Flipping the Script: Analyzing Youth Talk about Race and Racism

Flipping the Script: Analyzing Youth Talk about Raceand RacismROSEMARIE A. ROBERTS

Connecticut College

LEE A. BELL

Barnard College, Columbia University

BRETT MURPHY

Barnard College, Columbia University

In this article, we examine how youth in one urban high school talked about race and racismwhile participating in a curriculum that introduced the analytic lens of story types (stockstories, concealed stories, resistance stories, and counterstories) to look at race and racism andengage these issues through storytelling and the arts. We draw on data from observations andfocus group interviews to examine student-initiated themes and conversation as the curricu-lum unfolded. In particular, we look at the use of language, particularly racialized jokes andname calling, to consider how such talk functions to create social and rhetorical spaces whereyouth of color can express and critically analyze the particularities of their lived experiencesof race and racism in a contemporary “color-blind” context that asserts race no longermatters. [urban education, youth development, racism, resistance].

Tell me if this makes senseI think I MISSED SOMETHING“The Policy of Separating . . .”THERE WAS A POLICY?A strategy to segregate?Yeah, there wasAnd now it has moved from POLICY to NORMALCY.

—Ariane A. Gilgeous, 2004

What does it mean to live with and try to make sense of highly racialized experiencesin a society that denies the significance of race? As Lewis (2003) notes, what it meansto be black or Latino in 2006 is very different than what it meant in 1950 Selma or 1975Oakland. To understand how youth of color in the 21st-century urban U.S. experienceand make sense of their world, we need to comprehend the specifics of race, place,and space that produce their social and political struggles. Racial formation (Omi andWinant 1994) and critical race theory (CRT; Bell 1987; Delgado and Stefancic 2000)alert us to the changing yet persistent forms that racism takes in different eras andprovide a framework for our focus in this article on the ways that youth of color makesense of their racialized experiences in contemporary times.

Here, we report on extended conversations with urban youth in one New York Cityhigh school as they participated in a curriculum focused on examining race andracism through storytelling and the arts. We describe how these discussions helped usas educators and researchers committed to urban education better understand urbanyouth experiences with and views about the significance and impact of race and

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 39, Issue 3, pp.334–354, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492.© 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1492.2008.00025.x.

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racism in their lives. We begin by situating the racialization of youth of color inschools and the broader society within the color-blind ideology that dominates con-temporary mainstream discourse. Next, we outline the curriculum in which ourresearch took place and describe the school, students, and teachers involved. Ouranalysis follows, looking at how young people used the curriculum to grapple withtheir own racialized experiences and to question and talk back to the broader society,particularly through rhetorical devices of humor. We conclude by discussing thesignificance of the study, what we learned from the project and how these lessonsinform our ongoing work with young people and teachers in urban classroomsthrough the Storytelling Project (STP).

The Changing Face of Racism

Fifty-plus years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, public schools in theUnited States continue to be largely segregated by race and class. Black and Latinostudents not only attend more segregated schools than 20 years ago but in increas-ingly regimented school spaces, policies, and practices that subject them to intellec-tually constricted forms of education (Fine et al. 2004; Kozol 2005; Lawrence et al.2004; Orfield and Lee 2006). Their schools receive fewer resources (Carey 2004),provide fewer academic opportunities in a less rigorous curriculum (Fine et al. 2004;Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995), and treat them more punitively than their white,suburban counterparts (Lawrence et al. 2004). Even schools with more racially inte-grated student bodies segregate through differential curriculum such as advancedplacement (AP) and honors classes, special education, and other tracking systems thatfollow along racial lines (Fine et al. 2004; Shultz et al. 2000; Weiner and Oakes 1996).

Urban youth of color are racially coded in politics, media, and mainstream narra-tives as, in the best case scenario “at risk” and, at worst, as dangerous threats to society(HoSang 2006). This framing provides the backdrop for increasing “rationing ofcurriculum” (Darling-Hammond 1995), widespread use of standardized testing andtest-driven curriculum (Sleeter 2007) and zero-tolerance policies justifying high secu-rity, uniformed police, and metal detectors that seek to control, rather than educate,students in urban schools (Anyon 1997; Giroux 2003; Noguera 2003). Such policieslocate the source of problems in students and their communities rather than persistentand pernicious racial patterns that eviscerate social responsibility for equality.

The U.S. Supreme Court in a recent 5–4 ruling supported white parents whosechildren had been denied admission to nearby public schools where race-basedstudent assignments were used to achieve integration, thereby rejecting voluntaryracial integration plans. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “The wayto stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basisof race” (Barnes 2007). As noted legal scholar Derrick Bell rejoined, this color-blindanalysis turns the Brown decision on its head and “cruelly conflates minor cures withthe major disease. Were he a medical doctor, Roberts would ban the use of vaccinesthat are fashioned from the disease-causing virus” (2007). Such cases reflect erosion ofpublic commitment to the racial integration intended by Brown, marking a regressiveturn back to the days of legalized segregation under Plessy v. Ferguson. Although this“new” approach is couched in the rhetoric of color blindness, the effect is to againlegitimize racial segregation.

Roberts et al. Flipping the Script 335

Despite some civil rights–movement successes in fighting legalized racism, defacto discrimination carries on through subtle, normalized social ideas and patternsthat we and others subsume under the term color blindness (Bell 2003b; Bonilla-Silva2003; Frankenberg 1993; Winant 2004). The changing national climate reflects anincreasingly vocal and pervasive color-blind ideology that asserts racial equality hasmostly been achieved rendering demands for further redress unnecessary, and evenevidence of “reverse racism” (Bell 2003b; Bonilla-Silva 2003). For instance, Bell (2003a)found that color-blind ideologies are pervasive among white teachers, whereas blackand Latino teachers are more likely to highlight the excruciatingly slow pace of changeand barriers that remain. White Americans in general tend to believe that racialdiscrimination is a thing of the past (Brown et al. 2003), evincing weariness withmatters of racism and a desire to move “beyond” race (Sniderman and Carmines1999). In this ideological formation, race categories are noticed but not consideredsources of identification or analysis (Crenshaw 1997). “By asserting a race-neutralsocial context, color-blindness stigmatizes attempts to raise questions about redress-ing racial equality in daily life through accusations such as ‘playing the race card’ or‘identity politics,’ which imply that someone is trying to bring race in where it doesnot belong” (Lewis 2003:33).

