Study Finds White Teachers Struggle to Discuss Race With Black Coworkers and Students

A new study led by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has found White public high school teachers tend to avoid conversations surrounding race with their Black students and colleagues due to a sense that their identity, both personally and professionally, will be challenged. These feelings were consistent among the study participants regardless of how diverse the faculty and student body were at each teacher’s school. The research team interviewed and job-shadowed 56 White teachers across five metropolitan high schools in the southeastern United States in an effort to understand their sense of belonging at work and emotional responses to being a different race than their students and coworkers. They found that these emotions stem from three stages of the teachers’ lives: their racial socialization from earlier in life, their perceptions of race in the workplace, and their behaviors due to those perceptions. When encountering a race-related event at work, White teachers’ felt uncomfortable, anxious, and potentially devalued or disliked based on their own race. They also reported struggling to relate to and communicate effectively with their Black students due to racial barriers. Some teachers believed that because they were White, their students and Black coworkers thought less of...