This is the best of our knowledge, a presentation of national productions.
Talking about race in America is still an uncomfortable conversation, but a professor in Boston
found that teaching a class on the topic was a great way to bring the conversation to a
racially diverse collection of high school students.
She just didn't realize that race was something you studied before them, so I think that was
part of the excitement of the classes.
The students felt that they were really learning things that they didn't necessarily know
about and that helped them to understand their own experience better.
Today on the best of our knowledge we'll talk about that class and about the new book,
high schools, race, and America's future, what students can teach us about morality,
diversity, and community.
Plus we'll spend an academic minute exploring the evolution of skin color.
I'm Bob Barrett, and this is the best of our knowledge.
For years, Lawrence Blum taught a rigorous high school course on race and racism in
racially, ethnically, and economically diverse high school.
He's now taken his experiences with the class and written the book, high schools, race,
and America's future, what students can teach us about morality, diversity, and community.
The book chronicles students' engagement with one another, with a rich and challenging
academic curriculum, and with questions that relate powerfully to their daily lives.
Blum is the distinguished professor of liberal arts and education, and a professor of philosophy
at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
I spoke with Professor Blum recently and asked how he put together the course.
So I had been teaching at the State University for many years, and I have been working in
the area of race and decided that it would be good if I had some experience at the pre-college
level.
Partly because I was teaching, I was starting to teach teachers, I was starting to work
in the education program, and I felt like I hadn't had any experience of the world that
I was supposedly training these teachers for.
But also, I just was interested in how younger people were thinking about race.
And I decided to center the course on a kind of serious academic study of the historical
origins and construction of the idea of race, and how it sort of was interwoven with
the history of slavery, especially in the United States, but also to some extent in the Caribbean
and Latin America.
So I had a little bit of a comparative framework.
I wanted my students to understand that the way we think about race in the US is not the
only way that people think about race around the world and that the slave systems in different
areas affect what the resulting ideas of race that grow up around those slave systems
were.
And I wanted my students to understand that partly because Americans tend not to know enough
about the rest of the world.
So I wanted to broaden their outlook, but also several of my students, their own origins
were in Latin America or in the Caribbean.
So if their parents or grandparents had come, they were sort of the inheritors of different
ideas about race.
So I wanted them to understand the background to those differences.
Also another feature of the class was the school itself is very racially mixed and I wanted
my class to kind of mirror the racial mixture of the school itself.
So I wanted to make sure that I had students from all the major racial groups.
And I wanted also to make sure that white students were only a minority in the class.
So usually they were somewhere between a quarter and a third.
And part of the reason that I wanted to do that, I was partly just wanting to have the
diversity.
But in addition, because the course was a kind of honors course, not officially designated
as such, but it was a kind of high intellectual domain course that was college like.
And courses like that at that high school.
And actually, this is a true and general around the country, tend to have mostly white
students in them.
And I wanted my students to have a different experience in a class that was intellectually
challenging class.
One where the black and Latino students didn't have the experience of being one of the two
or three students in a mostly C of white students.
Did you find that by the time you got them in this high school course that they had a
philosophy of race already locked into their brains?
No, no, they didn't.
I mean, they definitely had a lot of experiences about race.
That's one of the things that happens at a multiracial school like that is that the students
are just kind of made more aware of race than they might be in a kind of single race school.
So they had a lot of experiences, but I didn't feel that they had sort of locked in any
kind of way of looking at race.
And so that was actually great because they were bringing this experience of race, but
they hadn't been in a situation where race itself was actually an object of study.
Sorry, remember one time, several years after the class was over, I ran into one of the
black students from the class.
She had actually graduated from college at that time.
And she said one thing that really struck her and stuck with her about the class was that
we had studied race in a way that she just didn't realize that race was something you
studied before then.
I mean, obviously, once you got to college, it's kind of standard operating procedure,
but she hadn't realized it in high school.
And so I think that was part of the excitement of the classes.
The students felt that they were really learning things that they didn't necessarily know
about and that helped them to kind of understand their own experience better.