In the face of undeniable statistics outlining sharp racial disparities in schooling,housing, health care and other markers of well-being (Cashin 2004; Fiss et al. 2003;Lawrence et al. 2004; Lui et al. 2006; Massey 2007) the dominant white society assertsnonracial justifications that preclude a racial analysis, a logic that limits public dis-course and the possibility of systemic solutions (Lawrence et al. 2004). Noting thepervasiveness of this logic, Bonilla-Silva (2003) argues that blacks, despite disagree-ments with whites on many issues, are forced to couch their perspectives in relationto the color-blind frame.

Locating Ruptures, Resisting Naturalized Silence about Racism

Although not the norm, it has been possible in some schools to carve out spaces toexamine and question racism. Fine (2005) notes that small public schools can be,although not always are, sites where dialogue about racism and other social injusticesare possible. In school-based writing and arts programs, many of which draw on theexpressive devices of spoken word and hip-hop, youth can articulate and critique theoppressive and alienating conditions of racism (Fine et al. 2004; Fisher 2006;McCormick 2004; Morrell 2004; Weiss and Herndon 2001). In this vein, the STPinvited youth to explore their experiences with race and racism within classroomcurriculum designed around racial story types.

Challenges to color-blind ideology and resistance to erasure and silencing onmatters of race often find articulation in the cultural formations of communities ofcolor, particularly those most marginalized by white society. For instance, commenton and challenges to racism in the broader society through jokes and humor havebeen an important feature of resistance for oppressed communities throughout thehistory of this nation (Scott 1990). Through literature, folklore, and humor AfricanAmericans, for example, have continuously underscored the gap between appear-ances promoted by the white racial in-group and their lived reality as an oppressedcommunity. Humor and verbal virtuosity, hallmarks of black community life, serve as“strategic survival tools” that provide comic relief from the cruelty and hardship of

336 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 39, 2008

living in a racist society, act as a safety valve to vent anger and aggression indirectly,and create a sense of communal solidarity and power (Gordon 1998). African Ameri-can humor satirizes the demeaning humor of whites, celebrates the unique attributesof black community life, and creates shared strategies for outwitting the oppressor(Watkins 1994).

Similarly, youth from the hip-hop generation (Kitwana 2002) give voice to thetensions and contradictions in a society marked by racial and social hierarchies (Rose1994; Runnell 2006). Using one of the operating principles of hip-hop culture—”flipping”—youth appropriate and modify an “old” or historical concept to producesomething new. In the words of Sonyetta, a young woman interviewed about itsmeaning in her life, “Hip-hop is a way to connect with us. It’s my way of life, my wayof learning really. Hip-hop is in your brain all the time” (Runnel 2006). As such,hip-hop speaks for a generation of youth caught in a historical moment where theracial disparities that circumscribe their lives are effaced by mainstream color-blinddiscourse (Kitwana 2002).

In the interviews and observations discussed below, we hear the voices of youngpeople of color, caught between daily encounters with racism and a societal colorblindness that negates their experiences, grapple with the dynamics of race andracism. One strategy they employ is racialized jokes and name-calling, one thatalthough filled with contradictions, also reflects, comments on, and attempts to chal-lenge the persistent racial, social, economic, and political injustices that permeatetheir lives (Rose 1994). Through these dialogic forms they “flip the script,” compellingus to listen closely to and enact curriculum that connects more readily to theirconcerns.

Examining racialized jokes and name-calling by youth of color through the culturallens of hip-hop and the historical lens of African American humor as resistance, wespeculated that these rhetorical devices reflect youth responses to changing forms ofracism. We see youth use such strategies to claim an educative space within a cur-riculum that creates the conditions for and invites explicit discussion of race andracism, using this opening to assert their authority to speak truth to power, tell storiesin their own lexicon, and explore questions about race and racism that they findmeaningful. In so doing, they weave a dynamic collective narrative.

The STP: Learning about Race and Racism through Storytelling and the Arts

The STP curriculum in which these discussions occurred is informed by four keyinteracting concepts: race as a social construction, racism as a system that operateson multiple levels, white supremacy and white privilege as key, although oftenneglected, aspects of systemic racism, and color blindness as the problematic confla-tion of race with racism that reinforces inequalities, hierarchies, and racial divisionswhile insisting that race does not matter (Bell et al. 2007). We define race not as abiological category but an idea, a social construction—created to interpret humandifferences and used to justify social arrangements in ways that accrue to the benefitof the dominant social group. We define racism as a system of advantage based onconstructed racial categories and supported by institutional structures, policies, andpractices that create and sustain benefits for the dominant group (Bell 2007; Massey2007; Omi and Winant 1994).


The STP curriculum emphasizes the importance of purposefully building a com-munity in which stories about race and racism can be openly shared, respectfullyheard, and critically discussed and analyzed. Story is the connective tissue of the STPmodel and the various art-based activities that ground lessons. The curriculum beginswith building a storytelling community where students can express hopes and fearsabout raising issues of race and racism in the classroom and collectively developguidelines that support open and critical discussion (Bell et al. 2007). The curriculumthen introduces four story types as frames for examining race and racism to question,challenge, and change stories that support and reinforce racial inequality.

