Black and Proud. Even if Strangers Can’t Tell. 

By REBECCA CARROLL

APRIL 1, 2017

My 11-year-old is understated, but not shy. He likes to bake, loves video games, is loyal to his friends and, biased as I may be, is a pretty good-looking kid. He gets mad sometimes, though, that people don’t immediately register him as black. “You’re so lucky,” he said to me a few months ago. “People look at you and know that you are black.”

Being black in America has historically been determined by whether or not you look black to nonblack people. This keeps racism operational. Brown and black skin in this country can invite a broad and freewheeling range of bad behavior — from job discrimination to a child being shot dead in the street. For my son, though, being black in America is about more than his skin color. It’s about power, confidence, culture and belonging.

You inherit race, though. You don’t steal it. We’re reminded of this once again by Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who made national headlines in 2015 for claiming a black identity because she felt like it. She released a memoir last week.

For the record, Ms. Dolezal, who has legally changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo, is white. She is the biological child of white parents who have stated publicly that their daughter is a white woman falsely identifying as black.

Ms. Dolezal’s story demonstrates our unnerving trajectory from 2015, when white privilege was a zeitgeisty phrase people might apply to certain egregious behavior — like using your white privilege to decide you are black because you feel an affinity for corn rows and weaves — to the white supremacy of the Trump administration.

I was adopted into a white family, and the only black birth-family members I am aware of are no longer living. Every day I am saddened by the fact that I don’t have any black relatives for my son to know and spend time with. But my son has me, and I have him. And we are black. He also has his father, my husband, a white man of Italian descent, which accounts for our son’s light-skinned appearance.

My son is not the only light-skinned, mixed or biracial person I know who identifies primarily as black. Increasingly, I have observed my adult peers and colleagues who fall into this category not merely identifying as black, but routinely pulling out the receipts to prove their blackness.

Some of this may have to do with what the brilliant Jordan Peele, who is also biracial and black, tapped into for the plot of his genre-redefining box office hit, “Get Out” — that it’s cool to be black right now, that we are trending.

In the more than two years since Michael Brown was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Mo., and the city erupted in anger and unrest, increasing the visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement, we have borne witness to the very best of who we are as black people in this country. The atrocities continue — the glaring police brutality, the staggeringly disproportionate numbers of black men in the prison system, the racial wage gap and any number of other disparities that come along with a nation founded upon enslavement of nonwhite people — but we galvanize our grief.

Our new president campaigned directly to those white people who are terrified by our resolve to not merely survive, but to represent America as something other than demoralized chattel. President Trump can try to reduce us to “the blacks” who are all relegated to life in the “inner cities,” which “are a disaster education-wise, job-wise, safety-wise, in every way possible,” but I suspect that’s because he knows he has already lost control of the narrative.

In the 1970s Warner, N.H., then a town with a population under 1,500, where census data indicates that I represented the black population in its entirety, I used to love watching “The Wiz.” I could look at Diana Ross as Dorothy, with her chic round Afro, brown skin and ruby slippers, and Michael Jackson, whimsical and fluid as the Scarecrow — the part I eventually got to play in my dance class production of the show — all day.

In middle school, I spent a lot of time trying to explain to my white classmates that even though I look black, I am actually biracial — my birth mother is white and my birth father is black — and so I wasn’t really as black as they thought. What’s more, my adolescent logic went, my adopted parents are white, so that should count for something, right? People were seldom interested. At best, I heard this: “We don’t even think of you as black anyway.”

It was a comment that, based on how I thought then, should have made me feel better than it did. After all, wasn’t that what I wanted? To be considered an equal? It took me a long time before I understood that being an equal in an exclusively white environment meant erasing and devaluing my blackness. As a young adult, though, I did come to realize that wholly embracing my blackness, not explaining it away to classmates or friends, comes with a mighty and magnificent sense of joy, which I hope will serve as a model for my son to keep doing the same.

So it’s profound to me that my light-skinned son, who identifies as both mixed and black, was upset when he started sixth grade last fall at a new school where his new racially diverse peer group expressed confusion about his background.

When my son first started to black identify at about 5 or 6 years old, an acquaintance of ours asked my husband, in my presence, if he felt like we were “depriving” our son of his “white side.” My husband, a sociology professor and the author of two books on the failure of housing and school desegregation in the United States, said: “If my parents had instilled any Italian culture in me, I might want to share that with my son. But if you’re talking about general whiteness, there’s nothing there to pass down.”

