This response is modified from my response at the Parents table because for me teaching and parenting are mixed up. As a preschool teacher I had learned to avoid tourist curriculum, where a teacher who is not of a culture acts as the expert of that culture to teach children briefly a few isolated activities of that culture while acting like this very short “visit” to the other culture is treated as if it is “all about this culture”. Examples: children are shown photographs of people in one version of that culture’s traditional clothing and told “this is how they dress”. They “learn” how to say “hello” in the language of that culture and are told this is how they talk. They are given the opportunity to try a traditional dish from that culture and are told “this is what they eat”. It is all very exoticized and othering and reinforces the colonization of other people in the sense of saying it’s okay for you to act like an expert on someone else’s culture, to take what you like from the culture and feel like a smart and worldy white person while displaying your pillaging of that culture with no regard to how you have objectified people. Little Passports World Edition is a premade tourist curriculum.
I had also learned to think about the picture books provided that show Black people. Are they all about racism? Do the ones that aren’t about racism go beyond just being about hair, sports and music, three of the areas where Black people are over represented in books, pushing children’s expectations for what Black people can be into those three categories?
More recently I also learned about curriculum violence and evaluating curriculum and books in terms of the amount of time spent on discrimination. Curriculum violence is generally talked about in terms of the children who are directly harmed by the violence, so Black children being asked to dramatize picking cotton in class, but also more subtle things like what percentage of the books about Black people show violence towards Black people and what percentage of an individual book shows violence towards Black people. Starting point for evaluation, although this is not set in stone and judgement still has to be used to assess violence further is 80% violence free, 20% “violence” meaning like discrimination shown and overcoming adversity. So with trans picture books for my trans child, for example, ideally 80% of the books we read about trans people would show no discrimination against trans people. They would just feature trans characters being their three dimensional selves without anti-trans adversity. The other 20% could show anti-trans discrimination and overcoming it, but within each of those books, the 80-20 ratio should still hold. 80% of the book should be free of discimination. (I’ll just say here that from what I have found 90+% of picture books with trans characters show violence towards trans people. Now that we are moving into middle childhood books I am finding more books at that level with trans characters that are not about trans-ness and therefore almost always include anti-trans discrimination as part of transness.)
Pivoting back to my white kids and seeing Black people as 3D, while they don’t experience anti-Black curriculum violence the same way that Black children would, I think having white children see Black people as 3 dimensional also requires us to consider the ratios of what we are showing white children. Are we preparing them to be consumers of trauma porn? Are we setting up expectations that this is the way it will always be for Black people, that it’s some characteristic inborn to Black people that they experience the world this way rather than emphasizing that white people are the actual problem? I have found it helpful to buy children’s books that are by Black authors and that have only Black characters in them. Those books both show Black people with much greater 3 dimensionality and also are free of anti-Black discrimination to balance out the biographies etc that do show anti-Black discrimination.
From my time here at Lace on Race and rewatching the Kwanzaa intro, I realize that previously – and I think it is likely that most white parents do this – I have shared books and other media with my children in a way that pushes them towards white saviorism even while being aware of white saviorism and hoping not to do that very thing. I did seek out books (etc) where Black people save themselves, but I think even then I have been too solution oriented. I have begun to be more nuanced and try new approaches to interacting with these materials with my children, approaching them with a greater sense of humility as Lace says. I will be sure to always model finding myself in the oppressor, not just being solution focussed. I will speak overtly about this lipstick is not for you, so that my white children can learn the lesson that they have no right to be the uberconsumers.