The story types are stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories, and coun-terstories.1 Stock stories form the ground from which to build critical analysis of themainstream stories of the dominant white racial group, passed on through historicaland literary documents and celebrated in public rituals, monuments, and mediapresentations (Bell et al. 2007). Students explore such questions as: What are thestock stories about race and racism that operate in U.S. society? How do we learnthem? Who benefits from these stories and who pays? How do such storiesjustify and perpetuate an unequal status quo? For example, lessons ask students toanalyze the “American Dream” through poetry, political speeches, songs and publicart that delineate aspects of this iconic story, look critically at claims of individual-ism, meritocracy, and inevitable forward progress and question their normativestatus.

Concealed stories coexist alongside stock stories but often remain in the shadows,hidden from mainstream view. Concealed stories are generally told from the perspec-tive of people who are marginalized, and often stigmatized, by the dominant societyand can also be revealed through color-conscious analysis of social science data usingthe lens of race. For example, students analyze statistics about access and opportunitythat reveal the social barriers erected against minoritized people as well as theirstories of struggle, self-affirmation, and survival in the face of oppressive circum-stances. Literature, poetry, music, and visual art created by artists from marginalizedcommunities allow students to expose the underside of the “American Dream” andexplore contradictions in stock stories.

Resistance stories, both historical and contemporary, relate how people haveresisted racism and fought for more equal and inclusive social arrangements. Suchstories illustrate persistent challenges to the racial order throughout history andnurture ideas about what is possible today. For example, after looking at patterns ofresistance in U.S. history, students conduct oral history projects, interviewing localcommunity activists about issues and strategies to create an archive of everydayforms of resistance to racism.

Finally, counterstories are new stories, deliberately constructed to challenge thestock stories, build on and amplify concealed and resistance stories, and offer waysto interrupt the status quo, subverting “common sense” (Gramsci 1971) assumptionsabout racial patterns and encouraging activism for justice. Such stories enact critiqueand enable imagination of new possibilities. For example, students analyze patterns intheir own schools and communities through the racial lens and story types in the STPcurriculum. On the basis of this analysis, they generate countervisions and potentialactions, using the arts to support their actions and inspire others to act for change. Theexploration of these four story types sets the context for the youth dialogue discussedbelow.


Research Methods

Our data come from an ethnographic study of the enactment of the STP curriculumin two classrooms in one urban high school in 2006. The researcher–authors are threewomen, two white (Lee and Brett) and one Latina (Rosemarie). (Other members of theresearch team were Vanessa D’Egidio, Kayhan Irani, Svati Mariam Lelyveld, BrettMurphy, and Ebonie Smith.) One of the authors was an undergraduate, now a middleschool teacher, and two of us are faculty in social psychology and education. Amidour differences, we share an interest in issues of teaching and learning and a socialjustice lens through which we view issues of education as well as race (Adams et al.2007; Bell 2003b).

The two teachers who participated in the study were recruited from a pool of 19New York City public school teachers who attended a weeklong summer institute ledby the STP creative team under the aegis of the New York City Board of Education inAugust 2005. The institute introduced teachers to the STP model and engaged themexperientially in activities from the curriculum. On the last day, we described theresearch. From those who expressed interest, we identified two who agreed to par-ticipate in the study and to join our ongoing documentation, evaluation, and revisionof the curriculum by implementing it in their classrooms. Elisa and Geraldo are bothLatina/o urban educators, who brought to the project a blend of teaching experienceand self-reflective inquiry that reshaped the study and the curriculum in valuable andenduring ways. The names of the school, teachers, and students used here are pseud-onyms, in most cases selected by them.

The research took place in a tenth-grade U.S. History class taught by Elisa and aninth-tenth grade advisory, facilitated by Geraldo. Both classes were situated in asmall urban public school (grades 9–12), which we call Riverside High, housed withthree other small schools in a large public high school in Bronx, New York. Thestudent population at Riverside is 58 percent black, 40 percent Hispanic, and 2 percentAsian and other ethnic groups. Five percent are English-language learners and eightpercent are designated special education students. The school receives Title 1 funding,with a much higher proportion of eligible students than in similar schools acrossNew York City (http://www.schools.nyc.org). The participants, except for one whitestudent, were all students of color, with about an even number of boys and girls. Ourresearch questions focused on examining the extent to which the STP curriculumserved teachers in teaching about race, racism, and white privilege and created aspace for students to articulate ideas and experiences of race and racism throughdialogue, writing, and interactive art-based activities. A formative evaluation designallowed us to examine these questions as the curriculum unfolded.

The research employed qualitative methods of classroom observations, semistruc-tured interviews with teachers, and semistructured focus groups with students(Denzin and Lincoln 1994; Fine and Weis 2004; Glasser and Strauss 1967; Patton 1990).We audio- and videotaped observations and produced field notes, for the class ses-sions using the STP curriculum, the individual interviews with teachers, and the focusgroup interviews with students. We conducted a total of 20 classroom observationsand three precurriculum and two postcurriculum focus groups with 4 to 12 studentsper group. Pre- and postcurriculum interviews were conducted with each of the twoteachers. For 21 of the 35 students and their parents, we obtained full informed assentand consent to participate in all aspects of the study, including focus groups and


http://www.schools.nyc.org

interviews, as well as consent to be videotaped or audiotaped during classroomobservations. We received assent or consent for limited video- and audiotaping for 12of the 14 remaining students.

The research team (two faculty and four undergraduate student-researchers) readthrough transcripts and field notes to identify categories and themes. From this firstreading, we collectively developed a coding scheme to use in subsequent readingswhere we independently coded the data. The coded data were then compared anddiscussed at weekly meetings to refine our analysis and interrater consistency(Auerbach and Silverstein 2003; Coffey and Atkinson 1996; Patton 1990).

Our analysis examined ways that teachers and students interacted with the STPcurriculum and with us as interviewers or observers. In particular, we tracked theways students inserted their own concerns and questions so as to shape the curricu-lum and research process toward their goals and interests. Our analysis of pre- andpost focus group and classroom-observation videotapes and transcripts indicates thatas it unfolded, students incorporated and extended language and concepts from thecurriculum to discuss their experiences, speaking eloquently about the ways racisminundates their lives and how they deal with the hurts and slights endemic to racism.