This acquaintance, it seemed, was suggesting that by encouraging our son to embrace his blackness, we were depriving him of something bigger and greater than the already big and great benefit of white privilege. That my son sees more power in centering his blackness over exploiting whatever white privilege he may ultimately be afforded is a thing of glory.

Who Needs Charters When You Have Public Schools Like These?

By David L. Kirp

Published April 1, 2017

NY Times

TULSA, Okla. — The class assignment: Design an iPad video game. For the player to win, a cow must cross a two-lane highway, dodging constant traffic. If she makes it, the sound of clapping is heard; if she’s hit by a car, the game says, “Aw.” 

“Let me show you my notebook where I wrote the algorithm. An algorithm is like a recipe,” Leila, one of the students in the class, explained to the school official who described the scene to me.

You might assume these were gifted students at an elite school. Instead they were 7-year-olds, second graders in the Union Public Schools district in the eastern part of Tulsa, Okla., where more than a third of the students are Latino, many of them English language learners, and 70 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch. From kindergarten through high school, they get a state-of-the-art education in science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM subjects. When they’re in high school, these students will design web pages and mobile apps, as well as tackle cybersecurity and artificial intelligence projects. And STEM-for-all is only one of the eye-opening opportunities in this district of around 16,000 students.

Betsy DeVos, book your plane ticket now.

Ms. DeVos, the new secretary of education, dismisses public schools as too slow-moving and difficult to reform. She’s calling for the expansion of supposedly nimbler charters and vouchers that enable parents to send their children to private or parochial schools. But Union shows what can be achieved when a public school system takes the time to invest in a culture of high expectations, recruit top-flight professionals and develop ties between schools and the community.

Union has accomplished all this despite operating on a miserly budget. Oklahoma has the dubious distinction of being first in the nation in cutting funds for education, three years running, and Union spends just $7,605 a year in state and local funds on each student. That’s about a third less than the national average; New York State spends three times more. Although contributions from the community modestly augment the budget, a Union teacher with two decades’ experience and a doctorate earns less than $50,000. Her counterpart in Scarsdale, N.Y., earns more than $120,000.

“Our motto is: ‘We are here for all the kids,’ ” Cathy Burden, who retired in 2013 after 19 years as superintendent, told me. That’s not just a feel-good slogan. “About a decade ago I called a special principals’ meeting — the schools were closed that day because of an ice storm — and ran down the list of student dropouts, name by name,” she said. “No one knew the story of any kid on that list. It was humiliating — we hadn’t done our job.” It was also a wake-up call. “Since then,” she adds, “we tell the students, ‘We’re going to be the parent who shows you how you can go to college.’ ”

Last summer, Kirt Hartzler, the current superintendent, tracked down 64 seniors who had been on track to graduate but dropped out. He persuaded almost all of them to complete their coursework. “Too many educators give up on kids,” he told me. “They think that if an 18-year-old doesn’t have a diploma, he’s got to figure things out for himself. I hate that mind-set.”

This individual attention has paid off, as Union has defied the demographic odds. In 2016, the district had a high school graduation rate of 89 percent — 15 percentage points more than in 2007, when the community was wealthier, and 7 percentage points higher than the national average.

The school district also realized, as Ms. Burden put it, that “focusing entirely on academics wasn’t enough, especially for poor kids.” Beginning in 2004, Union started revamping its schools into what are generally known as community schools. These schools open early, so parents can drop off their kids on their way to work, and stay open late and during summers. They offer students the cornucopia of activities — art, music, science, sports, tutoring — that middle-class families routinely provide. They operate as neighborhood hubs, providing families with access to a health care clinic in the school or nearby; connecting parents to job-training opportunities; delivering clothing, food, furniture and bikes; and enabling teenage mothers to graduate by offering day care for their infants.

Two fifth graders guided me around one of these community schools, Christa McAuliffe Elementary, a sprawling brick building surrounded by acres of athletic fields. It was more than an hour after the school day ended, but the building buzzed, with choir practice, art classes, a soccer club, a student newspaper (the editors interviewed me) and a garden where students were growing corn and radishes. Tony, one of my young guides, performed in a folk dance troupe. The walls were festooned with family photos under a banner that said, “We Are All Family.”