Did you see putting a class like this together for younger students maybe, say, six graders?
Bob, I just can't answer that.
I just don't know enough about that younger age group.
I'm sure that you could put together, I don't think you could do this kind of class with
all the kind of heavy history of it.
But I do think it would be good if younger people learn about race in some form, but I
just have to leave it to others to say what that would look like.
Well, what would a class like yours look like for the same age, but in a, say, a real
suburban white high school?
Could you even teach something like this?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So it seems to me that the material can stand on its own with any demographic or virtually
any demographic.
That is, anyone would benefit from learning about the history of slavery and the history
of where we got our idea of race from and legal dimensions of that and the social dimensions
of it.
Any group would be able to learn something.
Obviously, what would happen inside the classroom, the interaction would be different than
it was in my class.
I just wanted to make it clear that I do think the course would be valuable to virtually
any demographic.
I do have one slide exception, which is I don't think the course would work very well in
a class where you had like one black student or one Latino student.
I think that would be a demographic I would stay away from.
I think would actually be better to have an all-white class than to have a class with
a very hyper, you know, those students, the students of color would be too hyper visible
in that situation.
That's what I would be worried about.
Do you think it would stifle the conversation?
No, no, no.
I'd be worried about them.
I'd be worried about their experience.
Not that their presence would inhibit other people, but that they themselves would
feel too much in the spotlight.
You're talking about race and then you're the only black student in the class.
Hyper visible is a word that scholars have used for that kind of situation.
I would generally stay away from that.
It's only a guideline because I can imagine some black or Hispanics to this who, if they
were sort of told about that issue and were told they would be the only students and
maybe the instructor talked it through with them before him.
Maybe there would be some who would be up for doing that anyway, but as a general rule
I would stay away from that demographic.
But I think every other, like in all black school, I think would also be great.
I mean, my own black students, black students, generally, the largest single group even though
they weren't a majority.
And there was tremendous diversity of opinions.
So it's not as if you teach it to all one race, they're all going to have the same reactions
to it.
And there's a lot of diversity of opinions in an all white class or in all black
class.
And that's part of what would make it an intellectually interesting experience for them.
Even if it wouldn't quite have the educational richness of the cross racial aspect that my
particular class had.
You're obviously the one staring this ship, but the students probably take it in some
different directions.
Are there, are there, are there questions or topics of discussion that the students got
into that really open jurized a bit?
Well, there's one very striking example of this where I need to say a little bit of a
backstory where one year when I was teaching a class I did a unit on the N word and I had
a kind of pro and con setup that is recognizing that this is an issue that's kind of controversial
within the black community, but also kind of more generally as to whether it's all, if
it's all right for anyone to use the N word or if it's all right for non black people
to use it.
So I had set up a unit on that.
And then in a subsequent summer right before I was giving the course in the fall, I was
at a meeting with a parent from the high school.
And it was a meeting for parents to give input to teachers about curricular matters.
I thought this was a very good idea.
And an African American parent when I described how I was planning to do this unit on the
use of the N word and pro and con, she said she didn't think it was appropriate to do
that.
In high school, she said it's fine to do it at the college level.
College students are mature enough to do it, but high school students should just be told
that it's wrong to use that word.
So I was very startled by this and I kind of, I wasn't completely sure whether she was
right, but she was a very thoughtful person and I thought, well, okay, I'm going to go
along with this and try to do what she said.
So I sort of took that unit out.
But then one day in class, this gets to your question about whether I was actually steering
the ship all the time.
I mean, students often start talking about things that aren't necessarily on the syllabus.
So the students start talking about the N word and I think, oh, now how do I do this
disciplinary thing?
But this parent suggested that I do.
How do I kind of just stop them from doing it and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
I just couldn't figure out how, I mean, I only had like a few seconds to try to figure
out because things were zooming along.
But I just decided I would sort of let the conversation keep going and then I would steer
it rather than cracking down on it.
And it was quite a fascinating conversation.
So I think it turned out to be a very productive day in class.
But that was an example of something where the students really took charge.
