Education Commons^™

Developing A Vocabulary To Talk About Race In The White Home: One Family’S Experience, Rhianna K. Thomas

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

Studies have shown white parents actively avoid talking about race as the primary method of racial socialization of their white children (Bartoli et al., 2016; Pahlke, Bigler, & Suizzo, 2012). This limits children’s ability to talk about and therefore think about race in nuanced ways, resulting in white children who consider their own race meaningless and do not identify racially (Bartoli et al., 2016). Antiracist education breaks these white discourse norms, and directly addresses systemic racism (Escayg, 2018). This paper describes how one white family attempted to enact antiracist education in the home with a focus on developing a shared …