This environment reaps big dividends — attendance and test scores have soared in the community schools, while suspensions have plummeted.

The district’s investment in science and math has paid off, too. According to Emily Lim, who runs Union’s STEM program, the district felt it was imperative to offer STEM classes to all students, not just those deemed gifted.

In one class, I watched eighth graders create an orthotic brace for a child with cerebral palsy. The specs: The toe must be able to rise but cannot fall. Using software that’s the industry standard, 20 students came up with designs and then plaster of Paris models of the brace.

“It’s not unusual for students struggling in other subjects to find themselves in the STEM classes,” Ms. Lim said. “Teachers are seeing kids who don’t regard themselves as good readers back into reading because they care about the topic.”

A fourth grader at Rosa Parks Elementary who had trouble reading and writing, for example, felt like a failure and sometimes vented his frustration with his fists. But he’s thriving in the STEM class. When the class designed vehicles to safely transport an egg, he went further than anybody else by giving his car doors that opened upward, turning it into a little Lamborghini. Such small victories have changed the way he behaves in class, his teacher said — he works harder and acts out much less.

Superintendents and school boards often lust after the quick fix. The average urban school chief lasts around three years, and there’s no shortage of shamans promising to “disrupt” the status quo.

The truth is that school systems improve not through flash and dazzle but by linking talented teachers, a challenging curriculum and engaged students. This is Union’s not-so-secret sauce: Start out with an academically solid foundation, then look for ways to keep getting better.

Union’s model begins with high-quality prekindergarten, which enrolls almost 80 percent of the 4-year-olds in the district. And it ends at the high school, which combines a collegiate atmosphere — lecture halls, student lounges and a cafeteria with nine food stations that dish up meals like fish tacos and pasta puttanesca — with the one-on-one attention that characterizes the district.

Counselors work with the same students throughout high school, and because they know their students well, they can guide them through their next steps. For many, going to community college can be a leap into anonymity, and they flounder — the three-year graduation rate at Tulsa Community College, typical of most urban community colleges, is a miserable 14 percent. But Union’s college-in-high-school initiative enables students to start earning community college credits before they graduate, giving them a leg up.

The evidence-based pregnancy-prevention program doesn’t lecture adolescents about chastity. Instead, by demonstrating that they have a real shot at success, it enables them to envision a future in which teenage pregnancy has no part.

“None of this happened overnight,” Ms. Burden recalled. “We were very intentional — we started with a prototype program, like community schools, tested it out and gradually expanded it. The model was organic — it grew because it was the right thing to do.”

Building relationships between students and teachers also takes time. “The curriculum can wait,” Lisa Witcher, the head of secondary education for Union, told the high school’s faculty last fall. “Chemistry and English will come — during the first week your job is to let your students know you care about them.”

That message resonated with Ms. Lim, who left a job at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa School of Community Medicine and took a sizable pay cut to work for Union. “I measure how I’m doing by whether a girl who has been kicked out of her house by her mom’s boyfriend trusts me enough to tell me she needs a place to live,” she told me. “Union says, ‘We can step up and help.’ ”

Under the radar, from Union City, N.J., and Montgomery County, Md., to Long Beach and Gardena, Calif., school systems with sizable numbers of students from poor families are doing great work. These ordinary districts took the time they needed to lay the groundwork for extraordinary results.

Will Ms. DeVos and her education department appreciate the value of investing in high-quality public education and spread the word about school systems like Union? Or will the choice-and-vouchers ideology upstage the evidence?

David L. Kirp is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer.

Ta-Nehisi Coates- Between The World And Me

Below is the link to and excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between The World And Me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7wFZTgSFt0

How To Get On Death Row Without Firing a Bullet

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/04/opinion/how-to-get-on-death-row-without-firing-a-bullet.html?emc=eta1&register=google

Teaching Young Children About Race

Teaching Young Children about Race

A Guide for Parents and Teachers

By Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards

(Originally posted July 8th, 2015)

            Adults sometimes ask:  Aren’t prejudice, discrimination, and anti-bias adult issues? Why bring children into it? In one sense, these are adult issues. Adults have the power to create, to teach, to maintain bias—and to eliminate it. In another sense, because the realities of prejudice and discrimination begin to affect children’s development early, it is developmentally appropriate to address them in our work with young children.

