Research Shows Critical Race Theory Could Be a Valuable Teaching Tool for Overcoming Racism
Dr. Julie Hart and I recently published a research article1 that demonstrates the value of incorporating anti-racist conceptual frameworks when teaching about race and racism in the classroom.
I’m excited to share some of my thoughts about this paper with you and hopefully you find this interesting, too.
Let’s start with the premise that it is better for people to be less racist rather than more racist. And let’s add to that premise that when you are teaching college students to become K-12 teachers, social workers, and nurses, that cross cultural competency (i.e. the ability to interact with people from different backgrounds) is an essential skill2—not to mention a fundamental skill for the 21st Century.
How would you know which teaching strategies actually work to reduce bias among college students?
You would measure it, of course. But this “of course” is not as obvious as it might seem. Much of the debate surrounding race and racism in education (and critical race theory specifically) isn’t about measuring outcomes in students, it’s about (let’s call it) the performative side of the equation: what teachers say, not the difference they make.
Some Americans don’t want to have to engage in discussions of race of any kind, so they oppose any explicit conversations about race entirely. Others are mainly interested in adopting the right discourse, typically without any discussion (or evaluation) of whether that language is actually effective.
As a researcher and professor, this is an entirely unsatisfactory impasse that I routinely find redundant and rather stifling. I’m much more interested in understanding what actually works with students, meeting them where they are, and designing robust learning experiences that give them a leg up in the world.
So Julie and I set out to answer this question about “what works” when teaching about race using an empirical tool. Here’s what we did.
We evaluated various teaching techniques that addressed the topics of cross cultural competency, discrimination, and racism. Imagine that you wanted to address those topics and you have the option of (1) lecturing or (2) lecturing and arranging students to have conversations with someone from a different background. Surely the second teaching method would be more effective, right? The research shows that, yes, in fact, personal relationships do reduce inter-group discrimination and increase cultural competency and sensitivity. (The technical term for this is contact theory.)
Using pre- and post-tests to measure colorblind racism, our study finds that incorporating personal relationships into the course decreases colorblind racism. That is, students are more likely to accurately identify the consequences of race and racism on society rather than squirm away from the topic and claim that race either doesn’t exist or has no social effects.
But is this enough? Is it enough that students simply meet others who are different from them?
No. It’s not.
There are many reasons why one-on-one friendships aren’t enough. One reason can be simplified as the “one of my best friends" phenomenon, where people from dominant social groups frame a singular relationship as absolving them of further critical self-reflection, or where the views of one person of color are interpreted by someone from the majority as authorizing them to adopt that view with impunity.
So let’s consider a third teaching option, and this time the course explicitly incorporates the current research on race and racism. More than just covering the standard cross cultural themes, students read and discuss material that explicitly names racism as a social phenomenon and assesses its affects on society.
Our research suggests that teaching about racism using an anti-racist or critical race theory lens (the two are not identical) improves students’ abilities to correctly identify the role that race and racism have on society over time.
Let me put some numbers to this.
On the metric we used to evaluate students, 0 would be very approximately “I don’t see race at all” and 6 would be “I can perfectly see the role that race plays in society.”3
Students who identified as European American started out with scores of 3.91, indicating more belief in colorblindness than black students who started out at 4.58. By the end of the course, the average of European American students’ scores increased collectively to 4.09 but still remained lower than where black students started out at the beginning of class.
So that’s pretty interesting, but that’s across the board for all classes, not just classes that incorporated anti-racist pedagogy. Some of the courses that incorporated explicit discussion of race and racism saw higher gains than other courses. But here’s where things get interesting. I’ll mention just two.
First, we did see significant gains in one of the courses that incorporated anti-racist pedagogy. But those scores also started very low, so there was much more opportunity for improvement. So this raises a question for teachers and all of us, really: are you more interested in raising the awareness of students who already score high or more interested in seeing across-the-board increases among students who start out with misconceptions about race?
The answers are not mutually exclusive, necessarily, but I think that one finding here is that it is important to measure for relative progress over time, not just where people end up at the end of a class. What has become known as (or derided as) critical race theory combined with personal relationships can actually go a long way to accomplishing this since it gives students a useful, flexible framework for making sense of their first-hand experiences. In short: to overcome racism, you need relationships, but you need theory, too.
Second, students in these courses started out in very different places, based on racial and gender identity, as well as ranging in college experience from first year to fourth year students. This meant that the gains we saw in various teaching approaches, including anti-racist theory, were mitigated by the fact that some students simply had much further to go.
One thing really stood out here. Female black students began the class with the highest CoBRA scores at 4.76 and remained constant throughout the class with no appreciable change, whereas both black male and white male and female students saw substantive increases but never came close to where Black women scored.
All of this discussion about course content didn’t really do anything for Black women who already came into the course far above their peers. Now, this could be partly because many of the Black women were also third and fourth year students who had taken many courses that incorporated this type of content before, so the explanation could be based on education rather than identity—we don’t know.
One thing I take away from this data is that we really should be thinking as teachers about how peer mentorship can play a role in the classroom, and how to balance the fact that Black women in particular may bring valuable expertise in this area while not saddling them with the burden to then take on the additional responsibilities of teaching everyone else about racism.
Another take-away point is that if we are designing learning experiences that seem to mainly benefit White students, we should also think about how to make sure that Black students are also benefitting from course time, too. It could certainly be the case that Black women in this study do benefit, but in ways that we didn’t measure. I just raise this as a comment.
To sum things up: the data suggests that discussing race and racism in the classroom, rather than just relying on cross cultural competency or contact theory, reduces student’s color-blind racism. But it’s complicated by the fact that the background knowledge and experience that students start out with shapes their potential for measurable progress. (Which isn’t a bad thing if you already start off with very high scores.)
If you want to share what you believe should be the role of teaching about race and racism in the classroom, or ideas about what how to improve this study, feel free to leave a note below or send me an email.
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Putnam Hart, J., & Kocher, A. (2022). Impacts of Teaching Critical Race Theory and Applying Contact Theory Methods to Student’s Cross-Cultural Competency in Diversity Courses. Teaching Sociology. Online here.
Note that cross cultural competency training is actually a requirement of many degree programs for these and other professions.
For more about the survey itself, see information on the CoBRAS survey developed by Helen Neville. One link here among many.
Fantastic research! This gives me some hope humankind can rise above its hurtful ways. Thanks for sharing it.