Teaching.IU

Context

Racial identity formation is among the most challenging of topics to teach.  For much of the history of the modern human sciences, the topic of race has been essentialized in both scientific and public discourse.  By “essentialized,” I mean to suggest that race has been conceptualized in terms of deep biological or psychological structures that take behavioral manifestations in the world.  Essentialized conceptions of “whiteness,” “Blackness,” or any other racialized Other serve as the rhetorical foundation for racialized dehumanization, polarization, scapegoating, and material forms of racial inequality to the extent that some, but not all, racial identity categories are recognized in law and public policy.  How should we approach teaching a matter of such deep complexity and social tension that often becomes the subject of popular generalizations and misunderstanding? 

For years I have employed an in-class activity to teach diversity that involves deconstructing how students formulate their racial identities.  The activity draws from postmodern, rhetorical, and critical legal theories of identity formation.  The goal is to invite students to recognize the complexity of racial identity in a way that denaturalizes it (especially whiteness) and historicizes it as a socially and historically constructed abstraction that is embodied and performed in the world.  The learning outcome is to demonstrate to students the complexities of racial identity formation, since they are in a way historically and socially arbitrary, yet certainly not neutral, since the history of legal and cultural recognition of racial identities in the United States has had tangible outcomes that contribute to the country's deep and historical racial inequality.  Put another way, racial identity formation is in part the outcome of the agency of the individual to name oneself based on one's received heritage; yet, at the same time, the outcome of larger social and legal structures that shape agency unequally by the way they distribute opportunities and power according to racial identities that are legally codified and privileged in unequal ways.

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Have students take out a pen and paper (or laptop) to answer the following question in one word, and one word only: What is your race?
2. After they have self-identified their race, ask your students to answer the same question, “what is your race?,” again.  Students are only allowed to use one word to name their race, and they cannot use a word from a prior round of questioning.   
3. Ask your students to answer the question, “what is your race?,” again for at least three more rounds without using a word from a prior round of questioning.  
4. After you have finished asking them to self-identity their race, have them share their answers with a partner to recognize the racial diversity that lies behind common identity markers.  After students share with their partners for about 3-5 minutes, ask students if they would like to share how they answered the questions with the rest of the class.  This activity can serve as a starting point for a deeper discussion about race relations in any national culture, but I have used it for class discussions, readings, and units specifically regarding the United States.  I always pair this activity with a reading about race (see the list of resources below) that focuses on inequality in the United States.  I emphasize that the hierarchy of racial identities they choose to use round after round tells a story about the history of the United States.  Not all European heritages were considered “white,” for example, prior to 1945.  Some student identities have roots in the history of American racial violence, such as slavery or the treatment of peoples of Mexican or Native American descent.  Some students have identities rooted in the history of economic and social discrimination, such as redlining.  Some students have racial identities that are marked by migration within the United States (e.g. the great migration of former slaves to the north and the west) or immigration to the United States.  Some student identities are rooted in religious traditions that are recognized as national holidays, while others are not.  In short, the instructor can steer a discussion to emphasize that racial differences have tangible consequences due the history of structural racism in the United States.  This could involve discussing how the underlying complexities of racial identity formation intersect with questions of diversity and racial privilege, or even as a way of understanding the cultural sources underlying the intense radicalized polarization currently in the United States. 
5. This activity can take anywhere from 20 to 75 minutes. This depends on how many rounds of questions the instructor asks and the nature of the discussion they would like to marshal from the answers students offer. 

Effectiveness

I have found that students generally respond well to this activity.  As they undergo the process of deconstructing their racial identities, students begin to discover the symbolic resources they draw upon to construct who they are.  After the first round of answering the question “what is your race,” American students frequently draw upon common Census categories of race, such as white, African American, Asian-American, Arab-American, Native American, or Latino.  After the second round, students typically begin to specify the ethnicity of their heritage within these broader racial categories, such as “Irish,” “German,” “Korean,” “Chinese,” or “Egyptian.”  Often during the second and third rounds, students will begin to self-identify their race in terms of their religious faith, such as “Jewish,” “Christian,” “Muslim,” or “Hindu.”  After students have exhausted their ethnic and religious identity markers, they frequently use a variety of terms that are geographically oriented.  Some will self-identify their race as “American,” or “Texan,” or “Hoosier,” or “New Yorker,” for example.  Others will use a term like “red neck,” which fuses racial identity within a larger social class and geographic location.  Many students will self-identify as a species through the universal category “human.”  Moreover, I have found that this activity sparks curiosity and interest between domestic American and International students as they compare and contrast how they answer these questions within their own distinct cultural experiences.