There has been so much information to digest the first two weeks of this course, and I appreciate the opportunity to do so. As a white woman teaching majority Black students, I need to continue to learn more about my own identity and how to teach students that have a different road to identity than me due to the racist structure of this country. I also have a strong passion to create change in the educational, cultural, and political landscape of this time in the name of social justice. I wrote down many quotes and ideas for this reflection; however, I realized it is impossible to include them all without going well over ten pages, so I am including more of the parts that became meaningful to me personally and in the classroom.  

One point that first stood out to me was that Africans have more diverse genes than people of other continents, and the research shows the genetic diversity “declines steadily the farther one’s ancestors traveled from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which is roughly the site of the exit turnstile for the ‘out-of-Africa’ migration” (Brown, 2008, para. 3). This quote comes from “Genetic Mutations Offer Insights on Human Diversity” by David Brown. Similar to Indigenous people, Africans have extreme diversity, but colonization has deculturized them and put them all into one group when that could be farther from the truth. 

In the article How to Have Conversations About Race,” Dennis Sparks interviews Beverly Tatum. Sparks (2004) says to her, “You note that the parts of identity that humans notice are those that other people reflect back to them. For black students, that means the reflection is distorted by racism. You also observe that when individuals are members of a dominant or advantaged social group, that aspect of their identity is so taken for granted that they don’t notice it” (p. 48).  This quote really stood out to me because of it basically mentioning entitlement. There is a poster in my classroom that says “privilege is when equality feels like oppression.”  This resonates with me because as a white person in the education field and in this country, I have had to work extremely hard to analyze my own bias, identity, indoctrination, privilege, etc, because it will not be reflected back to me explicitly. I have the advantage to never have to think about race if I don’t want to, even with all of the police brutality and conversation regarding this topic happening right now culturally. I know many white people who are aware of some of these conversations but just don’t care enough to do anything about it, not even with themselves. The works starts with ourselves. I feel like I can put this into practice in my teaching by allowing my students of all racial backgrounds to express their experiences and opinions. As a journalism teacher, they are constantly getting to decide what stories to cover and we are always looking at what is happening in the news. To be able to allow them that space to share is vital. More personally, I can make sure that when I am planning lessons and picking stories, journalists, etc, that I am thinking about the culture of my students and giving them mirrors to see themselves and windows into other cultures.

Tatum (2004) also discusses that “people are afraid that conversations about race will lead to conflict and anger” (p. 49). I see this a lot when I have spoken to people in my own family and my boyfriend’s family who were raised in rural Missouri, many of which were raised low-income. There is a lot of anger in feeling that they have been screwed over, too. I think that by having these conversations about race and modeling that they can happen without anger or conflict.  I also think about “The Cycle of Liberation” by Bobbie Harro (2000) and how they write that “The cycle ‘teaches’ us how you play our roles in oppression, and how to revere the existing systems that shape our thinking, leading us to blame uncontrollable forces, other people, or ourselves for the existence of oppression. If there is an identifiable pattern of events that repeats itself, becomes self-fulfilling, and leads us to a state of unconsciousness about issues of oppression, then there may be another identifiable pattern of events that leads us toward liberation form that thinking” (p. 463). This quote is incredibly powerful to me. I do not think I quite understood this concept until reading this and really pondering. This is exactly what I was just mentioning about my family. I am also reminded of the discussion boards from the last couple weeks. I cannot remember which one, but I had a great conversation with some peers about how the system is sustaining itself by causing chaos within the population and giving them ammunition to blame each other and fight each other when the real power lies somewhere else. Because if we actually did the inner work, found common ground and humanity in each other, and decided to work together to break the cycle then the system would cease to exist and discontinue to benefit those with the most power and control. This quote also gives us the hope that this can be changed using the same repetitive process that keeps us trapped in this cycle. One of the big lessons I want to practice in my classroom is a micro example of a community. I would like to actually show students the cycle of liberation in this article, because as student journalists, they enact a similar cycle in the process of finding a story to share. I think the hardest part I find myself encountering and my students (especially after the wave of online learning) is finding community and coalescing to create and maintain change. I want my class to show them that they do have power, especially together, and to embrace it.

