Do You Teach the Children of White Supremacists?
Our founding fathers were slave holders and thus white supremacy is a bedrock ideology of this nation. No family is immune to the infection, the inheritance. In many families, white supremacist ideology and its violence are perpetuated in unconscious ways; in others it is perpetuated with explicit intention. Let us consider here those families who embrace the ideology explicitly, and the children of those families.
What is the responsibility of educators to children who are overtly exposed to white supremacist symbols and sympathies in their homes?
I first drafted these reflections last summer, following the violence in the streets of Charlottesville, VA. This summer, so far, much of the violence commanding the headlines is of a different sort. Instead of heated conflict in fuming streets, we see “icebox” processing centers, the traumas of children taken from families, and a cold bureaucracy that prohibits them hugs and touch. Consistent however, from summer to summer, is white supremacy as an engine of the violence; also consistent is the work of educators and others to confront it.
Many students returning to our schools next fall will have felt outrage at the white supremacist violence on display in our nation’s streets and on our borders. But other students will return to our schools from settings where there’s sympathy for Neo-Nazis, where “immigrant” is a slur, and where racist ideas are overt. The student who says “Heil Hitler” — and then says he was joking; the students who scratch swastikas into lunch trays: In what context are these students learning these words and symbols?
Educators are often concerned about what gets un-learned over the summer: math facts forgotten, or a reading level lost. But what about what gets well-learned? What have the children of white supremacists been learning these summer months, and what will they need upon returning to our schools this fall?
“You Will Not Replace Us!” goes the chant, and it is a reminder that people can find identity strength in feeling displaced and forgotten. Not only extremists. Promising to restore to greatness “the forgotten men and women of this country” was a theme of our President’s mainstream campaign and his inauguration address. It’s a promise that holds particular meaning to those that feel white identity is under attack.
In extreme or mainstream form, it is perilous, to say the least, when sentiments of racial superiority inform public policy and sanction violence. Educators must help protect the next generation from such ideologies, including those students who are vulnerable to adopting them.
Some young people have already integrated white supremacism into their worldview; they may already espouse supremacist thinking and symbols. Educators must respond strongly to such espousals, and tend with vigilance to how these acts harass, demean and threaten other students. Schools cannot tolerate racist and xenophobic aggression from those who speak it.
We must also keep in mind the children who have been sympathetically exposed to white supremacism but are not yet speaking it, those who are still listening, seeking, forming, becoming. What do they need? I’m thinking of the work of teachers here, so I’ll focus on curriculum and pedagogy; several imperatives come to mind:
Value every child and family: No matter where they come from, it is important that all students feel they were born into a home that has worth. This doesn’t mean celebrating a grandfather who wore a KKK hood, but it means honoring something of each child’s inheritance. The “Where I’m From” poems that I see adorning the 8th grade classrooms of my school are an example of such efforts. There are many ways to do this, including this series of lessons from Facing History and Ourselves. Honoring where students come from is crucial. It lays a foundation of trust upon which the work of challenging someone’s worldview can take place.
Re-historicize: To dilute the power that the supremacist ideology invests in concepts of being forgotten, erased or replaced, teachers and students can intentionally study such phenomena in accurate historical contexts. For instance, some white supremacists are agitated by paranoia about “white genocide.” Educators can challenge this notion by teaching historical case studies of actual genocide: how it transpires, step-by-step, in reality and in fact. When we “engage the facts” and arm young people with knowledge of the legitimate historical record we reduce the risk of delusion and make it less likely they’ll take shelter in closets of exceptionalism, where reality can be darkly distorted.
Help them choose alternative traumas: A “chosen trauma,” as noted by Khwaja Khusro Tariq in this piece on ISIS, involves “a group evoking the memory of a persecutory event and ascribing it an inordinate amount of emotional and historic significance.” The “You will not replace us” chants assert the trauma of being displaced, which becomes an identity of victimhood, wielded to sustain feelings of aggression and vengeance. In response, educators can help students understand their suffering in ways that do not rely on delusions of white superiority. We can help our students choose different traumas and more legitimate narratives of injustice. There are ample such narratives to choose from, both individual and societal.
Not all white supremacists have personal histories of abuse and loss — but, as Anna Almendrala notes, as a group they may have experienced higher than average rates of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse and neglect. Christian Picciolini, a former Neo-Nazi, affirms the presence of trauma in the past lives of many white supremacists, and how, deep down, they are running from that pain and desperately searching “for identity, community and a sense of purpose.” As I discuss here, teaching that carefully honors the hardships children have lived can help them be less alone with their pain, and more likely to turn their trauma into a story of hope, rather than a prophesy of rage.
Educators can also help students gain a positive self-concept and sense of purpose by focusing their gaze on contemporary socio-political traumas. We can engage white students, for instance, in a study of how the life expectancy of white America is declining due to drug overdose, alcoholism and suicide. There is trauma here to be claimed. There are laws and regulations to be interrogated and understood. There are enemies of the people to be named. So too with the injustice of extreme income inequality and the struggle for a living wage. Teachers have a roll to play in reframing our students’ understanding of struggle and pain, helping them choose stories of legitimate injustice to invest with emotional and historical significance.
There is certainly great emotional and historical significance attending the return to school this fall. We must build a safe learning environment for all students. We must be informed and respond unequivocally to instances of hate speech — and we must tend to the needs of students who may not yet know what they hate or love or believe, but who, in their formative years, are vulnerable to the poison identity of white supremacy.
RESOURCES: I recommend: Facing History and Ourselves; Rethinking Schools; Teaching Tolerance; The Zinn Education Project; Pro-Con.org.
Originally published at www.huffingtonpost.com on August 19, 2017.
