A Position Statement of National Council for the Social Studies
Approved by the NCSS Board of Directors November 2023

Introduction

In the spring of 2019, the NCSS Board of Directors affirmed its interest in adopting a position statement on racial literacy in social studies education (Resolution #19-04-6).

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the National Council for the Social Studies issue a position statement on teaching about race and racism in the social studies classroom as an essential aspect of preparing future citizens who will be informed advocates in an inclusive and equitable society; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, the National Council for the Social Studies continue to promote the importance of teachers and pre-service teachers to be active participants in the goal of combating racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry in their social studies classrooms.

What Is Racial Literacy?

Racial literacy has become an increasingly popular concept in educational research and in K–12 settings (Laughter et al., 2021; Oto et al., 2022). Broadly speaking, racial literacy is a concept designed to subvert the persistence of racism psychologically, interpersonally, and structurally (King, 2022). It is a process of learning to understand how race is a function of power in the United States and that race, while central, remains interdependent with other sociopolitical elements such as gender, class, sexuality, and geography. Within educational contexts, racial literacy has been explored through literacy education to examine how students learn about race and racism (e.g., Rogers & Mosley, 2006) and how teachers make pedagogical choices about curriculum and discussion topics based on their racial literacy skills (e.g., Skerrett, 2011). In social studies specifically, racial literacy has been used to elucidate the racialized histories of the United States, drawing on developing educators’ knowledge of Black history (King, 2016) and examining the pedagogical decision-making of practicing educators to subvert racism in their schools and classrooms (e.g., Epstein & Gist, 2015; Epstein & Schieble, 2019).

Intended Audiences

This position statement is intended for in-service and pre-service teachers, teacher educators, social studies education scholars, administrators, and broader schooling communities. Our aim is to clarify what racial literacy is and to illustrate the productive potential of including racial literacy in curriculum and teaching.

Background

The contemporary battles in school board meetings and teacher education programs over how race is, or is not, taught is the context for this position statement. While curriculum that directly addresses issues of race and racism has been vilified as an attack on children, teaching about race and racism in U.S. classrooms has always been a political issue. The erasure and disinformation about Black histories in U.S. curriculum at the turn of the 20^th century are what led Carter G. Woodson to develop the first Black history textbooks for Black students (Grant et al., 2016). Indigenous realities of genocide and forced displacement were replaced with the quest for freedom narrative that remains alive and well in U.S. history textbooks as the theme of “Manifest Destiny” (VanSledright, 2008). These are only two instances of the countless examples in history that illustrate the erasure of communities of color in learning about the past.

Moreover, desires to be seen as socially just have flattened the work of fighting against racism. While it remains important to talk about race and racism, these conversations are not end points in the work to subvert the ideologies, practices, and institutions that make racism permanent in U.S. society. It is here that racial literacy offers rich possibilities for us as a community of educators to take up and embark upon a sustained effort to combat racial oppression.

Why Teach About Race and Racism?

Despite the contemporary and historically persistent challenges that arise when teaching about race and racism in social studies classrooms, exploring these topics remains vitally important to a healthy democracy (Howard, 2004; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Navarro & Howard, 2017; Sleeter, 2014). Research has demonstrated that teachers who engage in conversations about race and racism strengthen students’ analytical skills relevant to social studies education, such as historical thinking and critical inquiry (Epstein & Gist, 2015; King, 2016; Martell & Stevens, 2019; Skerrett, 2011), and cultivate the democratic practice of working across and through difference that is foundational to the health and well-being of democratic societies (Banks, 1997; Howard, 2004; Parker, 1997). Additionally, weaving topics of race and racism into discussions and curricula disrupts the narratives that perpetuate the marginalization of communities of color in classrooms.

Importantly, avoiding race and racism harms white students too, as it promotes a flattened, inaccurate understanding of the self and the world, positioning white people as racial villains or totally absent of a racial identity when whiteness is very much at play in every aspect of their lives (Hawkman & Shear, 2020; Smith & Crowley, 2018). Thus, the centering of race expands their racial consciousness beyond the one-dimensionality that race-evasive approaches can offer (Adu-Gyamfi et al., 2023; Bishop, 1990; Hawkman & Shear, 2020). Moreover, the demographic shifts of the U.S. continue to move away from a white majority and toward an ever-evolving, racially complex citizenry (Navarro & Howard, 2017; Omi & Winant, 2015). As such, scholars have identified the need for social studies education to take seriously what it means to prepare a future citizenry that is not reflected in the current curricula, textbooks, or teaching approaches to social studies (e.g., Banks, 2004; Navarro & Howard, 2017).

