Talks about race should happen in schools

Race remains a thorny subject. Failing to equip our young people to talk about it openly isn’t going to help.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that 11 a.m. Sunday is the most segregated hour in America.

He would be disappointed to see some local high school cafeterias over the lunch hour 57 years later. Race remains a thorny subject in the United States, and in schools, too. Ignoring the subject is not going to make it go away.

Failing to equip our young people to talk about it openly isn’t going to help, either.

As Nakeiha Primus Smith, assistant professor of educational foundations at Millersville University, told LNP’s Hawkes, the reason we wrestle with race is because we’re not facing it squarely. “You have students who are not being confronted with values or perspectives that are not similar to their own,” she noted.

And here’s the thing: We need future generations to handle the issue better than we have. Because right now, conversations about race are often at best awkward and at worst hostile.

Daunted by the prospect of stammering our way through them, or saying the wrong thing, we often just change the subject — if that is, we’re part of the majority.

People who belong to minorities don’t have the luxury of pretending race isn’t an issue in American life. They’re reminded of this reality every day.

Black people in the United States have a “double consciousness,” ‘’this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” African-American intellectual and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois noted.

As Hawkes reported, Penn Manor High School history teacher Todd Mealy urged his Advanced Placement history students to consider Du Bois’ quote. Mealy’s lesson moved sophomore Tim Hermansen to acknowledge that he hadn’t thought about race, and the otherness of being a minority surrounded by the majority, before.

Hermansen, who is white, said he doesn’t want to just learn about racism. He wants to learn how to do something about it.

“Maybe we can be the solution,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be somebody older than us that has to fix everything. It can be us.”

That is the central aim of education: to teach students to think in different ways, and inspire them to venture beyond their comfort zones to seek solutions.

We’d be naive to suggest that opening the eyes of a few high school kids is going to solve our issues around race in the United States. In just the past month or so alone, our country has been roiled by the horrific events in Charlottesville, Virginia; the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for so-called “Dreamers”; the NFL’s rejection of quarterback Colin Kaepernick; and the controversy over ESPN “SportsCenter” host Jemele Hill.

“I just think race is an uncomfortable topic,” Sameeha Hossain, a Penn Manor junior whose parents are from Bangladesh, told Hawkes. “But we’re in a small group, so I think it’s easier to talk about. I think that’s the first step.”

She is right. Small group discussions, led by a teacher willing to talk about difficult topics like privilege and white supremacy, are a good first step.

We obviously want schools to teach kids the fundamentals, but we believe Mealy has the right idea: There is room in social studies, sociology, even English classes for exploring the issue of race.

In fact, a discussion about “Hidden Figures,” the book and movie that detailed the contributions of black women mathematicians at NASA, wouldn’t be out of place in a science or math class. Mathematician Katherine Johnson went on to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

But when she began working for NASA, she technically wasn’t allowed to use the restroom for white women (though she told a Vice News reporter she did).

Erica Long, an English and journalism teacher at Solanco High School, told Hawkes that she graduated from Penn Manor High School with little understanding of diversity. She plans now to take a fivesession workshop for educators on teaching anti-racism.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” Nelson Mandela said.

We ought to employ it.