Learning Race
Classroom Discussions in the New Urban School

By Kelly A. Feeney

At Urban Academy in New York City, students have no choice about whether they want to talk about race, especially if they are in Dickson Lam's social studies class. Race is simply a part of most discussions.

That's because for these students, whose backgrounds are mainly Latino and African-American, race plays a part in their daily lives.
"Race gets talked about a lot," said Lam, a 24-year-old Teacher's College student who is student teaching at the school. "Race is important in their lives."

For instance, on a recent afternoon, the students discussed gentrification, something they had been studying for weeks. Harlem, where one of the students, Mannie, lives is in the midst of being gentrified (Mannie gave his first name only). Color lines are changing in America's most well-known black neighborhood. And the sophomores, juniors and seniors in Lam's class were trying to figure out what this means. What Lam, who is Chinese, hopes the students will learn is that they will understand how race often determines where people live.

On this day, they wrote in their journals, answering such questions as "How important is race in gentrification?" and "What's more important: racial or economic factors?" For some of the students, the question on race and class touched on a theme they discussed earlier in the day in another class called "Yankee Si, Yankee No," about the Hispanic community in the United States. In that class, the students wondered whether race and class could be separated. "Aren't they like the same thing," one student wondered.

But before this class could discuss what everyone had written, the period ended and spring vacation started. Just before the students hurried to the hallway, Dickson, as the students call him at this alternative high school, gave an extra-credit assignment. He asked the students to attend, on one of their days off, a rally in Harlem. The topic: The Racist Conspiracy to Destroy Black Harlem. Mannie's father will be at the rally, Dickson said. Some of the students groaned, "Man, do we have to do this?" But a few said they would go.

In many ways this class seems both normal and atypical. Teenagers are growing up in the era of diversity. According to Census 2000 figures, cities across the nation are becoming more ethnically and racially diverse. In their lifetime, in the not so distant future as demographers predict, they will witness one of the most important demographic changes in American history: the United States will become a minority majority country. When this happens, the collective number of different minority groups - Hispanic and African-American to name a couple - will outnumber whites, who now have a tenuous hold on majority status. No doubt, race in America will be the focus of many public discussions.

But as important as race is and will become in America, it is a topic that is seldom raised in many American high schools. "You pick any random school and I'll bet my money that they're not talking about race," Lam said on another day. One of the reasons for this silence in classrooms, Lam implied, is that teachers are not trained in how to teach such a subject. At Teachers College, Lam said, he has not received any instruction on teaching race issues. He took a mandatory diversity class, but he said that it was designed for master's students to discuss their own issues of race, class and gender, not to impart pedagogy.

Many social studies classes, in traditional high schools, cover race in a historical context: slavery or the civil rights movement. "If you look at studies of what gets taught in schools, it seems to not," said Mike Marino, 30, who is a white instructor in the social studies department at Teachers College. "I would say that it would probably not get taught unless it's tagged to a historical framework."

Pamela Ramsden, the social studies department chairwoman in suburban Summit, N.J., which is 75 percent white but has a growing Hispanic community, confirmed Marino's belief. "We teach the history of the treatment of African-Americans during slavery, and what happened to Asians and Hispanics during the Great Depression," she said. Although she said that race is integrated into the curriculum when pertinent, there are no classes specifically geared toward race. It's peripheral, not central, to the U.S. history classes.

So Lam, who also taught a class on the cultural significance of hip-hop in the fall, is breaking new ground. The progressive educational philosophy behind Urban Academy encourages him. But because he has little instruction material to rely on, Lam's challenge lies in learning the methodology of teaching race.

"Race is not a mathematical equation like 3 + 5 = 8," Lam said. "When you're teaching it, you can't force them all to agree. People disagree about race. But I do want them to have a discussion about race."

What also makes teaching race difficult is the developmental level of many of the students. "A lot of these students, because of their age, have a superficial understanding of race," Lam said. "They don't understand what race is, in some ways."

Although critical thinking and analytical skills are developed as students mature - college is often where students acquire these skills - Lam believes that his students can engage in rigorous discussions.

He tailors the materials to help them. They make field trips weekly and often have guest speakers come to the school. Recently the class ventured to Chinatown to learn about gentrification there.

Another day, a speaker from a homeless coalition in Harlem spoke to the students about the displacement of homeless people in the wake of gentrification. Soon the students will meet with representatives of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. Articles from magazines and books, instead of a textbook, are used. Lam wants students to be engaged in current events.

He shows videos regularly to give them a clear portrayal of race in society. A few weeks ago the students watched an episode of ABC's "20/20" that explored racial discrimination in St. Louis. The episode, from the early 1990s, demonstrated how two men, one black and the other white, were treated differently in various situations because of race. Lam used it to illustrate discrimination in the real estate business.