Rationale for Recommendation

We encourage readers to explore the following recommendations with a few considerations. First, these rationales are designed as access points to conversations, ideas, and actions that exist within a rich lineage of organizing against racial injustice in the United States. All of the ideas presented here have origins in Black intellectual and activist movements throughout U.S. history, such as the anti-racist organizing efforts of Black women like Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker (Hartman, 2019) and the reimagination of public education by Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke (Grant et al., 2016), to name a few examples. This is important because the struggle for racial justice in education remains a central aspect of dismantling racism in U.S. society. Second, while the recommendations may be read as discrete tasks that can be completed as a “racial literacy checklist,” these recommendations are not that. These recommendations are processes that are historically situated, and we recognize that we are a part of that historical process of resisting racism in education. Lastly, this is not everything that racial literacy encompasses. As noted above, racial literacy has many meanings; what we offer here should be considered a partial, albeit meaningful, set of opportunities for people to enter and/or continue their journeys toward racial literacy.

Recommendations

Understand That History Is Racialized

One of the central arguments for learning about the past is that it allows us to understand root issues in our collective society and to make more informed choices about how we want to live in the present and where we want to go in our collective futures (Reich, 2022). To that end, understanding that history, in its entirety, is a racialized discipline that affords space for educators, young people, and communities broadly to make sense of how race became a predictor of academic achievement, physical health, and economic prosperity in the United States (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Muhammad, 2010; Omi & Winant, 2015; Sugrue, 2014).

Race has been central to the formation of U.S. social, political, and economic institutions. There are countless examples of this: The forced removal of Indigenous nations from land and the U.S. nation-state’s refusal to honor treaties between sovereign nations allowed for Westward expansion and an unprecedented accumulation of wealth for white settlers (Wolfe, 2006); insurance companies and banks such as AIG built their wealth on insuring enslaved Black bodies in their forced transport across the Atlantic and throughout the North American continent (Ralph & Rankin, 2017); colleges and local, state, and federal governments used enslaved peoples’ labor to construct their buildings (Mills, 2017); the transcontinental railroads critical to the U.S. supply chain were built by Chinese migrant labor (Takaki, 1993). While these may seem like little more than distant facts for a student to remember for their upcoming history test, we encourage readers to consider the ways that racialized histories paved the way for the racial realities we are confronted with today. The racism that afforded white elites with power and capital during the formative moments in the history of the United States cannot be divorced from the inherent wealth inequalities we observe today. Likewise, the laws that made it illegal for Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx youth to attend schools laid the foundations for the deficit understanding of communities of color in the present day (Watkins, 2001).

These facts and our interpretations are not designed to guilt or shame, despite what many policymakers with interests in maintaining systems of racial domination may argue. Rather, it is to show the ubiquity that race and racism have played in the past to make present-day society racially unequal. The emotions that can come when learning these truths are real and should be handled with ethical approaches that human beings deserve. However, evading these conversations to preserve someone’s feelings only perpetuates racism. Understanding the racial realities of our past allows us to explore the ways that we have internalized the normalcy of racism and work toward refusing its grip on our imaginations.

Challenge Internalized Racism

Whether knowingly and not, we are all invested in the beliefs that uphold systems of racial oppression, such as uncritically teaching racialized tropes that appear in textbooks or prescribed curricula (Stanton, 2022; Tatum, 2017; Woodson, 2016). In schools, these tropes manifest in a myriad of ways, ranging from colorism in conversations between students of color to actively endorsing anti-Black beliefs about Black peers as “the problem” (Milner, 2015; Tatum, 2017).

Teaching about race and racism in classroom contexts provides opportunities to challenge the ways we are all harmed by the racist ideologies that undergird racism in U.S. society because in order to effectively learn about race and racism, we must develop critical self-reflection (Sealy-Ruiz & Acosta, 2020). Also known as an archaeology of self, critical self-reflection must be predicated on a willingness to care for the communities we work in and a humility that allows us to remain open to different world views (Sealy-Ruiz & Acosta, 2020). In social studies education, these opportunities for deep introspection are deeply needed and become more frequent as students learn to embrace the nuances of learning history and resist the essentializing of the past that the freedom-quest narrative demands (Reich, 2022; Rodríguez, 2022). By teaching about the nuances of history, racist tropes that are subconsciously held can be deconstructed and released. Linkages from the nuances of the past to the present can help anchor students and adults in this complex process and also create a condition of collectivism that allows challenging internalized racism to be sustained.

Curriculum

Recent scholarship on curriculum, standards, and textbooks illustrate that these materials ignore the histories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, and in many instances, continue to promote racist narratives of history (An, 2022; James-Galloway, 2022; Rodríguez, 2022; Stanton, 2022). Additionally, social studies curriculum and instructional materials often ignore intersectional representations of race, therefore flattening representations of both identity and oppression (Vickery & Rodríguez, 2021). Importantly, curricula in public historical contexts, such as museums, historical sites, and monuments, can often reinforce the normalcy of whiteness and the erasure of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) histories from communities of color in learning about the past (Burgard, 2022; Duncan, 2022). Taken together, it is clear that the freedom-quest narrative remains alive and well in the materials that are used to teach about the past, furthering a narrative of U.S. history that evades teaching issues of race and racism in ways that are complex or grounded in reality.

