’s what a few of the optimists had to say[...]

The Teaching Tolerance team had a confab earlier this week to plan ahead. Looking at a 2011 calendar, Sean Price, Teaching Tolerance’s managing editor, reminded me that the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Civil War was fast approaching. Did we want to do something?

My first response? Frankly, no. As a former U.S. history teacher, I suspected that the next four years will present an unending opportunity mainly for military history buffs to strut their stuff. We would, I suggested to Sean, better serve teachers by focusing on the themes that spoke to racial justice.  

My students are too young to remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Just four years before their birth, they refer to them as something from “back in the day.”

But the themes of police brutality, poverty and racism are all too familiar. And most drew an immediate connection between the Rodney King verdict that sparked those riots and the 2009 fatal shooting of Oscar Grant. Grant was shot in the back by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle less than one mile from our school in Oakland.

Last December, South Philadelphia High School in Philadelphia was out of control. An outburst of racial violence prompted Asian students to boycott the school for a week. They wanted to pressure the school administration to do something about ongoing hostilities with black students. 

A new study proves what many already suspected: Your chances of getting suspended in middle school rise dramatically if you are black. 

The study, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the home of Teaching Tolerance.

It’s widely understood that African-American kids—and other children of color—get fewer opportunities in life than white kids. But still, it is jarring to find that perception overwhelmingly confirmed in a survey of adults whose jobs involve helping children.