            Young children need caring adults to help them construct a positive sense of self and a respectful understanding of others. They need adults to help them begin to navigate and resist the harmful impact of prejudice and discrimination. A person’s early childhood years lay the foundation for a developmental and experiential journey that continues into adulthood. With appropriate adult guidance, this foundation will be a strong one, providing the base for the next stages of healthy development and the skills a person needs to thrive and succeed in a complex, diverse world.

            Anti-bias education is an integral part of the “bricks and mortar” of emotional well-being and social competence, as well as an emotional foundation upon which children fully develop their cognitive capacities. A healthy sense of self requires that children know and like who they are without feeling superior to others. Understanding and liking one’s own personal and social identities open up the possibilities of building caring connections with others. Thinking critically about stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination takes away barriers to comfortable and respectful interactions with a wide range of people and gives children a tool to resist negative messages about their identities. Strong cognitive development is also enhanced when children develop curiosity, openness to multiple perspectives, and critical-thinking skills.

Strategies for learning about physical differences and similarities

            Creating a rich anti-bias learning environment sets the stage for discussion and activities about racial and other physical differences and similarities. The richer the environment, the more likely children will ask questions, even in classrooms where the staff and children come from similar racial backgrounds.

In all activities, highlight that physical diversity among people is desirable, and that all colors, shades, and shapes of people are beautiful. Talk about differences in a tone of delight and interest. Create a vocabulary that encourages children to look at themselves and others and admire their sameness and their uniqueness. Just as we do not wait until a child asks questions about how to read before planning how to provide a range of literacy learning opportunities, anti-bias education is the teacher’s responsibility, not the child’s, to initiate.

            Caution—Never single out one specific child when you do activities about the physical characteristics linked to racial identity. Every activity should be about all of the children, as everyone has a racial identity. Moreover, doing activities about all children reinforces that differences and similarities can be found within each racial identity group as well as across groups.

·         Exploring skin color, hair, and eyes
Children are active observers of physical characteristics. As they become familiar with some of their own features and those of their classmates, help them to have vocabulary and ideas to understand sameness and difference. There are many ways to involve children in discovering similarities and differences among themselves, their teachers, and their families.

·         Focus on children’s confusion about their own skin color
If, when you invite the children to make self-portraits, a child chooses colors that do not correspond to his actual skin, eye, or hair coloring, consider gently encouraging the child to choose the color closest to his skin color.

·         Expanding awareness of racial similarities and differences
After helping children become aware that the people within their family are alike and different, it is important to expand their knowledge and awareness to groups of people beyond those in the classroom and neighborhood. As children grow, they move into ever wider and more diverse settings, and we want them to be open to and respectful of all kinds of people they may encounter.

Fostering critical thinking and respectful relationships

            Positive and accurate learning experiences about human differences and similarities help to give children a foundation for resisting incorrect and harmful messages about themselves and others. Preschoolers are ready to begin thinking critically about the accuracy and fairness of the information and images they encounter. They also have the capacity to use their developing empathy to understand that unfair behavior hurts people and can learn respectful ways of interacting with others. Teachers can use the following strategies to promote young children’s development of these understandings and competencies.

·         Cultivate children’s empathy and ways to deal with the hurt of stereotyping. Read books that depict children experiencing unfair treatment based on their racial identity.

·         Tell persona doll stories about a discriminatory incident between dolls, engaging children’s empathy and problem-solving skills.

·         Intentionally plan activities to counter potential over generalizations or existing stereotypes in the children’s general environment.

·         Support children as they demonstrate awareness of stereotyping.

·         Engage children in group action. It is empowering when we help children take something that is “unfair” into something “fair.” Sometimes this involves addressing personal conflict, helping a child speak up for another child. But it is particularly powerful when children act together.

            If we want children to thrive in a diverse world and choose to stand up for themselves and others, then we must choose to help young children make sense out of the confusing and often emotionally charged messages they receive about themselves and others. The commitment to support each child to develop pride and self-confidence and deep connections with others calls on us to foster all children’s healthy racial identity. When we give children language to discuss their identities in an atmosphere of interest and delight, and the tools for addressing the unfairness they will inevitably encounter, then we know we have helped children construct a strong foundation for the next phases of their lives.

http://www.teachingforchange.org/teaching-about-race

Talking Across Divides: 10 Ways to Encourage Civil Classroom Conversation On Difficult Issue

NY Times
By KATHERINE SCHULTENSEPT. 29, 2016

"Fistfights at campaign rallies.  A congressional sit-in. Angry political trolling on the internet. It's not you imagination: America's partisan divide id deeper today than at any point in nearly a quarter-century, according to a new study."

