If you think about classrooms or workspaces or conferences, wherever we are, we go into these spaces and we look for ourselves. You want to see yourself represented. In that sense, when young people walk into a classroom, they want to see someone who they identify with, maybe because they’re the same race. It doesn't always have to be racial identification. [A student] can identify with a teacher because she likes music [or] identify with [educators] because they are into sports. But to the extent that kids of color walk into classrooms and rarely see someone who looks like themselves in that environment, that’s a missing link.

Anderson: Your writing on the development of white identity was a revelatory look into the current cultural and social dynamics in the United States. Please talk about the process of redefining whiteness from “just normal” to a more nuanced conception of what it means to be white.

Tatum: If ... you live in a neighborhood where everybody or most people are white, you grew up in a family where all the members are white, and you go to a school and most people are white, [chances are] you [see your white identity as] the norm. And you probably don’t think much about it—that’s not the part of your identity that you're focused on. But when you enter into a space, a classroom or a workplace, where you are now in a racially mixed environment, and there's conversation about issues of race in particular, you may start to have a greater awareness. You start to learn what whiteness means, in some ways, because you start to see what racial-group membership means for other people. Or maybe [that awareness comes through] ... reading a book, or taking a class.



However that awareness starts to happen, what I’ve found is that [white] people start to realize that they’ve had some advantages. ... They’ve had some benefits as a result of being white that they’d never really paid attention to, but have taken for granted, or not even noticed. And when they start to notice or when they learn the history, it’s upsetting ... There are often feelings of guilt. It’s usually at that point where it can be really helpful [to join] an organization like Showing Up for Racial Justice, which helps white people support each other in their growth and learning around how to become anti-racist.

[Figuring out how to turn that guilt into action] is a learning process, and it’s not as linear as I’m describing. It often requires re-educating oneself or learning things that you never learned in school, simply because it wasn’t [taught]. Talking to people you don’t usually talk to. It’s not like it happens instantly.



Anderson: Interestingly, you expand on the conversation—shifting beyond black and white—to interrupt the frequent resistance to talking about racism in non-black communities of color. What are some of the complexities surrounding identity development for students who belong to those communities?



Tatum: Well, I think the basic principle goes back to that picture analogy. If we want to affirm the identities of our students, the first thing we have to think about is: Do they see themselves represented? One of the points I talk about is that the representation of Native Americans is always in the past. There’s a Native educator I quote who says Native youth, who have a very high suicide rate, need to see themselves as having a future, not just a past. It’s thinking about how students will find themselves in the curriculum, not just who’s teaching, but [also] how are they being talked about? If you’re Native American, do you see yourself represented at all except perhaps as the mascot of the football team?