Discussion of Themes

Standing on Shifting Ground

The preimplementation focus groups took place during February—Black HistoryMonth. Students explicitly and implicitly used the story types to reflect on theirexperiences with the mainstream curriculum. Several black students lamented thatwith one day left to the end of the month there were no classroom- or schoolwideevents to mark this important time, viewing it as a missed opportunity to publiclyaffirm their blackness. Repeatedly, students referenced dissatisfaction with a curricu-lum that focuses on stock stories about slavery and iconic figures from the civil rightsera but does little to help them affirm concealed stories of their lives and communitiesor understand resistance stories that might support their capacity to envision andcreate counterstories specific to the historical moment in which they find themselves.Youth raised these issues again in June during post–focus groups. Keondra explains,

Like instead of in Black History Month . . . we need to know more than just Martin LutherKing and Malcolm X . . . they [teach] the most important people but the smaller people theydo stuff too . . . [post–focus group, June 7, 2006:15]

As the “smaller” people living today, they yearn to make sense of the particularitiesof race in their own lives but receive little support from social studies curriculum thatseems frozen in time, or from adults who offer little current information or particu-larized vision to guide them.

Referenced multiple times in interviews and classroom dialogue were studentconcerns about what is happening to the actual physical spaces in which they reside,marking the shifting economic and social trends of suburbanization and white flightfrom cities toward gentrification of newly desirable urban spaces and the displace-ment of poor and working-class people of color by white middle and upper classes(Freeman 2006; Jackson 2005). As students examined social science data and con-cealed stories about how race sorts opportunity and access, Myeisha initiated thefollowing conversation:


Just recently, my mom, my sister, and this guy we were all riding in the car and we wastalking about it, how they trying to move everybody from Harlem, a lot of black people fromHarlem, Spanish people from Harlem, move them to the Bronx.

Leticia piped in, “They say the white people—”Myeisha continued:

From Harlem coming to the Bronx and Queens and they trying to run everybody out . . . theytrying to bring everybody to the Bronx because they want to keep Manhattan . . . the wholething, Harlem too . . . and they trying to take everything over and I’m like, ‘Why you tryingto do that?’ But when you look at our part of the community we never have anything.[pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:11]

Malik added:

they cannot run these people out of Harlem and Queens and put them in the Bronx. It’s toomuch . . . it’s going to be an outbreak of violence because not everybody gets along witheverybody and it’s crowded here now and look what’s going on. Imagine if, if it gets morecrowded [pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:13]

In an interview, teacher Geraldo, who is Dominican American, reflected on thesetensions:

Yeah, because in their neighborhoods they hate anyone that is not of their status or their skincolor. They see a white person move in, and they’ll be offended and they’ll talk about that,“Why they trying to come into our neighborhood and kick us out?” . . . A lot of students usedto live in Washington Heights. They have left. They can’t afford it anymore, and they see thateverything’s changing. They’re saying, “They’re only raising rent, because they know wecan’t afford it, so they’re trying to get rid of us.” That’s their understanding. That’s what theysay. [postinterview, June 8, 2006:5]

Locally, in Harlem and the Bronx in 2006, race means, among other things, hyper-segregation (Orfield and Lee 2006), juxtaposed with gentrification and increasingdislocation (Freeman 2006; Jackson 2005; Wilson 1990). Here, students speak to thecentrality of race and class in gentrification and displacement of people of color, aswell as the inevitable social consequences of congestion and hypersegregation. Theyhint at the role of global migration in diversifying communities of color throwntogether in the same crowded locations and the consequent inter- and intragrouptensions, as well as potential connections, with which they contend. “Today’s Harlem,a gentrifying Harlem, is also shot through with . . . a color-coding that tints the lenseslocal residents use to see international influences on their small Manhattan commu-nity, a small community undergoing some very big changes” (Jackson 2005:42). Thesethemes threaded through several discussions in focus groups, interviews, and class-room observations as students struggled with how to locate themselves in time andspace, perhaps as a way to make visible that which the color-blind frame of our epochobscures (Winant 2004).

This struggle was reflected in several discussions comparing “then” and “now”—”then” being the past and the civil rights movement of the 1960s when the goals forchallenging racism seemed clear; “now” being the inchoate space in which contem-porary students find themselves in a society that declares racism mostly “over” andrace no longer a meaningful category. Leticia articulates this desire of her peers to


understand more about their own position in the present historical moment. “Welearned enough about slavery and stuff, I think we need to learn more about what’sgoing on today” (pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:11).

The effects of a global economy that fractures local community are a definingfeature of the epoch in which urban students of color find themselves, powerfullyaffecting the paths open to them for resistance. In previous eras, resistance to racismand white racial hegemony were launched from within cohesive black and PuertoRican communities in which collective action was visible and tangible. A sinisterfeature now is the rampant commercialism that disperses and obscures the specificityof local community ties, shared identity, and capacity for collective resistance. Thisshift is evidenced in one classroom discussion:

Geraldo: When I say 125th Street what do you think of?Leticia: I think of Black, ghetto.Nelly: I think of shopping.G: What changed?L: They have brand names like white people downtown wear.G: Have people there been fighting to preserve their community? Yes, but you don’t hearthose stories. [field notes, June 1, 2006:1]

Tracking references to place, time, and space, we began to understand the uniquecircumstances facing urban youth of color as they cope with and fashion responses tothe local effects of faraway forces in their communities.