However, the normalcy of whiteness in social studies standards, curricula, and textbooks can be disrupted. In Montana, the Indian Education for All framework (Montana Office of Public Instruction, 2019) gives explicit attention to histories and worldviews of Indigenous peoples and has encouraged educators to develop resources and lessons about race and settler colonialism (Bachtler, 2015; Stanton, 2022). The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana serves as an example of a public historical site that centers the experiences of enslaved peoples to illustrate the complicated histories of the Plantation in local history (Duncan, 2022). Teachers who take the risks required to teach about race in their classroom have received positive feedback from all students who assert that the course felt meaningful in ways that social studies classes that did not address race felt unhelpful (Blum, 2012; Howard, 2004; Martell, 2013). The examples illustrate that disruption is possible and that in order for social studies to take seriously the labor of developing racial literacy skills, educators must be willing to embrace racially literate curricula by bringing it into their classrooms while also positioning themselves as learners alongside students to develop their own racial literacy (Ender, 2022; Rodríguez, 2022).

Professional Learning

Professional developments for practicing educators about race and racism are routinely used to address gaps in teachers’ knowledge and skills to engage with race meaningfully in schools. However, the neoliberal model of professional training often makes these instances superficial and performative for the sake of appearing to work against racism, with little demonstrable change to the ideologies or practices of educators (Grinage, 2020). At the same time, professional development is one of the few, and often only, strategies that districts can implement to require all staff to engage in conversations about race and racism, making them high-stakes spaces for racial content knowledge.

Learning about race and racism is more important than what one professional development seminar can address. As such, professional development must change in order for issues of race and racism to be explored so that K–12 educators might deepen their knowledge of the topic and change their teaching to work against racism. For example, consider the structure of professional development framed in the enduring struggle to work against racism. Professional learning about race might be more meaningfully engaged with a focus on the middle (two to three years) and long (three to five years) range professional development programs rather than single sessions. This approach may have different options for educators based on their familiarity with centering race in classroom conversations and curricula as well as nuances that engage in the local community context to promote community learning. This structural shift embraces the reality that making sense of race, racism, and teaching is a non-linear, multidimensional process and that for the learning in professional development spaces to materialize, school leaders at all levels must be willing to invest district resources into this process, understanding that these resources are an investment in the teaching community, not a compliance box that needs checking.

For teacher education programs, this recommendation is analogous to the critique of the multicultural education course (Hawkman, 2022; Martell & Stevens, 2022). To cultivate the skills of critical consciousness about race and racism along with subsequent anti-racist actions, teacher education programs must embed the concepts of race and racism into the entirety of the program. Central questions about race and racism can be used to interrogate the multiple levels that racism manifests. These questions can be used as refrains in every course throughout a pre-service teacher’s experiences that demonstrate the importance of understanding and interrogating racism at every opportunity (Hawkman, 2022). Likewise, teacher education programs must become more strategic in selecting racially conscientious candidates to join their programs. Research demonstrates that teacher educators who have dispositions to combat racism or learn more about race and racism are more likely to develop racial literacy skills and enact an anti-racist pedagogy (Martell & Stevens, 2022; Wideen et al., 1998). To leaders of teacher education programs, the responsibility falls to leaders of teacher education programs to change the structural elements of licensure programs so that conditions of becoming a teacher foster the skills to understand and teach about race in meaningful ways.

Conclusion

Developing racial literacy is something that all practicing educators, policymakers, leaders, and scholars must work toward in order to ensure that racism is sustainably combatted in social studies education and education writ large. While naming the need for racial literacy in social studies education is a critical first step to combating racism (Kendi, 2019), action is required for the anti-racist work that racial literacy demands to take shape (Mitchell Patterson, 2022). This is labor that is best done together because it can be sustained. In that spirit, we offer the following sets of organizations and resources as possibilities to begin, strengthen, and extend networks of anti-racist educators. As with all work that aims to dismantle racism, the racial realities of police brutality against Black communities, the erasure of Indigenous nations’ rights to water, and the pathologizing of Asian and Latinx communities will not go away easily. However, making decisions to examine race and racism in social studies education changes an idea of racial justice in schools into a reality. These acts are what bell hooks (2003) refers to as a pedagogy of hope, acts that illustrate that change is possible and that the world can become a better place, not through simple desires and wishes, but through the labors of love that come with acting to make the world better. Through sustained effort, a pedagogy of hope becomes transformative and might inspire another generation of people to carry on toward a world that is humane and just.

Resources for Teachers/Administrators/Scholars

Organizations

• Zinn Education Project
• Rethinking Schools
• Black Lives Matter at School
• Education for Liberation Network

Conferences

• Free Minds, Free People
• Teaching Black History Conference

Other

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Racial Literacy Position Statement

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