Three insights on anti-racist teaching from Marco

1. Racism is a systemic problem, and must be confronted in terms of institutions and power dynamics rather than interpersonal relationships

2. Learning must be done in community. This involves reversing traditional hierarchies to place teachers and students as co-learners, and encouraging learning through self-investigation and exploration of lived experiences.

3. Antiracist pedagogy consists of both tools—curricula, lesson plans, antiracist media—and methods, that is, the antiracist educator. A complete understanding of the task at hand requires equal emphasis on both learning of new, critical perspectives, and the unlearning of racially sanitized ones.

“What do you not know, why do you not know it, and how can I help you do this?”

Marco Cenabre has been asking questions like these since he was a 7th grade student in New Haven Public Schools. “I cycled through about 17 substitutes, literally, in a science course,” he recalls, “and I would play this guessing game of ‘Why is this going wrong and what can we do differently?’” Responding to the needs of his peers, he often served as a “translator” of unclear concepts and lessons. This attunement towards identifying and resolving issues in the processes of education is a skill that he continues to leverage years later as a high school literature teacher at New Haven Academy.

Cenabre has now been teaching for 8 years, during which time he has embraced the framework and practices of antiracist education. The same critical mindset that he had adopted since his early years now clarifies how traditional pedagogy must change to facilitate this alternative learning process. 

“The educator has to have an awareness of systems, and power and how they work, and how racism works as a system,” he says. “One of the biggest fallacies is many teachers define racism just on an interpersonal level”. More than a matter of individual behaviors and relationships, he defines racism as “an act on the structural level” and antiracist teaching as “having knowledge of, one, what racism is on all levels, and making conscious acts against racism”.

Cenabre admits this makes pedagogy a complicated topic. “There’s more to it than putting these antiracist texts in front of kids and calling it a day,” he says. Cenabre in his curriculum emphasizes student exploration of systemic racism. In one lesson, students were asked to examine the Civics Test that is a part of the Naturalization Test given to immigrants applying for U.S. citizenship in relationship to the concept of  the “mythical norm” from Audre Lorde’s classic essay “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Lorde argues for the existence of certain idealized behaviors and characteristics in a society that define what is normal and desirable. This mythical norm is usually “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian and financially secure”, and is maintained at the oppression and rejection of those who do not meet it.

 By placing these two texts in conversation, Cenabre encouraged his students to discuss amongst each other, and see for themselves the systemic nature of racism and power: “In order to become an American you have to know this information. But the information that’s being fed and being studied is all white”.

These norms of student-student discussion and student-guided learning are key to Cenabre’s antiracist redesign. Classes comparing A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the challenges a black family’s faces while relocating to an all-white neighborhood, and urban redlining utilized whiteboards where students could compare and address each others’ ideas. Cenabre often utilizes historical events as case studies, such as the efforts in the 60s of Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers’ League, an organization of homebuyers on the West and South sides of Chicago, to combat the predatory practices used to sell houses to black buyers. Students imagined themselves in the situation at hand and discussed what actions they would take if in similar circumstances. Cenabre affirms that such exercises encourage “really understanding, on an empathetic level, about what this fight constitutes” .

This power sharing facilitates full collaboration between students and teacher in the process of learning. Students in Cenabre’s classes spend time reflecting on their own socialization and formative experiences through writing prompts. “We’re the ones facilitating the conversation and helping illuminate voices that are there, and students are really the ones who are driving the learning in the classroom. We’re just helping set the parameters.” The result is a process of learning that takes advantage of existing communities, histories, and lived experiences, that reshapes traditional educational hierarchies. “We’re co-learners dismantling the bigger system” .

“There’s no easy conversations,” Cenabre admits with a laugh. “Sometimes it’s just not someone’s day or they don’t feel like talking.” He takes steps to ensure that students feel safe and protected when having these conversations, especially as they frequently evoke generational trauma and hardship.  Lower-stakes conversations about antiracist slam poetry, meditation and journaling activities, and regular check-ins with each other and with teachers ensure that these issues are broken into gently, within a culture of safety and trust.

Regarding the importance of the teaching community, Cenabre says that “The transfer of learning is a really hard task in general. You throw in the unlearning that comes with antiracist teaching, on top of the learning that comes with antiracist teaching, on top of your classroom alone: that is a difficult feat”. While Cenabre himself has been fortunate enough to operate in a supportive environment, he emphasizes that for teachers who face significant pushback , the emotional burden that antiracist education represents can cause them to reconsider whether their efforts are worth the cost. 

Both for emotional support and for furthering antiracist education, Cenabre recommends teachers engage in teacher-teacher mentorship programs and participate in networks such as the professional learning communities at New Haven Academy. Such communities, in combination with regular monitoring of university curricula and outreach to professors, can equip teachers with the basics of antiracist pedagogy.

However, Cenabre warns that the most pressing needs in antiracist education were not lesson plans or curriculum, but education regarding methods, lenses to pierce the cloud of resources. “What is language and methods we can use to navigate the actual teaching portion of it? Not just the ideation, but the actual teaching with the students in front of us. How do we be antiracist educators?” For Cenabre, this begs an equal emphasis on unlearning as on learning. “Being antiracist and first unlocking and understanding developing consciousness—that, that is such heavy work and that comes from more than just like, a class explaining racism.” 

“Just think about the burden, the heaviness that goes with this in teens and especially younger kids.” Cenabre finishes. “It’s very deep, and deeper than one might imagine in practice.”