Christin Spoolstra then asked me if problematic exposure is better than no exposure at all. And I responded: Is problematic exposure worse than no exposure at all? I am thinking yes, it is worse because there is very little learning happening about other cultures, but a lot of whiteness being modeled. A belief behind tourist curriculum being pushed as a way to combat discrimination is that lack of exposure to other cultures is the cause of discrimination. Clearly the response is under a post about seeing Black people as three dimensional, advocating that expanding our exposure to Black people is an essential part of lessening and mitigating harm to Black people perpetuated by white people like me and by white supremacy. It is not the only part though, right? This is one post among many many others where Lace is asking us to confront and analyze our whiteness and where our whiteness shows up. Tourist curriculum involves no examination of whiteness. If we LOR walkers only did the “follow Black people outside of anti-racism spheres” part without the larger context of examining our whiteness, we would likely do it in ways that are harmful such as exploiting their labor, appropriating lipstick that is not for us and more. Tourist curriculum is less about learning about other cultures and more about learning whiteness…not examining and confronting whiteness, but learning how to approach other cultures in white, harmful ways.
Now let’s ask a different question. In a homogenous environment such as Indiana, are problematic exposure and no exposure the only two options? (Obviously as a student your only option was problematic exposure, but thinking bigger here as white parents/teachers in homogenous areas.)
A large part of the problem with tourist curriculum is the attitude of the teacher (or parent, the adult) as expert on other people’s cultures. White adults have a belief that hierarchy and experts are needed in order for learning to occur, the belief that the teacher/adult is someone who already holds knowledge and the children are people who do not have knowledge and need someone else, an expert/an adult, to give them that knowledge. It’s related to white people’s love of clean and tidy binaries with no grey areas as well as white people’s love of paternalism. White education also tends to value broad and shallow education over deep focused education especially for little kids. We tend to think it is better to touch on a ton of stuff poorly rather than stick with one thing and learn it well while developing deep thinking skills in the context of that one thing, skills that can be applied elsewhere.
If we look at Lace on Race though, that’s not how learning works. Lace on Race’s mission is to be a teaching/learning space, but in order to meet the mission, much teaching/learning occurs. Yes, Lace is an expert on racism. She is also an expert on constructing learning environments that are not dependent on her transferring directly the knowledge in her brain into our brains. She creates learning environments where we are provoked to stretch our brains and our understanding in ways we never have before. She creates environments where we construct our own knowledge and support each other in the construction of knowledge in a guided, carefully crafted way. The learning that we do is based in humility and teachability, based in never completing/being forever ongoing, based on us looking for what we don’t know yet and what better questions we should be asking ourselves. Lace has also said that she learns from engaging with Lace on Race too.
Additionally Lace has talked about how at Lace on Race she is mentoring mentors, leading leaders… She is not giving us a fish. She is teaching us to fish. The tourist curriculum is not about thinking. It is not about going deep. It is about memorizing shallow 2 dimensional info, the giving of fish, not the fishing. It is about practicing engaging in other cultures with whiteness instead of with respect. The white women Lace is mentoring will never be experts on racism the way that Lace, a Black woman, is an expert on racism. That does not excuse us from the work. We can learn to be mentors and leaders if our mentoring and leading is also based in humility and teachability, based on seeing ourselves as incomplete and our learning as forever ongoing, based on looking for what we don’t know yet and what better questions we should be asking ourselves. When we are mentors and leaders for our children, we can make sure their learning has this same basis.
What might that look like when parenting little ones? In addition to materials choice which I mentioned in my earlier comment, this could mean interacting with something like a picture book in a way that emphasizes the enormity of what is still not known to both adult and child and what is not for us. So instead of “This is what Chinese people wear.” a statement based on assumed expertise and lack of nuance, we could ask “Do you think all Chinese people wear clothes like this? Do you think these Chinese people wear clothes like this all the time?” and facilitate a thinking conversation, bringing in examples from the child’s actual experience with the culture or cultures they do have experience with that helps them form three dimensional thoughts about others based on humility and teachability rather than “expertise”. “Remember that photo of our family all dressed for Easter Sunday? I wonder if someone from another culture saw that, what would they think about us? Might they think we dress like that all the time?” Does this make sense as an alternative to problematic exposure vs no exposure?
