To Get Students to Understand What Racism Is, I First Had to Teach What It’s Not

In September of 2012, I stood behind a podium in an auditorium-style classroom, shaking as students filed in and took their seats. I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and while the course was not my first as the instructor of record, it was the first time I would be teaching 200, mostly white students specifically about race and racism in the United States. “What have I gotten myself into?” I texted my mother. The start of a new way to teach about race and racism as it would turn out.

The semester passed in a whirlwind of typical new-class stressors: overpreparing for lectures, learning how to manage a class of 200, supervising two teaching assistants who were otherwise my peers, realizing I had brought too few scantrons to the exam. As a young Black woman teaching at a primarily white institution, I also faced being challenged and insulted by white students when they preferred their own racist stereotypes to the data and data-informed explanations presented in my class.

Since that first class over 10 years ago, I have come to recognize this as a situation of many students coming to my classroom with ideas about race and racism that are, put most kindly, problematic. Inaccurate ideas like “Immigrants don’t pay taxes,” when sales taxes are a thing in most states, are frustrating; but racist/sexist ideas like “Black women should stop having children,” especially when stated matter-of-factly to my face in the middle of class, represent one of the hardest parts of teaching, as I describe in my contribution to Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty of Color Overcome Challenges and Thrive in the Academy.

Recognizing that students more than likely entered my classroom ignorant of academic conceptualizations of racism and/or believing misinformation from their prior schooling and the media, when I first began teaching Race/Ethnicity I was extremely focused on presenting academic definitions, showing lots of empirically accurate information, and debunking stereotypes. My lecture slides showed the latest data and numbers on racial trends and disparities from reputable organizations like the U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. To my mind, these statistics provided facts and disproved stereotypes. I emphasized the normality and logic of an evidence-based approach with a statement in my syllabus that read, “In no field do professors purposefully teach inaccurate information about their topics.”

When my first student evaluations arrived, they were split. Some students said I was teaching my “opinion,” and that I marked off when students did not share my “opinion.” Others accused me of being biased against white men. Due to some students “getting it” from my data-driven approach, I stayed the course. I thought that if I showed and explained the numbers clearly enough, that more students would come away with an empirically accurate picture of race and racism in the U.S. I believed that if I closely stuck to the numbers, that students would be unable to dismiss information, even information that contradicted common but racist stereotypes, as merely my “opinion” or “bias.”

Then, one comment shattered this delusion. A student wrote: “I will never believe a word she says no matter how many statistics she shoves down my throat.” While of course no instructor can expect that every student in their class will learn, appreciate, or even believe the topics they teach, seeing that even cold hard numbers — in a science class no less! — could be rejected in favor of racist beliefs was humbling. The comment was an example of the commitment that many in the U.S. have to the empirical reality of racism.

Fortunately, the comment also shone a light on a pedagogical way forward, for it made me realize that before I could hope to get some students to even consider a data-informed perspective on race and racism, I had to first actually address the entrenched “culture-serving distortions” with which they entered my classroom.

In his now infamous 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me, sociologist James Loewen argues that adults have problematic ideas about race and racism in large part because middle and high school history/social studies classes teach “culture-serving distortions.” That is, for their first education, people are taught lies, such as the myth that Reconstruction failed because Black people mismanaged it as they “weren’t ready” for full citizenship, which supports a “white supremacist ideology and material social structure,” as Loewen writes. Though he originally wrote the words while I was in junior high school, by graduate school I had joined what he called the population of “Sociology professors [who] are amazed and depressed at the level of thinking about society displayed each fall, especially by white upper-middle-class students in their first-year classes.”

Psychologists have found that, “If prior knowledge is inaccurate and consists of misconceptions, new learning can be particularly difficult and ‘resistant to correction.’” I realized that it was not enough to present students with data and expect that they would, upon comparing it with their first education, be able to recognize that social science offers a more rational and systemic view of society than high school history books, clickbait media, or their cousin’s boyfriend’s hot takes on social media. So I decided to teach my students to think critically about the common yet distorted ideas about race and racism that so many of them brought to the classroom. In this pursuit, I dedicated first a half, and then eventually a whole, lesson to what racism is not.

Exploring a topic by focusing on what it is not has been found to be a useful way to gain key insights into the properties of a phenomenon. The first chapter of the race textbook I use lists “Five Fallacies about Racism,” and the authors, sociologists Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer, explain that:

There are many misconceptions about the character of racism. Americans are deeply divided over its legacies and inner workings, and much of this division is a result of the fact that many Americans understand racism in limited or misguided ways.