 So begins an article from June 2016, which described a problem that has only deepened as the weeks of this unprecedented, vitriolic presidential campaign have gone on.

Months ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented the worrying effects of all this angry rhetoric on students and classrooms, and, since then, we’ve heard those concerns echoed by teachers we asked ourselves. But even after this election is over, a divided nation will remain — and teachers will always be in a uniquely powerful position to help young people learn how to talk to each other across those divides.

Below, we share some ideas we’ve collected from our readers, The Times and around the web. Use them anytime you and your students are tackling controversial issues, whether in a traditional classroom or online. We welcome your additions to the list.

We also invite your classes to put some of these ideas into practice from Oct. 3 to Nov. 7 via our Civil Conversation Challenge.

During the week of Oct. 3 to 7, we are posting a new Student Opinion question each day about five issues that are dividing Americans this election year.

Those posts will remain open to comment until Election Day, and we invite teenagers from anywhere in the world to share their thoughts and reply to the thoughts of others. The challenge? We are asking them to consciously counter the tone and content of much of what is online around hot-button issues and, instead, model respectful dialogue that fosters understanding of other points of view. And we’ll be calling out our favorite conversations.

Find all the details here, as well as links to each forum as it opens.

Here are 10 ways to prepare.

1. Create classroom rules and structures that support respectful and generative discussion, online and off.

How do you handle conversations in your classroom in general? What structures and rules are in place to ensure that they are constructive and civil, yet promote real learning and growth? How do you invite all voices? What happens when someone states an unpopular opinion?

Consider talking about these issues with your students after first asking them to write anonymously about how teachers and schools in general might improve in this area. What problems do they see? What memorable experiences, good and bad, have informed their attitudes toward class discussions? What suggestions for rules, structures or guidelines might they have? How should schools balance the need for open intellectual discussion about issues with the need to protect those who may feel marginalized for some reason?

Then, have a classroom discussion about classroom discussions.

Over the years, we have published many ideas for talking about sensitive issues, and suggested structures including journal-writing, the “one-question interview,” fishbowls and four-corner exercises. You might use any of those methods, or consult this “big list of class discussion strategies” from Cult of Pedagogy. Or, use a protocol called Circle of Viewpoints that focuses on helping students consider diverse perspectives on a topic.

Finally, extend your inquiry from physical classroom conversation to online discussion by borrowing a recent Reader Idea from a teacher named Kate Harris.

She explains how, when teaching a high school World Religions elective, she used the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as a “teachable moment” to help her students observe and critique online conversations. Ms. Harris writes:

Teachers have to address the political and social issues that divide our nation and dominate our social media feeds. More important, we need to equip students to address those issues on their own, to engage with and respond to conversations and news that may be troubling or challenging, from domestic gun control and police brutality to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and worldwide terrorism. So much of our students’ worlds is online. How can we get them to think critically not only about big media, delivered by giants such as Fox News and The New York Times, but also about “little media,” or the comments and tweets that they write, read and repost?

_________

2. Take the ‘Speak Up for Civility’ pledge from Teaching Tolerance.

Though it is a pledge intended for teachers and other adults, you might share it with your students as well:

I pledge to discuss this election with civility, to treat people whose opinions differ from mine with respect, and to focus on ideas, policies and values. I will encourage others to do the same. I will speak up when I hear name-calling, stereotypes and slurs. I will do this because children are listening, and it’s important that adults model good citizenship.

The organization’s ideas for teaching Election 2016 can also be useful, and those under the heading of “getting along” can be applied far beyond this election season.

