The article discusses how multiracial students grappled with race and racial identity issues during a classroom literacy project on cultural backgrounds. In making posters to show their cultural heritage, the 4th/5th-grade students were probably excited to share their class’s diversity. While the public speaking displays represented biracial characters Zack, Stephanie, and Jeff as authority figures, these expositions intensified the hurtful comments from their peers, which challenged and delegitimized their racial identities.
Comments like “you’re just half” and “he’s not really from South Africa;” showed that people were looking at biracial students in terms of strict and mutually exclusive racial categories. The pre-decided boxes did not define the mixed-race students, so their self-identification culture/ethnicity was challenged. This imposed monocultural ideal erased the richness of the students’ mixed heritage and individual identities. The students’ sense of anger, frustration, and confusion following racial categorization shows how deeply one’s racial identity can be felt, even from a child’s point of view. Whether accidentally ignorant or not so, the comments their classmates made demonstrated how irrationality and one-sidedness inherent in the social construct of race take away from the intricate and layered identity of an individual. This event was instrumental in changing racially motivated educational tools into a learning platform for critically analyzing racial standards and norms.
The text describes the multiracial students’ conflict with race and racial identity problems during a classroom literacy activity about one’s cultural background. For the multicultural 4th/5th grade class we had, students learned about their roots by doing research and then were to create posters to present to each other. Nevertheless, the students who were biracial, namely Zack, Stephanie, and Jeff, voiced some resentment after the presentations since their classmates had mortified them by saying things like “You are just half” or “He’s not from Africa.” Further, this discussion raised the issue of multiracial identity and the questioning of racial categories, which were considered fixed until then. Major features of the book are the construction of race as a social category rather than an intrinsic trait and, above all, the idea of whiteness as an unmarked norm that becomes the standard by which other races are judged based on. According to the authors, a multiracial heritage makes it hard to maintain the white/”of colour” opposition, thus banging to smithereens the myths underpinning racism.
The article offers the class conversation to illustrate the students’ critical thinking about race and ethnicity. Zack strongly underlines that people won’t automatically place a box or a label on his racial identity solely because of his appearance, and he wouldn’t let that. He asserts, “They don’t get to know me like that, my culture.” And his comments prove identity goes beyond superficial categorizations based on skin colour or physical traits (appearances). Zack continues dismissing the classroom’s social divisions by taking a step further. He counts the white students in the class, and it sounds like they are not all white on the outside but have different racial backgrounds. This profoundly questions the presumed “purity” of whiteness as a category of identity by suggesting hidden racial complexities may be obscured by apparent purity. In his observations, he stirs the belief that whiteness is the superior and unmarked default that is used to marginalize other races as “others.” During this session, the students carefully studied that rigid racial boundaries are social fictions that do not reflect an identity’s dynamic nature and inter-relations.
Literacy teaching implies that multiracial identities might generate productive tensions, resulting in new “literacies of race” in the classroom (Dutro et al ., 2005). Rather than avoiding such fraught topics, the authors argue literacy educators should create safe spaces for students to critically examine racial categories and how we are positioned within them. This means being self-reflective about our racial identities/privileges and teaching with questions that interrogate assumptions and multiple perspectives.
Suggested open-ended discussion questions
- How can literacy curricula and children’s literature authentically represent and explore multiracial experiences and identities? What are some promising examples?
- What are white literacy educators’ responsibilities in facilitating critical conversations about race and racism? What challenges exist?
- How might issues of multiraciality and discussions of race differ across geographic contexts (e.g., urban vs. rural areas, areas with different racial demographics)?
- Beyond race, what other socially constructed categories (gender, class, etc.) might be productively troubled and examined through literacy practices?
- How can we create and sustain truly “safe spaces” for students to vulnerably explore their identities while pushing against comfort zones?
References
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., & Balf, R. (2005). The Aftermath of “You’re Only Half”: Multiracial Identities in the Literacy Classroom. Language Arts, 83(2), 96–106. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41962087
write