Unit Zero: Reflections from the First Month in Black & Latino Studies Course

By Daisha Brabham

“ALL of your students were generating their own questions and taking ownership over learning.” That was the feedback I received, happily, in September from my department supervisor after her first observation in my classroom this year. 

Last year was challenging for me, as it had been for educators all across the country. Between the struggles of navigating trauma, forming new bonds with students in person, and redefining “school” for our students, many of us felt defeated. 

But this fall, teachers and students returned hopeful, ready to engage, and perhaps even more prepared to connect. To begin our class, we started the year by dissecting our identities through our names. We wrote poems based on Jonathan Rodriguez's “Two Worlds, One Name” and explored how our individual identities intersect and collide. Students created beautiful poems that shared their hobbies, passions, and dreams with the classroom community. I was inspired immediately by how vulnerable my students were after what seemed to be two years of limited connection. 

History and Present Collide 

To begin our first unit, students examined the origins and evolution of racial classifications in the United States. Students were amazed at the various racialized terms that were once used to classify people throughout our country's history. They examined vital shifts such as the expansion of Asian classifiers during the 1920s during the immigration boom, the stability of the term white, and the addition of more inclusive terminology in the 2000s. 

They then examined the impact of racism by looking at the impact of these racial terms on people’s everyday lives. We explored how, in the 1920s and in response to mass immigration, the US Supreme Court struggled to define whiteness in the face of petitions from several Asian Americans vying for citizenship and how even the expression of love was quantified and prohibited in South Carolina through anti-miscegenation laws and could mean death in the form of lynch mobs. 

For many students, when presented with racism and its impact, the lines between black and white seem permanent and resolved. But here, within legislation and racial classifications, students witnessed a system that was fluid and consistently being contested. You could be black in South Carolina but not in Georgia. You could be granted citizenship under one Supreme Court case and have your land stripped after another within months. 

By examining the historical impact of racialization and racism on various communities within the US, students could understand the effects its modern-day manifestations, such as racial classifications on a census, and their direct ties to access and equity. 

Creating A Space For Reimagining and Reclaiming

If race and the terms used to define it are fluid and constructed, might language be used creatively to empower, too? This was a question that emerged organically from students’ initial explorations and that we pursued together in the classroom. Students examined concepts such as political blackness in the Black Power Movement and the evolution of the term people of color.  We learned about the development of “new” terms such as Hispanic, Latino and Latinx,, Black and African American, and Chicano. Students walked around the room, taking notes, reacting with their peers, and reflecting on their connections to the words. 

For their final assessment, my students engaged in a structured academic controversy, where they selected their own topic of discussion as a class - the value of inclusive language - and broke into groups to represent different perspectives. Using the information they gathered from our gallery walk about racial classifications, students identified key ideas, extracted quotes to share, and researched additional sources to present. 

Students also introduced to one another a variety of studies and articles that prompted personal responses. These, in turn, supported students to ask one another new questions, such as: “Have you ever felt excluded by what someone called you?” and “Are there new terms we could use to embrace difference and be inclusive?”  

The structured academic controversy was dynamic and impressive. Students reflected deeply on their personal experiences with language. One shared that he had only heard the term Latinx in school and that his family members had never used it. Another discussed how, as a Jamaican American, she felt sometimes isolated by the term Black, as she did not believe it fully encompassed her background. A third discussed how as an Afro-Latina, it was important to her to have a term that embraced both identities. A fourth discussed her sense that age plays an important role in how people respond to language, and argued that youth especially would benefit from more inclusive language. 

By the end, students had determined that inclusive language was ideal, but that room for individuals and groups to self-identity and self-define was also necessary. Overall, they had come to see language as a critical tool in communication, organizing, and resistance. 

Although this unit is technically Unit 1, it was really ground zero for laying the foundations of the course, building community, and empowering students to be agents of change. I want my students to ask their own questions and to feel accountable to and for their classroom environment and the world around them. 

In the words of one eloquent student in her “Two Worlds, One Name” poem, come with me and here we’ll write our own futures. 

Daisha spoke beautifully about this unit during the Teachers’ Roundtable Teaching History in the Classroom Today session at this year’s Gilder Lehrman Center Conference. The panel conversation places a unit like this one, and the goals that undergird it, in a deeper and broader context of what it means to teach for justice in these particular times. Click anywhere on the still below to watch the panel in full; you can also view it by clicking here.