_________

3. Read and discuss articles that explore the problem of a divided America.

Your students might annotate as they read, then use one of the discussion models listed above to talk about their reactions. Here are just a few places in The Times to start:

• The Divided States of America

• Why Calls for a ‘National Conversation’ Are Futile

• Polarization Is Dividing American Society, Not Just Politics

•Bipartisanship Isn’t for Wimps, After All

• Why Facts Don’t Unify Us

• The Age of Post-Truth Politics and a response from a teenager — a Student Summer Reading Contest Winner, Michelle Kim — who wrote:

After reading this op-ed piece, I am more aware of my own attitude and more wary of this polarization — the “us” versus “them” mentality that often reduces comments sections into battlegrounds, when passionate ideals are not tempered by a willingness to explore possibilities in order to approach fact.

To what extent do your students experience these divides? What can their generation do to close them?

_________

4. Consider commenting standards — and test what you learn via the Times Comment-Moderation Quiz.

In “What Your Online Comments Say About You,” Anna North writes about some questions researchers recently asked:

When we comment on news stories, most of us hope to say something about the topic at hand — even (or maybe especially) if it’s that the author got it all wrong. But what do the comments we leave say about us — about our beliefs, our biases and how we act when the ordinary rules don’t apply? And how do our comments affect the beliefs of others?

Read that article, and, for more context, perhaps the Room for Debate forum “Have Comment Sections on News Media Websites Failed?” Why do we seem to be able to say things online that we wouldn’t say in person? Where do students see especially glaring examples of that?

The Times, including The Learning Network, has commenting standardsput in place to maintain civility. You might share them with students, along with a related Times post, “The Top 10 Reasons We Deleted Your Comment.” What do they think of these rules? Could they be useful elsewhere on the internet? Why or why not?

Then, test how well they have absorbed those standards by taking a Times quiz created by our comment-moderation team. If you were a moderator, which responses would you approve and which would you reject? Why?

Finally, have students choose a Times article that interests them and that has many reader comments. Scan the comments, noticing which ones are “reader picks” and which are “Times picks.” What do they notice about the conversation? Is it generally civil? Do they think people are actually talking to each other, or do you think they are more talking at each other? In their opinion, can online conversations ever change minds?

You might start with a recent Op-Ed essay “Will the Left Survive Millennials?” Among the many comments, this one by Andy B:

Has anyone noticed that despite our increasing diversity, we are becoming a more isolated society? More prone to stare at a screen than to engage our neighbors in conversation. That same screen provides easy access to surround oneself with an echo chamber that allows for an ever growing sense of entitlement to impose one’s opinion on others above all else. Both sides have moved so far away from one another that honest constructive debate is next to impossible. For the sake of our American experience, let’s hope we can eventually find a unifying force. Imagine what could be done as a society if we unplugged and engaged again.

_________

5. Practice empathy.

Do your students know who Glenn Beck is? He is a conservative radio host and media personality who surprised many this summer when he urged his fellow conservatives to understand the Black Lives Matter movement. He then published an Op-Ed essay in The Times that begins:

In a recent speech to a group of conservatives, I made what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial point about the commonalities between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter activists. I thought this was a simple idea, but the criticism was immediate and sharp: How dare I try to understand the “other side”?

But as people, wouldn’t we all benefit from trying to empathize with people we disagree with?

Have them read what he has to say — and read some of the 919 comments Times readers made in response. What do they think of the argument he makes? What issues about which they feel passionately might they seek to understand from an opposing point of view?

_________

6. Back up statements with evidence and sources.

 “These days it seems like politics and propaganda take precedence over rational discussion, especially when the conversation goes online, “ writes Chris Sloan in an essay at KQED Education on “Teaching the Art of Civil Dialogue. He suggests “teaching argument the way it’s been conceived since Aristotle’s time.”

It seems that everyone agrees that in order to be “college and career ready” our students need to know how to write argument and back it up with evidence. In reality, this approach falls short when our own assumptions are challenged; however, research shows that learning gains are greatest in these moments of “cognitive dissonance.”

The winners of our annual Student Editorial Contest, in which we invite students to “write about an issue that matters to you” but back it up with evidence both from The Times and elsewhere, can provide models for how to do this. You might invite students to scroll through the essays and find a few that interest them to see how the evidence is woven in.

And this related lesson plan can help with tips and ideas. In it, we quote Andrew Rosenthal, former Times editorial page editor, who made a video for our contest and reminds students to do their research. He says:

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, you’re not entitled to your own facts. Go online, make calls if you can, check your information, double-check it. There’s nothing that will undermine your argument faster than a fact you got wrong, that you did not have to get wrong.