Claiming Space for Youth Concerns

We noticed that frequently students interrupted the planned flow of lessons ordiscussions to insert their own topics. For example, in a lesson aimed at buildingcommunity, the teacher asked students to write down what they wished to learnabout race and racism and their hopes and fears about raising these issues in theclassroom. When asked to share their writing, the conversation flowed in manydirections. Kevin began, “I want this class to be raw so that I can learn more.” Anotherstudent wanted to learn about what race means to “white people, too. Why is it onlycolored people?” (observation field notes, March 9, 2006:3.) As the teacher tried torefocus the discussion, a short debate arose about whether or not racial or ethnicaffiliation matters when it comes to helping one another with schoolwork. Then, in aseeming non sequitur, Derek interjected:

We are wondering why it happened to us again that we did better . . . but still lost. They saidit’s because they don’t understand you because of the accent and they assumed that otherpeople know what they’re doing. Someone did an opening statement. [She was told] that itwas good, it went well, but it didn’t sound like her. She had good pace, but because she hadgood grammar, it didn’t sound like her! How do you want us to speak? I think that they wereassuming that because we are from the Bronx that we don’t speak right. I didn’t think thatthey were racist but I was confused about where they were coming from. [field notes, March9, 2006:7]

Although Derek’s comments initially seemed a diversion, he illustrates how studentsinjected their concerns into class discussion. We learned that Derek was referring to amock trial competition in which Riverside High students had recently participated.


Competitors and judges lauded their performance, saying they had done “an excep-tional job cross-examining witnesses and eliciting testimony.” Yet on the final day ofthe competition, one judge commented that Riverside High students couldn’t helpthat they “didn’t speak the Queen’s English” because they “had not been raised to doso.” A panel lawyer commented that Riverside High students could beat another team“because they were from Harlem” (field notes, March 9, 2006). Derek’s now under-standable and relevant insertion interrogates the contradiction between a presumablyfair (color-blind) mock trial judging process and racial stereotypes about their team,leading Riverside High students and administrators to wonder among themselveswhat role race and racism played in their ultimate loss to a mostly white opposingteam. Although not typically addressed in school, students used the STP curriculumto raise these concerns and challenge stock stories of color blindness with concealedstories that revealed their own experiences with race and racism.

Wrestling with Contradictions

Students’ analyses of racism were frequently incisive and critical. “Today’s lesson. . . showed how much knowledge these students bring to the classroom and specifi-cally the curriculum around race and racism. The level of sophistication they show intying in structural issues with personal experience, debating theories of . . . stereotypeand self-responsibility was very powerful” (field notes, March 15, 2006:10). At thesame time, students often seemed to accept and use racial language and stereotypesunquestioningly. For example, they joked in stereotypical ways about Jamaicans,Africans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and whites, calling someone a “freakin’ Rican”or using the “N-word,” telling other students to “go back on your boat,” and makingfun of Rosa Parks, to name a few examples.

As researchers concerned with racial justice, such language often made us cringe.From our antiracist perspective, words that express racial stereotypes are powerful, notonly reflecting ideas about race but also justifying and perpetuating discrimination. Yetwe did not want to dismiss or ignore what this language signified for students. A moreprevalent view, popular in mainstream television comedy, sees racialized jokes asbenign and inconsequential, meant merely to make us laugh. Neither conception quitefit how students at Riverside High used jokes and name-calling, obliging us to considerother rhetorical and strategic functions this talk might serve.

In pre–focus groups, one of the first issues to arise was racial names and jokes.Three questions into the first interview, we asked, “How does race operate in oursociety?” Jamal responded, “Like the biggest word I would say that operates is theword . . . if I can say it . . . can I say it?” After being assured that he could say whateverhe wanted, Jamal continued,

Nigger. . . . I mean, everybody says it no matter what color they are, they just say it as a wordnow. . . . The real meaning just died out and now nigger is referred to as a friend or “wassupnigger” or a greeting. [pre–focus group, February 27. 2006:2]

Likewise, in the other focus group, students brought up jokes and the idea of“playing” with racism:

Derek: I think that racism and the way that we say it are so commonly used. Like certainthings that would be offensive . . .


Kyle (interjecting): We take racism in the school sort of as a joke.D: Like me and Kyle will joke around and I’ll call him . . . that word I don’t want to say [classlaughs]. It becomes so widely heard, so accepted that we just play with it. [pre–focus group,February 16, 2006:11]

Because this issue arose early on, we wondered if youth were testing our willingnessto honestly engage on their terms and in their language. Might they be feeling outhow “real” we were going to be, determining whether we would engage with theirconcerns and look at race and racism in terms relevant to them? What did we,researchers from a private, elite college, really understand about racism or their lives?

Once we demonstrated that we would not shy away from their issues or thelanguage they used to express themselves, that we truly wanted to understand theirperspectives, students became comfortable enough to share thoughts in more depth.The two teachers played a critical role in facilitating this trust. Their position asteachers of color who in part shared and understood their students’ experiences, andtheir willingness to openly discuss issues of race and racism, enabled them to cocreatea space of trust, honesty, and critical learning. The discourse that developed blendedjokes and name-calling with personal stories as teachers and students actively fash-ioned the STP curriculum to fit their interests and concerns.

These dialogues enabled us to see the intense paradoxes facing youth of color andreplicated in schools, of living daily with the consequences of racism within a color-blind ideological context that asserts that race no longer matters. Elisa noted:

I think that most of them don’t understand why it’s not talked about, and they don’t knowhow to deal with it, . . . and I think it’s because people always say, “Color doesn’t meananything” or “I treat everyone the same.” [postinterview, June 12, 2006:5]

For example, in the initial focus group Malik claimed he didn’t know how racismoperates:

I haven’t . . . I haven’t met anybody racist so I can’t say how it operates in society ‘cause Inever came across it, and when I do come across it I don’t know how I’m gonna take it on,how I’m gonna handle it, but I can’t say how because I’ve never experienced it. [pre–focusgroup, February 27, 2006:8]

Yet later, responding to a classmate’s story about a tutor at her after-school programwho argued that “the way to keep something from black people is to put it in a booksince they don’t read,” Malik offered this analysis:

I say that’s a stereotype, because I read all the time. And so, race has a lot to do with it becausesomebody sees that there’s a minority and they view minorities so bad, like they’re the worstpeople to be around and like minorities are not something that you want to be. They makepeople not want to be . . . they make people feel ashamed about their skin or where theycome from, so I think that race plays a big role. [classroom observation, May 17, 2006]

Malik’s first response premises racism on blatant acts committed by individuals, actsthat he claims not to have seen. In the second response, and many other timesthroughout interviews and classroom dialogue, he cogently identifies systemic fea-tures of racism that affect people of color and their chances at success. Close readingof the dialogue often showed students oscillating between mainstream color-blind


discourse that negates race and racism as an explanatory factor and systemic analysisgrounded in daily experiences with racism.

