Race Conversation Must Go Deeper

When I was in fifth grade and new to suburbia, my teacher introduced the concepts of racism, civil rights and fairness. And she began the task of helping 10-years olds—all of us white—learn how to talk about race in constructive ways. 

I’d moved from a gritty urban neighborhood where whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans lived together rather warily. My parents maintained a chilly silence on the issue of race, although they forbade racial epithets; on the street I heard plenty. In this place, the black kids came mostly from the projects, the Puerto Ricans lived in apartments and the better-off among the white families might have an entire house. I knew that race divided.

When my fifth-grade teacher challenged us to think about how this country could ever overcome its racial divide, I remember raising my hand and offering the “melting pot” solution: if only we’d all intermarry, the divide would just go away.

Last week’s New York Times article about the rise of a multiracial generation had echoes of that simple solution. Profiles of young people who wanted the freedom to “identify as they choose” and who embraced being part of this “new tribe” gave lots of reason for optimism. While carving out a new identity is nice, it doesn’t do much to help us confront the racism that swirls around old identities.

The fact is that one group of people has never had the power to “choose” their identity. The Times article sent Ta-Nehisi Coates into our past when, in the 19^th century, Irish, Italian and other immigrants were seen as separate races, yet over time their descendents “became” white.  The single permanent division in American history, he reminds us, has been between blacks and non-blacks.

Some readers challenged Coates for his apparent racial exceptionalism, and in a second blog post, he considered those criticisms and regretted that his “insistence on the singularity of the black experience … so often comes off as an insistence that no one else is hurting.”

The ability to transcend racial identity has long been the key to acquiring privilege, and the one racial identity hardest to transcend is being black. The characteristic poverty, poor education, incarceration rates and ill-health that disproportionately affect black communities must be discussed and confronted with our students.

Costello is the director of Teaching Tolerance.