POSTRACE 101: Teaching and Unteaching Race in America's High Schools

Extract

There are some telltale signs that we might really be living in the kind of moment that academic provocateurs have labeled “postracial” (i.e., indifferent to historically self-evident expectations about race relations and race-based identifications): Duke lacrosse players, all of them White, who taunt a Black collegian-cum-stripper with carefully crafted quips better suited for a comedy club than a Klan rally (“Thank your grandpa for my cotton shirt”); a Black Ivy League professor testifying under oath that a baseball bat-wielding White vigilante who begins pummeling a Black man in Brooklyn by calling his victim a “nigger” does not necessarily harbor any race-specific animus; a former Education Secretary seemingly shocked and appalled that African Americans would be shocked and appalled by his comments regarding the hypothetical abortion of African American babies as a technique for lowering crime rates; and any of the dissenting judicial opinions penned by the lone Black justice on the nation's highest court. Race is doing some very strange things these days.