By Lauryn Daniels, AES 340 student
Reflecting on hidden curriculum was very eye opening for me this week. As a child I remember being very aware of how people who looked like me were left out of our textbooks, except for when the unit on U.S. enslavement of African people and Civil Rights came around. When that time came, I always felt a sense of dread, and embarrassment almost. Kids would always end up laughing or making racist jokes about it at recess and such, which felt humiliating. As an adult, I can look back now and see how this reaction from my peers coupled with only seeing Black people come up in terms of enslavement made me feel inferior, especially in a predominantly white school.
As I continued to progress through school it made me angry at the way the education system was set up and at this idea of white people as a group of people who seemed inherently against me and my people. I think it’s interesting how, for me, from the perspective of a Black child, the curriculum quickly taught me the idea of a Black-white binary and began to heighten these feelings of intra-group loyalty for me that meant opposition to the proverbial white man. For other children of color who were not included whatsoever, they could not see how they fit into history at all, but for me it was a sense of hatred for the way I knew my ancestors were being disrespected but knowing there was so much more to my background.
Luckily, my grandma would teach me about Black history, so I knew this, but it wasn’t any less frustrating, and I still built up a fair share of internalized racism. I do not remember disliking white children, but adults I was wary of, and I especially hated the historical figures we learned about because, in my mind, I figured they were all racist and had probably done terrible things, so I didn’t see why they were being celebrated or focused on in class. Of course, I didn’t even “formally” learn anything about Chicano history until college, so that was just out of the picture in school entirely.
I remember in middle school this really solidified with the murder of Michael Brown. I was so shocked, horrified, and infuriated, and because the school system was already making me more aware of racism and oppression that Black people and other POC have had to endure throughout history year after year, this really highlighted to me how nothing had changed. I felt like no one cared, and it filled me with more hate towards my oppressors.
From then on, I became increasingly privy to the curriculum of control, and the more I learned, the more I realized the ulterior purposes that it was serving. My understanding of school then could not stay on the content but was constantly preoccupied with thoughts of how larger systems of oppression were always at play. I couldn’t even escape it at a place that was supposed to be for all children, supposed to be safe. Because of that, I felt disheartened and often expressed a disdain for our education system before I had the depth of understanding or experience that I do now. Growing up in an environment like that, where you hate your surroundings and your country and simultaneously feel hated by it, can make for a very sullen existence. That’s why I feel like sometimes, when I take classes like this, I am finally gaining the language to talk about things that I have been considering and experiencing for so long, which is empowering.
It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the country to which you have pledged allegiance along with everyone else has not pledged allegiance to you.
—James Baldwin
This is also why I find it extremely ironic when opponents to CRT claim that this is a pedagogy intending to make white children feel guilt or self-hatred. How do they think the current education system makes every other child feel? Still, much like the students in the Robbins (2018) study, I continued to internalize messages of control that school taught me. For me, this not only manifested in feelings of inferiority, embarrassment, and hypervisibility/invisibility, but my self-esteem being extremely tied to my academic performance and rule following. I do always remember expressing a dislike for disciplinary systems, but I was never outright resistant to what a teacher told me to do. I did learn to work the system like the students in the study, participating in certain classes so that I could have certain privileges throughout the school building and such, or asking for a library pass so I could talk to my friends or go to Dutch Bros or something in high school. Still, I would cry if I scored below an A and took my grades extremely seriously, but this was not really because I wanted to learn any of the material at this point in my academic career. It was because I knew or felt this imminent sense that my future depended on excelling. I worked myself to stress and overwhelm trying to succeed in a system that I actually hated and did not feel cared for by except for the support I found in my teachers.
This calls to mind a quote from the Ladson-Billings piece (1998) where they cite Patricia Williams (1995), “‘One’s sense of empowerment defines one’s relation to law, in terms of trust-distrust, formality-informality, or rights-no rights (or ‘needs’)” (p. 16). For those whose status is protected by law, it is a more serious matter. They respect the law and feel that those who do not are morally wrong and deserve punishment. That’s what the school system teaches us too, evidenced in Robinson’s study. But, as a child of color when you realize that this system is against you, how can you be expected to respect it in a genuine or sincere way? That is why you get a sector of kids who blatantly disobey or are just simply behaving or learning in a way that is not considered acceptable or “standard,” or are just not the standard in and of themselves (not white, wealthy, hetero, cis males), and they get demonized, punished, and degraded. They learn to have even more scorn for education because of their experiences. They end up being just another who pretend to be rule followers and work 10 times harder just to gain an ounce of the same respect afforded to white students but inside despise the whole ordeal all the same.
Our school system conditions us to eventually go on to serve its racist, capitalist interests. It teaches us that if we don’t understand, we are the problem. It teaches us that if we are not included, we must not be important enough. It teaches us that there is only one way to be who we are based on monolithic stereotypes and even further that there is only one right way to learn, to look, to act, to be. It teaches us as children of color that though we may deserve respect just because we are human, we will not receive it without learning how to work the system at the expense of ourselves.
This experience of the education system is a huge part of what has inspired me to pursue Social Work and American Ethnic Studies, because like my ancestors, despite all of this, I still have a strong belief in the possibility of a better future for myself and those that come after me. I know that this starts with education, but not the kind that is standardized in the U.S.—with decolonial, anti-racist education, like the kind we learn about in this very class. I have a lot of cognitive dissonance when it comes to being in college at times, or even going to work inside systems that I want to dismantle, but I do believe that this is one of the best places I can be if I want to enact transformative justice, and that that doesn’t have to wait until I leave here. Or at least I hope so.