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What Is Racial Literacy?

In schools, healthy conversations involving race across class, culture, and other characteristics of diversity are possible. The use of multiple texts and modalities to engage students in these conversations is readily facilitated by digital technologies. To develop racial literacy among students, educators can draw from historical, fictional, and poetic texts most effectively. Teachers who are able to engage their students in the topic of race are most successful when they employ self-exploration and honest assessments about the role they may play in perpetuating racist ideas. Once specific behaviors are recognized, it becomes easier for racially literate individuals to interrupt those behaviors in the future. Racially literate teachers develop curricula that are centered on fostering open-mindedness, commitment to inquiry and reflection, and exploration of ideas connected to the concepts of democracy and equity in schooling. Racially literate teachers make evident their deep commitment to social justice in the ways they interact with students, families, and their BIPOC colleagues. Racial literacy is a skill and practice by which individuals can probe the existence of racism and examine the effects of race and institutionalized systems on their experiences and representation in US society (Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Sealey-Ruiz, 2011;

Racial Literacy A Policy Research Brief 2

A Policy Research Brief produced by the James R. Squire Office of the National Council of Teachers of English

Thus, racial literacy in English classrooms is the ability to read, discuss, and write about situations that involve race or racism.

Sealey-Ruiz, forthcoming; Skerrett, 2011). Students who have this skill can discuss the implications of race and American racism in constructive ways. A desired outcome of racial literacy in an outwardly racist society like America is for members of the dominant racial category to adopt an antiracist stance and for persons of color to resist a victim stance. Thus, racial literacy in English classrooms is the ability to read, discuss, and write about situations that involve race or racism. Scholarship that informs the concept of racial literacy identifies race as a signifier that is discursively constructed through language (Hall, 1997); fluid, unstable, and socially constructed (Omi & Winant, 1986) rather than static; and not rooted in biology, but having “real” effects in individual lives (Frankenberg, 1996). The architect of the concept of racial literacy, Harvard Professor Lani Guinier (2004), implored a shift from racial liberalism to racial literacy. She critiqued racial liberalism as an inactive, deficit approach to racial equality that subjugates Black people to the position of victim and does not activate the required antiracist stance that white people must take against their own racist ideals and actions.

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