The authors go on to define fallacies as “logical mistakes, factual or logical errors in reasoning” that they say “are recurrent in many public debates about racism.” Likewise, early in sociologist Crystal Fleming’s How to Be Less Stupid About Race (2018), she details six “fallacious ideas about white supremacy that I’d like to address up front.” In both of their books, the concept of fallacies helpfully functions to debunk common but problematic perspectives on racism before readers dive into the deeper content. Desmond and Emirbayer say it plainly, writing: “Before we articulate what we believe race to be, however, perhaps the best way to start off is by offering some suggestions on how not to think about race.”

And so in my class I decided to focus deeply and wholly — not just passingly — on ignorance of racism; that is, what it is not, building on the concept of fallacies of racism by analyzing a dozen common perceptions that, upon closer examination, are revealed to be rooted in an “epistemology of ignorance” that functions to uphold white supremacy. Some of the fallacies are expansions of those that Desmond, Emirbayer, and Fleming briefly mentioned, but the majority are culture-serving perceptions that I have identified from my teaching and research.

The Fallacies of Racism

From historic Indigenous resistance to the nation’s first racist project of European colonization to the contemporary rejection of white beauty standards that is Black women wearing our natural hair, the idea that white domination is natural and just, versus human-imposed and immoral, has been constantly challenged since its inception. To reassert a Bourdieusian illusio in such a clearly unjust system, though, takes “specific cognitive tactics” born of “white agency, motive, and creativity.” I call these Fallacies of Racism. Fallacies are perceptions, but they are not simply thoughts. As patterns of thinking, they are tools that are used in writing and conversations to (knowingly or unknowingly) maintain white domination by obscuring the operation of it and/or (attempting to) neutralize challenges to its legitimacy.

The Individualistic Fallacy is the notion that racism only exists at the individual level; in other words, it is the view that there is nothing systemic nor structural about racism. The Token Fallacy is the idea that racism only exists if all power and resources are held by whites; and conversely, it is the idea that if so much as one member of another race has any power or resources, then racism against that group does not exist. The Familiarity Fallacy is the belief that a person cannot possibly be or act racist against a given group if that person has a relationship with a member of that group. Because these fallacies share the common feature of being individual-focused, taken together they are called the Micro-Level Fallacies.

The next five fallacies are called the Meso-Level Fallacies. Meso, i.e., middle or “in-between,” level analysis within sociology studies localized norms and processes within groups, organizations, and social institutions. Privileging what a person says over what they do is the Simon Says Fallacy. Named for the childhood game, it is the perception that if Simon says “jump” then the group jumps, and if Simon says “I’m not racist” then the group believes that he is not racist. The Mens Rea Fallacy is the perspective that pre-meditated, malicious intent is a prerequisite for racism to exist or have occurred. The Innuendo Fallacy is the view that coded language and behavior do not exist with respect to racism. In other words, it is the perception that only explicitly hateful speech and actions are racist, and that it is invalid to claim that euphemisms or codes can be racist too. The perception that pointing out instances of racism is problematic, or even constitutes an act of racism itself, is the Recognition Fallacy; and the perspective that collective action to defend or protect minorities against racist oppression is just as harmful as oppression itself, and thus is “wrong,” is the Self Defense Fallacy.

The four Macro-Level Fallacies are socio-historically focused, structural and systemic. The Legalistic Fallacy is the perspective that having a law against racism means racism no longer exists. The Fixed Fallacy is the perspective that racism does not modernize over time, and thus only specific types of historical actions are racist, not anything in the present. The perspective that those past actions did not create, and in fact have nothing to do with, the state of current conditions is the Ahistorical Fallacy. Lastly, the Silence Fallacy is the assumption that talking about race at all is harmful, and that silence is the best way to solve racism.

If these fallacies are not interrogated, they will function to justify and (re)produce white domination, both ideologically and materially. Many, if not all, of the fallacies can apply to gender inequality, sexual orientation inequality, and other systems of oppression as well. Also, it is important to note that some members of oppressed racial groups also think in ways that align with fallacies of racism. Whether due to having been miseducated, conventionally socialized within the dominant Western culture or under colonialism, or due to the influence of experiences based on their gender, sexuality, or non-race social statuses, non-white people are not a monolith who are immune to society’s common patterns of thinking about racism. To quote Kehinde Andrews: “the delusions of Whiteness disturb all of our thinking.”

In sum, as Jennifer Mueller explains, analysis of racial ignorance “recognizes that all groups can engage in practices of racialized ignorance and not knowing.” Learning to think critically is a skill that is important for all members of society.