In the same way, students often juxtaposed the received dominant ideology ofindividual responsibility with critique of systemic white power and privilege. Monicareflected:

The reason why they [white people] stereotype . . . [is that] we are using it. If we’re tired ofgetting stereotyped, maybe we should stop using it. . . . If we all stopped, they could blamethe white people. How come the white people think that they have to do anything? They goto foreign places and they take over everything. . . . They came over here. How can they be sohypercritical? You’re the one that’s starting a lot of the stuff going on. [classroom observation,March 15, 2006:6–7]

Initially, Monica calls for youth of color to stop acting in stereotypic ways, placingblame on individuals rather than institutional patterns that create and perpetuatestereotypes. In the next breath, she acknowledges the systemic operations of whiteprivilege, “tak[ing] over everything” and “starting a lot of the stuff going on.” Monicaand Malik narrate a typical pattern in which students alternate between individualand institutional analyses of racism. Yet, when invited to do so through the lens ofstory types, they offer incisive analysis of how racism functions systemically:

Interviewer: What is your understanding about how race operates in American society?Keyara: It’s hidden it’s not really put out there. But it has so much of an influence on howpeople, like, how we go to school, how we dress, our education, where we live at, how we getjobs and stuff like that. I think it is hidden so we can’t really see . . . [overlapping voices]Sheronda: . . . I don’t think that it is hidden. I think that it is being put out there to make thesociety function. . . . It’s put out there as in, like the white man is supposed to be superior toeither a black fellow . . . and like, say you go to get a job and all of that and people that’ssitting at the table that’s interviewing you they already have this image from society. . . . Idon’t think that it’s hidden. I think it’s put out there so society functions the way it does today,so it’ll keep on going like that.I: So who’s benefiting from that function?S: The government, the white person . . .K: I don’t mean to say that it’s hidden hidden . . . because everybody they’re . . . like “Oh,everybody has the same opportunities to go to school” and all of that. But reality is that we’renot all going to get to the same place that’s in your example with the white man. That in a waygets hidden because the black man doesn’t know and neither does that white man. Theythink that they [are] in the same boat, but the reality is, [they’re] not. [post–focus group, June7, 2006:8–10]

Here Sheronda and Keyara get at the normalized patterns of white privilege thatmystify and block critical awareness of how opportunity and access are shaped byrace. Likewise, the students below astutely critique how stereotypes function:

Student: . . . my brother dropped out and it makes the white man look at him like the badexample. But I can be good in school and still have a black attitude.Sheronda: What makes it a black attitude and ghetto too? That’s part of the stereotype.Students shout out: What is ghetto?! What is black?! [classroom field notes, March 15,2006:10]

Student talk both colluded and wrestled with the schizophrenia of race in the con-temporary United States. Although their own experiences authenticate the continuing


realities of racism, the discourses that surround them assert a color-blind view that“race has nothing to do with it,” a contradiction we see threaded through theirrhetoric.

Contradictions also showed up in their use of jokes and name-calling. Youth mustbe fierce to carve out spaces to talk about race when they come up against societalunwillingness to confront the realities of racism and adult perceptions that denyyouth agency. Jokes and name-calling may be one way to invert the unspoken rules of“polite” talk about race and assert their authority to talk about it in their own terms,thus “flipping the script.” Kyle and Derek provide an example of this kind of inter-ruption and the typical adult response to it:

Kyle: Like I’ll say the cops keep searching me, and this Puerto Rican will be like “Oh, it’sbecause you’re black” . . . and I was like “Puerto Ricans—like nothing in their house is theirs.Everything is stolen!”Derek: And the then the white teacher threw them out. [post–focus group, June 6, 2007:12]

Through the shock value in jokes and words that adults consider out of bounds, youthcan challenge polite norms of color-blind discourse and dramatically interrupt oth-erwise sanitized lessons that tiptoe around the issues, making it harder for teachers toclaim the classroom as “raceless” space. Geraldo explains,

because if everyone else views it as bad students view it as, “Well if they think I’m bad, I’mgonna do it.” Because they don’t think it’s bad. So they’ll go completely against the curve.[postinterview, June 8, 2006:2]

However, youth are also aware that they do not have the power to unilaterally changelanguage nor control how they are racially coded by the dominant society. Theirpublic visibility represents a powerful paradox: their race is simultaneously hyper-visible and yet “unseen” as the dominant gaze reduces them to oppressive stereo-types based on skin color (and age or gender) that deny individual self-definition, yetclaims that race does not matter. Lillianna and Keondra note these tensions:

You go to Times Square, you’ll be like, “Damn, look at all these white people. This shit ain’tright . . . they have all this stuff and we have nothing.”

Keondra continues,

When you go to Times Square with your friends, it’s like everyone is staring at you. [pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:5]

Youth struggle for self-representation in the face of media that define them throughracially coded labels, images, and associations that efface agency and individuality. Inher study of African American teenagers, Cohen argues that they “are not passive butengaged in constructing racial identities in action, a self or selves that deal creativelywith the challenges of being African American in a racist society” (1993:301). Just so,students at Riverside employ language creatively to construct identities within andagainst the erasures of a racist society that claims race doesn’t matter.

