Raising Race Questions

Conversations about race can be confusing, contentious, and frightening, particularly for White people. Even just asking questions about race can be scary, because we are afraid of what our questions might reveal about our ignorance or bias. Raising Race Questions invites teachers to use inquiry as a way to develop sustained engagement with challenging racial questions and to do so in community so that they learn how common their questions actually are. It lays out both a process for getting to questions that lead to growth and change, as well as a vision for where engagement with race questions might lead. Race questions are not meant to lead us into a quagmire of guilt, discomfort, or isolation. Sustained race inquiry is meant to lead to antiracist classrooms, positive racial identities, and a restoration of the wholeness of spirit and community that racism undermines.

Book Features:

• New insights on race and equity in education, including the idea that a multicultural curriculum is not sufficient for building an antiracist classroom.
• Case studies of expert and experienced White teachers who still have questions about race.
• Approaches for talking about race in the K–12 classroom.
• Strategies for facilitating race conversations among adults.
• A variety of different resources useful in the teacher inquiry groups described in the book.
• Research with teachers, not on teachers, including written responses from each teacher whose classroom is featured in the book.

Ali Michael is Director of K–12 Consulting and Professional Development at the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the Director and cofounder of the Race Institute for K–12 Educators.

“Provides much-needed guidance and inspiration for educators who want racial equity in schools.”
—From the Foreword by Shaun R. Harper, University of Pennsylvania

“As a White teacher engaged in this work, I've watched these tools help educators support one another as they make mistakes, reflect, and grow together.”
—Lynn Eckerman, Independence Charter School, Philadelphia

“In Raising Race Questions Ali Michael is an excavator, determined to dig into every unexplored crevice of White teachers' experiences with race in order to unearth the complex realities of racism and schooling, and a model of reflective inquiry, willing to lay herself and her assumptions bare in service to the reader's consciousness and her own. This book grew my consciousness in multiple ways, and that is the greatest gift an author can give me.”
—Paul Gorski, founder, EdChange, associate professor, George Mason University

2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award