Peggy McIntosh’s article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1989) is, of course, amazing with many nuggets of wisdom. The list of daily effects of white privilege is one I will keep for class. It would be a great lesson starter for my Intro to Journalism students. One line that really stood out to me is as follows: “We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies” (para. 15).  I always just thought that privilege was always in terms of negative advantages that need to be stopped, and this list and quote made me realize that no, that privilege is also just spreading positive advantages too so that they are not advantages anymore but basic human and societal rights. I don’t know if I even considered this distinction. 

Joel Spring’s book Deculturization and the Struggle for Equality (2016) has blown my mind. I have enjoyed reading each chapter, as well as getting to have a presentation to go along with it to further my understandings. Knowing that the spreading of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture and “civilization” was justification for imperialism is a really important fact to teach students and to remember myself. It reminds me of the phrase “follow the money.” I can empower students to appreciate their own culture and to remember that nothing and no one can take away their education and whatever is in their mind.  

One of my favorite things that stood out to me was in chapter two of Spring’s book when the missionaries tried to develop written Native American languages so that Anglo-Saxon culture and religious texts could be taught to the Native Americans. The Sequoyah made a written Cherokee language and used this to preserve Cherokee culture even though the Protestants did not want them to preserve their history and religions. And because each character matched a particular sound, the Cherokee could quickly become literate. And then the start of the Cherokee Phoenix was first published in 1828 (Spring, 2016, p. 28). This is an amazing example that shows the power of language and the importance of literacy in preserving one’s culture. I think that since my students are writers, I feel I can take this information into my teaching and help them to make meaning about this class and what they are trying to accomplish as they share their own voices with the school and community. This also matches my own recent understanding that multiculturalism and differentiation is the future of education. Students would probably benefit from more local systems of governance where the community had more control over the curriculum and what culture(s) are addressed in the schools. This concept is something I will continue to take with me throughout my career and will be a big point of advocation from me. While the idea of state and national standards makes sense to me in theory, I am not sure if globalization can actually have real students’ interests at heart because of the risk of factory-model schooling and the perpetuation of students as products. When Spring discussed how when the Cherokee schools were taught by actual Cherokee and not Europeans, there was better performance and learning. To blatantly ignore this to this days shows the inherent racism and imperialism that continue to exist until we change this from the local level first. I am learning that I also have more power than I think, and I can become more involved in the community around me, especially when I am dissatisfied with what is happening. 

Lastly, Tracy Ore’s book The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality” (2019) has some amazing essays. One line that really struck me was in the essay “Racial Formations” by Michael Omi and Howard Winant: “When European explorers in the New World ‘discovered’ people who looked different than themselves, these ‘natives’ challenged then existing conceptions of the origins of the human species, and raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered in the same ‘family of man’” (Ore, 2019, p. 20). This line really stuck out to me because my understanding has always been that it is ridiculous to ever think that another race (which is a social construct) could be inferior than people that have the same skin tone and more similar features (in some cases). However, I put myself in their shoes and realized that I am sure it is alarming to come across another group of peoples that are different than what one has always known. However, at a certain point, this is just an excuse. Even if ignorance does exist at the start, violence is never the answer. Humans are always justifying violence to humans, animals, and plants. I think I can use this in my teaching to show my students that just because one is ignorant at the beginning of a new experience, it does not justify continued hate. This is also a good lesson to have students identify blind spots and ignorance and explore that as they research and write stories. 

In conclusion, the last two week’s readings, websites, and resources were very thought-provoking, relevant, and interesting. I have been reflecting on my own privilege and how that may be reflected in my classroom without me realizing it. I have also learned that I want to be more explicit about these conversations around race, imperialism, deculturalization, because my students are at the age where they are forming and exploring their own identities. They deserve a safe space to express and explore their identifies and their thoughts about their place in the world, learn from each other, and leave the class with new critical thinking skills they can transfer to any area of their life. Being an educator is so extremely hard in so many ways, but this course has only energized me and shown me how lucky I am to be able to work with the future of tomorrow.