_________

7. Listen better, and ask genuine questions that seek to help you understand rather than judge.

Hearing is easy, writes Seth S. Horowitz in the Sunday Review. But “listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.”

Many teachers are familiar with the concept of “active listening” and, via activities like “think/pair/share,” have incorporated regular practice in the skill. But listening can be much more, as this famous essay from the 1930s, “Tell Me More,” describes. In it, the writer Brenda Ueland says listening is a “creative force,” and explains:

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it.

One recent example of listening in action: a new book by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild that seeks to understand “Why Do People Who Need Help From the Government Hate It So Much?” The Times reviewer writes, “A distinguished Berkeley sociologist, Hochschild is a woman of the left, but her mission is empathy, not polemics.” Have students read the review to understand the role open-minded questioning and listening played in this “respectful” work, then think about how they might practice listening to those with whom they disagree.

_________

8. Expand your ‘filter bubble.’

In a Student Opinion question, “Is Your Online World Just a ‘Filter Bubble’ of People With the Same Opinions?,” we challenge teenagers to look at their social and news feeds and work to broaden them to include new perspectives and opinions.

Read our questions and invite your students to think about where and how they get their news. How diverse are their social media and news feeds in terms of the ages, races, religions, geographical locations, interests and political affiliations of the people they follow — and why does it matter?

_________

9. Consider why ‘us and them’ is so ingrained in who we are.

Our friends at Facing History and Ourselves frequently look at questions like these:

• Why are notions of “us and them” such a consistent feature of human societies?

• When and why does an “us and them” view of the world become especially appealing or attractive? When does this worldview develop into verbal and physical violence?

• How can individuals respond to expressions of hatred, anger and fear? What happens if we choose to remain silent?

In “How Teachers Can Help Students Make Sense of Today’s Political and Social Tensions,” Laura Tavares and Jocelyn Stanton list a number of resources to help teachers and students go deeper.

_________

10. Learn about and try to counter ‘confirmation bias.’

Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for information that supports the way we feel about something. Carl Richards wrote about it for The Times in a 2013 piece, “Challenge What You Think You Know”:

We do this all the time. In fact, academics even have a name for it:confirmation bias. It’s when we form an opinion, and then we systematically look for evidence to support that opinion while discarding anything that contradicts it.

The first place we go for feedback about what we believe is other people. And who do we ask first? That’s right, people we know who are already inclined to think the same way as we do. And friends don’t always tell one another the truth, even if they disagree. The result is a dangerous feedback loop that actually confirms our bias. It’s incredibly hard to avoid.

The Upshot also wrote about this phenomenon, saying:

...confirmation bias may be the reason that our political debates remain intractable. After all, as you accumulate more evidence confirming your views, you’re less likely to question them, and less likely to change your mind. As members of competing political tribes collect more evidence in favor of their favored views, their opinions harden, and each tribe becomes more convinced of its correctness.

So what’s the solution? As Mr. Richards writes, “The only solution that I see is to purposely expose yourself to views that don’t match yours.” In an echo of many of the other ideas in this post, he suggests purposely seeking out views from “the other side,” whether via websites, books, radio or television, or conversations with people across the aisle. And, he says, it’s not enough just to seek them out:

Try, just try, to listen, to understand. See if you can get to the point where you can honestly say, “I understand the argument and can see why they feel that way.”

_________

Conversation starters:

1)      How can you incorporate some of these strategies in fostering difficult conversations in your setting? Please leave your comments below. 

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Review: ‘Blood at the Root,’ a Tale of Racial Cleansing Close to Home

New York Times: Book Review
By: Jennifer Senior
Date: September 14, 2016

Early one morning in September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl named Mae Crow was discovered in the Georgia woods, badly beaten and barely alive. It took only a day for the Forsyth County sheriff to arrest three young black male suspects. Two were hanged by the state within two months; the other was hanged by a mob within 48 hours.

There was barely a difference. The trial of the two accused young men was merely for show, predicated on confessions made under extreme duress. After the sentencing, one of the boys, all of 16, asked for permission to “make a run for it,” preferring an immediate bullet in the back to three terror-filled weeks of waiting for the noose.

