After an opening-day-of-school keynote speech I delivered for a K-12 urban faculty in New York state, a white male high school teacher came up to me and said, "I don't have any black students in my classes." Knowing that the student population in his school was 70 percent black, I was baffled by this comment. I had just spent 90 minutes talking about issues of cultural competence, race and social justice in urban classrooms, and I wondered what message he was trying to deliver to me. I probed a bit by asking what kinds of classes he could be teaching that would not include any black students. Then he delivered his intended meaning: "I don't see the race of my students. They are all just students, and I don't see any of them as being black." Wishing to engage the conversation further, I suggested, "You may not want to see race in your classroom, but I can guarantee you that all of your black students know you are white." He seemed not to receive this as an invitation to continue our dialogue and walked away in anger.
In sharp contrast to this teacher's obvious denial of the realities of race in his classroom, Dottie Blais' "Lessons for a Teacher" exemplifies the kind of honest and courageous self-reflection required of white teachers if we are to be effective practitioners in racially diverse schools. Race isn't the whole story or the only factor influencing our effectiveness with students of color, but it is a key factor. Whether or not our students have read Cornel West, they know that "race matters." And because race matters, our whiteness also matters.
The pretentious color-blind attitude of the teacher in New York is one expression of white privilege; it renders "the other" invisible and thus inferior. The refusal to see race is a refusal to know about the dynamics of race. The refusal to know is a refusal to care, and if we do not care about race, we are not worthy to teach in the presence of our students of color. Unexamined whiteness is the enemy of good teaching in racially diverse schools; it is a danger to all of our students, and it is one of the prime factors contributing to the perpetuation of both the institutional inequities and the personal pain that too often impact the lives of students of color.
In a powerful and humble way, Dottie Blais confronts these connections between seeing, knowing, caring and teaching in her deep self-examination of a relationship with one African American student. Her experience brings to life one of the things I have often said in my own speaking and writing: "It's not whether we are white, it's how we are white that really matters." Her story also bears witness to the fact that whiteness does not have to be in the way of good teaching, but when denied or ignored, it is always in the way.
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