I mean, not that they were trying to challenge me in any way, but I just mean they sometimes
just talk about what's on their mind and it's not the same thing that you had planned
for the days less.
Still to come, my conversation with Larry Blum, author of High School's Race and America's
Future Continues, we'll talk about living in a quote, post-racial world.
That's next on The Best of Our Knowledge.
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This is The Best of Our Knowledge.
I'm Bob Barrett.
Our guest today is author and educator Larry Blum, author of High School's Race and America's
Future.
What students can teach us about morality, diversity and community.
We're talking about his high school course on race.
And I asked if he thinks a class like this could be started today with so many people calling
this a post-racial world.
Do you think you could start a course like this today with so many people calling this
a quote post-racial world?
You know what's funny.
I mean, it seems to me that when Obama was elected president, one of the things that could
have happened is that people got more interested in black history and in the racial aspect of American
history.
But that didn't happen at all.
It's sort of like the opposite happened.
People thought, well, we've got this black president, so that's the end.
There are no more racial problems.
We don't really need to think about this anymore.
That's extremely unfortunate.
And I do think that people in the world of education will recognize that this idea that
we're in a world where race doesn't matter.
It's just crazy.
It just isn't so at all.
So I would actually hope that a lot of schools would be amenable to having courses like this.
And for all I know, I'm not really part of that high school world exactly as a college
professor.
So for all I know, there are actually a lot of courses like this around different parts
of the country.
But I certainly hope that a lot of schools would be welcoming of people who would want to
teach this.
As long as they were capable of doing it, it's a very challenging thing to teach.
It's a minefield.
There's no doubt about it.
But I do think many high school teachers would be capable of rising to it.
But when did you sit down and say, you know what?
This would make a good book.
When did you start putting that together?
Yeah.
That's a good question, Bob.
So when I taught the course, I was just teaching the course.
I didn't plan to write on it.
It wasn't like a research project in any way.
It was just a teaching thing that I wanted to do.
But I just felt that the conversations that these students were having were so fascinating.
And that I thought a general reader would really be interested in what 17-year-olds of
different racial groups would say when they were put into a situation where they're engaging
with very rich historical material about race and also connecting it to their own experience
and experiences.
So I just started, you know, it took me quite a while to finally write it.
I couldn't quite figure out what form it would have.
But I do think that many Americans would be really interested to see that these students
of very different races are capable of having conversations with each other, are capable
of listening to one another and learning from one another, and are capable of having
really insightful things to say.
I mean, I think what these high school students say is something that a lot of adults could
really learn something from.
So that's kind of why I decided to write the book.
And I hope it was correct.
Well after all these years teaching these students and hearing what these students think
are you hopeful for the future of race relations?
Well, that would be a little too positive, I would say, because I don't think that the
country is really coming to grips with racial inequality in any way.
And I actually don't think Obama has been particularly helpful about this.
In a way, the fact that he's black has actually made it harder for him to raise issues of racial
justice.
He really has had to walk around on tiptoes about the issue at least during the first
turn.
Yes, that's true.
That's true.
But I guess it's possible that since he doesn't have to run again, maybe he could be a little
more forthright this time around.
And I hope that's true.
But like you say, whenever he says anything racial, everybody just like jumps on me, says
like some tiny little racial thing like about Trayvon Martin, a young man who's killed in
Florida and he just said, well, if I had a son, he would look like that and people just
like jump down the throat at this.
This was like some horrible thing to say.
So those are not reasons for being very optimistic about the future of race in America.
But I did feel hopeful about one thing that came out of my class, which is just the ability
of young people to be so thoughtful and to be able and to be curious and to be engaged
with one another about the racial issues.
So it's great to think that high school students are capable of doing this and hopefully
this will give them a kind of civic foundation for sort of civic knowledge about race and
civic engagement around racial issues.
And since that's an important goal of education, I was pleased to see that happening.
I can, of course, over generalize from my own experience, but I did have a very diverse
range of students over the years.
They had a lot of different backgrounds.
They were fairly typical students in a lot of ways.