Stories of savage racism and judicial burlesque were unremarkable in the Jim Crow South. What distinguished this case from most others was what happened in the aftermath: Almost every single one of Forsyth’s 1,098 African-Americans — prosperous and poor, literate and unlettered — was driven out of the county. It took only a few weeks. Marauding residents wielded guns, sticks of dynamite, bottles of kerosene. Then they stole everything, from farmland to tombstones.

Forsyth County remained white right through the 20th century. A black man or woman couldn’t so much as drive through without being run out. In 1997, African-Americans numbered just 39 in a population of 75,739.

“Many in Forsyth believed that ‘racial purity’ was their inheritance and birthright,” Patrick Phillips writes in “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,” an astonishing and thoroughgoing account of the event, its context and its thunderous reverberations. “And like their fathers’ fathers’ fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life."

To give an idea of just how dedicated residents of Forsyth County were to the notion of racial purity: During the 1950s and ’60s, there were no “colored” water fountains in the courthouse or “whites only” diners in the county seat, Cumming; there was no black population to segregate. In 1987, an intrepid local citizen and several national civil rights leaders organized a Brotherhood March — made up largely of people who lived outside the county, obviously. They were almost immediately overpowered by rock-throwing hordes screaming hate-filled invective.

“We white people won,” crowed the head of the Forsyth County Defense League to The New York Times, “and the niggers are on the run.”

Oprah Winfrey did a special from Forsyth County that same year. On YouTube, you can watch her patiently listening to her all-white audience use the same language, her composure a marvel and a reproach.

“Blood at the Root” is a compendium of horrors and a catalog of shame. (The title comes from the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit,” originally a poem by Abel Meeropol.) As he was doing his research, Mr. Phillips, who grew up in Forsyth County, realized how uncomfortably abstract this purge had become, even to him. Misinformation and distortions about it were part of the soundtrack of his childhood. They masked prodigious bigotry and made a whitewash of history.

“The tale,” he writes, “stripped of names and dates and places, made the expulsion of the county’s black community seem like only a legend — like something too far back in the mists of time to ever truly understand — rather than a deliberate and sustained campaign of terror.”

The observation reminded me of the moment in “Between the World and Me,” when Ta-Nehisi Coates implores his son to remember that “slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific slave woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own.”

Because so many African-Americans in Forsyth did not know how to read or write, and because the victims from that era are long gone, Mr. Phillips was not able to give us a series of psychologically intimate portraits. But he did a heroic amount of archival spelunking to tell this story, one that still humanizes its subjects and brims with detail. He also explains the larger historical forces and phobias that set the stage for mass expulsions in Forsyth County, including the downward mobility of whites in the antebellum South; the irrational panic over black male sexuality; and the paranoia over the possibility of a black uprising to avenge slavery, which allowed whites to see themselves as victims, rather than aggressors.

This last anxiety suggests that white people’s fear of African-Americans was, and may well be, a fear of their own conscience and sins.

Mr. Phillips carefully documents, too, the brutal origins of Forsyth. Before its citizens drove away African-Americans, they drove away Native Americans. They resisted Emancipation with consistency and brazen creativity. “It was a place where powerful whites rejected black citizenship on principle,” he writes, “and resented the very idea of paying for black labor.”

Mr. Phillips’s descriptions of lynchings are graphic, unflinching, important — a clear reminder that a century (or less, even) is hardly enough time to recover from the sentiments that made them possible; hate is in the groundwater. After a second Brotherhood March in 1987, one that was far more successful, the civil rights leader Hosea Williams drew up a list of demands from Forsyth leaders, including financial reparations, enforcement of federal laws and programs to train black police officers. They might as well have been issued yesterday.

“Twenty-nine years later,” Mr. Phillips writes, “Hosea’s letter looks like a blueprint for confronting deeply ingrained bigotry and for combating the kind of institutional racism that persists in so many American communities in the 21st century — from Ferguson to Charleston, Baltimore to Staten Island.”

Sometimes, Mr. Phillips gets a bit too granular in his research, bombarding readers with a great many names and places all at once. (This is his first work of nonfiction. Before this, he wrote three books of poetry; “Elegy for a Broken Machine” was a National Book Award finalist in 2015.)

But this rookie mistake does not, ultimately, detract from the moral force of “Blood at the Root” or even how involving it is. The subject is too urgent, the characters too memorable. Some were depraved, showboating politicians. But others were remarkable men and women, who were violently uprooted. At least here, they begin to get their due.