From “Nigger” to “Nigga”: Flipping the Script

Like the “dozens” played by African Americans historically (and now), jokes andname-calling also represent forms of play on reality, allowing participants:


to avoid boredom and at the same time to enhance their self-esteem and to poke fun at theirfailures. Through indirection, examples, exaggerations, half-truths, jokes, boasts, and insults,they express the realities of the ghetto experience and at the same time remake that experi-ence. [Lefever 1988:14]

Students often referenced the idea of “playing” with race and explained their use ofracialized names within this frame:

Myeisha: . . . sometimes you could be playing, ‘cause I know I am playing sometimes . . . andI do say, “Oh you a nigga, you this, you that” and “You Puerto Ricans,” and “you gualagualas.” [pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:7]

Through playing with language, students comment on the realities, pains, and con-fusions of their lives and attempt to take back and reframe racial stereotypes andderogatory terms, following a tradition of African American comedians like RichardPryor and Dave Chappelle, who deploy stereotypes to make fun of them, exposingboth their resonance and their futility.

Although most of the jokes and name-calling were about each other, students alsojoked about white people:

Albert: Like if you see a white person walking by, you gonna say something.Students: Yeah.Student: I’ll make fun of them and talk like them.Student: Yeah, we do.Lillianna: Yeah, if you go out with your friends, if you go to Manhattan or something, you’rebound to make fun of white people. [post–focus group, June 7, 2006:11–12]

Students talk about caricaturing white actions or mannerisms:

Student: I’m not going to lie. I make fun of them, like the way they talk . . . like we were on42nd St. and there was a white girl on her cell phone and something that we would normallysay, when she says it sounds funny—like something is “cool” and “hot.” That’s like what theysay about us though. [post–focus group, June 6, 2006:18]

In the context of persistent racism and intensified gentrification, jokes may enableyouth of color to challenge white encroachment on their spaces, even if languageseems their only option for doing so. They also comment on white privilege, breakdown notions of white superiority by making fun of white performances of race, andhighlight the illusions and inequalities of racism, that although there is clearly no“better” race, white people come out on top.

Youth do not see their experiences with race and racism represented either in the“official” history taught in schools or in the experiences of previous generations intheir own communities. In their struggle to make sense of their own experiences, theyattempt to reinscribe new meaning into names and insults that are anathema to ideasand struggles of the civil rights movement. Kyle’s story illustrates this point:

I was making jokes on the bus about black people and this old lady got up and yelled at meand said that I don’t know the meaning of the words I’m saying and I wasn’t around duringthe time and all that.

Leticia continued:


We’re just learning the foundation and stuff of race. We don’t know. We [weren’t] born inthose days and stuff so we can joke about it, like that’s just what we do. [post–focus group,June 6, 2006:12–13]

Youth also suggest that they don’t connect with the loaded meaning of the wordsbecause they have not explored the genesis of and history surrounding racial terms.As Leticia says, they know that the N-word is derogatory to black people, and, in thesame way that they want to explore the roots of race and racism, they want tounderstand the roots of this word even as they struggle to redefine it.

Leticia describes these complications:

What you don’t know about, you don’t. . . . So I believe that the word “nigga,” it was “nigger”back in the day. That was derogatory to black people. Nowadays it’s not derogatory, but itactually is. Now, ‘cause we’re so young, we use words because we don’t know the back-ground and where the words came from and what they mean. That’s why we use words. LikeI use “nigga” all the time, but some people don’t like to be called that. I have a friend whodoesn’t like being called “nigga.” She’ll be like, “Stop calling me that!”

Derek interjects:

Me too, I’ll be like, “I’m not for sale!” [pre–focus group, February 16, 2006:11]

In distinguishing between “nigga” and “nigger,” Leticia and Derek attempt to reap-propriate the word as part of a specifically youth based response that fits theircontemporary, urban milieu. For them, the word signifies a friend, a familiar,someone belonging to their in-group. Yet they are not unaware of the persistence ofmeanings in a racist society, even as they consciously struggle to transform them.Keondra argues:

The “N-word”—“nigger,” it died out and jokes are just jokes that people say to make otherpeople laugh, which dies it out. [pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:3]

The role of laughter in bringing people together and rendering funny that which isotherwise hurtful makes the transformation of stereotypes into jokes potentiallyaffirming, providing a way to deal with injury and create spaces of self-definition.Although not unproblematic as they themselves note, relating to one another throughredeploying derogatory terms youth argue is a way to “die out” the negative conno-tations. Elisa, their teacher, remarked:

I think it’s probably their way of dealing with it, maybe of getting rid of the hurt and laughingit off. [postinterview, June 13, 2006:3]

Among themselves they claim, jokes and name-calling are symbols of affection andaffiliation rather than antagonism or rejection. Students cited the example of a boy intheir class, Pharell, who is often teased about his dark skin. Malik explained, “Itshows that he’s our friend. Your friends joke with you.” Sheronda, however, acknowl-edges the contradiction that it is also “like racism.”

Sheronda: We joke, you know. It’s a joke. But that’s like racism, that’s like saying we acceptit, but I don’t know . . . we’re just mocking him.


Interviewer: So what’s the difference?S: We’re just mocking him.I: You know you’re doing it but you’re mocking him, so then what’s that?Reggie: We know our boundaries. We know the limits. Laughing, joking.I: How do you know those limits?S: ‘Cause we just . . . everyone in our class, we just have this chemistry. Like I don’t knowwhat it is, we are all cool and we all know, you know, stop. And then it’s done with.[post–focus group, June 7, 2006:12]

We might expect that as students explored racism in more depth, they would see suchlanguage as perpetuating stereotypes and consider foregoing its use, but many con-tinued to reject this option, holding onto the transformative potential of youth-defined language while also taking a critical stance about its genesis. When askedabout how interactions with other people had changed since experiencing the cur-riculum, Leticia noted that she continued to use jokes and name-calling, even thoughshe was now more critical:

Nothing has changed. I see it in a more . . . deeper complex way now.”