Over the years, how did the course evolve?
If somebody who was in your first year teaching it, how different would it be if he sat in
it on the last year?
Well, I did make some curricular changes.
I used some readings that I then changed over time.
I do think that I became more knowledgeable about the subject.
I felt more of an ability to, I just felt more in control of the class.
So I remember the first time out there was this kind of fascinating thing that happened
where we had seen a video, you know, about some racial issue and we were sort of analyzing
the video and students said that I gave them my take on it on a particular aspect of
it and they said, you know, Mr. Blom, you're wrong about that.
And I defended my view and they said, well, it's because you're white, you're kind of
missing this thing that happened in the video.
And you know, I was, of course, very startled by this challenge to me, but they were actually
correct about it.
So I think, you know, my own learning curve helped me over time to sort of know what I was
talking about better and to have a more enriched consciousness about these racial issues.
So in that sense, I just like any teaching, any new teaching experience, you just get
better at it over time, but I just think I was able to bridge these quite vast gaps
between myself as this older white guy and these young, you know, these young students
of color.
I mean, culturally, I was just in a completely different world from them.
I didn't really know anything about like hip-hop culture or anything like that.
So I had these kind of gulfs between me and them, which I had to learn to get over.
And I think I got better at sort of showing that I was really interested in them, which
I was.
I was extremely interested in what they had to say.
And I was interested in helping them to develop educationally.
And I think I got better at conveying that to them over time.
And I think that made it easier for them to trust me despite these vast differences between
us and that, you know, I got better at that over time as well.
Lawrence Blum is the distinguished professor of liberal arts and education and a professor
of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
His new book is called High School Race and America's Future.
What students can teach us about morality, diversity, and community.
It's published by Harvard Education Press.
So when you get down to the root of it all, to many, the question of race is just the
question of skin color and how those colors evolved as the topic of today's academic
minute.
Welcome to the academic minute.
I'm Lynn Pascarella, President of Mount Holyoke College.
While human skin color is essentially a minor biological difference, it is the most visible.
Nina Gibonski, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Penn State University, explains
the evolutionary force that has created such a broad spectrum of skin colors across
the globe.
I studied human evolution and my special interest is in skin and skin color.
We homosapiens evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago and had darkly pigmented skin that
was well adapted to strong sunlight and high levels of ultraviolet radiation.
Around 70,000 years ago, small groups left Africa and spread into Asia and Europe.
These people eventually evolved deep pigmented skin by natural selection.
Later skin made it easier for vitamin D to be produced in the skin under conditions
of weaker and more seasonal sunlight.
By about 5,000 years ago, sunnier places were populated by more darkly pigmented people
and places with weaker sun were inhabited by more lightly pigmented people.
This situation changed dramatically as people began to move over long distances at fast
speeds and is sped up considerably in the last 500 years.
Many people today live far away from their ancestral homelands and their skin color does
not match the solar conditions under which they live.
These mismatches create some serious health problems.
People with light skin who live in sunny places are more likely to get skin cancer and people
with dark skin living in far northern and southern latitudes are more likely to be deficient
in vitamin D.
The most serious mismatch is related to urban living.
Regardless of skin color, city dwellers are more likely to be deficient in vitamin D because
they spend most of their time indoors and don't have enough vitamin D in their diets.
Vitamin D is important for health and we need to make sure that we get enough of the sunshine
vitamin even if we don't get very much sunshine.
That was Nina Jablonsky of Penn State University.
You can find this, other segments and more information about the professors on our website
academicminute.org.
Function support for the academic minute comes from Newman's own foundation in partnership
with Mount Holyoke College.
That's all the time we have for this week's program.
If you'd like to listen again, join us online at our flagship stations website.
Go to wamc.org and click on the programs link.
And if you have any questions or comments about the program, send them in.
Our email address is knowledge at wamc.org.
I'm Bob Barrett.
Be sure to join us next time for another edition of The Best of Our Knowledge.
Bob Barrett is producer of The Best of Our Knowledge.
Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer.
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