Sonja Cherry-Paul Shares 5 Antiracist Practices to Transform Reading Instruction

Excerpted from Antiracist Reading Revolution: A Framework for Teaching Beyond Representation Toward Liberation by Sonja Cherry-Paul. Copyright (c) 2024 by Corwin Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

While there is no one way to define antiracist curriculum or instruction, several characteristics emerge from the existing and growing body of scholarship on antiracism. I have identified five that can inform instruction and shape the educational experiences of students. Each of these characteristics works together as a whole to construct a vision of an antiracist reading classroom—the work of teachers and the work of students—that leads to liberation.

Although I discuss each of the characteristics individually and one at a time, it is important to note that they are not linear, but circuitous and interconnected. Looking at them individually can, I hope, provide a greater understanding of antiracist teaching as lived, liberatory practice.

1. Center BIPOC in texts

Antiracist educators work to affirm racially and culturally diverse people and communities lovingly and joyfully. One way to achieve this is through transparent, intentional text selection, understanding that otherwise, books and texts are powerful ways young people can be socialized into racist and inequitable ideas. In Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You, I ask young readers to look out for mainstream representations that too often provide limited, deficit, harmful perspectives of Black and Brown people. Therefore, antiracist teaching seeks to powerfully reflect those who have been minoritized and marginalized in depth rather than in superficial breadth that can proliferate stereotypes. Books and texts written by BIPOC creators who share the same racial and cultural identity as the people and characters they are writing about are more likely to present important, nuanced perspectives.

2. Recognize cultural, community and collective practices

Antiracist educators recognize the importance of truly knowing their students — their personal identities, such as favorite TV shows, movies, sports and music, and also their social identities, which include their racial, cultural and linguistic identities as well as knowing the communities in which they live. Antiracist educators see this work of knowing as continuous, and it helps them to develop instruction and curriculum that are closer fits between students’ home and school cultures. Kimberly Parker asserts, “We see the world through our own racialized, gendered, complicated lenses” and the importance of educators reframing our thinking. To accomplish this, she recommends we lean into the scholarship around “funds of knowledge” to develop multidimensional understandings of the children in teachers’ care. Therefore, antiracist teaching is grounded in historical and contemporary experiences and issues of people and community. Rather than revering individualism and competition, books and texts that are centered in curriculum support collectivism and communal practices and are those that value multiple ways of knowing across cultures.

3. Shatter silences around racism

Educators name racism proactively and explicitly and help students develop a working definition of racism. This definition deepens across space, time and context, making it possible for students to recognize social, economic and political factors that create environmental conditions that oppress BIPOC and communities. Each summer, Tricia Ebarvia and I co-facilitate the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy (IREL), a unique professional development experience that supports educators in the work of antiracism and equity in their classrooms, schools and communities. This work demands critical reflection and action. We challenge educators to identify the ways in which racism has been embedded throughout history and in every societal institution, including schools.

– And we ask educators to reflect on questions such as these:

– How can we ensure that our educational practices are not just inclusive but equitable?

– How can we use our power and position as educators to transform systems, whether those systems be our individual classrooms, districts or greater communities?

– How can we help students read, write and speak up for justice?

Therefore, antiracist teaching helps students recognize ways racism is entrenched in institutions and systems such as education, housing, health care, media, government, law enforcement and more and ways we can work to dismantle oppressive systems.

4. Teach racial literacy

Antiracist educators acquire racial literacy themselves and help their students become racially literate. This involves teaching that invites students to recognize race as a social construct, acknowledge racism as a contemporary problem and not just a past condition, and interrogate the ways whiteness drives the values, structures and systems in the United States and beyond. Detra Price-Dennis and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz convey the urgency for educators to not just talk about race and racism “but to learn how to examine carefully how race is lived in our society.” When educators acquire this skill, they are able to support the racial literacy development of their students so they are able to navigate and interrupt racist structures, systems, policies and practices. Sealey-Ruiz explains that “a desired outcome of racial literacy in an outwardly racist society like America is for members of the dominant racial category to adopt an antiracist stance and for persons of color to resist a victim stance.” Therefore, antiracist teaching supports authentic, critical and constructive conversations as students apply racial literacy skills to read and discuss texts and develop tools to disrupt racism in their lives.

5. Learn about community activists

Antiracist educators learn about people locally as well as globally who are working to dismantle racism. They recognize that those who make this their life’s work aren’t always heralded in books for students to access. Also crucially important is the recognition of ways activists work in community with others. Parker defines community as “a group of people who come together around shared purposes” that includes “members’ needs for connection, interdependence and the belief that a community — and the work required to create and maintain it — are necessary and possible.” The work of antiracist educators cannot flourish without cultivating community in our classrooms. Community, Dr. Parker asserts, “must be intentional if we want it to be liberatory.” The nurturing of our classroom communities must also include connecting students to the people and organizations in the wider school community who work to make life more equitable in their neighborhoods and in the world. Such connection is one way students maintain hope for a more just world — a hope that is underpinned by intention, commitment and action. Therefore, antiracist teaching creates community and connects young people to activists that empower them to consider how they locate themselves in the longevity of work for liberation and ways they will cultivate new ideas that become seeds of change.

Sonja Cherry-Paul is the founder of Red Clay Educators, co-director of the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy, co-director of the Teach Black History All Year Institute and executive producer and host of The Black Creators Series. She is an educator with more than 20 years of classroom experience who has written several books that support reading and writing instruction and has adapted the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Stamped (For Kids). Sonja leads professional development for schools and organizations in equity and antiracism.