Leomary continued,

And you know how they see it as a joke, and, I mean, I laugh too. But I still think about it,even though I laugh.” [post–focus group, June 6, 2006:24]

One student asserted a difference between analyzing the emotionally charged lan-guage of racism inside the classroom and informal interactions outside:

Say we on the video [reference to our videotaped observations in class]. Like we really bringemotion into it, but when we’re around our friends, it’s nothing, it’s light, you know what Imean? Right now, we sit down and talk like racism is bad and you know we don’t appreciateit and stuff like that, but when we get around our friends, you know as soon as we leave thisclass, its going to be, “What up my nigga.” [post–focus group, June 7, 2006:14]

Some students conclude that a critical analysis of white privilege, stereotypes, andracism can coexist with racialized jokes and name-calling among friends, with thecaveat that this space of resistance be reserved for friends. Geraldo observed:

I see friends use it on each other; they don’t use it on anyone else. Like somebody they don’ttrust, they’ll refrain from using it. [postinterview, June 8, 2006:2]

Conscious of the gaze of a wider society students also see the need to make consciouschoices about when and how they use language.

I thought it was funny, but I don’t know if everyone else would think it was funny. I don’t seethe world as race . . . racist or whatever because my friend Tom makes a lot of black jokes andTom’s white and I think it’s funny. And I do the same about Tom so that’s it. But then againother people won’t think it’s so funny so I don’t think it should be put out public-wide.[pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:4]

Students also recognize the danger when in-group language is appropriated bywhites who assume they can use the same terms without knowledge of historicalconnotations and experiences that shape language and authorize speakers who arepositioned racially.


Malik explains:

We be playing but we bring it upon ourselves, and if people see that it’s cool for us to say itthen anybody else can call us “nigga” too. [pre–focus group, February 27, 2006:6]

Although we highlight here the way in which students articulated their use of lan-guage as resistance, they and we were also aware of the difficulty of appropriating andredefining language and images that are historically and socially sedimented withmeaning. In our final conversation with the group when we shared with them thethemes described in this article, the issue they continued to debate was how andwhether it is possible to resist racism through reclaiming words and images and findpower in flipping associations and meanings to create change. We hope we honorhere the complex and creative strategies they employ in their search for tools ofliberation to create their own counterstories for change.

Conclusion

The research reported here adds to the educational literature on the value of linkingcurriculum to the felt concerns of the youth it seeks to engage (Fisher 2006; Freire1998) and of creating democratic sites within public schools for addressing criticalsocial issues such as racism (Dixson and Rousseau 2006; Greene and Abt-Perkins2003; Lee 2007; Marri 2005). Significantly, our study shows that students yearn forspaces and curricula that provide the context and history within which they canground their experiences and analysis. Elisa concludes:

They have such valuable opinions and beliefs and I think one of the reasons why our studentsdon’t get a lot of the information that comes out of the mainstream curriculum is that theydon’t care, they don’t care about it. They feel like it has nothing to do with them. And talkingabout this [the STP curriculum], really made them feel important and just . . . most of thetime I was just standing and listening. They were just talking to each other, and that’s whatneeds to happen. It’s their room, it’s their space, and that’s what they come to school for.[postinterview, June 13, 2006:9]

Although students seemed to find the story types to be a useful tool to use in theiranalysis, these data also give us a critical vantage point from which to reshape ourcurriculum in more relevant and connected ways towards what students actuallyknow, need and desire to learn about the topics of race and racism.

When a classroom includes, indeed focuses on issues of race and racism, and valueswhat students bring to the table, everyone involved (students and teachers) canengage in more thoughtful and creative analysis of the system of racial oppression inwhich we live to develop the tools to change it. The STP curriculum and story typesenabled students to value their already developing analyses of their social world,better understand the systems they contend with on a daily basis and approach coursecontent with a sense that their experiences could be an integral part of the curriculum.A learning process based in this kind of back and forth between student and teacherbrings us closer to Paulo Freire’s ideal of education as the practice of freedom (2000).

Rosemarie A. Roberts is Assistant Professor of Education at Connecticut College. Her researchinterests are in the areas of intergroup relations and the ways in which schools, communities,


and other social institutions create conditions of inclusion and exclusion ([email protected]).Lee A. Bell is Professor and Barbara Silver Horowitz Director of Education at Barnard College,Columbia University. Her research and teaching focus on issues of race, racism, and socialjustice in teacher education. She is currently working on a book about the STP ([email protected]).Brett Murphy is a middle school Humanities teacher in the Northwest Bronx and one of thecoauthors of the STP curriculum. Her teaching practice and research interests are based in howto make radical, antiracist pedagogy a lived reality within the current education system([email protected]).

Notes

Acknowledgments. We would like to acknowledge the members of the STP creative team:Anthony Asaro, Lee Anne Bell, Vicki Cuellar, Leticia Dobzinski, Zoe Duskin, Christina Glover,Uraline Septembre Hager, Thea Abu El-Haj, Dipti Desai, Roger Bonair-Agard, Kayhan Irani,Rosemarie A. Roberts, and Patricia Wagner. We acknowledge the wonderful members of ourresearch team: Vanessa E’gidio, Kayhan Irani, Svati Mariam Lelyveld, Brett Murphy, and EbonieSmith and the teachers and students at Riverside High School for their generous engagementwith and honest critique of the STP model. We also want to thank three anonymous reviewersfor their thoughtful and comprehensive feedback on drafts of this article.

1. Our use of the term counterstory is somewhat different than, although closely related to, itsuse in CRT and we are inspired by CRT scholarship and narratives. Like CRT we see race andracism as central to our analysis of inequality. Like CRT theorists, we use counterstory to denotestories that counteract or challenge the dominant story (Dixson and Rousseau 2006; Yosso 2006),but we differentiate such stories into three types: concealed, resistance, and counterstories.

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Flipping the Script: Analyzing Youth Talk about Race and Racism

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