"Racism is complex," Lam said. "It's about more than people just discriminating against one another. There's institutional racism. Trying to get students to understand this is harder."
It appears that his efforts to get students to see race in a larger context are working.

After the class in which they discussed gentrification in Chinatown, two of Lam's students offered an analysis of what they have learned this semester.

"Gentrification is mostly about money," said Christina Cordova, an 18-year-old Puerto Rican senior in the class. "A lot of people want to put a face on it for a scapegoat."

She said that gentrification isn't always about whites moving into minority neighborhoods and then displacing those groups. For example, she said that if a rich Chinese person moved into Chinatown and forced a poor person out, that wouldn't be about race. But sometimes people want to make race a bigger issue in gentrification than it really is, she said.

Her classmate, Marcela Barriento, a 15-year-old sophomore from Honduras, agreed. On a different note, she added that race and economics are complex. "There are a lot of poor whites," she said, referring to a trip she made recently to rural Vermont. "Their ghettos are trailer parks."

Her comment illustrates a central thing the students are learning: to use their analytical skills to break down stereotypes. And they do this a lot in class. As their discussions twist and turn, they dissect everything.

"Race comes into play all the time," Cordova said. "Someone will say, 'You're speaking black' and we discuss it."

Cordova and Barriento, along with the rest of the class, clearly enjoy their discussion. Any outside observer would see how much they laugh and challenge each other in class. There is a warm feeling in the classroom.

"Instead of attacking a person, we ask, 'Why do you feel that way,' " Barriento said of heated discussions. She's grateful for the opportunity to voice her opinions. If she were at a regular high school, and not the alternative Urban Academy, she said she doubted that she would get the chance to talk about race and other topics with the freedom she now has.

As for parental support of these non-traditional classes, Lam said that he has received only support, and no criticism. He said that he thinks that when parents send their children to Urban Academy they know that their children will receive an alternative education. "One parent, who is Puerto Rican, told me last semester that he was really happy that I was teaching hip-hop," Lam said. "He thinks that race is important."

Lam, who dresses casually in jeans and T-shirts for school, rarely stands in front of the class. Just like the students, he sits in the discussion circle. He doesn't inject his opinion to the discussion, as much as moderate the discussion.

His mentor, Avram Barlowe, follows the same format when he teaches his class "Yankee Si, Yankee No." On the same day that Lam's students wrote in their journals about the roles race and class play in gentrification, students in Barlowe's class deconstructed the issues raised in an article in the New York Times series "How Race Is Lived in America." The story they discussed was about two Cuban friends, one black and the other white, and what happened to their relationship once they moved to the United States.

Barlowe, like all the other teachers at Urban Academy, used the Inquiry method to start the discussion. This method emphasizes open-ended questions. There are no right or wrong answers with this method, only discussion.

After Barlowe, who is white, posed his first question "Why is race different in Cuba?" the discussion went in many directions. Some students thought economics made the difference - in Cuba, one student said, everyone is on the same economic level so people don't need to feel superior to other people - while others said it had nothing to do with money. Cuba is simply a more tolerant country, they said. But Barlowe pushed them to explore this at a deeper level: Could it be, he asked, that racism is just subtler there?

For more than an hour and a half the students talked about race. They talked about how there is no scientific basis for race, but that it is a social construct. (The students are right. Scientists say that although people may look differently, there is no "race" gene.) At one point, they debated whether is it a good thing to ask people's races on standardized tests. They discussed interracial marriages. White privilege was mentioned.

The discussion was animated. Students, many of whom won't admit to liking class participation, had something to say. This is another reason Lam likes teaching race: talking about things that are relevant to students' lives is educationally a good idea, he said. If students are given a topic they can connect to, Lam said, they will achieve. And achieving is something many of these students didn't do at traditional high schools. Many of them left traditional high schools, where their needs were often ignored, he said.

"These schools are failing students of color," he said. "We need a culturally sensitive curriculum." So teaching hip-hop and gentrification is not only a way to talk about race, but it is a way to reach out to students whose needs may have been ignored because of their race.

This is a message that Lam is taking to a broader audience. Recently, Lam spoke at a symposium entitled One Hip-Hop Empowerment, held by Columbia University, to discuss the cultural importance of hip-hop in America. He sat alongside some of hip-hop old school stars, such as Easy AD from the Cold Crush Brothers, to speak about how hip-hop can be used as an educational tool to empower students.

When hip-hop started in the African-American community in the South Bronx in the 1970s, it was seen as a fad. But today it is mainstream. Dickson Lam is hoping that his teaching methods, by no means conventional, will someday become mainstream, too. He may have history on his side: educational experts, such as the ones that teach Lam at Teachers College, say that as schools become more diverse, the role that race plays in students lives may have to become a part of the curriculum.